Using a model based approach to teach english writing to 10th graders in ba dinh high school, nga son, thanh hoa

Rationales At present, the requirement of applying Communicative LanguageTeaching CLT in L2 teaching from Vietnamese Ministry of Training andEducation An Nguyen, 2011 leads to a focus on

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

1 MBA/MBT = Model-based approach/Model-based teaching

2 L1= Mother tongue or first language

3 L2= Foreign language or second language

4 CLT = Communicative language teaching

5 EFL = English as a foreign language

LISTS OF FIGURES, TABLES AND CHARTS

i

Table 1 Writing tasks in English Textbook 10 4Table 2 Classification of writing tasks in English Textbook 10 5Chart 1 Comparison of the mean values of the paragraph-level question items 6Chart 2 Test-based scores of the two groups 10

TABLE OF CONTENT

ii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS i

LISTS OF FIGURES, TABLES AND CHARTS ii

PART A - INTRODUCTION 1

1 Rationales 1

2 Aims of the study 1

3 Scope of the study 2

4 Significance of the study 2

5 The participants 2

6.Questionaires………

2

PART B - DEVELOPMENT 3

1 English teaching and learning at Ba Dinh High School 3

2 Writing tasks at the 10th grade and MBA/MBT 4

3 Students difficulties in writing tasks 5

4 Benefits of using MBA/MBT 6

5.Implimentation of the model-based approach in a writing class 7

6 Implementation of the model-based approach in a writing class 9

7 Effectiveness of using MBA/MBT to teach writing to the 10th graders 10

8 Major findings 10

PART C: CONCLUSION 12

1 Conclusion 12

2 Pedagogical suggestions 13

3 Limitation of the study 13

4 Suggestion for further study 13

REFERENCES 14 APPENDICES I

iii

PART A -INTRODUCTION

1 Rationales

At present, the requirement of applying Communicative LanguageTeaching (CLT) in L2 teaching from Vietnamese Ministry of Training andEducation (An Nguyen, 2011) leads to a focus on development of all the fourmacro language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) so thatVietnamese, L2 students are able to communicate well in the target language.However, teaching-learning quality at many places is still far from beingsatisfactory, and Vietnamese learners have encountered many difficulties inEnglish learning, especially with English writing skills

The first is that English at high school, and nearly at all levels of theVietnamese educational system, is primarily treated as a compulsory subject, soits learning and teaching is heavily exam-driven rather than communication-oriented despite the call for the use of CLT Multiple choice tests are extensivelyused to assess language learners’ English competence, with a focus on grammar,vocabulary, reading comprehension and writing–which only requires L2learners’ performance on a surface level like sentence-rewriting and jumbled-word activities This practice definitely cannot enhance students’ writtencommunication skills and leads to teachers’ teaching of ‘non-communicative’writing skills

Teaching composition in the Vietnamese EFL context today emphasizesthe assistance for students to produce the error-free texts based on the models ofcorrect language by providing student writers with vocabulary relating to therequired topic and some guiding questions to form their ideas into the finishedparagraphs This predominantly language-based teaching of writing cannot helpthe student writer create compositions to serve the many purposes outside theclassroom context The endeavour to seek innovative methods to enhancestudents’ writing skills and building up their positive attitudes towards learning

this skill is the very drive for us to engage in this study entitled ‘Using a

model-based approach to teach English writing to 10 th Graders in Ba Dinh High School, Nga Son, Thanh Hoa’, which implements the model-based approach in

an actual classroom to discover its down and up sides of the teaching technique

in a Vietnamese context

2 Aims of the study

 Investigating the situation of teaching and learning English writing to 10thGraders in Ba Dinh High School, Nga Son, Thanh Hoa;

 Investigating the effectiveness and difficulties in using a model-based approach

to teach English writing to these students;

 Providing some suggestions and implications for the improvement of writingteaching at Ba Dinh High School by using a model-based approach

3 Scope of the study

Because of the limitation of a minor study, the author only carries outresearch on teachers and 10th graders at Ba Đinh High School The study alsomainly focuses on the effectiveness and difficulties in using a model-basedapproach and the activities used in helping students work well in English writinglessons

4 Significance of the study

Theoretically, the study systemised the theory of a model-based approach

to teaching writing, together with its advantages and disadvantages The studyalso provides suggestions for successful application of the approach intoteaching composition in a real classroom

Practically, the research provides language teachers and learners with anumber of activities and exercises using the model-based approach in all stages

of writing in English Textbook 10

5 The participants

Two classes of 10th graders were chosen for the present study They wereboth of mixed ability and supposed to be best represented the average level ofEnglish among the 10th graders in the whole school The total number ofstudents from these two classes is 70, and they are divided into the “controlgroup” and the “experimental group” All are at the age of 15 or 16 and have 7-year experience of learning English The experimental group were taught withMBA/MTB while the other with regular traditional approach

6 Questionnaire

A questionnaire was designed to discover the difficulties which theparticipants encountered during their composition in English The questionaireconsists of 13 items which are selected basing on the literature on the problemswhich L2 learners encounter in their L2 writing (see Appendix A) It does notaim to investigate all kinds of the difficulties that language learners might have

but focus on linguistic aspects of the writing process only, with some questionsrelating to timing and the effect of L1 ways of thinking into L2 writing

PART B - DEVELOPMENT

1 English teaching and learning at Ba Dinh High School

Though Ba Dinh High School is the only gifted high school in Nga Son,its English teaching and learning has several difficulties Firstly, the class sizefar exceeds the standard number for a language class, with approximately 40students each Secondly, the number of technology-aided classrooms is verylimited; therefore, teachers can not apply electronic lessons to the extent thatthey desire for Finally, there is lack of visual aids such as pictures andportable boards from the school Thus, the teachers and students are not offeredthe most convenient and modern environment to the teaching and learning ofEnglish

As regards students, they are strictly selected to enroll in the school, mostare academically qualified There are 10 classes in the 10th grade with oneEnglish gifted class whose students’ English proficiency are supposed to bebetter than those from the others In this study, the average level of the majority

of the 10th graders in the school was selected

2 Writing tasks at the 10 th grade and MBA/MBT

CLT underpins the design of English Textbook 10, so the structure ofeach unit includes four skills: reading, speaking, listeningand writing Linguisticknowledge such as phonetics, vocabulary and grammar areconsidered the means

and condition to form and improve communicative ability In fact, the

learner-centered approach is also adapted in order to promote students' activeness and

creativeness, in which teachersact as theorganizer and facilitator in the class

The content of the book is theme-based, with 16 units covering different

topicswhich were contextualized to be suited to Vietnamese students Further,

learning is task-based, with the activities are designed in the way in which

students are offered opportunities to interact and co-operate

In English Textbook 10, writing is the last and the most challenging skill

in each unit It is put after three other skills due to its productive nature anddependence on input from other skills In the 10th grade, students are expected towork on a variety of writing tasks, each of which goes with a particular topic.All the writing tasks in the textbook are summarised in the table below:

Table 1 Writing tasks in English 10Textbook

Topics Required writing tasks

4 Education A letter of complaint

5 Technology A set of instructions

7 Mass media Advantages and disadvantages of the mass media

8 Hometown An informal letter: giving directions

world

A description of given information

10 Conservation A letter of invitation

11 National parks A letter of acceptance or refusal

to write a letter of complaint, and this requires students’ knowledge of acomplaint letter and appropriate vocabulary to successfully accomplish the task.All the possible text types attached to the writing tasks in English Textbook 10are summarized as follows:

Table 2 Classification of writing tasks in English Textbook 10

Table 2 clearly allows a suggestion that using MBA/MBT to teach writing

to the 10th graders is definitely appropriate since all the writing tasks requiredthe students to master a particular text type and its features and signalexpressions More importantly, if the 10th graders have mastered a given texttype in one writing task, this will benefit them when they work with others asseveral tasks are based on a certain type of texts Students’ prior knowledge oftext types will also reduce their cognitive loads when they cope with otherwriting tasks, which helps them free from the focus on writing conventions inorder to focus on vocabulary and expressions when the text types are used fordifferent communicative purposes A clear example for this argument is the case

of writing a letter: students can apply the letter format that they master in Unit 4

to solve the writing tasks in Unit 10, and they just need to acquire somegrammatical structures for inviting others politely

3 Students difficulties in writing tasks

The mean comparison was employed to compare the mean values of allthe items in the questionnaire The results of this analysis indicate that thestudents from the two groups share a number of writing difficulties However,there are several items where lots of participants from the control group haveexperienced obstacles in their writing, whereas those from the experimentalgroup appeared to have fewer difficulties

The chart below compares the mean value of these question items between thetwo groups:

Chart 1 Comparison of the mean values of the paragraph-level question

items

The chart shows that the students who experienced MBA/MBT have morepositive attitudes towards their ability to write a paragraph compared to theircounterparts in the control group Specifically, the statistics shows that fewerstudents in the experimental group reported their difficulties in the ways ofstarting their writing, what to write in a paragraph, ways of organising theirparagraph and connecting their ideas than the participants in the control group.These findings partially suggest the positive impacts of using MBA/MBT toteaching composition to the 10th graders in a Vietnamese context

To sum up, the 10 graders participated in the present study suffered thecommon difficulties among language learners in terms of lack of vocabulary,grammatical structures and ideas for writing As regards the ways of writing aparagraph, those students taught using MBA/MBT have fewer difficultiescompared to their counterparts who did not experience the teaching technique

4 Benefits of using MBA/MBT

MBA/MBT benefits L2 learners in various ways It meets therequirement of writing in any culture, which consists of three basic forms ofknowledge requisite for the writer: semantic knowledge, knowledge of models,and knowledge of social and cultural rules (Purves & Purves, 1986) Models

provide exposure to the lexical items, structural patterns, and conventions of the

target language at all levels of discourse (Watson, 1982) They also allow

learners to stress their efforts on one section of the essay at a time, whileintroducing them to the important rhetorical patterns Some may argue that thisapproach is overtly prescriptive, but the predictability of structure enhanceslearners’ sense of sercurity (Cotterall &Cohen, 2003) Thus, models can “stillcontribute a very great deal to the teaching of composition, especially in thesecond or foreign language situation” (Watson, 1982: 13)

Others might claim that MBT/MBA neglect students’ self-sufficiency.This is not the case Many daily situations involve predictable and recurringpatterns of language use, without which our interactions would be random andchaotic, and this requires us to recognize the generic expectations of varioussituations to produce an acceptable response (Derewianka, 2003) Thus,MBT/MBA does not neglect students’ self-sufficiency but guarantee the use oftheir self-sufficiency to achieve their communicative purposes in variouscontexts

Finally, the availability of model texts could create a condition forstudents to copy and become lazy in the process of learning Hare (1992) arguesthat introducing students to the rules of writing can, in fact, avoid their use of alow level strategy of copying Students are likely to copy the model if they donot know how and what to write This inadequacy can be easily avoided with acareful lesson plans and wise strategies used to scaffold students in the process

of learning and teaching

5 Implementation of the model-based approach

In regard to the lesson plans and the worksheet, all observers recordedthat the layout, the time alloted to tasks/ activities and the task sequence issuitable for the 10th graders Especially, one observer strongly supports theproviding of new words and expressions in the model texts; she noted that this

“enables low-achieving students to accomplish their learning activity while doesnot affect the learning of average and high-level students since the very aim ofthe activity is to develop students’ awareness of text type, not their lexicon orgrammar”

More importantly, all the four observers expressed their positive attitudestowards the use of MBA/MBT to teaching composition to the 10th graders, andthere were no negative comments on the teaching procedure suggested by the

researcher Actually, in the first teaching segment, the data from the observationtools indicates that many students seemed to be anxious during the process oflearning However, this should not be considered as a negative reaction from thestudents to MBA/MBT It was a normal reaction when the students had notexperienced this style of learning before This claimed is proved by the fact thatthe participants had positive reactions in other teaching segments.

In ‘modelling’, the overall evaluation of the four observers suggests thatthe teaching technique used to introduce model texts are appropriate, especiallythe guiding questions helping the students to focus on the format of the modeltext, purpose of writing and language of the text type However, severalcomplaints were made regarding the ‘modelling’ One observer wrote: “thetechnique is all right, but its repeated use may cause boredom for the students inlong-term teaching”, and he suggested that two paragraphs of similar text types

in Vietnamese and English could be sometimes employed to vary the ways oflearning and this ‘helps students to recognize the differences in the way ofwriting in Vietnamese and that of English”

With respect to the ‘joint construction’, it is recorded that explicitdiscussion about the model text benefits the students in terms of mastering ageneral model for the genre and recognising its appropriate connectors for thegenre–which enhance their performance in the later stage of learning.Nevertheless, three out of four observers suggest that a comparison between thefeatures of Vietnamese text types and those of the target language could beuseful at this stage since it raises the students’ awareness of the similarities(which could facilitate their process of writing) and difficulties (which enablesstudents to avoid when they write) This proposal could be an adjustment to theapplication of MBA/MBT in a Vietnamese context since Vietnamese students’writing style differs in native English speakers’ (Thuy Nguyen, 2008) and there

is evidence that students’ L1 writing styles affect their L2 writing (Ferris, 1994)

In ‘independent construction’, the observation data states that severalstudents experienced difficulties when they constructed their own text though amajority of the participants worked quite well Perhaps, this phenomenon isinevitable in a multi-level classroom, but it raises the necessity of revising thelesson plans and worksheets so that low-achieving students could ease theirdifficulties in their writing process One observer suggests the level ofscaffolding requires certain adjustments to meet the students’ various