An investigation into writing strategies of 11th grade students at huu lung upper secondary school, lang son

The data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and SPSS 16.0software.The findings of this study revealed that twelve writing strategies were used at thehighest degree by eleventh gra

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES

LÊ THỊ HỒNG VINH

GRADE STUDENTS AT HUU LUNG UPPER SECONDARY

SCHOOL, LANG SON.

(Nghiên cứu về chiến lược học viết tiếng Anh của học sinh lớp 11 trường Trung Học Phổ Thông Hữu Lũng- Lạng Sơn)

MA MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field: English Teaching MethodologyCode: 60.14.0111

Hanoi, 2014

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST- GRADUATE STUDIES

LÊ THỊ HỒNG VINH

GRADE STUDENTS AT HUU LUNG UPPER SECONDARY

SCHOOL, LANG SON.

(Nghiên cứu về chiến lược học viết tiếng Anh của học sinh lớp 11 trường Trung Học Phổ Thông Hữu Lũng- Lạng Sơn)

MA MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field: English Teaching MethodologyCode: 60.14.0111

Supervisor: Trần Thị Thu Hiền, Ph.D

Hanoi, 2014

I hereby certify the thesis entitled “An Investigation into writing strategies of 11 th

grade students at Huu Lung Upper Secondary School, Lang Son” is my own study in

the fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts at University ofLanguages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi

Hanoi, September 2014Signature

Le Thi Hong Vinh

On the completion of this thesis, I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude and deepgratitude to my supervisor, Tran Thi Thu Hien, PhD, who gave me benefits of herwisdom and her expert knowledge in teaching methods as well as her constantencouragement from the beginning stage of working out the research proposal to thefinal stage of writing up the thesis for her Without her valuable suggestions, carefuland detailed critical comments, this thesis would not have been fulfilled

My sincere thanks also go to all my grade-11 students and teachers at Huu LungUpper Secondary School for their assistance during the process of data collection.Also, my appreciation goes to my family and friends for their support whoseencouragement and assistance are of extreme importance during the course of mywriting

ABSTRACTThe present study aimed at exploring writing strategies employed by the eleventhgraders at Huu Lung Upper Secondary School (HLUSS) Participants were eightyeleventh graders identified as successful and unsuccessful writers The data for thestudy was gathered utilizing questionnaire and interview Oxford’s theory (1990) andPetric Czarl’s writing strategy questionnaire (2003) were used to formulate students’writing strategies The data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and SPSS 16.0software.

The findings of this study revealed that twelve writing strategies were used at thehighest degree by eleventh graders at HLUSS in which while-writing ones were mostfrequently employed Despite no variation in the frequency of the overall writingstrategy use between two parties of writers, several differences were found in the use

of individual items Some implications and suggestions for learning and teaching

writing strategies were offered to enhance students’ writing performance

LIST OF TABLES

Tables

Table 1 Writing strategy use in each stage by students in the writing

class

Table 2 Overall writing strategies most frequently used

Table 3 Mean and standard deviation of overall writing strategy between

successful and unsuccessful students

Table 4 Mean and standard deviation of writing strategy at different

stages

Table 5 between successful and unsuccessful students

Mean and standard deviation of prewriting strategies used by

Table 6 successful and unsuccessful students Mean and standard

deviation of while-writing strategies used by

Table 7 successful and unsuccessful students Mean and standard

deviation of revising strategies used by unsuccessful and

unsuccessful students

Page

24252727

2829

31

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

EFL: English as a foreign language

ESL: English as a second language

HLUSS: Huu Lung Upper Secondary School

LLSs: language learning strategies

SD: Standard deviations

SPSS: Statistical Package for the Social Science

WSQ: Writing Strategy Questionnaire

TABLE OF CONTENT

Declaration i

Acknowledgements……… ii

Abstract ……… iii

List of table ……… … iv

List of abbreviations……… v

Table content ……….vi

PART A: Introduction……… 1

1 Rationale………

…… 1

2 Aims of the study ……… 2

3 Research question… ……… 2

4 Method of the study…… ………

… 2

5 Scope of the study……….3

6 Significance of the study

………3

7 Organizations of the study ……… 3

PART B: DEVELOPMENT ……… 5

Chapter 1 Literature Review.… ……… 5

1.1 Learning language strategies ……….5

1.1.1 Definition of learning language strategies……… 5

1.1.2 Classification of learning language strategies……… 6

1.2 Writing strategies……… 9

1.2.1 Definition of writing strategy……… 9

1.2.2 Writing strategy questionnaire………9

1.3 Writing approaches……… 10

1.3.1 Product approach……… 11

1.4.1 Previous studies on language learning strategies………13

vi

1.4.2 Previous studies on writing strategies………14

1.5.Summary………16

Chapter 2 Methods………18

2.1 Setting of the study……… 18

2.2 Participants………19

2.2.1 Students……… 19

2.2.2 Teachers……….19

2.3 Instruments ……… 19

2.3.1.Questionnaire……….………19

2.3.2 Interview……… 20

2.4 Data collection procedure ……… 21

2.4.1 Questionnaire……….21

2.4.2 Interview………22

2.5 Data analysis……….22

2.6 Summary……… 23

Chapter 3: Results and Discussion………24

3.1.Results ………24

3.1.1.Questionnaire……… 24

3.1.1.1.Writing strategies most frequently used by 11th HL students……24

3.1.1.2 Differences in writing strategy use based on proficiency level…26 3.1.2 Interview……… 31

3.2 Findings and discussions……… 32

3 3 Chapter summary ……… 34

PART C: Conclusion……… 35

1 Recapitulation ………

……… 35

2 Implications………

35

3 Limitations of the study and suggestion further studies……… 37

vii

Appendix 2 ……….IIIAppendix 3 ……… VAppendix 4 ……… XIV

PART A: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale of the study

The crucial role of writing cannot be denied in the language learning process.According to Harmer (2007:112), this productive skill is a practical tool to givelearners chances for language utilization they have been studying Paradoxically,writing is an extremely difficult skill and poses great challenges for many second or

foreign language learners to truly grasp Because writing is “not an innate skill or

potential aptitude, but as a developmental capacity” (Grabe and Kaplan, 1996:151),

and a highly complicated process requiring writers to uncover thoughts and ideas,making them concrete and individual (Matsuda, 2003; Westwood, 2004) or a process

in which an initial idea in writing task needs refining and expanding by learners(Shaughnessy,1977: 234)

However, in approaching writing tasks such as writing a paragraph, a description, anarrative or a letter, students at Huu Lung Upper Secondary School (HLUSS),especially many eleventh graders seem to be more prone to finding solutions togrammar and vocabulary problems, imitating or copying fixed organizational patternspassively and unsuitably rather than analyzing or developing ideas As a result, theyfail to attain writing skills which lead to the burnout and low marks in writing

There goes an old Chinese proverb that “Teachers open doors, but you must enter by

yourself” When applied to the language teaching and learning, this proverb probably

means that teachers should provide their learners with good opportunities to acquireknowledge and the learners should know how to take the initiative to apply thatknowledge to their own case to be able to be more successful Nevertheless, most ofthe learners little apply and sometimes ignore appropriate writing strategies whenthey take guidance from their teachers As Wenden and Rubin (1987) found out thatsome learners were more successful than others since they used learning strategiesmore effectively Furthermore, Oxford (1990:1) claims

that the application of the appropriate learning strategies can lead to improvedproficiency and greater self-confidence This suggests that arousing learners’awareness of strategy use in learning can improve the learners’ result.

Writing strategies have been identified by various researchers in both second andforeign language contexts ( Petric & Czarl 2003; Pham Thu Hien, 2004; Chen , 2011,Maarof & Murat, 2013) Yet, there has not been any practical strategy studyconducted to uncover and clarify what strategies HLUSS students actually use inwriting

For all the reasons above, the researcher would like to investigate the use of writingstrategies of 11th grade students at HLUSS with the hope to reformulate the writingstrategies used by the group, namely “successful writers”, then, apply them to train

“unsuccessful writers” to help improve their writing skill

2 Aims of the study

Research hopes to find ways to help students learn to write in English better.Specifically, it aimed to find out what writing strategies are used most frequently bythe eleventh graders at HLUSS in their writing tasks in English and to determinewhether there were any differences in writing strategies used between successful andunsuccessful students

3 Research questions

The current study attempts to address the following research questions:

1 What writing strategies are most frequently used by eleventh graders at Huu Lung Upper Secondary School?

2 Are there any differences in the use of writing strategies between successful and unsuccessful students?

4 Method of the study

To achieve the objectives of the research, the study was conducted by usingquestionnaire and interview The questionnaire was used as the major instrument ofdata collection and interview was employed to confirm more reliable data from thesurvey questionnaire In addition, SPSS software was employed to analyze the datacollected from the survey

5 Scope of the study

Concerning the scope of the study, the following issues should be taken intoconsideration First, the study relates to writing strategies used by the eleventhgraders at HLUSS, Lang Son Province Second, writing strategies are studied invarious writing tasks such as writing a paragraph, a description, a narrative or a letter

6 Significance of the study

The current study is significant for several following reasons First, it makes asignificant contribution to investigate the writing strategy use of eleventh graders atHLUSS Second, it clarifies how writing strategies are applied Finally, manyimportant implications are discussed not only to arouse learners’ awareness of the use

of writing tactics and help learners use their writing strategies as effective languagelearning tools but also to help teachers make sense of their students’ strategy use andshare strategies with other learners or ponder their teachers’ future teaching direction

in writing

7 Organization of the study

This thesis consists of three parts, namely introduction, development and conclusion

Part A is introduction which provides an overview of the study including therationale, the aims, methods, the scope, the significance and the design of the study.

Part B, Development, has three distinguishable chapters.

Chapter 1, Literature Review, reviews theoretical background on which the whole

study is based concluding terminological definitions and taxonomies of languagelearning strategies, writing strategy and approaches to teaching writing

Chapter 2, Methodology, briefly presents the methodological framework of the study.

It covers features of the participants, setting of the study, instruments and datacollection procedure

Chapter 3, findings and discussion, presents findings and discusses the findings,

which gives comprehensive answers to the two research questions

Part C, Conclusion, summarizes significant findings, suggest implications for writing

strategy instructions at HLUSS, addresses notable limitations, and puts forwardpractical suggestions for future research

PART B: DEVELOPMENTCHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEWThis chapter discusses the theory and research into the five areas that form theunderpinnings for this study The first section begins with an overview of theoreticalissues on terminological definitions and classification systems of language learningstrategies The second section puts forward writing strategies, and writing strategyquestionnaire The third section provides writing approaches in teaching writing Thefourth section concludes a review of previous studies on LLSs and writing strategies.Finally, the main points are summarized at the end of this chapter

1.1 Language learning strategies

This section puts forward relevant issues of language learning strategies (LLSs) interms of definition and classification

1.1.1 Definition of language learning strategies

There are various definitions on language learning strategies given by variousresearchers and scholars, but this thesis only focuses on definitions by Rubin (1975),Tarone (1983), and Oxford (1990)

Learning strategies are, as Rubin (1975:43) defined, “the techniques or devices which

a learner may use to acquire knowledge”.

Tarone (1983) defines a learning strategy as an effort to “develop linguistic and

sociolinguistic competence in the target language - to incorporate these into one's interlanguage competence" (cited in O'Malley and Chamot, 1990:47).

Language learning strategies are, as Oxford (1990:8) defined , “specific actions taken

by the learner to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective, and more transferable to new situations”

These strategies seem to share the same characteristics: LLSs are “what students do

to assist their learning” (Bremner, 1999:8).Obviously, researchers use these different

terms to depict strategies and to explain for their own targets (Bremner, 1999:8)

Griffiths (2004:2) states that Rubin is one of the pioneers in the realm of doingresearch of learning strategies, Rubin’s definition, hence, is too broad to cover

In Tarone’s definition, although it may contribute to the language learning process to

a certain extent, learner autonomy, cultural understanding, or other aspects oflanguage learning are not underlined (Lan, 2005:16)

Compared with other definitions, Oxford’s is considered to be one of the mostcomprehensive ones (Lan, 2005:15) Furthermore, her definition adds affective factorused for other purposes like making learners more enjoyable which is not reflected inother definitions (Alhaisoni, 2012:116)

For the purpose of the study, Oxford’s definition acts as a guideline for the presentresearch because of its clearness, concrete and easy comprehension

1.1.2 Classification of language learning strategies

There are several different viewpoints on the classifications of LLSs in the field ofsecond and foreign language learning To seek a suitable classification of LLSs forthis study, the most common classifications of LLSs proposed by Naiman et al.,(1978), Rubin (1981), and Oxford (1990) are presented in this study

First, Naiman et al., (1978) presented a classification including five major strategiessuch as (i) an active task approach, (ii) realization of language as a system, (iii)realization of language as a means of communication and interaction, (iv)management of affective demands, and (v) monitoring of second languageperformance He emphasizes on distinctive learning strategies of good language

learners with expectation of transferring the strategies used by the good languagelearners to the poor ones However, Gass & Selinker (2008:443) point that, “…

studies which do not include poor learners cannot be used to say that poor learners

do the same thing that so-called good learners do” This classification, thus, is

irrelevant to the current study aiming at exploring the LLSs use in writing of both

“successful” and ‘unsuccessful” writers

Rubin (1981) classifies LLSs into two broad categories with eight sets such as (i)clarification/verification, (ii) monitoring, (iii) memorization, (iv) guessing/inductivereasoning, (v) deductive reasoning, and (vi) practice A distinctive point in theclassification proposed by Rubin is its direct influence to learning (O’Malley and

Chamot, 1990: 3) Additionally, it makes “a sketch of important strategies” utilized

by successful language learners (Lan , 2005) : 21) Her category, however, makes up

of certain limitations As pointed by Gass & Selinker (2008:443) above, the modelonly basing on her observations of the good language learners does not correlate tothe study which tend to explore both successful learners and unsuccessful ones

A common limitation in the classification by both Rubin and Naiman et al is that thetheoretical foundation of second language acquisition or cognition is ignored whichresults in difficulty to identify the foundation for learning (O’Malley and Chamot,1990: 7)

Although the taxonomies above yield some first insights for language learningstrategies, the visible weaknesses of the classification emerge which seem to beunsuitable for the current study The study, thus, needs to work out more appropriateclassification This is followed by another specific classification introduced byOxford (1990)

Taxonomy proposed by Oxford (1990:37) divides the language learning strategiesinto two major classes, direct and indirect with 62 question items Each class is

composed of three groups: memory, cognitive and compensation under the directclass; metacognitive, affective, and social under the indirect one

The first classification is direct strategies that directly refer to the purpose oflanguage Its three subcategories are memory strategies for language learners to storeand retrieve new information needed for communication; cognitive strategies forlearners to make out and produce new language by numerous different means easierand compensation strategies for assisting learners to get over their knowledgelimitations in language use

The second taxonomy of strategy class is indirect learning strategies that “supports

and manages language learning without directly involving the target language” with

three groups: metacognitive strategies, affective strategies and social strategies(Oxford, 1990:135) First, metacognitive strategies are actions which provide a wayfor learners to cooperate their own learning process Second, affective strategies areactions that assist learners regulate their motivation, attitude, as well as significantly

influence their learning success or failure The third ones, social strategies “help

students learn through interaction with each other” Oxford (1990) emphasizes that

indirect strategies are useful and able to apply for the development of all languageskills

By and large, compared with other categories, Oxford (1990) brings about anexclusive taxonomy (Ghee et al, 2010:51) and her classification is appreciated to bethe most comprehensive one of learning strategies to date (Ellis, 1994:539).Particularly, Oxford (1990) hints two additional kinds of strategies in detail such ascompensatory strategies, memory strategies that are not included in previouscategories and depicts social and affective strategies as distinct This new point is said

to be “part of language learner self-regulation” (Oxford, 2003:112) Moreover, in

view of Oxford (1990:37), she asserts that the six strategy categories supportmutually for the purpose of assisting learners to get more achievement in

their own learning and these strategies with 62 question items can be applied to 4language skills with some changes for appropriateness of each.

Basing on Oxford’s classification of LLSs, some suggestions for modifications wereoffered to be more suitable to explore learners’ writing strategies The next sectionwill present the issues related to writing strategies

1.2 Writing strategies

This section represents writing strategies including definitions and the writingstrategy questionnaire

1.2.1 Definition

Writing strategies are defined by Petric and Czarl (2003:189) as “actions or

behaviours consciously carried out by writers in order to make their writing more efficient” Another definition by Lei (2008:220) of writing strategies is “mediated actions which are consciously taken to facilitate writers’ practices in communities”.

According to Petric and Czarl (2003:190), the definition of writing strategiesconcentrates on students’ perceptions of the writing strategy use, which may not bethe same as the actual strategies applied

In analyzing writing strategies, linguists proposed some different writing strategyquestionnaires From different perspectives, different writing strategy questionnairescan be used or adapted Writing strategy questionnaire will be presented in the nextsection

1.2.2 Writing strategy questionnaire

Basing on Oxford’s format of Strategy Inventory for Language Learning, Petric andCzarl (2003) made some suggestions for changes of questionnaires so that it can beappropriate for investigation into writing strategies The authors divided it into threesubcategories: (i) planning strategies (8 items), (ii) while-writing strategies (14

items), and (iii) revising strategies (16 items) (see Appendix 3) They emphasized thatthis division was introduced for the sake of clarity According to Jackson (2006: 154)these items had a strong reliability.

To construct its reliability and validity, the authors conducted studies with differentgroups of members of the target population, i.e., advanced non-native speakers ofEnglish, in academic environments

To establish the reliability of data collection instruments applicable to questionnaires,Petric and Czarl (2003) undertook a study among English majors at a Hungarianuniversity by using the test–retest as the main reliability check method proposed bymany researchers (e.g Seliger and Shohamy, 1989; Alderson and Banerjee, 1996;Hatch and Lazaraton, 1991) According to Petric and Czarl (2003:191), this methodhas been proved to be stable over time and relatively feasible to be applied in regularschool settings

To build its validity, the authors applied the think- aloud protocol termed by Converseand Presser (1986) and interview by Alderson and Banerjee (1996) The resultsrevealed that relevant types of validity are considered to be content, construct andresponse validity Moreover, validation using triangulation of different data sources

provides “not only information on the validity of the instrument but also valuable

insights into the construct itself.” (Petric and Czarl 2003:191)

From all the reasons above, the present research bases on definition of LLSs, sometheories of proposed by Oxford (1990) and writing strategy questionnaire by Petricand Czarl (2003) which act as the key direction to its investigation because of theirclearness, concreteness and validity The following section will discuss writingapproaches

1.3 Writing approaches

There are a number of different approaches toward teaching writing emerging overthe years, each of which has its distinctive focuses leading to the use of differentstrategies to help ESL/ EFL learners fulfill their writing tasks To some extent, theapproach to teaching writing affects the investigation into writing strategies In thisstudy, two approaches will be presented, namely product approach and process onefor the purpose to identify the one that is better in teaching writing.

1.3.1 Product approach

This approach is, as Nunan (1991: 86) states, “consistent with sentence - level

structuralist linguistics and bottom – up process” According to Pincas (1982: 22),

the product approach includes four stages: familiarization, controlled writing, guidedwriting and free writing The purpose of familiarization stage is to arouse learners’awareness of certain features of a particular text In the controlled and guided writingsections, the learners’ practice in skills aims at increasing freedom until they are

ready for the free writing section, when they “use the writing skill as part of a

genuine activity such as a letter, story or essay”

This approach has some merits As stated by Nunan (1991: 87), the focus on usage,structure, or correct form would result in the improvement of writing Moreover,Likewise, Rodrigues (1985) and Howowitz (1986) (cited in Nunan 1991: 87)advocate that overall goal of the product approach to teaching writing is to developthe learner’s ability to the creation of grammatically accurate texts that will beencountered in academic or personal setting

Nevertheless, the limitations of the product-oriented approach to the teaching writinghave been pointed out by other researchers First, it mainly focuses on the end result

of learning process in which learners attempt to imitate, copy and transform fixedorganizational models of correct language at the level of the sentences provided bythe teachers or textbook to facilitate the meaning of the sentences (Nunan, 1991:86-87) Thus, it is said that less attention is paid to purpose,

communication, audience, or the process of composition ( Zamel ,1982:195) , there is

“ no freedom to make mistakes” (Pincas,1982:91) or “little or no opportunity for

learners adding any thoughts or ideas of their own” (Raimes 1983: 10) Also, Hamer

(1991: 257) and Nunan (1990:8) add that the product approach primarily concerns theaim of a task and the end product And it is supposed to be more suitable to somekinds of text such as formal letters or postcards (Steele, 2005)

1.3.2 Process approach

Later, the emergence of the process approach in teaching writing has drawn attention

to various language researchers According to Zamel (1982: 196), the processapproach makes up of the act of writing, pre - writing and re-writing and is said tobeneficial to students with the various classroom activities Raims (1983:10) depicts

that in the process approach, “students do not write on a given topic in a restricted

time and hand in the composition rather, they explore a topic through writing”

Nunan (1991: 87) points out that thanks to this approach, learners can work together

as a way of increasing motivation and developing positive attitudes toward writing.Supporting these views, While and Arndt (1991: 11) suggest a process writing modelinvolving six recursive procedures

In this model, the first writers’ task is drafting to brainstorm ideas Followed this isstructuring by ordering information, experimenting with arrangements, etc Next step

is reviewing in which writes check context, connections, assess impact and edit Thefourth stage, focusing, makes sure that the writer is getting the message across shewants to get across The fifth one, generating, writers have to generate ideas Finally,the writing needs evaluating

Although, the process – oriented approach is said to take time to brainstorm ideas(Hammer, 2001: 258), it is believed to promote the development of skilled languageand the responsibility and control of learning is shifted from teacher to students

(Nunan, 1991: 86-87) In other words, the teachers in the process-oriented writingclasses serve as facilitators who enable the learners to develop effective composingstrategies Though there are views of strength of the composing process revealed byprocess oriented studies, most writing classes are still based on mechanistic, product-oriented exercises (Zamel, 1987: 701) This suggests that writing classes maycombine these two approaches However, the research into the process ofcomposition makes contribution to raise implications for the methodology of teachingwriting in a second or foreign language.

1.4 Previous studies

This section will put forward an overview of previous studies in terms LLSs andwriting strategies in accordance with subject selection, data collection methods andfindings with the purpose of seeking the most suitable method for collecting data thencomparing the results of the study with those has been presented in this section

1.4.1 Studies on language learning strategies

Alhaisoni (2012) conducted a significant research on the identification of the typeand frequency of the English language learning strategies of 701 male and femaleSaudi EFL students at the University of Ha’il The Oxford Strategies Inventory ofLanguage Learning was used with some modifications The findings indicated thathighly proficient students used all six categories more than low-proficiency students.The result revealed that the students utilized LLSs with low to medium frequency.They preferred to use cognitive and metacognitive strategies the most, used affectivestrategies and memory strategies the least

Ismail and Khatib (2013) explored the patterns of language learning strategies (LLS)used by 190 students in the Foundation Program of the United Arab EmiratesUniversity (UAEU) It also investigated the effects of language proficiency level andgender on the use of these strategies The Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory forLanguage Learning was used for collecting the data The results indicated that

these learners were overall medium strategy users They utilized Metacognitivestrategies the most frequently used among the six strategies Followed this was socialstrategies, compensation strategies, affective strategies, cognitive strategies andmemory strategies respectively.

1.4.2 Studies on writing strategies

Pham Thu Hien (2004) investigated LLSs of Vietnamese EFL groups, namely

“effective” and “ineffective” writers in writing classes at a university in Vietnam.Classroom observation, interview and questionnaire were served as data collectioninstruments, and then data was analyzed by SPSS The result showed that thesubjects utilized all of the direct and indirect strategies that were proposed by Oxford(1990) Concretely, the effective writers used some strategies at higher degree thanthe ineffective ones while they did writing tasks

Chen (2011) conducted a present study aimed at investigating writing strategies used

by 135 Chinese non-English majors at Dezhou University The questionnaireproposed by Petric and Czarl, (2003) and interview were major means of collectingdate The findings showed that in spite of using strategies in all stages of writing,students tended to utilize more writing strategies in while-writing strategies compared

to pre-writing strategies and revising strategies; and writing strategies as a wholehave certain predictive power for writing achievements

Another study undertaken by Maarof & Murat (2013) explored the writing strategyuse between two groups of high-intermediate and low proficiency ESL uppersecondary school students in Malaysia to determine any significant differences instrategy use between them The number of participant was 50 Data gathered by theWriting Strategy Questionnaire by Petric & Czarl (2003) revealed that the while-writing strategies were most frequently used by ESL students while the revisingstrategies more were least used

All the students displayed approximately similar frequency use of strategies butdiffered only in the type of strategies used.

In summary, on the basis of a discussion on the previous studies, some comments onsubject selection, data collection method and results are given as follows:

In the first place, some generalizations can be made First, the subjects chosen forthese studies are learners from different colleges studied by Pham Thu Hien (2004)Alhaisoni (2012), Ismail and Khatib 2013 and Chen (2011) and high students inMalaysian by Maarof & Murat (2013) These students learn English as a second orforeign language Second, most previous studies, the subjects are divided into groupsfor comparison, namely successful learners and unsuccessful learners, highlyproficient and low proficiency students

Second, in terms of methods, the classroom observation, interview and questionnairewere adapted to investigate strategies Nevertheless, no single research method isperfect (Cohen and Scott, 1996) and how they are used depends on the main purpose

of the study (Robson, 2002:161)

Concretely, in the previous study by Pham Thi Thu Hien (2004), the observational

method failed to yield much strategy data Because one of its key demerits is “its

inability to produce description of internal and mental strategies such as reasoning

or self – talk” or nothing about the mental operations learners use is revealed (Cohen,

1998: 32) Additionally, little opportunity for learners to exercise behaviors isproduced (Ellis, 1994:532) Another weakness is that researchers probably collect

data only from the students who are more verbal and this may “limit the data to only

a subset of language learners- namely, the outspoken or extroverted” (Cohen,

1998:33) Thus, the observational method as stated is irrelevant to the current study.Regarding interview, Cohen, et al., (2007:349) asserts that interview is a flexible toolfor data collection, allowing multi-sensory channels to be used: verbal, non-

verbal, spoken and heard Additionally, interviews allow interviewers to “seek

clarification in limited ways and to disambiguate questions if necessary and they normally yield a better response rate” (McDoNough & McDoNough, 2003:183).

However, interview is “somewhat prone to subjectivity and bias on the part of the

interviewer” (Cohen et al , 2007:352).

In regard to questionnaire, as can be seen from the previous studies, researcherswidely used questionnaire proposed by Oxford (2003) to explore learners’ LLSs andPetric & Czarl’s (2003) to investigate learners’ writing strategies Although it issometimes unsuitable for probing deeply into an issue (Dornyie, 2003), questionnaire

is a relatively popular instrument of the data collection (Nunan, 1992:143) Cohen(1998: 29) and Dornyie (2003:9) claim that questionnaires can be administered to alarge group of people which helps one collect a huge amount of information withlittle time Furthermore, by using questionnaire, researcher’s time, effort and financialresources may be reduced (Dornyie, 2003: 9)

After carefully considering the major demerits of a variety of data collection methods

in strategy studies and especially, the strengths of questionnaire, the researcher hasdecided to choose questionnaire as the main data collection method for the purpose ofthe current study The reasons for its popularity are that it had been adopted byvarious researchers In addition, interview is employed to confirm more reliable datafrom the survey questionnaire

1.5 Summary

This chapter has addressed a review of the literature related to the focus of this study.First, language learning strategies have been defined in various ways, yet Oxford’sdefinitions will be chosen for the purpose of the study Second, some classifications

of learning strategies have been clearly presented and discussed Nevertheless,Oxford’s taxonomy and Petric and Czarl’s writing strategy questionnaire will beadopted to investigate the writing strategies employed by

eleventh graders at HLUSS, and interview is used to clarify and supplement statisticalresults from the survey questionnaire Fourth, the writing process theory is used toanalyze and discuss the findings of the investigation Finally, some previous studieshave been briefly reviewed with an attempt to seek the most appropriate methods forcollecting data in the present research and to help the researcher to compare andcontrast her research results with those in the literature review The next chapter willput forward methodology.

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGYThis chapter consists four parts: the setting of the study, participants and instruments

of the study as well as the data collection procedure

2.1 Setting of the study

The study was conducted at a public educational institution, Huu Lung UpperSecondary School, Lang Son In the school year 2013-2014, the school consisted often eleventh - grade classes with four hundred students encompassing two naturalscience oriented classes, two classes specializing in English and the others belonging

to the group of social science majors

In terms of the official learning material, “Tieng Anh 11” compiled by Hoang VanVan et, al has been selected for eleventh graders This document is composed ofsixteen units, each of which consists of five parts: Reading, Speaking, Listening,Writing and Language focus In the writing section, students are exposed to sometasks such as letters, descriptive writing and narrative writing

Regarding learners, although most students are aware of the importance of English, asmall number of students are motivated, make efforts to learn well and seem to payattention to their own learning strategies While many others are only interested insubjects they are supposed to perform in the entrance university examinations and all

in all they are little aware of the strategy use in learning process

In terms of teaching staff, all of teachers are from College of Pedagogy, many ofwhom have a great deal of teaching experience , are enthusiastic, active and full ofinspiration for teaching Nevertheless, in teaching writing, they are familiar with theGrammar-Translation teaching method without paying much attention to teachingwriting strategies

2.2 Participants

2.2.1 Students

The number of eleventh graders was 405 They were between 16 and 17 years old Bythe time of the study, all of them had learned English as a foreign language formallyfor four years in lower secondary schools and a year and a half in upper secondaryschool

Eighty participants were randomly selected for the study on the basis of the followingcriteria Firstly, basing on the result of the previous semester, the students with 7.0upward were identified for “successful” group and those who got 5.0 downwardswere classified as “unsuccessful” one respectively (see Appendix 1, 2) Secondly, all

of the participants were willing to take part in the study Lastly, they have beensomewhat accustomed to the teaching and studying methods, the conditions and theteaching environment at upper secondary school This makes convenient for theauthor to get their consent to participate in the research

2.2.2 Teachers

Four teachers aged from 24 to 40 were invited to join this study All the teachers arefemales, three of whom have many years of experience in teaching English writing;one is novice and lacks teaching experience The reason for choosing these teachers isthat they are all currently teaching 11th English at HLUSS

2.3 Instruments for data collection

Questionnaire and interview were chosen to collect data in the study

2.3.1 Questionnaire

Questionnaire was adopted as a major source of data in the current research forseveral reasons, one of which is that questionnaire encourages great honesty (Cohen

et al., 2007: 351) Another reason is that the data themselves “are more amendable to

quantification than discursive data like free form field notes, the transcripts of oral language” (Nunnan, 1992: 143) The others lied in its popularity in writing strategy

studies and its strengths over other data collection techniques which were discussedelaborately in 1.4.2

The questionnaires are composed of two sections: A background questionnaire andWriting Strategy Questionnaire proposed by Petric & Czarl, (2003) which weretranslated into Vietnamese for the purpose of making them easier for the subjects toanswer According to Dornyei and Taguchi (2010: 49), translated questionnaires have

been widely practiced with the belief that “the quality of the obtained data will

increase if the questionnaire is presented in the respondents’ own mother tongue”.

In the first section, the background questionnaire designed to obtain additionalinformation about the participants included five questions basing on the Oxford’ssuggestions (see Appendix 3 section 1)

The second section was designed on the basis of WSQ adapted from Petric & Czarl(2003) to uncover information about students’ writing strategy use during theirwriting process (see Appendix 3 section 2) The questionnaire is divided in to threeparts following the structure of the writing process, i.e.; before writing, while writingand revising and includes a list of thirty-eight specific items for writing, each ofwhich presents an assertion about the use of a writing strategy and was given on a

five-point Likert scale ranging “never or almost never true of me”, “Usually not

true”, “Somewhat true”, “usually true” and “always, or almost always true of me.”

2.3.2 Interview

Interview was used to confirm the information collected from the questionnaire andidentified to be relevant to the current study due to the following reasons: First,

interview has been widely used in survey research to seek data on stages andprocesses of language acquisition (Nunan, 1992:149) Second, interviews allowresearchers to “investigate phenomena that are not directly observable” (Mackey andGass, 2005:173) Other reasons adopted in this study were discussed in 1.4.2.

A semi - structured interview in English was carried out with four teachers who wereteaching “Tieng Anh 11” at HLUSS In semi - structured interview, interviewer canchange the order of the question because of its flexibility (Nunan ,1992: 148) andfollow up interviewers’ response more extensively (McDoNough and McDoNough,2003:184 ) There were three interview questions which focused on asking thefrequency of teaching strategies and different strategies used to teach students atdifferent levels (see Appendix 4) The length of each interview depended largely onthe subjects’ talkativeness

2.4 Data collection procedure

2.4.1 Questionnaire

First, after students had completed the first-term of the academic year 2014, thequestionnaire was directly delivered to 80 eleventh graders in a hall at HLUSS fornearly two hours This process was divided into three sections: Briefing, Writingstrategy questionnaire and Background questionnaire

In the first section, Briefing, the researcher stated the purpose of the study in fiveminutes

In the second section, the subjects were required to write a paragraph about 100-120

words on the topic “writing about a friend “ , which was designed to provide the

subjects with opportunities to use writing strategies in writing process and to helpresearcher collect accurate data on writing strategies The participants were dividedinto groups of five to discuss the topic, list vocabulary and structures and generate theideas in 15 minutes Next, the researcher observed the subjects’

activities and gave suggestions when asked Having completed the discussion, thesubjects were asked to complete their writing tasks in 20 minutes, exchange theirwriting papers with their peers’ in 10 minutes and hand them in later These activitiesaimed at providing the subjects with chances to use numerous writing strategies.Finally, subjects spent thirty minutes fulfilling the writing strategy questionnaire.

In the last stage, to obtain the students’ background, the investigator distributed thebackground questionnaire to the subjects and required them accomplish within fiveminutes Then the researcher collected their answers

2.4.2 Interview

Two weeks after analyzing data from the writing strategies questionnaire, interviewswere conducted between the researcher and four teachers in English The interviewstook place in a quiet room on the fourth floor Before starting the interview, theresearcher explained the nature of the research and the purpose of the interview Theinterviewees were also informed that the data were recorded and transcribed for thestudy

2.5 Data analysis

All the data gathered from the WSQ were put into a computer and analyzed throughthe Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS) 16.0 to measure and uncover thesimilarities and differences in the use of writing strategies by two groups: successfuland unsuccessful writers Specifically, descriptive statistics including frequencies, themeans and standard deviations (SD) in the form of tables were calculated to show thestudents’ use of writing strategies

The frequencies of using writing strategies of the two groups “successful’ and

“unsuccessful” writers (see 2.2.1.for detail) were calculated by counting the number

of responses to the questionnaire items based on 5-point scale: always used (scored

4.5-5), usually used (scored 3.5-4.4), sometimes used (2.5-3.4), generally not used(1.5-2.4) and never used (0.0- 1.4).And three scales for stating the degree of learningstrategy use were figured out in term of high use (3.5-5.0), medium use (2.4-3.4) andlow use (1.0-2.4 ) proposed by Oxford (1990:300).

2.6 Summary

This chapter provided detailed descriptions of the methodology employed in thisstudy First, the setting of the study is presented Second, the subjects werespecifically depicted Third, questionnaire proposed by Petric & Czarl (2003) on thebasis of Oxford’s theory was adopted to explore students’ writing strategy use and therationale for choosing this method was given Besides, interview was used to clarifyinformation from survey questionnaire Finally, the procedures of data collectionwere described The results from analyzing the students’ questionnaire and interviewand discussion will be reported in the next section

CHAPTER 3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONThis chapter reports the results which are resulted from the analysis of thequestionnaires and interview Then, the researcher will provide discussion on thebasis of processed results.

3.1 Results

This part will put forward the results of the questionnaire and interview to answer theresearch questions

3.1.1 Questionnaire

3.1.1.1 Writing strategies most frequently used by 11 th HLUSS students

Table 1 presents the overall writing strategies used at three writing stages As can beseen from the table, while-writing strategies (M =3.54) had the highest frequency,followed by those at the prewriting stage (M =2.90) and revising stage (M = 2.77).According to Oxford’s (1990) division of language learning strategy use, (High usage

is from 3.5 to 5.0; Medium usage is from 2.5 to 3.4; and Low usage is from 1.0 to2.4) Therefore, it can be understood that the overall use of writing strategies bystudents in English writing is at the medium level

Table 1 Writing strategy use in each stage by students in the writing class

Stages Prewriting

While-writing

Revising

Overall writing strategies

Table 2 presents the descriptive statistics for the most frequently used strategies inwriting As shown in this table, twelve out of thirty-eight writing strategies were mostfrequently used by students, nine of which were at while – writing stage, while onlyone was at the prewriting and two at the revising stage.

At the prewriting phrase, sixty-five percent of the students chose Before they start

writing they revise the requirements (M =3.58; SD=1087) Regarding the

while-writing stage, among nine of the most frequently employed strategies, Ask somebody

to help out when they have problems while writing was preferred by most students as

their initial strategy (M=4.23; SD = 857) whereas Reread what they have written to

get ideas how to continue (M=3.52; SD=1.124) was the least used strategy in the list.

Other strategies at this stage ranged from M =3.53 to M=3.85 As for the revisingstage, two strategies were the most frequently utilized by the students One of them

was Check their mistakes after they get back the paper with feedback from the

teacher, and try to learn from them (M=3.95; SD =.898); and the other was Compare their paper with their friends’ on the same topic (M=3.71; D= 1.173).

Table 2 Overall writing strategies most frequently used

Scale and stages

help out when I have

problems while writing

2 Use a bilingual

dictionary

3 Start with the

4 Simplify what I want

to write if I do not know

word in English, stop

writing and look up the

word in the dictionary

8 If I do not know a

word in English, I write

it in my native language

and later try to find an

appropriate English word

9.Reread what written to

get ideas how to

continue

Revising stage

1 Check mistakes after

getting back the paper

with feedback from the

teacher, and try to learn

from them

2 Compare the paper

with friends’ on the same

Table 3 Mean and standard deviation of overall writing strategy between

successful and unsuccessful students

Further comparisons of overall writing strategy use at different stages between thetwo groups will be presented in the next section

Table 4 Mean and standard deviation of writing strategy at different stages betweensuccessful and unsuccessful students

Groups N=40 Successful

Unsuccessful

The results from Table 4 show little difference in writing strategy employmentbetween successful and unsuccessful groups at three writing stages As can be seenfrom the table, both of the groups used a repertoire of strategies with the samefrequency at the pre-writing and the revising stage (Medium level) They, however,employed writing strategies at high level at while-writing stage