Effectiveness of indirect corrective feedback in english writing at the faculty of english, hanoi national university of education

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIESFACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES NGUYỄN THỊ KHÁNH EFFECTIVENESS OF INDIRECT CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK IN ENG

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

NGUYỄN THỊ KHÁNH

EFFECTIVENESS OF INDIRECT CORRECTIVE

FEEDBACK IN ENGLISH WRITING

AT THE FACULTY OF ENGLISH, HANOI NATIONAL

UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION

(HIỆU QUẢ CỦA CHỮA LỖI GIÁN TIẾP TRONG MÔN VIẾT TIẾNG ANH TẠI KHOA TIẾNG ANH TRƯỜNG ĐẠI

HỌC SƯ PHẠM HÀ NỘI)

M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field: English Language Teaching Methodology Code: 60 14 10

HANOI – 2013

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

NGUYỄN THỊ KHÁNH

EFFECTIVENESS OF INDIRECT CORRECTIVE

FEEDBACK IN ENGLISH WRITING

AT THE FACULTY OF ENGLISH, HANOI NATIONAL

UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION (HIỆU QUẢ CỦA CHỮA LỖI GIÁN TIẾP TRONG MÔN VIẾT TIẾNG ANH TẠI KHOA TIẾNG ANH TRƯỜNG ĐẠI

HỌC SƯ PHẠM HÀ NỘI)

M.A MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field: English Language Teaching Methodology Code: 60 14 10

Supervisor: Nguyễn Thị Bách Thảo, M.A.

HANOI - 2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DECLARATION i

ACKNOWLEDGEMEMTS ii

ABSTRACT iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS iv

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS vii

LIST OF TABLES viii

LIST OF CHARTS ix

PART A: INTRODUCTION 1

1 Rationale 1

2 Aims of the study 2

3 Scope of the study 2

4 Method of the study 3

5 Significance of the study 3

6 Organization of the study 4

PART B: DEVELOPMENT 5

CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 5

1.1 Process writing 5

1.1.1 An overview of process approach 5

1.1.2 Stages in a writing process 6

1.2 Corrective feedback 8

1.2.1 Definitions of corrective feedback 8

1.2.2 Types of corrective feedback to students’ writing 9

1.2.2.1 Self-assessment 9

1.2.2.2 Peer feedback 9

1.2.2.3 Teacher’s feedback 10

1.3 Teachers' corrective feedback strategies 11

1.4 Effectiveness of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback 13

1.5 Students’ reactions and attitudes towards teachers’ indirect corrective

feedback 14

2.1 Participants 17

2.2 Data collection instruments 18

2.2.1 Students’ writing analysis 18

2.2.2 Questionnaire 19

2.3 The procedure of data collection and analysis 20

3.1 Findings 21

3.1.1 Effectiveness of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback on students’ writing accuracy from students’ writing analysis 21

3.1.2 Students’ reactions and attitudes towards teacher’s indirect corrective feedback from survey questionnaires 23

3.2 Discussion 33

3.2.1 Effectiveness of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback to students’ writing accuracy from students’ writing analysis 33

3.2.2 Students’ reactions and attitudes towards teacher’s indirect corrective feedback from survey questionnaires 34

3.2.2.1 Students’ feeling about the use of indirect corrective feedback 34

3.2.2.2 Students’ difficulties when the teacher uses indirect corrective feedback in class 34

3.2.2.3 Effectiveness of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback on students’ attitudes towards writing 34

3.2.2.4 Students’ attitudes towards the value of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback 35

3.2.2.5 Students’ expectations for better use of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback 36

CHAPTER 4: RECOMMENDATIONS 37

4.1 Recommendations for the teachers 37

4.2 Recommendations for the students 38

PART C: CONCLUSION 40

1 Conclusion 40

2 Limitations of the study 41

3 Suggestions for further study 41

: Hanoi National University of Education

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Ellis’ table of feedback types (2009 p.98) 12

Table 2: Frequency of grammatical errors of experimental group and control group

21

Table 3: Effectiveness of Teacher’s indirect corrective feedback to students'

attitudes towards writing 26

Table 4: The students’ perception about the effectiveness of teacher’s indirect

corrective feedback on their writing accuracy 28

Table 5: Students’ sources to self-correct their grammatical errors 29

Table 6: The students’ progress in writing accuracy after 6 weeks of the study 31

Table 7: Students’ suggestions for better use of teacher’s indirect corrective

feedback 32

LIST OF CHARTS

Chart 1: Students’ feeling about the use of indirect corrective feedback 23

Chart 2: Students’ difficulties when the teacher uses indirect corrective feedback in

class 25

Chart 3: The suitability of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback to the students and

their leaning style 27

Chart 4: Percentage of errors corrected by students after receiving teacher’s indirect

corrective feedback 30

PART A: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale

Nowadays, English is considered as an international language in the world with over1,500 million speakers (Crystal, 2003) Recently, Communicative Language Teaching(CLT) has been widely used in Vietnam In such approach, students are taught fourmain skills: reading, listening, speaking and writing However, not many students likewriting and are able to write well Le (2008), when investigating the teaching andlearning English among high schools in Can Tho, found that only 6.9% of theVietnamese students want to learn writing In my own teaching experience, it wasfound that most students in Faculty of English, Hanoi National University of Educationhave similar problems with their writing These problems are (1) they have a lot ofgrammatical errors in their writing, and (2) they have negative attitudes towardslearning writing Thus, how to improve students’ writing as well as to change theirattitudes towards writing activities has greatly attracted my attention

Through a review of literature, although the effect of written corrective feedback is stillcontroversial, numerous studies on the use of corrective feedback in writing classeshave shown that corrective feedback including indirect feedback can be applied inwriting classes to improve students’ writing accuracy (Liu, 2008; Kaweera, 2008;Ferris, 2000; Ferris et al., 2001) Beside teacher’s writing instructions, in many cases,teacher’s correction and comments can help to solve the problems of students’ writingaccuracy and their attitudes towards writing In other words, teacher’s good feedbackstrategies may give students stimulation for revision and motivation to maintain theirinterest in writing

In Vietnam, there has been some research on teacher’s written corrective feedback such

as Le (2011) or Tran (2011) which focuses on the high school setting but none of the

studies has investigated the effect of indirect corrective feedback on students’ writing

in university setting

For all the mentioned reasons, the researcher wishes to conduct a study entitled

“Effectiveness of indirect corrective feedback in English writing at Faculty of English, Hanoi National University of Education”

2 Aims of the study

This current study aims at (1) examining the effectiveness of written indirect correctivefeedback on improving writing accuracy of the second-year students at Faculty ofEnglish, Hanoi National University of Education (FOE, HNUE); (2) investigating thestudents’ attitudes towards the use of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback and (3)proposing some recommendations of the use of teacher’s written indirect correctivefeedback in writing classes

In short, the research paper aims to address the following questions:

1 To what extent does indirect corrective feedback strategy have effects onsecond-year students’ writing accuracy at Faculty of English, Hanoi NationalUniversity of

Education?

2 How do second-year students at Faculty of English, Hanoi National Universityof

Education react to teacher’s indirect corrective feedback on their writing?

3 What can be done to improve students’ writing by employing indirect

corrective feedback?

3 Scope of the study

In fact, teacher’s corrective feedback can be given in both oral and written forms,directly and indirectly on students’ writing However, within the framework of a

2

In addition, due to the limit of this study, the participants selected are not all year students at FOE, HNUE but only students from the two classes that the researcherdirectly teach.

second-4 Method of the study

Analysis of students’ writing and questionnaires were utilized to collect the data for thewhole paper 50 second-year students at FOE, HUNE were divided into two groups:one experimental group and one control group The 26 students in the experimentalgroup were given teacher’s indirect corrective feedback while the 24 students in thecontrol group were given direct corrective feedback without any revision required Allthe 50 students were asked to do a pre-test at the beginning of the study and a post-testafter 6 weeks of the study All the 50 students’ writing papers in the two tests werecollected, measured and analyzed

After the sixth week of the study, 26 students from the indirect corrective group wereasked to complete questionnaires on their reactions and attitudes towards the teacher’suse of indirect corrective feedback in class After that, all the questionnaires werecollected, analyzed and discussed

5 Significance of the study

As mentioned above, only few researchers have investigated the effectiveness ofteacher’s written indirect corrective feedback on students’ writing in university setting.Thus, the thesis can help to fill the gap in literature

Moreover, in practice, the suggestions presented in this study may partly contribute tothe enhancement of the effectiveness of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback tosecond-year students at FOE, HNUE in particular and to university students in general

6 Organization of the study

The study consists of three parts:

Part A – Introduction – states the problems and rationale of the study, the aim, the

scope, the method, the significance and the organization of the study

Part B - Development

Chapter 1 – Literature review – synthesizes the results of other research that are

relevant to this study

Chapter 2 – Methodology – describes the methods utilized in the study.

Chapter 3 – Findings and Discussion – presents and analyses the collected data from

students’ writing and questionnaires; provides the discussion based on the findings

Chapter 4 – Recomendations – makes some suggestions for better use of teacher’s

indirect corrective feedback to improve students’ writing accuracy and change theirattitudes towards writing at FOE, HNUE

Part C – Conclusion – summarizes the main issues mentioned in the research, outlines

the limitations of the study and makes suggestions for further research

PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 Process writing

1.1.1 An overview of process approach

Since early 1970s, what is now called the writing process has been taken intoconsideration as an approach of teaching writing Nowadays there is a shift from thefocus on students' written products to attention to students' writing process

Product writing is considered a traditional approach in which writing is defined as “anact of transferring ideas to paper with attention neither to the context nor to the stageswriters go through when creating a text” (Aires, 2010, p.2) In their study onapproaches to teaching writing, Badger, R., & White, G (2000) state that “product-based approaches see writing as mainly concerned with knowledge about the structure

of language, and the writing development as mainly the result of imitation of input inthe form of texts provided by the teacher.” In a word, it can be understood that thisapproach to writing mainly concentrates on the product of writing rather than on theprocess of writing

On the contrary, process approach in writing is demonstrated in Harmer (2001, p 257)

as an approach in which the teacher pays attention to various stages that any piece ofwriting goes through It is also noted that “Writing in process approaches is seen aspredominantly to do with linguistic skills, such as planning and drafting, and there ismuch less emphasis on linguistic knowledge, such as knowledge about grammar andtext structure” (Badger, R & White, G 2000: 154)

In recent years, the process approach to writing has been seen as an improvement overthe traditional methods of writing instruction Writing is no longer considered to be a

“linear and fragmented procedure” (Hairston, 1982, p.78) with the mere target at anerror-free product Rather, it is “a cyclical process during which writers can move backand forth on a continuum, discovering, analyzing and synthesizing ideas” (Hughey, etal., 1983 as cited in Joe, 2006, p.48) While product approach is described byNunan(1999:75) as “reproductive language work”, Stanley (2003:1) considers theprocess approach as “a creative act which requires time and positive feedback to bedone well.” Moreover, one of the major strengths of process approach is that it helpsstudents to improve the accuracy of a text by revising the drafts of writing Theemphasis on a series of drafts on the same topic proves helpful to students becausethanks to writing and revising the writing, students can gradually discover the way toexpress their ideas appropriately.

1.1.2 Stages in a writing process

As stated by many researchers, the writing process consists of different stages.However, the stages in writing process are defined in different ways According toTribble (1996), the process approach identifies four stages in writing: (1) prewriting,(2) composing/drafting, (3) revising, and (4) editing

(1) Prewriting: Prewriting includes anything done by the writer before he writes a draft: deciding a topic, brainstorming ideas, outlining, etc

(2) Composing/drafting: In this stage, the writers do actual writing and refining of their sentences and paragraphs

(3) Revising: In this stage, the writers deal with the content of the writing;i.e refining text organization, structure, idea connections or other addition andconnection

(4) Editing: In this stage, the writers work on the mechanics of writing such

as spellings and punctuations

Writing in the abovementioned viewpoint is a one-way process in which there is noinvolvement of a reader Reid (1993) provides a different view in dividing writingstages into basic stages such as planning, drafting, revising, and editing, and four otherstages externally imposed by teachers, namely pre-writing, responding, evaluating andpost writing This distinction is helpful for teachers to apply the most productiveintervention in students' writing process in classroom context The following is asummary of the stages in the view of Reid (1993).

(1) Pre-writing: In this stage students are motivated to generate ideas by brainstorming and discussion

(2) Planning: Students organize ideas into a mind map, spider gram, orlinear form which helps students easily know the main points as well as theorganization of those main points in the required form of writing

(3) Drafting: Students write the first draft At this stage, attention should be

paid to the fluency of the writing and the choice of language in reference tothe target audience

(4) Responding: This stage is important to the success of students' writing

It gives them a sense that their writing is purposeful In the context ofteaching writing, this stage also brings in assistance for students to improvetheir writing through feedback of the teacher or fellow students

(5) Revising: When drafts are returned, students review their texts on the

basis of teacher or peer feedback

(6) Editing: At this stage, students do some finishing work of their writingfor teacher's evaluation Students make final "readjustments and checkaccuracy so that the text is maximally accessible to the reader" (Hedge,

1988, p.23)

(7) Evaluating: At this stage, the writing teachers assign scores which may

be analytical (based on specific aspects of writing ability) or holistic (based

on a global interpretation of the effectiveness of that writing)

(8) Post-writing: This stage may involve the cooperation between students

and teachers on the finished product to publish, share, read aloud andtransform the texts

In a word, the way Reid (1993) defines stages in a writing process better reflects theprocess approach since according to him, writing is a multistage process in which thewriter has to regularly look back and forth to discover, analyze and revise the writing

1.2 Corrective feedback

1.2.1 Definitions of corrective feedback

Corrective feedback, in the view of Lightbown and Spada (1999), is any indication tothe learners that their use of the target language is incorrect This includes variousresponses that the learners receive

Error correction is one kind of teacher's feedback and it can be used interchangeablywith the term "corrective feedback" According to James (1998:256-257), correctioncan be understood in "three senses" In the first sense, correction can be understood asfeedback, which informs learners that there is an error, and leaves them to diagnose andrepair it themselves In the second sense, it refers to proper correction in which learnersare not only informed about the error but also shown how to repair it, or even given analternative The third sense of error correction is remediation, which means carryingout error analysis that explains why an error is committed with the view to prevent itsrecurrence

According to Ellis (2009), corrective feedback provides the students with direct orindirect information about what is unacceptable He also states that corrective feedbackoften take the form of a response to learners’ linguistic errors.

The definition of Ellis (2009) seems to be the most suitable and closely involves in thescope of this study because it mentions the teacher’s response to the students’ errors in

a direct or indirect way Hence, this definition is adapted in this study

1.2.2 Types of corrective feedback to students’ writing

Written feedback in writing can be divided into three main types, namely assessment, peer feedback and teacher’s feedback

self-1.2.2.1 Self-assessment

Self-assessment is the process of finding and correcting students’ own mistakes It isstated in Wei and Chen (2004) that “Self-assessment encourages students to lookcritically and analytically at their writing and to take more responsibility for what theywrite Being involved in the process of self-evaluation, the students are no longersimply passive recipients of feedback, but become active participants in evaluation”.However, self-assessment is more time-consuming than the other types of feedback.Also, it is unsuitable way for students with low English proficiency to revise theirwriting

1.2.2.2 Peer feedback

Peer feedback is a practice in language education where feedback is given by onestudent to another According to Bartels (2004), peer feedback means feedback fromthe fellow students If students are working on the same assignment together, peerfeedback means exchanging drafts and comments on each other’s drafts

Peer feedback is used in writing classes to provide students more opportunities to learnfrom each other Peer feedback broadens learners’ involvement by giving them theadditional roles of reader and advisor to go with that of writer Further, structuringface-to-face discussion into the feedback process provides students the opportunity toengage in constructive controversy, which may lead to insights and greater taskengagement (Johnson & Johnson, 1987).

However, there are still some problems in the use of peer feedback One of the majorproblems is that the quality of the responses is questioned Students often feel that theirpeers offer unspecific, unhelpful and even incorrect feedback because they lack theknowledge of the target language or the knowledge in certain specific content areas(Allaei & Connor, 1990) Another problem with peer written feedback is the students’characteristics Many students may not easily accept the idea that their peers arequalified enough to evaluate their writing (Rollinson, 2005)

1.2.2.3 Teacher’s feedback

In the light of process writing approach, teachers play an important role in helpingstudents to revise their writing drafts Teacher’s corrective feedback, to some extent, isthe teacher's correction and can be defined as teachers' indication to learners' errors,which takes the forms of implicit or explicit correction

Some researchers indicate that students favor corrective feedback from teachersbecause they believe that they will benefit greatly from it (Leki, 1991; Radecki &Swales, 1988) Studies by Ashwell (2000), Cardelle and Corno (1981), and Ferris(2003) conclude that there is a positive correlation between student writing accuracyand teacher corrective feedback Furthermore, Ellis (1998) and Lightbrown (1998) statethat thanks to teacher corrective feedback adult learners can avoid fossilization andmaintain their progress in their second language proficiency

1.3 Teachers' corrective feedback strategies

Rod Ellis (2009) mentions six main strategies to provide corrective feedback which aredescribed in Figure 1 below

Basing on Ellis table of feedback types above, Sheen (2011) makes some slightchanges In his view, there are seven types of feedback namely (1) direct non-metalinguistic written correction; (2) direct metalinguistic written correction; (3)indirect written correction (non-located error); (4) indirect written correction (locatederror); (5) indirect written correction using error codes; (6) indirect metalinguisticwritten correction; (7) reformulation.

In the two versions of the typology of written corrective feedback above, the contentsare the same but the categorization is different This current research adapt Ellis’typology of written corrective feedback in which indirect corrective feedback is whenteachers indicates or locates the errors using underlining, but does not give the correctform

1.4 Effectiveness of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback

A great number of studies have been investigating whether corrective feedback haseffects on students’ writing There is a controversy among researchers about thebenefits of corrective feedback on second language learners’ written outcomes.Truscott (1996) concludes that all error correction is unnecessary, ineffective and evenharmful because it diverts time and energy away from more productive aspects ofwriting instruction However, other researchers advocate the usefulness of correctivefeedback as well as indirect corrective feedback (Ferris, 1999 & 2006; Ferris andRoberts, 2001; Lalande, 1982 and Hyland & Hyland, 2006)

The comparison between the effectiveness of direct and indirect corrective feedbackmay be informative for better understanding about the effectiveness of indirectcorrective feedback Of all the studies that consider the effectiveness of direct andindirect corrective feedback, the reported results are somewhat contradictory

Some researchers report no significant difference between the direct and indirectcorrective feedback (Robb et al., 1986; Ferris and Roberts, 2001) In their research,Robb et al (1986) investigate four types of feedback including direct feedback andindirect feedback where the number of errors was given in each line of text However,the students’ improvement in accuracy in Robb et al (1986) and Ferris and Roberts(2001) is considered only by the revised texts instead of by students’ new pieces ofwriting, which can not provide adequate evidence of the long-term effect of writtencorrective feedback on students’ accuracy.

Although it is found in Chandler (2003) that students who receive direct correctivefeedback often perform better than students who receive indirect corrective feedback,Lalande (1982) and Lee (2005) report more progress in accuracy for students whosetexts are indirectly corrected over those whose texts are directly corrected Also, it isnoted in Lalande (1982) that indirect corrective feedback caters “guided learning andproblem solving” Therefore, indirect corrective feedback is considered more likely tolead to long-term learning (Ferris and Roberts, 2001)

All in all, the effectiveness of different kinds of corrective feedback is still argued bydifferent researchers Beside the research that supports the use of direct correctivefeedback, there are a great number of studies asserting the effectiveness of indirectcorrective feedback Some studies which conclude that direct corrective feedback ismore effective also agree that indirect corrective feedback can have effects on students’problem solving skill and their long-term learning

1.5 Students’ reactions and attitudes towards teachers’ indirect corrective

feedback

Students’ reactions and attitudes towards teachers’ indirect corrective feedback can beunderstood as how students respond to the indicated errors teachers The student’s

response frequently takes the form of revision of the initial draft - an important stage inwriting process Many studies that have investigated written corrective feedback havecentered on whether students are able to make use of the feedback they receive whenthey revise their writing.

Many studies have described and classified the types of revisions that students make.Ferris (2002), for example, identifies a number of revision categories in the redrafts of

146 ESL students’ essays In Ferris’s study, it is found that 80.4 per cent of the errorssubject to corrective feedback are eliminated in the students’ revision drafts bycorrecting the error, by deleting the sentence containing the error, or by making acorrect substitution 9.9 per cent of the errors are incorrectly revised whereas 9.9percent of errors are left unchanged This study along with a number of others suggeststhat indirect corrective feedback is effective in helping students to eliminate errors intheir writing redrafts

Chandler (2003) compares indirect corrective feedback with the opportunity for thestudents to revise their writing with indirect corrective feedback where students have

no opportunity to do it Chandler concludes that there is more significant improvement

in the group that is asked to correct their errors than in the group that receives only theindication of errors Also, this increase in accuracy is not accompanied by any decrease

in fluency Chandler notes that “what seems to be a crucial factor is having the students

do something with the error correction besides simply receiving it” Clearly,corrections can only work if students are given a chance to notice and revise them.Another important issue that should be taken into consideration is students’ attitudestowards the use of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback Up to now, contrasting results

of this issue have been reported While Leki (1991), Lee (1997) and Liu (2008) claimthe students’ preferences for direct correction, students’ positive attitudes to teacher’sindirect correction have been reported in the other studies (Lalande, 1982;

Lee, 2005) Chandler (2003) finds that a reason for students’ preferences for directcorrective feedback is that it is the fastest and easiest way to correct their errors.However, the students in Chandler’s (2003) research also agree that they can rememberthe mistakes and learn more thanks to indirect corrective feedback Therefore, ameasure of the students’ attitudes towards the use of teacher’s indirect correctivefeedback could be of great value.

CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY

This research followed a two-group pre-test and post-test design To measure theeffectiveness of indirect corrective feedback on students’ writing with the focus on thegrammatical accuracy both quantitative method (analysis of students’ writing) andqualitative method (questionnaires) were employed In this study the students’grammatical errors, their reactions and attitudes were measured and investigated

In this study, students were divided into two groups: one experimental group and onecontrol group For six weeks, the two groups were instructed equally and similarly interms of instruction method Nevertheless, the difference between the two groups wasthat the control group received direct corrective feedback from the teacher while theexperimental group received indirect correction After six weeks, students inexperimental group were required to do a survey on their reactions and attitudestowards the use of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback

2.1 Participants

This study investigated 50 second-year students who major in English at Faculty ofEnglish, Hanoi National University of Education (FOE, HNUE) Among them 26students in the experimental group were chosen to do the questionnaires Because this

is a small-scale study, this number of participants appeared to be reasonable andmanageable

The students chosen in this study all passed an institutional entrance exam into HanoiNational University of Education They started learning English at secondary schooland now they are the second-year students at university Most of the participants’ level

of English proficiency is pre-intermediate level though in reality, some students havelower level Moreover, because of the curriculum of the university, self-study skills andproblem solving skills are quite familiar to the participants in this study

In their second year at university, the students in this study learnt how to writeparagraphs and the process writing method was applied in teaching writing at FOE,HNUE with a carefully designed curriculum In the writing lessons, many materialswere used, but the main course book was “Writing Academic English” in which thewriting process was employed.

2.2 Data collection instruments

In this study, analysis of students’ writing and a questionnaire for students wereemployed to collect data for the research

2.2.1 Students’ writing analysis

The researcher analyzed students’ writing through the two tests: pre-test and post-test

to see the effectiveness of teacher’s indirect corrective feedback on students’ writingaccuracy The analysis only focused on students’ grammatical errors Firstly, thenumber of grammatical errors and the total words of each paragraph were counted.Then, because the students’ writing paragraphs are of different length, it was difficult tocompare the errors between the pre-test and post-test Thus, the researcher calculatedthe average number of students’ grammatical errors per every ten words This couldmake it easy for the researcher to compare the students’ error between the pre-test andpost-test A ten-word ratio was used because students’ writing texts were quite short(around 180 words)

The number of grammatical errors per ten words was calculated in the followingformula:

Number of grammatical error per ten words =

For example, if a student writes a paragraph of 150 words and he/she has 8 errors inthat paragraph, the number of grammatical error per ten words = × 10 = 0.5

The above result means that the student makes approximately 0.5 errors in every 10words he/she writes

After the average errors per ten words were calculated, the numbers were analyzedusing t-test statistical technique to show the difference between the performances of thetwo groups

2.2.2 Questionnaire

A questionnaire for students was designed to answer the second research questionabout the students’ reactions and attitudes towards the teacher’s indirect correctivefeedback The survey was only delivered to students in experimental group (K60B)after six weeks of the research to investigate the students’ reactions and attitudestowards the teacher’s indirect corrective feedback

Nine questions of the questionnaires were multiple choices and open-ended questions

in which the informants were entitled to select items listed or provided with room toadd their own ideas The survey contained five main parts Question 1 aimed atinvestigating the students’ feeling about the teacher’s use of indirect correctivefeedback Question 2 was designed to measure the students’ difficulties when theywere asked to self-correct the indicated errors Question 3 helped to show theeffectiveness of indirect corrective feedback in changing the students’ attitudes towardswriting Questions 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 were to investigate the students’ perception of thevalue of indirect corrective feedback on their writing accuracy And the last question,question 9 was some expectations of the students for the better use of indirectcorrective feedback

2.3 The procedure of data collection and analysis

In the first week of the writing course, all 50 students were asked to write a paragraph,and then the teacher collected all students’ paper to analyze only the grammatical errorsthey made After that, one class (K60B) was chosen to be an experimental group andthe other class (K60C) was the control group In the following weeks, the students inthe experimental groups were instructed and given indirect corrective feedback, whilethe students in the control group were given direct corrective feedback from theteacher In the sixth week, a post-test was given in which students were asked to write aparagraph of the same level with the pre-test Both the writing tests (pre-test and post-test) of each student were collected to see improvements of their writing All in all, 100students’ writing papers were analyzed to evaluate the effectiveness of teachers’indirect corrective feedback strategy on students’ writing

To specify the data, 26 questionnaires were sent to the students in the experimentalgroup (K60B) to see the students’ reactions and attitudes towards the use of teacher’sindirect corrective feedback Questionnaires for students were handed after six weeks

of this research These questionnaires also provided students with enough time to thinkand make their best response to given questions All the questionnaires to students werethen collected and transcribed into arithmetic figures and analyzed by Microsoft Excel

on the purpose of investigating the students’ reactions and attitudes towards the use ofteacher’s indirect corrective feedback in writing