the effects of e comments on the academic writing activities for graduate students at hcmc open university

In terms of the total number of e-comments deliveries on both global and local areas, the graduate students provided more total of e-comments on both global and local areas on their peer

BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO

TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC MỞ TP HỒ CHÍ MINH

BÁO CÁO TỔNG KẾT

ĐỀ TÀI KHOA HỌC VÀ CÔNG NGHỆ CẤP TRƯỜNG

The Effects of E-comments on the Academic Writing Activities for

Graduate Students at HCMC Open University

Mã số: T2015.15.194

Chủ nhiệm đề tài: TS PHẠM VŨ PHI HỔ

TP HCM, 4/2016

E-peer comments were widely investigated by researchers around the world However, comparing lecturer’s e-comments to e-peer comments with the purpose to help improve e-peer comments were vacant in research In addition, the effects of lecturer’s e-comments on the student writing revision and e-peer commenting skills were not widely researched The purpose of the current study was to see if the instructional model of showing the lecturer’s sample e-comments

to the big size classes was effective in terms of training students how to become better e-peer commenters Comparison between lecturer’s e-comments and e-peer comments were also investigated, including whether those e-comments affect on the writer revision Finally, students’ attitudes towards the training and its effects were explored Quantitative data collection from 26 written papers from those who received lecturer’s e-comments, including the e-peer comments from group members were analyzed Questionnaires responded from 86 graduate students from two graduate classes (Dip 17A & TESOL 10) were also analyzes In terms of qualitative analysis, data recorded from the semi-structure interviews from 20 graduate students were analyzed as supplementary data to obtain in-depth information

The findings of the current study show that there was no a statistical significant difference between the lecturer’s and e-peer comments in terms of the total number of words written in the e-comments In terms of the total number of e-comments deliveries on both global and local areas, the graduate students provided more total of e-comments on both global and local areas on their peers’ papers than those provided by the lecturer In addition, there was no statistical significant difference between the lecturer’s and e-peer comments on global areas although the e-peer comments on local issues were more than those from the lecturer However, in terms of qualified comment deliveries or revision-oriented comments which trigger revision, there was a statistical significant difference between lecturer’s e-comments and e-peer comments on both global and local issues The lecturer tended to provide more qualified comments on global areas whereas the peers provided more on local issues The findings of the study also reveal that the lecturer’s sample e-comments illustrated in the classroom during the treatment had great effects on the quality of the e-peer comments The graduate students were able to provide more qualified e-comments (revision-oriented comments) on global issues throughout the training to help each other improve writing revision while local areas seemed to be less provided In terms of comparing the effects of

lecturer’s e-comments with the e-peer comments on writing revision, the study found that there was no statistical significant difference between the effects of these two However, there was a statistical significant difference between the total number of qualified comments and the number

of total revisions The graduate students were able to make far more revisions than expected Finally, the graduate students highly evaluated both the lecturer’s e-comment and e-peer comment activities employed in the treatments They confirmed that the e-comment activities helped them learn how to write academic writing papers and contributed to the writing quality because those e-comments helped identify the writing problems for revisions The current study highlights the effects of the e-peer comment training for graduate students to enhance not only the writing quality but also the skills for e-peer comments

Keywords: Lecturer’s e-comments, e-peer comments, areas of comments, global comments,

local comments, revision-oriented comments, non revision-oriented comments, qualified

comments, unqualified comments, sample e-comments

C ONTENTS

Abstract 1

1 Rationale for the study 4

2 Literature review 5

2.1 Trained Peer Comments 7

2.2 Research questions 10

2.3 Definitions of terms used in the present study 10

3 Research Methodology 11

3.1 Research setting 11

3.2 Participants 12

3.3 Research design 12

3.4 Training procedures 13

3.5 Writing Assignments 15

3.6 E-comment activities 17

3.7 Areas of e-comments 21

3.8 Coding schemes 22

3.9 Data collection for analysis 25

3.10 analysing the writing revision 25

3.11 Interviews 26

3.12 Questionnaire 27

4 Findings and discussion 28

4.1 Research question 1: 29

4.2 Research question 2: 37

4.3 Research question 3: 42

4.4 Research question 4: 48

4.4.1 Quantitative analysis 48

4.4.2 Qualitative analysis 55

5 Conclusion 57

references 60

Appendix A: Lecturer's e-comments 64

Appendix B: syllabus for academic writing for graduate students

Appendix C: interview

1 R ATIONALE FOR THE STUDY

The course of Academic Writing for Graduate Students at the Graduate School of HCMC Open University (HCMC OU) was introduced to the graduate students since 2012 Prior TESOL classes (from 1 to 5) and Diploma courses (Dips 1- 10) were not included for the training of this Module The occurrence of this course came from the fact that many MA students could not write

up their theses very well in terms of Academic written styles Actually this was not something new

or weird because this phenomenon is found similarly in other contexts where the Master programs

in TESOL were offered The MA students are often have writing problems when they composed their thesis That is the reason why the graduate program in TESOL at HCMC Open University offers this course to train the students to do better in their writing

In the graduate program in TESOL, the graduate students at HCMC OU are required to write research projects for most of the courses End of each course, the graduate students are normally required to write a 2000-word paper to submit to the lecturers for gaining scores This requires students to use their critical thinking to compose their papers, which includes conducting broad reading, provide critiques or argument for each session of the paper This is not an easy job at all

In the same situation from other context, Harris (2006) claims that he/she found frustrated with the quality of students’ writing skills whenever he/she read the graduate projects or research proposals This suggests better teaching methods or other teaching activities in the academic writing classrooms in order to help graduate students improve their writing skills

Research on writing instruction has changed from controlled writing to process writing Writing is no longer viewed as a means of reinforcing structural patterns (Andrade & Evans, 2012) Writing is now seen as a written means of communication, and has become an integral and important part of language learning and is necessary for academic and professional purposes The instruction has gradually shifted from a product-centered approach to a more process-oriented approach (Andrade & Evans) In the view of product approach, learning writing in L2 (Foreign language) means learning how to produce sentences, grammatical structures without any errors Forms are the center of focus rather than the content or idea development On the other hand, process approach views writing as a developmental process in which multiple drafts were revising based on lecturer/peer comment activities

In the context of the graduate training program at the Graduate School of HCMC OU in TESOL, each class size is about 40 – 50 graduate students This number is large in terms of training students how to compose Academic writing papers Particularly, using lecturer’s comments to all students each week is impossible In this training, the lecturer often provided e-comments for 5 fastest students (early birds) who submitted the papers during each week to provide comments and used those e-comments as samples in the classroom to train the students how to revise their written papers and how to provide e-peer comments efficiently Make use of the models or framework of trained-peer comments in the classrooms from Berg’s (1999), Min’s (2005), Pham Vu Phi Ho & Usaha’s (2015), Stanley’s (1992), and Tuzi (2004) to help students enhance their comment deliveries to improve peers’ writing revision is essential in the training process Accordingly, the lecturer applies the student-centered approach in the classrooms to help get involved all the students in the learning process The activities of training e-peer comments in current study were not investigated in literature in the learning process of the graduate students about e-peer comments (Using Microsoft Word) to enhance the quality of comments and writing revision

2 L ITERATURE REVIEW

There are a number of research studies on comparison between lecturer and peer comments

in literature Hyland (1998) conducted a study on the impact of lecturer written comments on individual Writers’; Nelson and Carson (1998) investigated the ESL students’ perceptions of effectiveness in peer comments; Tsui and Ng (2000) studied the roles of lecturer and peer comments in revisions in writing among learners; Hyland (2000) investigated written lecturer comments and how they interacted with other aspects of the context; Nguyen Thi Kieu Thu (2002) conducted a survey in Vietnam to investigate the lecturer’s practices in giving errors comments to second year and third year students’ writing; Yang et al (2006) investigated two types of comments from peer and lecturer to EFL students in China; and Jones et al (2006) studied the interactional dynamics in online and face-to-face peer-tutoring sessions for second language writers Recently, Pham Vu Phi Ho and Usaha (2015) conducted a study on training e-peer comments to help student writer improve their writing quality and writing revision

The findings of these studies remain questionable in terms of preferences of the lecturer’ comments to peer comments Nelson and Carson (1998) found that students preferred the lecturer’s comments to peer comments and considered comments on local areas as relatively ineffective

Tsui and Ng (2000) and Yang et al (2006) found that lecturer comments were more favored by most students than peer comments and led to more revisions which yield good results on the lecturer’s comments Tsui and Ng (2000) found that students have more confidence in lecturer comments because the lecturer is seen as more experienced and more authoritative Moreover, lecturer comments were considered to be of better quality They were more specific, were able to explain what the problems were, and were able to make concrete suggestions for revision Yang

et al (2006) also found that students considered lecturer as more “professional,” “experienced,” and “trustworthy” than their peers In addition, Hyland (2000) found that cultural factors made students feel uncomfortable with the peer comments and discouraged them from being critical of each other’s work In addition, Treglia (2006) indicated that the students appreciated receiving comments of encouragement and found their lecturers’ written commentary helpful in improving their writing The most common reason for the rejection of peer comments was that the writers did not accept the comments for the reason that it seemed “incorrect” to them In another story, Hyland (1998) conducted a case study to describe two students who received lecturer’s comments during the course and found that the two students both started the course with positive feelings towards writing but ended with demotivation and lacking in confidence in terms of receiving lecturer’s comments This indicates that the lecturer comments were sometimes inefficient in the training writing process Supported to this view, Nguyen T K Thu (2002) found a positive shift in students’ priorities from traditional lecturers’ comments to more involving methods like peer comments and self-comments Jones et al (2006) argued that force students to make a choice between peer comments and lecturer comments were not appropriate because peer and lecturer comments should be mutual supported Also, Jones et al added, when students were not forced to make a choice, they welcomed both peer and lecturer comments Tsui and Ng (2000) asserted that peer comments could not be replaced by lecturer comments Hyland (2000) indicated that the relationships between lecturers and students are both complex and unequal in terms of power Hyland (2000) argued that students were expected to take full responsibility for their own writing process and to revise it on their own, using their own strategies Lecturers should consider measures to help student writers to do help themselves instead of controlling the commenting process Pham Vu Phi Ho and Usaha (2015) found that e-peer comments were effective to help student writers revise their papers to enhance the writing quality and students highly evaluated e-peer comments Therefore, training students to provide qualified comments is a means to get

students involved in the learning process and makes them become more responsible for their own writing products

Although lecturer comments were highly preferred by the students, Hyland (2000) found that the lecturers tended to treat the students’ papers as in the product approach rather than process writing approach They had a tendency to focus on ‘fixing up’ the texts rather than to help them develop their writing when giving comments Also, Nguyen T K Thu (2002) found that error fixing and grammar correct were more employed in the lecturer’s comments In addition, Montgomery and Baker (2007) found that the lecturers generally gave little comments on global issues, such as organization, and a large amount of comments on local issues, such as grammar and mechanics, throughout the writing process Regarding the impacts on the student revisions, Hyland (1998) asserted that the students’ revisions did not incorporate with the lecturer comments,

or if so, it occurred on the surface level On the other hand, Yang et al., (2006) found that peer comments appear to bring about a higher percentage of meaning-change revision (global areas) while most lecturer’s comments influenced revisions on local areas surface level In other words, the majority of lecturer comments to students’ writing was prior to the local rather than the global areas The next session will present the employment of training peer comments to help students help themselves in the writing process

2.1 T RAINED P EER C OMMENTS

As mentioned earlier, the activities of peer comments are seen as fruitful to the training classrooms According to Lui and Hansen (2005), peer comment activities help students take responsibilities for their own learning, build critical thinking skills, and consolidate their knowledge of writing In addition, peer comment activities can enhance students’ communication, build their social skills, and provide them with a supportive social network Also, peer comments activities are seen as good chances for students to build their own linguistic knowledge, enhance participation, and improve both oral and written styles The literature reviews above indicate that most of students preferred teacher’ feedback However, quite a few research studies still found beneficial from peer feedback in terms of more active involvement and encouragement of autonomy (Yang et al., 2006), and students taking more responsibility in their own learning process (Hyland, 2000) Therefore, the trends of research in this field take an action to train students in the peer comments activities

As a key research in peer comment activities, Berg (1999) conducted a research study on effects of trained peer comments on ESL students’ revision types and writing quality The researcher conducted the research through a comparison of 46 ESL students, divided into two groups, in an intensive English program at a university in a large city on the U.S One group was trained in how to participate in peer comments to writing and the other was not trained Each student’s first and second drafts were compared sentence-by-sentence The study found that peer comments can teach students academic writing because, in discussing their own and other essays, students have to actively apply their knowledge of such aspects as a thesis statement, the development of ideas, and the different types of organization In addition, the research also found that watching a peer’s approach to reading one’s text might serve as a model for how to read text through the eyes of someone else It may then help students to develop a better sense of how to read their own texts from a perspective of an audience, what questions to ask, and how to systematically examine their text with the purpose of improving it The study did not investigate the nature of comments (areas of comments)

In order to train students to become successful peer comments to provide qualified comments on global and local areas, Min (2005) made use of four steps to train students to do peer comments 18 EFL sophomore students participated in the researcher’s composition class at a large university in southern Taiwan The results indicate that the numbers of comments and number of words produced post-training were significantly higher than those prior to training In addition, the students were able to provide a greater amount of comments on the global issues after training This indicates that students tended to allocate more attention to macro issues such as idea development and organization post-training Besides, the students pointed out that the four-step procedure helped them become better reviewers, although following the four steps was both time- and energy-consuming They also learned from their peers how to focus their ideas and view things from different perspectives The study did not investigate the direct training peer comments via the lecturer’s own commentary practices

In terms of investigating the effects of per comments on writing revisions, Min (2006) examined the impact of trained responders’ comments on EFL college students’ revisions, both in terms of revision types and quality The study took place at an urban university in Southern Taiwan Participants were 18 sophomores in the researcher's writing class The results show that

review training were on global areas such as idea development, unity, and organization The result

of this study also demonstrated that 77% of the trained peer review feedback was incorporated into students’ revisions, which constituted 90% of the total revisions The training in the study did not take place during the course, but just at the short beginning of the course

Recently, Pham Vu Phi Ho and Usaha (2015) conducted a study training students to provide blog-based peer comments on students’ writing papers The study also aimed at investigating the extent to which the students incorporated peer comments into their writing revision 32 second year students from a University in Ho Chi Minh City participated in the study The students learned how to write academic writing, worked in groups to brainstorm ideas, made outline, and wrote essays, and posted on the blogs seeking for e-peer comments The results indicated that though the comments on global areas were greater than those on local areas, the qualified comments (revision-oriented comments) were not The total revisions made during e-peer comments were greater than the total revision-oriented comments delivered by peers In addition, revisions at lower levels such as “word” or “phrase” needed less help from peers, whereas those at higher levels such as “sentence” or “paragraph” needed more help from peers The study failed to compare the effects of lecturer’s e-comments vs e-peer comments

Earlier research studies succeeded in training students to provide peer comments to help student writers improve their writing revision; however, they failed to compare the differences between lecturer’s and peer comments Though some research studies investigated the students’ attitudes and preferences towards lecturer and peer comments, they failed to compare the numbers

of comments between lecturer and peers’, the length of the comments, and the effects of lecturer’s comments on peer comments In addition, in terms of e-peer comments training, most of the previous research studies provided short-term training such as face-to-face conference or classroom demonstration before the actual peer comment activities were conducted In terms of long-life learning or long-term memory, length of training was supposed to be more effective Therefore, the purpose of the current study was an attempt to search for responses to the following research questions

in term of revision-oriented comments?

3 Are there any differences of effects between the lecturer's and peer comments on

students' writing revision?

4 what are the graduate students’ evaluation on the comment training and the

e-comment activities in the academic writing for graduate students?

2.3 D EFINITIONS OF TERMS USED IN THE PRESENT STUDY

E-peer comments: According to Ware and Warschauer (In press), e-peer comments refer to

the means by which human comments, particularly peer comments can be provided through technology In the current study, e-peer comments refer to the comments provided by group members on the student written papers, using the feature of “New Comment” in the menu of Microsoft Office

Lecturer’s e-comments: lecturer’s e-comments refer to the comments provided by the

lecturer using the feature of “New Comment” in the menu of Microsoft Office

Lecturer’s sample e-comments refer to the lecturer’s e-comments as mentioned above

which were used to illustrate on the projector in the classroom with a purpose to train the

graduate students how to provide qualified comments and how to revise their own writing

papers

Areas of comments: Liu and Sadler (2003) define areas of comments as the comments

addressing to the writing problems on both Global and local areas

Global comments: Pham Vu Phi Ho and Usaha (2015) define global comments as the

comments addressing to the content, idea development, rhetoric, and organization of the writing papers which are the decisive factors to make the writing paper become qualified

Local comments: Pham Vu Phi Ho and Usaha (2015) define local comments as the

comments relating to the writing errors such as spellings, word choice, grammatical structures… which do not make changes in meanings

Revision-oriented comments: According to PhamVu Phi Ho (2015), revision-oriented

comments, also known as qualified comments refer to comments that address directly to the writing problems to trigger revisions

Non revision-oriented comments refer to the comments that do not trigger and changes

Those comments like praises or statements that do not request for revision are considered as non revision-oriented comments

Both MA training programs requires graduate students to hold at least a Bachelor Degree

in TESOL or in relevant English major They have to take an entrance examination before

admission The National Master Program requires grad students to complete 50 credit

coursework and a thesis while the twinning program is not thesis-based The twinning program is divided into two phases, one (phase 1) is learning from the lecturers at HCMC OU for about six months, and the other (phase 2) is learning from the teaching staff coming to Vietnam from the USQ The students spent most of the weekends to take part in course-works for approximately one year Each module required students to participate at least 80% of class meetings, took part

in classroom discussions, activities, and composed assignments or reflective papers for around

2000 words After they completed their course-works and other requirements, they could come back to their working place to work and conduct their thesis

3.2 P ARTICIPANTS

Two intact classes from both programs (National and Twinning program) assigned to the researcher/lecturer for training were selected for the study 95 grad students, 45 from the class Diploma 17A (Dip 17A), and 50 from the TESOL2015 (or TESOL 10) participated in the study However, only 36 out of 45 students from the Dip 17A responded to the questionnaire They both took the course of Academic Writing for Graduate Students The Dip 17A class started from 24/5/2015 to 02/8/2015 with 3 credits and the TESOL10 started from 18/10/2015 to 20/12/2015 with 2 credits based on the curriculum of the Graduate School Most of the instructional models and training activities were similar (Fig 1) The class of Dip 17A (with 3 credits) had more time

to review their paragraph and essay writing

3.3 R ESEARCH DESIGN

The current study employed both quantitative and qualitative research Though two intact classes from courses of Academic Writing for Graduate Students were selected for quasi-experimental research, no comparison between control and experimental groups was used because the purpose of this study was to see if the instructional model of trained e-comments was effective The most important characteristic of a quasi-experiment study is that it deals with the phenomenon

of cause and effect (Walliman, 2001; Thomas, 2003; Hult, 2006; Charles & Mertler, 2004) In a quasi-experimental study, research is conducted under the conditions in which it is difficult to control many of variables and in which subjects cannot be assigned to special groups for the purposes of the research (Seliger & Shohamy, 2001) Nunan (2001) and Hult (2006) claim that it

is not always feasible to carry out a true experiment for humanities due to the impossibility of randomly assigning subjects to experimental and control groups and controlling the research environment In addition, Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias (1996) and Charles and Mertler (2004) point out a common problem in social science research that in many cases the researcher cannot randomly assign individual or other units of analysis to comparison groups, especially in school settings Leedy and Ormrod (2005) have also said that in the experimental designs, researchers emphasized the important of randomness; however, randomness is sometimes not possible or practical In most quasi-experimental studies, researchers do not control for all confounding variables, and so cannot completely rule out some alternative explanations for the results they obtain (Walliman, 2001; Leedy & Ormrod, 2005) In this case, the current study used

kind of content analysis to analyze the data, specifically the lecturer’s and students’ e-comments The analysis was based on e-comments collected from the lecturers and peers instead of evaluating the writing quality Hence it was rather easier to control variables Fig 1 presents the research design

Fig 1 Design of the Research

3.4 T RAINING PROCEDURES

The purpose of the course was to enhance graduate students’ writing quality in terms of Academic writing styles The students were reviewed several writing genres in both paragraph and essays writings Paraphrase and summary writing techniques were introduced In addition, how to avoid plagiarism was carefully trained in order to help graduate students keep away from unexpected mistakes in Academic writing contexts Different from the research methodology module, the students were trained to understand how to write each part of a research study The ultimate purpose was to help students improve their writing skills when they conducted their writing assignments for some course-work or to write up their research studies After learning this course, the grad students gained a broad knowledge of writing skills such as the organizations of paragraphs and essays, some essential linguistic features for academic writing, and especially, they learned how to write up a paper for publication for national or international journals

e-Post-treatment

The students were required to write a paragraph or an essay each week or every other week based on the content of the lecture deliveries All writing had to be in academic writing styles The writing papers should include citations and references APA styles were highly recommended Students’ papers are highly evaluated based of the informative references that they searched for This required students to conduct a lot of reading to obtain much knowledge in this field In addition, writing at graduate studies always required students to obtain critical thinking; hence, most of their writing needed their heuristic skills based on broad reading A writing paper without this feature was not highly evaluated Students’ writing submission was always at the first hour of the class meeting Hand-writing was rejected; no late submission was accepted

Presentations are conducted with group of four or five students Although the presentations are kind of group work, the scores will be given to each individual in terms of informative presentation, good preparation, and delivery techniques Instead of presenting the topics on the course-outline, in this course, the lecturer required that each group select a research article for their presentation The purpose is to help them get accustomed to the template of international research papers and to provide you good literature review for their research thesis

At the end of the course, students were required to conduct a research project or discussion

of literature review relating to experience in their own teaching profession The students were expected to write a small-scale research paper for publication on a national or international journal

In case some students were not lecturers to conduct their experimental research, writing literature review with in-depth arguments and discussion was also accepted They had to make sure that they were able to point out the objectives and argue for their own stance

Academic writing style was required Their written papers needed to include the purpose of the paper, and every paragraph should have a topic sentence and supporting sentences to stay focused In each paragraph of the paper, they needed to make sure that they were arguing an issue (Argumentativeness), or classifying some points of the matter (Classification), or comparing two points of theories (comparison-contrast), or they wanted to present some causes of a problem (Cause-effect) Low academic writing styles would lead to low assessments Grammar errors and poor sentence structures were also evaluated They were advised to make use of the Microsoft Office to help them with those weak points Broad reading was highly recommended to include citations and references in their papers Books or empirical studies relating to their topic area

should be advised to review for clarifying the arguments They were also advised that writing styles should be simple, apparent, and consistent from the beginning to the end References and in-text citations should be in APA styles They were trained to make use of Microsoft Word 2010-

2013 or later to help with APA fifth edition (sixth edition with Word 2013) This was one training

session of the course The syllabus for training the two classes was provided in the Appendices 3.5 W RITING A SSIGNMENTS

During the course, the graduate students were requested to writing 9 different assignments based on the training syllabus Most of the assignments were composed outside the classroom as homework This aimed to provide lecturer and students spaces to conduct e-comments to help enhance writing quality The assignments were presented as follows:

Assignment 1: Select one of the topics below to brainstorm and compose a good paragraph of

120 words:

1 Education system in Vietnam

2 Writing problems

3 Steps to improve writing quality

4 The effects of collaborative writing

Assignment 2: Select one of the following topics to write a paragraph about between 120 - 150

3 Why do people keep seeking for happiness?

4 Note: You have to use references to support your reasons or ideas; make use of citations and references in APA styles

Assignment 3: Write an argument essay from 500 to 600 words using the data you have collected

from the interview What are the pros and cons of the issue? Make sure that your evidence is strong

enough to convince readers Data used from the interviews can be cited as (personal communication, year) Other references to support your argument would be included

Assignment 4: Use one of the journal articles I provided (for presentations) to write a summary

for 120 words Be sure to include these features in the summary:

 Author and (year of publication)

 Purpose of the study

 Setting and sampling

 Methods/ data collection

 Findings

Assignment 5: Write your own critique paper on the article that you summarized for your last

assignment (200 words for the critiques)

Assignment 6: Administer the questionnaire you have constructed (from 5 to 7 question items) to

about 20 people; then write a data commentary of about 120 to 150 words

• Alternative topics can be:

• Social network affected learning (Facebook, YouTube, etc.)

• Mobile learning

• Frequency of using L2 in teaching/learning a foreign language

Assignment 7: Write your research title and compose an introduction to your research between

600 – 900 words Read as many materials relating to your topic as possible to use citations to support your ideas/argument for the topic Don’t for get to include the reasons why you need to conduct this research and the purpose of your study

Assignment 8: Compose the review of literature for your final project research Use materials and

previous research studies to support and provide the rationale for your study Citations and references are written in APA styles

Assignment 9: You plan to present your paper in a conference (the topic might be the one you

interviewed your peers) They ask you to submit the abstract for their consideration

• Work in group of four or five

• Write a topic (your intended topic for the final assignment)

• Brainstorm and write the general background of the topic area

• Write a sentence for the research gap

• Write the intended sample and setting

• Write the method or data collection

• Describe the hypothesis

• Write the significance/highlight for the study

Among these 9 assignments provided during the course of Academic writing for graduate students, only 6 first assignments were collected for analysis The graduate students were requested

to compose all the first 6 assignments because these could be written for a week The last three assignments (7-9) required broad reading and its purpose was to help students compose their final research project Therefore, the current study did not intend to take those for data analysis

3.6 E- COMMENT ACTIVITIES

When discussing the methods of teaching Academic Writing in English, lecturer/peer comments were not excluded Previous researchers such as Berg (1999), Min (2005, 2006), Stanley

(2003), Tuzi (2004), and Pham Vu Phi Ho & Usaha (2011 & 2015) have found its benefits when

applying to the writing classrooms Lecturer/peer comment activities help make students become more active and responsible for their own learning process in order to help one another improve their writing products, help lecturers reduce the amount of work when dealing with big-size classes (Pham Vu Phi Ho, 2015) Therefore, these activities were used in the training courses of this study According to Hyland, K and Hyland, F (2006), employing peer comments provides student writers with opportunities to discuss their texts and discover others’ interpretations of them Hyland (2002), Liu and Hansen (2005), Nunan (1993), and Storch (2005) agree that lecturer/peer comments help enhance collaborative learning, help students experience the sense of audience (Berg, 1999; Tsui & Ng, 2000; Nguyen, 2002), encourage interactions and comments among learners (Warschauer, 1996; Sullivan and Pratt, 1996; Braine, 1997; Braine, 2001; Abrams, 2001; Liu and Sadler, 2003; and Yang et al., 2006), affect the writing revisions (Berg, 1999; Liu &

Sadler, 2003; Rodriguez, 2003; Tuzi, 2004; and Min, 2006); and finally, help students improve not only draft quality, but also the overall language skills (Sullivan & Pratt, 1996; Berg, 1999; Liu & Hansen, 2005; Min, 2006; and Yang et al., 2006)

Liu and Hansen (2005) reason that the roles of the peer in the group are important to get the ball rolling, to maintain the time flow, and to reconcile disputes If there is no facilitator, there might be delay in commenting activities Muncie (2000) argues that peer comments can only be truly effective in that development when the learners are encouraged and be able to analyze and evaluate it by themselves The lecturer has the responsibility to provide a supportive atmosphere and to provide concrete useful guidelines in the process of peer comments (Lui & Hansen, 2005) Being aware of this, the lecturer/researcher attempted to find ways to trigger the “ball rolling” by making students force each other to provide comments faster as mentioned later in this session Students were required to work in a group of four or five (randomly selected) during the writing process After completing their writing assignment, they needed to share their papers with their peers to seek for help Meanwhile, they had to read their peers’ papers and provide comments

to help them correct mistakes and word usages, reorganize the ideas, make it in logical order, improve their writing quality in terms of unity, coherence, and organization, etc These activities aimed at not only helping their peers to enhance their writing, but also helping student-writers themselves look back their writing for better revision Each of them needed to read and provide comments to other three of their group members Although these were time-consuming activities, they helped students learn from one another and perfect their writing faster Peer comments were much appreciated if they focused more on the content and organization of the essays

After collecting all the peer comments and revising their papers based on peer comments, they handed to the lecturer/researcher via email or the website (phamho.com/classes), including the peer comments and revised version Then the lecturer selected the first five or six papers to provide e-comments using the function of Microsoft Word Processor (Menu => Review => New Comment) Figure 2 presents a sample of e-comments used during the training process, and figure

3 shows one of the peer comments on a group member’s writing 3 More samples of lecturer’s e-comments are attached in appendices

Fig 2 Lecturer’s e-comments on student’s writing paper

Fig 3 Peer comments on an assignment

At the beginning of each training session, the lecturer showed the e-comments to the whole class via the projector and explained every comment that he made The purpose was to use those comments on 5 or 6 writing papers as samples to train the students’ writing skills as well as

to train them how to provide comments on their peer writing papers The lecturer also observed peer comments on each paper to see if peers provided qualified comments or not In case some comments provided by peers but led to no revision by the student writers, the lecturer also

mentioned in his e-comments to get the student writer valued their peer’s comments After each training session, the lecturer sent back those comments to the whole class so that they could read

to learn from the comments provided by the lecturer The purpose was that the students has chances to reflect their own writing from the sample e-comments or learned how to provide qualified comments on their peers’ papers

Showing and explaining lecturer’s e-comments was one of the main instructional

activities in the current study when the lecturer had to deal with big-size classes and writing assignments were provided every week That was also a purpose of this study when the

researcher/lecturer attempted to investigate if this training model was effective in terms of

training students how to revise their papers and how to provide comments on their peers’ writing papers

The purpose of selecting the first five or six earliest papers to provide e-comments was that each group members need to encourage each other to read and provide comments on their own papers as soon as possible so that they could have chances to receive e-comments from the lecturers That is to say “getting the ball rolling” among group members Submitted papers without/not enough e-peer comments were not accepted Figure 4 presents the instructional model and activities

Fig 4 Instructional model and activities

3.7 A REAS OF E - COMMENTS

During the e-comment training, the graduate students were advised to focus more on global issues (idea, content, and organization) than on local areas (grammar, spellings, vocabulary, and mechanics) As a matter of fact, many research studies debated about the effectiveness these issues during lecturer/peer comment activities Nguyen Thi Kieu Thu (2002) states that getting students involved in the error correction is an essential part of writing process, and Chandler (2003) reasons that having the lecturer correct all the grammatical and lexical errors resulted in a significant improvement in both accuracy and fluency Padgate (1999) states that if not focusing on forms during peer comment activities, it might not be powerful enough to result in grammatical improvement However, Truscott (1996) reviewed quite a few previous research studies and argues that grammar correction in L2 writing classes should not be the center of focus because it is ineffective unhelpful; sometimes it has harmful effects In addition, Bitchener et al (2005) found that L2 writing learners, in the process of learning new linguistic forms, may perform them with accuracy on one occasion but fail to do so on another Furthermore, Liu and Hansen (2005) claim that the most helpful comments for student revision are those that address global issues rather than local issues As an expert in this field of training students how to improve their writing based on comments for revision, the lecturer/researcher strongly advised the students to focus more on the

Activities

Mode of Instruction Research Project

•Writing weekly assignments

•Providing peer comments

•Academic writing style

•Use Citations & References of APA styles

global issues when providing comments because this would help the writing paper enhance unity, logic, and coherence These factors are very important to help enhance the quality of the writing paper However, local issues were not exclusive and considered as secondary concerns during the e-comment activities

3.8 C ODING SCHEMES

In order to assist the categorizing process, the researcher tried to make definitions and regulations for each category so that it was easier to code each peer comment and distinguish one type of comment from the other types Table 1 presents the coding scheme adopted from Pham

Vu Phi Ho and Nguyen Thi Thuy Duong (2014)

Table 1 Coding scheme

Revision-oriented

Non oriented

revision- oriented

Revision-Non revision- oriented

Evaluation: If students make their own judgment about other peers’ writing in general or

on a specific point in the writing, that comment will be sorted as general or specific evaluation

For example, the comment like “Your writing is very well-organized and easy to follow” was regarded as “general evaluation” Some comments such as “You have a very clear description of the class in the picture Moreover, I like the way that you describe objects with their functions”

were classified as “specific evaluation” In this study, many of these types of comments were students’ compliments and therefore did not give any suggestions for writing revision A few

comments such as: “I think this sentence is not suitable to the picture” or “This point is not convincing” which pointed out some problems and evaluate a particular weak point in writing may

lead to changes to the student writers’ writing

Clarification: When the students were unsure about any particular ideas, use of word

choices, phrases, sentences or grammar in their peers’ writing, they gave comments to clarify that point, which were classified as “clarification type” In this type of comments, students could raise some questions related to meaning or coherence of a specific idea or sentence to the topic Some common phrases can be found in this type of comment include “what does that mean?”, “How does it relate to…?”, I don’t quite understand…,

Alteration: When students discovered that their peers made mistakes/errors about

grammar, vocabulary, punctuation, spelling, format…, they could suggest correct replacement This means that alteration was used for comments on local areas For example, instead of using past tense “collapsed”, a student carelessly wrote “collapses” In this case, the suggestion for the correct word was considered belonging to alteration type

Suggestion/ Advice: When students consider their peers’ ways of writing, using structure

or vocabulary, they may come up with better ideas to make the writing better; they can make suggestions for another ways of expression The suggestion can be general or specific For

example, an original sentence was “Next to the man is a lovely white dog looking at its master”

Some students suggested that the dog should be personified as a human and “the personal pronoun

“he” should be used in the sentence Another example is “It is not very interesting You can write: There are 3 soldiers in uniform with guns in their hands.” These comments were typical of specific

suggestion One example of general suggestion can be “Try to lengthen it It will be more logical and smooth”

Sometimes, the alteration type could be confused and overlapped with suggestion type However, the researcher decided to distinguish the two types as follow: the alteration type was for correcting surface mistakes/errors and the peer reviewer did propose the correct substitute Suggestion type was to raise awareness of some unconvincing writing points and advised the writers toward better writing though the current writing was grammatically correct

Explanation: With this type of comments, the students not only pointed out problems in

writing but also provided reasons or language knowledge about why the writing should be

changed For example, “we use too for negative thing” can be classified as an explanation

Explanation is highly valued when giving comments as it may provide students with knowledge that they haven’t known or at least they can be satisfied about why their writing should be rewritten

Plagiarism: It is important to avoid plagiarism in academic writing “Plagiarism is using

someone else’s works or ideas as if they were you’re your own, and it is a serious offense” (Oshima

& Hogue, 2006, p 41) Hence, comments related to plagiarism touches one sensitive issue in the research: copy other’s ideas or work without giving citation or references Some comments like

“Should give a citation & reference” was arranged to lie into the category of plagiarism

Statement: Any statements which do not contain the meaning of the six types of comments

above were coded as statement For example, after commenting on an essay, a peer wrote, “This

is just my opinion, I hope it will help you a lot” or another said, “These are some points I give you

I hope they help you much.” They were regarded as “statement.” (Pham Vu Phi Ho, 2015)

Global and local areas: Depending on the aspect that a comment mentioned, it can be

arranged into global or local areas

Global areas refer to feedback about the content idea development, purpose, and organization of writing Local areas refer to feedback about mechanics and surface grammatical

mistakes/errors e.g spelling, capitalization, punctuation, tenses (Lam, 2010) For examples,

comments like “You should rank the effects in terms of importance It may make your writing organized.” or “There is no balance between the idea 1 and 2 I mean that you discussed the idea

well-1 a lot while you talked about the idea 2 in only one sentence without supporting ideas.” was considered as comments on global areas Comments like “Wrong tense, punished”; “Please check your spelling of the highlighted words” or “Do you think these words should be used in plural forms?” were sorted into the group of comments on local areas

Revision-oriented comments refer to comments that trigger revision For example, some

comments such as “Do you think this sentence is a good conclusion? It makes me confused Can you make it clearer?” or “I don’t understand what you mean Can you explain?” request changes These comments triggered revision that requested the author to make changes

Non revision-oriented comments refer to comments that lead to no revision requested For

example, “Your paragraph is well-organized.”

In general, a comment “I think you should have one sentence telling how many problems you list here” would be coded as “global, suggestion, revision-oriented comments In case two e-peer comments addressed to the same issue would be coded as one comment only because it triggered only one revision

3.9 D ATA COLLECTION FOR ANALYSIS

In this study, the researcher selected data from those students’ writing papers who

received lecturer’s e-comments, including their e-peer comments from class Dip 17A for

analysis I decided to collect 26 papers which received e-comments by the lecturer and e-peer comments provided on those papers were also analyzed Hence, in terms of e-peer comments, 31 papers which received e-peer comments were analyzed as well The data from semi-structured interviews, and questionnaires were collected from both classes of TESOL 10 and Dip 17A to explore the all participants’ attitudes

3.10 ANALYZING THE WRITING REVISION

In order to compare the changes/revision made by the student writers after receiving comments, I made use of the feature of “Compare” in the Microsoft Office vs 2016 (Menu => Review => Compare) This helped much for the comparison between the two writing versions This feature traced back every single change in the subsequent draft such as insertions, deletions, Moves, formatting Figure 5 presents the analysis for changes between drafts

e-Fig 5 Analysis of revisions

3.11 I NTERVIEWS

Interviews involve a researcher orally asking questions for individuals to answer orally Wilkinson and Birmingham (2003) provide three models of interviews to be considered The first one is the unstructured interview in which areas of interest are established by the researcher but the discussion of issues is guided by the interview The second model of interview is the semi-structured interview in which some questions are predetermined The format and the ordering of the questions are informed by the ongoing comments of the interviewee to the questions posed The third model is the structured interview in which the interviewer controls over the order of questions All of the questions are predetermined by the researcher Unlike the other two models, the structured interview may provide an easier framework for analysis

In the current study, semi-structure interviews were employed on the last day of the instruction The researcher used group interviews to save students’ time and to obtain the general views of the training by the students 20 graduate students, 10 who had received e-comments from the lecturer on their papers and 10 who never received lecturer’s e-comments, from the class of Dip 17A were selected randomly to participate in the semi-interviews The time for the interview last 1 hour 24 minutes Participants from TESOL10 were not asked for interviews because they provided qualitative data in the forms of open-ended questionnaire via Google Drive The interviews were conducted in Vietnamese in order that the interviewers felt at ease to respond whatever came up to their mind about the training Smart phone (Samsung Note 4) was used to

record the data The interview data were translated into English and every effort was made to keep the translation as close to the original as possible for analysis

3.12 Q UESTIONNAIRE

An effective questionnaire is one that enables the transmission of accurate and useful information from the respondents to the researcher (Wilkinson and Birmingham, 2003) The questionnaire of the current study was adapted and designed based on previous research of Pham

Vu Phi Ho (2015) Modifications were used to make it appropriate to the purpose of the current study The class of Dip 17A was administered the questionnaire by hard copies on the last day of the training session while the TESOL 10 was conducted via email, using Google Drive The questionnaire items provided by Google drive were designed with closed and open-ended questions while only close questions were provided in hard copy-questionnaires for the Dip 17A class The reason for doing so was that the lecturer/research only had the email group of the TESOL

10, not that of Dip 17A Only 36 students out of 45 from the Class of Dip 17A responded and returned the questionnaires to the researcher because some of them were absent from the last session training while 50 students from TESOL10 responded to the questionnaire Rich qualitative data from the questionnaire of TESOL 10, responded via Google Drive, were provided by the students since the students had more time to do it when they were at home Data were collected and analyzed to respond to the research questions of the study

4 F INDINGS AND DISCUSSION

As mentioned earlier in the session of Questionnaire, at the end of the Academic Writing for Graduate Students course, the hard copies of questionnaire were administered to the Class of Dip 17A while Google-Drive questionnaire was sent to the class of TESOL 10 for data

collection 86 graduate students responding to the questionnaire, including 36 from the class of Dip 17A and 50 from TESOL 10 Table 2 shows the number of students who received e-

comments from the lecturer’s

Table 2 The number of students receiving e-comments from the lecturer’s

Have you received any e-comments from the lecturer’s?

Valid Percent

Cumulative Percent

Cumulative Percent

Table 2 illustrates the number of students from classes Dip 17A & TESOL 10 who

received e-comments on their writing papers during the course of Academic Writing for

Graduate Students As can be seen, out of 86 students who responded to the questionnaires from

2 classes, 41 of them (48%) had received e-comments from the lecturer’s within 6 assignments during the courses This number (48%), though less than 50% of students, can be seen as a large number for the reason that only 5 to 6 students’ papers which were earliest submitted to the lecturer’s email or website (phamho.com/classes) would be selected for being e-commented Those who received e-comments from the lecturer were those had received all e-comments from group members (3 or 4 members), revised based on those e-peer comments, then sent to the

lecturer’s e-comments once or twice during the course, 3 of them received 3 to 4 times, and 5 students (12%) received from 5 to 6 times of lecturer’s e-comments This indicates that these 5 students were those who successfully triggered their peers to provide e-comments on time for every assignments during the course

4.1 R ESEARCH QUESTION 1:ARE THERE ANY DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LECTURER’S AND E-PEER COMMENTS IN TERMS OF GLOBAL AND LOCAL AREAS?

This research question was mainly responded by both quantitative Some responses from the students’ interviews related to this issue (qualitative data) were also regarded In order to respond to this research question, I first described the frequencies of e-peer comments and

lecturer’s e-comments on both global and local areas, including revision- and oriented comments Then I compared them all from total comments to areas of comments

non-revision-Descriptive statistics, Paired-sample t-test, and independent sample t-test were employed from the SPSS vs 22 Table 3 presents the e-peer comments on graduate student writers’ in terms of areas of comments

Table 3 Frequency of e-peer comments on student writers' papers

Descriptive Statistics

N Range Minimum Maximum Mean

Std

Deviation Variance Skewness

Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic

Std Error Number of words

of writing papers 31 517 119 636 289.90 169.527 28739.29 .655 .421 Number of words

of the comments 30 492 67 559 194.57 123.105 15154.81 1.852 .427 Total comments on

both global and

local areas

31 41 11 52 20.87 9.999 99.98 1.331 421 Total comments on

global areas 28 18 1 19 8.75 5.147 26.49 .037 .441 Global revision-

oriented comments 24 12 1 13 4.88 3.542 12.55 .964 .472 Global non

revision-oriented

comments

26 12 1 13 4.92 3.709 13.75 800 456 Total comments on

local areas 31 38 1 39 12.97 8.179 66.90 1.207 .421 Local revision-

oriented comments 31 38 1 39 12.77 8.094 65.51 1.286 .421 Local non

revision-oriented

comments

3 2 1 3 2.00 1.000 1.00 0.000 1.225 Valid N (listwise) 2

Table 3 reveals the areas of e-peer comments on student writers in the course of

Academic Writing for graduate students Out of 31 written papers, there were in total 647

comments delivered by peers on their group members’ who received e-comments from the lecturer’s Of the 5.936 words extracted from the total comments, on average, each student composed 290 words (M = 289.90; SD = 169.53) on each of 6 writing assignments In terms of number of words of e-comments, on average, each student writer received 195 words of e-peer comments from group members (M = 194.57; SD = 123.10) on each writing assignment The number of commenting words are as many as 67% of the student author’s writing assignments

Of the 647 e-comments provided by peers, 245 e-peer comments (38%) were related to global areas while 402 e-peer comments (62%) related to local areas Of 245 e-peer comments

on global areas, 117 e-peer comments (48%) were revision-oriented comments which triggered revisions, while 128 e-peer comments (52%) were non revision-oriented comments which

triggered no revision at all In addition, of 402 e-peer comments on local areas, 396 e-peer

comments (99%) were oriented comments while only 6 (1%) were non

revision-oriented comments Non revision-revision-oriented comments on local areas were usually very few due to the size of comments Some peers, in some cases, praised the use of beautiful words or phrases in the writers’ paper

As shown in table 3, on average, each student’s writing paper welcomed 21 e-peer

comments (M = 20.87; SD = 9.99) from group members to help revise their writing better Each student’s writing paper received 8.8 e-peer comments on global areas (M = 8.75; SD = 5 15) in which 4.9 of them were revision-oriented comments (M = 4.88; SD = 3.54), and 4.9 (M = 4.92;

SD = 3.71) were un-qualified comments (non revision-oriented comments) It seems that these two areas of global comments were similar In addition, among 402 e-peer comments on local areas, on average, each student writing paper received 12.9 e-peer comments on local areas (M = 12.97; SD = 8.12) of which 12.8 of them (M = 12.77; SD = 8.09) were qualified comments (revision-oriented comments), and only 2 were unqualified comments (non revision-oriented comments) This indicates that the graduate students provided greater e-peer comments on local than on global areas (62% vs 38%) on both revision- and non revision-oriented comments Coincidently, this result was similar or correspondent to the previous study conducted by Pham

Vu Phi Ho and Nguyen Thi Thuy Duong (2014) on graduate students on a Diploma class (Dip

global areas (M = 2.16) Though the total number of local comments of both studies were nearly the same, the graduate students in the present study provided more comments on global areas compared to those of previous study (8.75 vs 2.16) The finding of this study was consistent to Liu & Sadler’s (2003) that students delivered e-comments on local than on global areas

However, this finding was still contradicted to Jones et al.’s (2006), Min’s (2005), Pham Vu Phi

Ho and Usaha’s (2015), and Tuzi’s (2004) who found that students provided more e-comments

on global than on local areas Table 4 presents the frequency of lecturer’s e-comments on

graduate students’ writing papers

Table 4 Frequency of lecturer's e-comments on student writers' papers

Descriptive Statistics

N Range Minimum Maximum Mean

Std

Deviation Variance Skewness

Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic Statistic

Std Error Number of words of

the comments 26 540 8 548 202.88 151.438 22933.47 1.050 .456 Total number of

oriented comments 26 32 1 33 9.73 8.483 71.96 1.811 .456 Global non revision-

oriented comments 21 6 1 7 3.05 2.109 4.45 .709 .501 Total comments on

local areas 18 13 1 14 4.06 3.638 13.23 1.748 .536 Local revision-

oriented comments 18 13 1 14 4.00 3.597 12.94 1.834 .536 Local non revision-

oriented comments 1 0 1 1 1.00 Valid N (listwise) 1

Table 4 illustrates the frequency of lecturer’s e-comments on student writers in terms of global and local areas In this assignment, the lecturer provided e-comments on the first 5 writing assignments, so only 26 writing papers of the graduate students are analyzed for lecturer’s e-comments There were totally 390 e-comments delivered by the lecturers on 26 papers Out of 5.275 commenting words delivered, the lecturer composed, on average, 203 commenting words (M = 202.88; SD = 151.44) when he provided e-comments on graduate students’ papers The number of commenting words written by the lecturer as providing e-comments were as many as 70% compared to the students’ writing papers This seems like the lecturer, while provided less

number of e-comments compared to e-peer comments, wrote more commenting words to help explain some issues or problems to the student writers (70% vs 67%) However, this does no say much until the comparison was conducted by t-tests to see if there are any differences between lecturer’s e-comments and e-peer comments

Of 390 e-comments delivered by the lecturer, 317 lecturer’s e-comments (81%)

addressed to global areas while only 73 comments (19%) to local areas Of 317 lecturer’s comments on global areas, 253 lecturer’s e-comments (80%) were qualified comments (revision-oriented comments) while 64 e-comments (20%) were non revision-oriented comments Also, of

e-73 lecturer’s e-comments on local areas, 72 (99%) were revision-oriented comments and only 1 e-comments were non revision-oriented comments

As can be seen from table 4, on average, each student’ writing paper received 15

e-comments from the lecturer’s (M = 15.00; SD = 10.47) in which 12.2 e-e-comments addressed to the global areas (M = 12.19; SD = 9.15), and 4 e-comments addressed to local areas (M = 4.06;

SD = 3.64) On average, each writing paper received 9.7 lecturer’s qualified e-comments on global areas (revision-oriented comments) which triggered to revisions (M = 9.73; SD = 8.48) and only 3 lecturer’s e-comments were on non revision-oriented comments which received no trigger of revisions (M = 3.05; SD = 2.12) Most of the lecturer’s e-comments on local areas were revision-oriented comments except one single comment of non revision-oriented The next session would be analyzed to respond to the first research question to investigate if there are any differences between lecturer’s e-comments and e-peer comments

I would compare the number of words delivered in the e-comments, the total e-comments

on both global and local areas, the total revision-oriented comments Table 5 presents the

comparison of e-peer comments and lecturer’s e-comments

Table 5 Comparisons of lecturer’s and e-peer comments

Total comments on both global

and local areas

aThe t and df were adjusted because variances were not equal

bThe t and df were adjusted because variances were not equal

cThe t and df were adjusted because variances were not equal

Independent Samples t-test

Table 5 summarizes the comparisons of e-peer comments and lecturer’s e-comments on student writers’ papers First, in terms of the number of words in the e-comments written by both lecturer and peers On average, three or four group members composed 195 words on each peer’s written paper (M = 194.57; SD = 123.105) while the lecturer made it for 203 words in the e-comment deliveries (M = 202.88; SD = 151.438) It seems to be that the lecturer provided more words in the comments than the whole group members when delivering e-comments (203 vs 195) The difference between the means is 8.3 words However, the independent sample t-test

with t(45) = -.227, p = 822 (P > 05) indicates that there was not statistical significant difference

between the lecturer and e-peer comments in terms of number of words This indicates that the number of words provided by a group of three or four students are equal to that of a lecturer

when providing e-comments on the peer’s written paper In terms of considering the lecturer as more preferable and professional in providing comments found by Nelson and Carson’s (1998), Tsui and Ng’s (2000) and Yang et al.’s (2006), the current study sets a different light to see the values of e-peer comments Table 6 presents the comparison of total e-comments on both global and local areas

Second, table 5 also illustrates the total e-comments of lecturer’s and peers’ on both global and local areas As can be seen, on average, each written paper received 21 e-peer

comments on both global and local areas (M = 20.87; SD = 9.99) lecturer seemed to provide less number of e-comments than peers (M = 15.00; SD = 10.47) on both global and local areas The difference between the means is 5.87 points The result of the Independent sample t-test with

t(55) = 2.16, p = 035 (p <.05) indicates that the number of e-peer comments on both global and

local areas in general were greater than those of lecturer’s In other words, the group members provided more comments to student writers’ papers than the lecturer did This means, three or four peers in a group could work more than the lecturer could in terms of numbers of e-comment deliveries Compared to the number of words written in the comments, the lecturer seems to write longer in each comments in order to explain or give suggestions to each writing problem This finding was an inventory compared to previous research in terms of comparing the number

of words in the comments and the number of e-comments between lecturer’s and students which were not found in key research studies in this field such as Berg’s (1999), Pham Vu Phi Ho & Usaha’s (2015), Min’s (2005), Stanley’s (1992), and Tuzi (2004)

Third, in terms of e-comments on global areas relating to commenting on contents, idea development, and organization of the written papers, table 5 reveals that each written paper received, on average, 8.8 e-peer comments (M = 8.75; SD = 5.15) on global issues However, the lecturer seemed to address more to global issues when providing e-comments on student writer’s papers (M = 12.19; SD = 9.15) than the peers’ The mean difference between e-peers’ and

lecturer’s e-comments is -3.44 However, table 5 shows that there was no statistical significant difference between lecturer’s and e-peer comments addressing to the global areas when

providing comments (t(52) = -1.72, p = 091, p >.05) The null hypothesis was not rejected This

indicates that when providing e-comments, group members also addressed to global issues such

as content, idea development or organization of the written papers to help peers enhance their

Treglia’s (2006), Tsui and Ng’s (2000), and Yang et al (2006) who found that peer preferred lecturer’s comments than those of peers because they lecturer was more trustworthy and had more experience

Fourth, regarding the e-comments on local areas, comments addressing to wording, grammar, spellings, sentence structure, or punctuation, table 5 illustrates that on average, each written paper received 13 e-peer comments on local issues (M = 12.97; SD = 8.18); however, each paper received only 4 comments on local areas provided by the lecturer’s (M = 4.06; SD =

3.64) The difference between the means is 8.9 The result of the independent t-test, t(44.75) = 5.24, p = 000 (p< 01), shows that the was a statistical significant difference between the e-peer

comments and lecturer’s e-comments addressing to the local issues This finding indicates that the students provided e-comments on local areas greater than the lecturer As mentioned earlier

in this study, the lecturer who had to deal with big size classes, from 40 to 50 graduate students Then if peers helped address to local areas when providing e-comments, the lecturer would have more time to focus on global issues such as content, idea development, or organization of the written papers which helped enhance the quality of students’ writing Truscott (1996) argued that only comments addressing to the global/macro-issues would help student writers improve their writing quality In some sense, the activities of e-peer comments could help the lecturer received less local-error papers so that he/she could have time to focus more on the global issues to help student writers improve their writing quality

Though the number of global issues of the lecturer’s e-comments were more and the local issues were less addressed by the lecturer compared to those of e-peer comments, they didn’t say much during the e-comment activities until qualified comments or revision-oriented comments, which trigger revision, were measured (Pham Vu Phi Ho & Usaha, 2015) Table 5 shows that e-peer provided 4.9 revision-oriented comments (M = 4.88; SD = 3.54) on global areas while lecturer provided 9.7 revision-oriented comments (M = 9.73; SD = 8.48) The difference between

means is -4.86 Independent sample t-test with t(34) = -2.68, p = 011 (p <.01) indicates that

there was a statistical significant difference between lecturer’s and e-peer comments in terms of qualified comments (revision-oriented comments) addressing to the global issues That means the lecturer provided more qualified e-comments than peers on global areas during the e-

comment activities In this case, Nelson and Carson’s (1998), Treglia’s (2006), Tsui and Ng’s (2000), and Yang et al (2006) were right when they found that lecturer comments were more

professional and qualified than peers’ This finding filled the gap of Pham Vu Phi Ho and

Usaha’s (2015) for they didn’t investigate this area of comparing lecturer’s and e-peer

certainly a statistical significant difference between the lecturer’s and e-peer comments in terms

of oriented comments on local areas That is, the peers provided greater local

revision-oriented comments than the lecturer (t(44.75) = 5.214, p = 000, p <.01) Again, as mentioned

earlier, e-peer comments were a great activity employing in the Academic writing classes for graduate students because peers provided much more qualified comments on local issues so that the lecturer had more time to focus on areas such as content, idea development, or organization

of the written papers to help student writers enhance better writing quality This is a good

support to previous research by Pham Vu Phi Ho and Usaha’s (2015) who found that student writers needed more e-comments on global areas while local e-comments could be made by students themselves

The qualitative data from the semi-structured interview unveiled the reason why e-peer comments were more on local issues The interviewees stated that graduate students provided e-comments more on local than on global areas because they considered themselves as insufficient knowledge in the field compared to that of the lecturer’s An interviewee said:

Every time the lecturer assigned to do homework, the group members reminded among themselves to complete the assignment earlier so that they could provide e-peer

comments Most of them were enthusiastic in giving e-comments But most of the

comments were relating to local areas rather than global issues because they were not capable to do it They found themselves enough quality to provide comments relating to grammar or simple errors, rather than to organization or idea development.”

In short, in comparison between lecturer’ and e-peer comments, the findings of the

current study show that first, the total number of words written in the e-comments of both

lecturer’s and e-peers were not statistical significant difference In other words, the number of words producing in the e-peer comments were as many as those producing in the lecturer’s e-

comments Second, in terms of the total number of e-comments deliveries on both global and local areas, e-peer comments were statistically greater than those provided by the lecturer That

is, the graduate students provided more total of e-comments on both global and local areas on their peers’ papers than those provided by the lecturer Third, there was no statistical significant difference between the lecturer’s and e-peer comments on global areas although the e-peer comments on local issues were more than those from the lecturer’s e-comments on the local issues Finally, in terms of qualified comment deliveries or revision-oriented comments which trigger revision, there was a statistical significant difference between lecturer’s e-comments and e-peer comments on both global and local issues The lecturer tended to provide more qualified comments on global areas whereas the peers provided more on local issues

The finding of the current study raises a controversy issue to previous research studies Hyland (2000) found that the lecturers tended to view peer comment activities as a passive process, focusing on ‘fixing up’ the texts rather than as an active activity like the current study which viewed it as a supportive tool additional to lecturer’s e-comments Nguyen Thi Kieu Thu (2002) found that lecturer’s comments were mostly on grammar and Montgomery and Baker (2007) found that the lecturer provided most of comments on local issues and little on global during the writing process

4.2 R ESEARCH QUESTION 2:DO THE LECTURER'S SAMPLE E-COMMENTS AFFECT QUALITY OF STUDENTS' COMMENTS?IF YES, TO WHAT EXTENT ARE THERE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN

LECTURER'S E-COMMENTS AND E-PEER COMMENTS IN TERM OF REVISION-ORIENTED

training session in an attempt to train students to provide qualified e-comments to help one another enhance their writing skills In case there was any different e-comments between the two

periods of comment activities, there would be an effect from the lecturer’s illustrated

e-comments Other qualitative data from the interviews relating to responses to this research question will be presented in the session of research 4 in terms of exploring students’ attitudes Table 6 presents the comparison of e-peer comments between the first three and the last three assignments during the course

Table 6 Comparing the e-peer comments from the first 3 with the last three assignments

aThe t and df were adjusted because variances were not equal

Independent Samples t-test

Table 6 summarizes the comparisons between the first half and the last half set of e-peer comments during the course of Academic writing for graduate students In this data analysis, the total e-comments on global areas and those on local areas were analyzed to compare the first set

of e-peer comments from the first three assignments with those from the last three assignments

In addition, qualified e-comments (revision-oriented comments) on both global and local areas were analyzed as well As illustrated in table 6, on average, each written paper from the first three assignments received 5.93 e-comments (M = 5.93; SD = 4.68) on global issues However, the last three written papers received 11.57 (M = 11.57; SD = 5.99) on this macro-area The

difference between means is 5.64 The p-value was 002 (t(26) = -3.43, p = 002, p< 01)

indicates that there was a statistical significant difference between the first set of e-peer

comments from the first three and the last three assignments That means, the graduate students were able to provide much more e-comments on global areas throughout the training In other