AN EXPLORATION ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PEER-EDITING TECHNIQUE IN TEACHING ESSAY WRITING AT FOREIGN LANGUAGES FACULTY, LHU

The results of the study show that the employment of editing activities in large and multilevel classes of writing can benefit both teaching and learning: students’ participation in thei

LAC HONG UNIVERSITY FOREIGN LANGUAGES FACULTY

RESEARCH REPORT

TITLE:

AN EXPLORATION ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PEER-EDITING TECHNIQUE IN TEACHING ESSAY WRITING AT FOREIGN LANGUAGES

FACULTY, LHU

Le Thi Bich Vy & Ngo Thi Thu Ha

consultancy, without all of which we would not be able to finish our study on time

Secondly, we also wish to express our great gratitude to the four colleagues who,

in spite of their very busy schedule, were very willingly to participate in and to provide us with much useful ideas for our study

Thirdly, we would like to thank all of 120 senior students of batch 2007 for their very enthusiastic co-operation during our research

Last but not least, our big thanks are hoped to be sent to all of the other

colleagues of the Foreign Languages Faculty for their precious comments that enabled

us right-time adjustment in the way we carried out the research

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1-5

1.1 Statement of the problem 1

1.2 Justification of the study 3

1.3 Research questions 4

1.4 Hypotheses 4

1.5 Significance of the study 4

1.6 Definition of the key terms 5

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 6-11 2.1 The rationales for using peer-feedback in ESL (English as Second Language) and EFL (English as Foreign Language) classrooms 6

2.2 Review of the prior studies on the use of peer-editing technique 7

2.3 Summary and the scope of the current study 10

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY AND PROCEDURES 12-21 3.1 Aims and Objectives 12

3.2 Methodology 12

3.2.1 Population and sampling 12

3.2.2 Data collection 15

3.2.2.1 Tests 15

3.2.2.2 Questionnaires 15

3.2.2.3 Interviews 16

3.2.2.4 Classroom observation 16

3.3 Procedure 17

CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 22-36 4.1 Peer-editing has a positive influence on students’ writing skill in terms of accuracy and fluency 22 4.2 Peer-editing enhances students’ participation in the study 31

4.3 The use of Peer-editing technique in the classroom creates a positive atmosphere, necessary for language learners 33

4.4 Peer-editing technique is a welcoming tool to be employed in a writing classroom 35

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION 37-39 LIMITATION OF THE STUDY 37

RECOMMENDATIONS 38

REFERENCES 40-42

APPENDICE 43-60

LIST OF TABLES

Table 3.1 The detailed information of the research

Table 4.2 T-Test on the EG’s results of two tests 4 24

Table 4.3 T-test on the posttest results of two groups 4 24

Table 4.4 T-test on the CG’s results of two tests 4 25

Table 4.5 Report on the kind and number of errors

students of both groups made in the pre-&

Table 4.8 Report on two groups’ scores of fluency 4 30

Table 4.9 T-test results on the comparison of posttest

scores between EG &CG

Table of Raw data of pre-questionnaire Appendix 2 45

Table of Descriptive Statistics Appendix 3 49

Table of Final Scores of Two Groups Appendix 11 57

Table of the Number of Errors of Two

Groups

Appendix 11 57

Table of Scores of Fluency Appendix 11 58

Table of Scores of Accuracy Appendix 11 58

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 4.3 Report on the proportion of each error

type in students’ writings

4 27

Figure 4.4 Comparison of the number of errors

made by 2 groups in the pre & posttest

4 28

Figure 4.5 Standard deviation values of the

analyzed data

4 35

ABSTRACT

YZ

Many studies were done on the use of peer-editing technique and all shared the same conclusion that it is a useful teaching tool to be employed in EFL/ ESL classrooms

In this study, peer-editing technique was tried in a 14-week experimental course in which

30 senior English majors of the Foreign Languages Faculty were designated to learn essay writing with this technique During the experiment, students were asked to

exchange and to edit each other’s finished essays with the teacher’s guidance and the use

of editing checklist The results of the study show that the employment of editing activities in large and multilevel classes of writing can benefit both teaching and learning: students’ participation in their study is highly promoted; their writing ability is improved in terms of the level of accuracy and fluency and also a stimulating atmosphere

peer-is created in the classroom

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Feedback is widely seen in education as crucial for both encouraging and

consolidating learning (Anderson, 1982; Brophy, 1981; Vygotsky, 1978) (as cited in Hyland, K& Hyland, F(2005) and it is also regarded as a fundamental factor in the

writing context Supporting this view, Williams (2003) states that written feedback is an essential part of any language course that involves a writing element, and this has also been recognized by those working in the field of second language writing Virtually, for

a long time, product-approach has dominated writing pedagogy and teacher feedback is used as the only way to respond to student writing “Surveys of students’ references indicate that ESL students greatly value teachers’ written feedback, and those coming from cultures where teachers are highly directive generally welcome and expect teachers

to notice and comment on their errors and may feel resentful if their teachers do not do so “ (Hyland, K& Hyland, F, 2005: 4) While teacher feedback has been indicated to be desirable for the development of student writing, there are still many debates on whether

it should be provided as it is often neglected and misunderstood by students This is also

a great concern to teachers teaching writing including the researchers at Lac Hong

University (LHU)

1.1 Statement of the problem

It is true in nearly all the teaching and learning contexts of the Foreign Languages Faculty (FLF) of LHU that teacher feedback is the dominant and the most preferable mode According to the results of the researchers’ survey on 120 English majors of batch

2007 conducted on May 15, 2010(see appendix 2), a majority of these English majors

prefer teacher’s feedback to their peers’ Up to 70.8% of the surveyed students just

trusted and appreciated teacher feedback 65% of them said that they had used peers’ feedback, but they rarely did it Thus, students tend to write only when they know that

their writings would be read and evaluated by their teachers, as the confession of 75.8%

of the respondents Since students depend so much on the teachers, their practice

opportunity has been restricted Concerning it, 60% of the students revealed in the

questionnaire that two is the average number of writings they usually produce for a

writing course and just a very small portion of the respondents (12.51%) have more than

2, which has been confirmed by the information obtained from the interviews with 4

writing teachers(see appendix 6) According to those students, they were demotivated

from practicing writing due to four main reasons: The first and also the leading reason is that they have no one to read and comment their writings (41.7% of the respondents); the second one is due to the difficulties they have in writing in terms of grammar and

structure (31.7%); the third one is due to their occupied timetable at school(19.2%) and the last one is that they do not feel it imperative to write(7.5%) What is worse,

according to the survey, is students’ lack of practice, which is one of the causes of their failure in learning writing In fact, many teachers of writing have been trying their best to help students, but very little success has been achieved due to the giant sizes of the

classes there Regarding it, 3 out of 4 teacher-interviewees clarified that the big size of the writing class usually discouraged them from giving their students lots of chances to write because correction work always took them much time to do Because of the lack of systematic practice, English students including high-level ones cannot write (Baskoff, 1990) While students said they were badly in need of teachers’ feedback, in reality, few

of them take it properly When being asked about their responses to kinds of teacher

feedback, a majority of students admitted that marks were what they expected or were eager to see first when getting the writing assignments back from the teacher; only about 26.7% of the students paid attention to the teachers’ comments and corrections, but they did no follow-up based on the teachers’ remarks in the returned writings; and just 5% made a good use of teacher feedback This fact explains why many students usually make the same errors over and over again although those mistakes have been explained to them for many times Obviously, once students do not want to revise their writing based on feedback, teachers’ feedback is useless (Chandler, 2003)

In short, teachers teaching writing in general and essay writing in particular at FLF

of LHU are now sharing the same fiasco in enabling their students to practice sufficiently and in drawing students’ attention to their feedback, all of which have negatively affected the results of both teaching and learning Thus, being teachers of writing, we have been strongly urged by the long-lasting wish to find out an effective way to help ourselves as well as our colleagues positively modify our teaching contexts for the sake of students’ progress

1.2 Justification of the study

With the development of writing pedagogy, in addition to teacher feedback, new feedback modes are burgeoning and varied feedback techniques are explored Among the

feedback techniques have been studied, peer-editing proves to be advantageous to some

extent Particularly, in our research we decided upon it for some primary reasons, which have been carefully considered in relation to the specific context of FLF First, peer-editing is an interactive technique for stimulating students to actively work with their peers through the exchange of their first drafts of the text Second, it helps students

realize the changes they need (e.g for better organization, paragraph divisions, sentence variety, and vocabulary choice) Third, it is suitable for big classes with multi-levels like those at LHU, where teachers have big difficulties maintaining their role as the primary communicator with the students via one-on- one interaction This creates ground for the

hope that the workload teachers usually take individually would be shared, saving them more time to develop their own teaching instead of spending most of the time editing students ‘writing, and that students would get used to sources of feedback other than teachers’, so they would be motivated to write more outside the classroom Moreover, with group work in the classroom, teachers could avoid the” homework syndrome” that usually results in the situation in which writing lessons are quiet [thus de-motivated] so that the teacher can easily maintain the classroom control (Hadfield and Hadfield, 1990) Last but not least, peer-editing, according to Johnson, J.H.(1983), can promote students’ confidence which is vital to language learning In brief, the technique of peer-editing was chosen to discuss in this paper because of its potential advantages and its suitability to the specific features of the learning and teaching conditions at LHU

1.3 Research questions

From the above rationales, two questions were expected to be addressed in the research

1 To what extent can peer-editing technique help better the context of teaching and

learning essay-writing at the Foreign Languages Department of LHU?

2 What are students’ responses to the use of this technique?

1.4 Hypotheses

It was hypothesized that peer-editing technique with its own advantages would be

a technique suitable for being applied to the teaching of essay-writing at the Foreign Languages Faculty, LHU and the application would bring about significant changes in students’ learning of this subject in terms of their improvement in the writing ability and their enhanced level of participation in the classroom activities

1.5 Significance of the study

Writing is one of the four basic skills in the curriculum of English major, which is taught from the first to the third year Moreover it is fundamental in relation to other subjects in that students could be asked to produce either sentence, or a short paragraph

or even an essay when they learn reading, translation, listening, or even speaking…and especially, essay writing is a compulsory part of the graduation exam or of any entrance

exams for a post-graduate course However, essay writing has not ever been taught and learnt satisfactorily, for which students’ insufficient participation in their study is the

main reason In order to be more actively involved in the learning, students need to be independent It means that they should get rid of the habit of relying on their teachers as the only source of knowledge or of feedback in the context of learning writing In respect

to the indicated potential effectiveness of peer-feedback, the researchers believe that the success of the experiment on the use of peer-editing technique in teaching essay writing would bring numerous benefits to both teachers and students of FLF Particularly,

students would be trained to be more dynamic and more self-reliant in their study, which

is one of the leading requirements, that LHU’s current curriculum plays a very strong emphasis on Similarly, correction work load would not be a challenge to teachers of writing and thus teaching writing will be more appealing to teachers of languages than is

it now

1.6 Definition of the key terms

• Feedback: information given in response to a product, a person's performance of a task, etc., used as a basis for improvement (Oxford English Dictionary, 2004)

• “Peer” is someone equal to the learner such as his/ her classmate or fellow student (Oxford English Dictionary, 2004)

• “Peer editing (or peer reviewing)” is an instructional strategy in which a student evaluates another student’s work and provides feedback This is a standard strategy used in writing courses across the curriculum.(Achieved from en.wikitionary.org)

• “Peer responses” refer to student’ s comments and correction on his/ her peer’s writing in terms of organization, tone, flow, grammar, punctuation, and even

content.( Achieved from en.wikitionary.org)

• “Editing” is the process of preparing a written material for publication by

correcting, condensing, or modifying it ( Achieved from en.wikitionary.org)

• Writing process is seen as consisting of 5 stages: prewriting, drafting, editing,

revising and publishing ( Achieved from en.wikitionary.org)

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 The rationales for using peer-feedback in ESL (English as a Second Language) and EFL(English as a Foreign Language) classrooms

The use of peer feedback is justified by numerous concepts in education such as the process approach to the teaching of writing Proponents of peer responses have a long history of theory and research to support their beliefs Hansen and Liu (2005)report that peer response is supported by several theoretical framework, including process writing, collaborative learning theory, and interaction and second language acquisition(SLA) It also matches well with the five basic principles of cooperative learning proposed by

Johnson (1983), which are positive interdependence, individual accountability, face interaction, interpersonal and small group skills, and group processing In addition,

face-to-De Guerrero & Villamil (2000)’s further exploration on the previous work by

Wertsch(1979) determines that guidance provided by another assists an individual in his/ her development and awareness According to those researchers, in the transition from inter-psychological functioning, the learner moves from stages of other regulation to complete self-regulation, the stage when he or she is capable of independent problem-

solving This is needed for learners of today’s language classrooms because if “language

is ‘part of social interaction and behavior,’ we are compelled to consider the

communicative value of language and introduce the process of interaction into the

classroom” (Swan 1985:9) In the process approach, the focus of attention has moved from the finished product to the whole process of writing: experience and question,

previewing preparation, draft writing, editing and rewriting, publication or sharing, and response and feedback from the readers In this way, teachers will not be the exclusive source of feedback as it usually takes places in traditional classrooms Peer-feedback should be encouraged As the peer editors can compensate for one’s strong points and deficiencies, it helps the writer as well as the editors overcome their “private way of thinking, their habits and their biases and preconceptions”(Bruffee 1980:103) Vital peer- feedback will also provide students with a chance to see their essay from another’s

perspective and thus to be able to improve their work In short, whatever the method is, the benefit of peer-feedback is endless, as Rollinson pointed out:

Peer feedback, with its potentially high level of response and interaction between reader and writer can encourage a collaborative dialogue in which two-way feedback is

established and meaning is negotiated between the two parties It also fosters highly

complex socio- cognitive interactions involving arguing, explaining, clarifying and

justifying

(2005: 25)

2.2 Review of the prior studies on the use of peer-editing technique

The widely- adopted technique of peer- response in language 1(L1), language 2(L2) and foreign language (Fl) classes has enriched the teaching of writing in many ways A great number of earlier studies carried out by L1 and L2 researchers have dealt with the implementation of peer- editing and its ability to improve students ‘drafts In L1 studies, Nystrand and Brabdt(1989) and Gere and Stevens (1995) found the oral

discussion in peer response to be very beneficial to young and adult learners L2 studies looked into the social interaction of peers in term of types of students’ talk(Lockhart &

Ng, 1995; Mendonca & Johnson, 1994; Nelson & Murphy, 1992; Villamil & De

Guerrero, 1996) together with the attitudes of students to peer feedback in terms of their perceptions of its effectiveness (Mangelsdorf, 1992) Researchers of L2 writing have marked a variety of behaviors, interaction styles, and reactions among peer group

members during peer response sessions Mendonca and Johnson (1994) realized that students use different functions during negotiations: asking questions, offering

explanations, making suggestions, restating what their peers have written, and correcting grammar mistakes And as Guerrero and Villamil (1996) reported, in peer groups,

activities consisted of reading, assessing, dealing with trouble sources, and discussing task procedures In a writing classroom, during a cooperative learning process, students review and comment on each other’s writing as peers who collaborate in order to give insight and knowledge to each other, thus, peer- reviewing can be seen as powerful

learning tool incorporating reading and writing practice and such a view summarizing the contemporary social constructivist theory of learning (Gousseva, 1998) Moreover,

“reviewing and evaluation are greatly enhanced by having more than one person working

on it, and the generation of ideas is frequently more lively with two or more people

involved than it is when writers work on their own” (Harmer, 2001: 260) Engaging students in the feedback process, meaningful interaction increases—interaction with peers and interaction with the content of the discussion postings—which subsequently promotes students' satisfaction with the course (Swan, 1985) Rollison (2005) mentioned other effective advantages of peer-editing technique including the perception that the peers are less threatening, less authoritative, friendlier and more supportive than the instructor and that by giving the students practice in becoming critical readers, we are at the same time helping them towards becoming more self-reliant writers who are both self-critical and have the skills to self-edit and revise their writing Once students have been familiar to editing skill, the burden for dealing with errors thus shifts from the

teacher to students Besides, peer-editing has also proven a welcoming activity when used in any ESL and EFL classrooms of writing In the study on 38 first-year Turkish university students about the value of reflection in writing, Arden Arikan(2006) reported

that” the positive points that the students found in peer viewing were that it made them get opinion of many different individuals and this helped them improve their work”(p.7) Zheng Chunxian, Zh( 2007) in his study on Peer Error Feedback gained a conclusion that peer error feedback is a good choice in the EFL teaching context in which the work of teachers’ error feedback is a “tedious chore” Finally, after researching adopting varied feedback modes in the EFL writing class, Li Mi-mi (2009) stated that peer feedback could help train students to be a critical reader as well as a confident writer

Not all the studies of peer reaction show unqualified positive effects on revision, however Some studies suggest negative consequences as well The first disadvantage of this technique is that not all students take peer feedback seriously and also their

feedbacks are just overall comments like “ good” or” well-written”, from which their peers benefit very little In relation to this fact, Zheng Chunxian, Zh( 2007) explained that students errors are various and sometimes those errors are out of the range of

students’ language proficiency Adding to this point, LI Mi-mi (2009:2) clarified response cannot achieve fruitful results because students are not knowledgeable enough

“peer-to detect and correct errors or students tend “peer-to withhold critical comments so as “peer-to

maintain group harmony” And once students cannot review their peers’ writings

appropriately, they are likely not to trust their peers reviews (Nelson & Carson, 1998).In short, those studies pointed out that there were differences between L1 and L2 and

claimed that a lack of language proficiency in L2 affects peer-review Gere and Stevens (1985) looked at a fifth-grade writing class to determine if the oral responses provided by groups to individual writers shaped the subsequent revisions in what they were writing The study found both positive and negative results Student writers were challenged by their peers "to clarify, to provide more detail" (p 95) as the peer reacters asked questions when they were confused, and suggested ways to improve the writing Some student writers integrated their peers' suggestions into subsequent revisions Yet there were

incidents of unproductive, even hostile, verbal exchange, and in some groups students hurried through the group work in a "robotlike monotone." A case study of four children

with low, average, and high abilities in writing (Russell, 1985) examined the relationship between peer conferencing and revision The results indicated that in revising, poor

writers were dependent on the questions of other students, whereas average and good writers tended to become their own audience and revise on their own Another case study conducted with freshmen (Berkenkotter, 1983) sought to find out how students interact in their writing groups and whether writers improve their texts as a result of the interactions The research revealed that the students' attitudes toward assistance from their peers varied considerably, as did the writers' approaches toward revision One student, Stan, was too immature to heed his audience Because of her sensitivity to audience, another student, Joann, became vulnerable to unwarranted criticism Although a third student, Pat, felt responsible to his audience, he felt a greater obligation to his emerging text and revised independently of peer suggestions The study concluded that students writing for an audience of peers as well as their teacher do not necessarily benefit from their

peers'suggestions An experimental study (Rijlaarsdam, 1987) looked at peer feedback among 11 classes of eighth-grade students in eight Dutch schools The control group received teacher feedback; the experimental group received peer feedback Although the study had hypothesized that there would be more frequent evaluation and revision in the experimental group, the results showed no differences between the two

2.3 Summary in relation to the scope of the current study

In short, 16 studies of researchers from Western and Eastern Countries have

proved peer-editing technique an effective tool to be used not only in EFL but also ESL

classrooms, especially in teaching writing; however, those researchers have also pointed out that this technique still has some limitations They are students’low trust in peer responses and the possibility of error spread among students, all of which are due to learners restricted level of language proficiency Therefore, the researchers considered

peer-editing technique as the subject of their research for two main aims: First, the

researchers would like to know if peer-editing would work at its best in the contexts of writing classes of LHU, where most classes are composed of at least 40 students with

mixed levels, so as to be an effective teaching aid to teachers of writing here; second, the researcher would like to see if they could deal with the disadvantages of the technique

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

3.1 Aims and Objectives

This research was done for two primary goals First, it aimed to measure how effective peer-editing technique is in teaching essay-writing so as to be implemented in the real context of FLD of LHU with regard to the benefits it could bring to students of the experiment Then, it intended to explore students’ attitudes toward the employment of the novel method

3.2 Methodology

Considering the aims and objectives of the study, a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches was used to carry out the research

3.2.1 Population and sampling

The population of this study is defined as all the junior English majors of LHU They have been learning writing in 6 successive terms (2 for sentence, 2 for paragraph and 2 for essay writing) In this study, the researchers chose on students of batch 2007, who have just finished the third year, instead of those of batch 2008, who start the third year, for 3 main reasons First, the target of the study is to find out if peer-editing

technique can help students be more independent in their practice chance In order to do

it, students need to write a lot and to do much editing, all of which requires students

certain knowledge of essay writing; thus, the choice on batch 2007 of which students have just finished two courses of essay-writing enabled the researchers more time to focus on their experiment In addition, these students have learnt essay writing and also they are in third year of school, so they know more clearly than anyone else how difficult and important this subject is; thus, reliable data would be ensured

The participants were chosen and used as follow: All of 120 English majors from

4 classes of batch 2007 were to respond to a questionnaire which was administered at the beginning of the study to help the researchers look further into the problem that English majors cannot learn essay-writing effectively and that they are not actively engaged in their learning Out of these 120 students, 110 students of three day-time classes (07av111,

112 and 113) were focused to select the subjects for the experiment Students of evening class- 07AV101 were excluded from the experiment due to the reason of convenience In

particular, from those 110 students, 60 were chosen by systematic random sampling The

sampling was proceeded in three phase as described in fig 3.1

Grouped Into 4

11

Figure 3.1 Chart of the Sampling Process

Those 60 samples were then divided into 2 groups: control group (CG) and experimental group (EG) with equal number Each group stands for a class with mixed sex and levels for the reliability After the experiment, 30 students of EG were planned to answer a questionnaire about their attitudes toward the use of new teaching technique Also, some students of this group who had the striking results in the posttest- both highest and lowest scores- were interviewed for further insights into their achievements or their

unsuccessfulness

In addition to students, the participants of the study also include 4 teachers- 2 males and 2 females- who have been teaching English at FLF for at least 5 years and have over- 2-year experience in teaching writing These teachers were interviewed for deeper thoughts in to the researchers’ identified problem Also, two of them were asked

to help the researchers with marking the tests

In order to collect data, tests, questionnaires, interviews and classroom observation were employed as the main instruments

3.2.2.1 Tests

“Tests may be used to access achievement, mastery, to diagnose weaknesses and so on” (Kemmis & Taggart, 1992: 105), so pretest and posttest were employed in this study The tests took the form of two writing assignments Students were particularly asked to compose a 5-paragraph argumentative essay within 90 minutes To reduce their

difficulty with vocabulary as well as ideas, the topics were chosen in such a way that they

were realistic and familiar to their schemata (see appendix 9) Students’ finished essays

were then marked by two teacher- participants with the use of the same specific marking

scheme (see appendix 10) for the objectivity and the reliability of the data and finally

analyzed for students’ change of the level of accuracy and fluency by the researchers themselves

3.2.2.2 Questionnaires

Questionnaires were used in the study because they were adaptable to

qualification, cheap and easy to answer (Cohen & Manion, 1989; Weir & Robert, 1994)

In this study, the researchers used questionnaires at two different points of time-before and after the experiment- for different purposes The two questionnaires are all written in English To make the questions comprehensible to all respondents, jargon is avoided These questionnaires were administered to the participants directly and were collected right after having been filled in This helped ensure that none of the items were missed and, as Brown (1988) said, enabled the researcher to explain any ambiguities as they arose

The pre-questionnaire (see appendix 1) was designed to look into the problem of

the study, namely the students’ attitudes toward essay writing, their learning habit as well

as the reasons for their insufficient practice Thus, it was delivered to students at the beginning of the study The questionnaire is composed of 8 close-ended questions which the respondents were supposed to choose the answer that is closest to their opinion

The post-questionnaire (see appendix 3) was composed to explore students’

attitude toward the new method, so it was sent to students of EG only right after the

experiment finished The post-questionnaire includes 8 statements to which the

respondents were expected to express the level of their agreement

3.2.2.3 Interviews

Interviews were also conducted at two different phases of the study for the

purposes of investigating the problem and confirming the information achieved from the questionnaire Specifically, to check if the other teachers share the same ideas on the observed problems in the context of teaching essay-writing, the researchers conducted an interview with 4 teachers who are now teaching at FLF of LHU Also, to acquire a deeper understanding and stronger confirmation of what the researchers found from the

experiment, interviews were done with some special individuals of the EG, at the same time with the post-questionnaire 15 students were interviewed They included 7 with remarkable progress in the post-test and 4 showing no change or even backwardness in

the post-test The two interviews were semi-structured, according to which during the

process of interviewing, some would be added to the scheduled questions when there was

a need for clarification of the opinion In fact, for the pre-interview, each teacher was asked 7 questions, but during the interview 3 more questions were added when the

researchers would like to get clearer view from their opinions, so 10 in all were asked

(see appendix 5) For the post-interview to students, the total number of questions to be asked is 7 including 5 scheduled ones and 2 added ones (see appendix 7) All the

interviewing questions are open-ended and in Vietnamese for the comfort of both the interviewers and interviewees

3.2.2.4 Classroom observation

In the study, observation is employed to help the researchers have a clear view of

how students worked with the introduced technique and it takes the form: participant as

observer In detail, one of two researchers took the role of the teacher in the experimental

class and also during the class she did the observation All that were worth considering

for the findings such as the way students worked with the new technique, how they behaved when taking the peer-editing activities, or what they remarked on the editing activities would be taken into account for later discussion and those pieces of information

were recorded in the form of teaching diary (see appendix 14) that the researcher wrote

after every class meeting At the end of the course, information from the diary was synthesized and analyzed to support other findings, which were found out from tests, questionnaires and interviews for final conclusions to be described in the report

3.3 Procedure

This research had been carried out for about 1 year (from August 19 to Nov 05) and in five main phases as follows:

Phase 1: Problem Identification

After the researchers had noticed the problem students faced in their own writing classes, a survey with the participation of 120 students and 4 teachers teaching writing at FLF was conducted to get deeper insights into the observed problem The survey was carried out on May 15, 2010 with the use of two instruments: questionnaire (to students) and interview (with teachers), all of which had been prepared beforehand In detail, the questionnaire and the interviewing questions were all designed at the beginning of May and were then piloted on a small portion of the aimed population for necessary

improvement After the problem to be researched had been clearly identified, the

researchers got down to making a plan for the research

Phase 2: Plan

After the problem identification, the researchers looked for the solution by

intensively reading professional books and journals together with consulting experienced colleagues It took the researchers about 3 and a half months – from August 30 to

November 11, 2010- to get in the agreement with deciding upon trying out peer-editing

technique After that, the researchers worked together on the research plan In this phase,

some things were decided and done First of all, the experiment was designed In this

research the experiment took the simplest form of the pretest-posttest control group, in

which the results of two groups: CG and EG were compared for the final results The subjects of the experiment were 60 samples got from the population of 120 senior English majors, who had joined the survey in May The researchers would be in charge of the teaching of the experimental course Ms.Vy, for more experience in dealing with group work in writing classes, was assigned to teach EG and Ms Ha, because of less experience

in using group work in writing classes, was to teach CG Second, the detailed schedule for the teaching and the data-collecting was set up, about which more specific

information can be seen in table 3.1

Table 3.1: The detailed information of the research procedure

Duration What to be done What for Who to do Whom to

contact

19/08 to 25/08/10 - Meeting the

research subjects

- Preparing students for course

- Ms Vy &

Ms.Ha

- Students of EG&CG

23/08 to 28/08/10 - Supervising the

pre-test

- Getting data - Ms.Ha-

CG Ms.Vy-

EG

- Students of EG&CG

30/08 to 19/11/10

(time for the course)

- Conducting the teaching

- Getting data - Ms.Ha-

CG Ms.Vy-

questionnaire and

interviewing

- Ms.Ha-

EG Ms.Vy-

CG

- 2 participant -teachers

- Students of

EG &CG

- Participant teachers

- The

observing notes questions

- Getting ideas for the questionnaire and interview

- Ms Vy &

Ms.Ha

researchers themselves

29/11 to 03/12 - Building the

post-questionnaire and composing the interviewing questions

- Piloting the newly-designed instruments

- Students of

EG

06/12 to 11/12 - Administering the

questionnaire

post Conducting the interview

- Collecting data

- Discussing on the analysis of the data

- Getting the findings

- Ms Vy

- Ms Vy &

Ms Ha

- The researchers themselves

Finally, the necessary items for the experimental course- writing topics (see appendix

12), editing checklist (see appendix 13) and for the data collection – tests, marking

scheme, post-questionnaire and post-interviewing questions were composed or

constructed

Phase 3: Action

The experimental course lasted within 14 weeks (table 3.1) Because of the differences in students’ timetable of the curricular classes, the experimental classes were held after school hour- usually at 5p.m and it lasted within 4 periods To the CG, teacher first helped students review the theoretical knowledge of essay- writing as well as provided them with more techniques to write good essays of different genres Then, students were supposed to write on the given topics either individually at home or in groups in class Some of the finished writings were then asked to be presented on the board for teacher’s feedback To the EG, group work was employed for both the writing and the editing process The first two of the fourteen weeks were saved for teacher’s instruction on how to use the peer-checklist sheet The checklist is the form students based on when they offering feedback on their peers’ writings during the course This checklist design was based on the one introduced by Alice Oshima & Ann Hogue(1998:120) The teacher modeled the editing process for students to observe The period from the 3rd to the 14th week was for further lessons about essay writing and also for practice In detail, on each topic (6 in all) given by the teacher, there was a discussion with the participation of the whole class in order to generate the main ideas for the essay Then, basing on the generated ideas, each group- 5 in all, made their general outline Once the outline had been built, each member would develop it into a complete essay As soon as he/ she finished the essay, it would be exchanged with that of a certain peer Students were allowed to choose their partners, but changing the partners was encouraged during the course For any difficulties the writer and the peer-editor might face during their editing process, they were advised to share with their group or class members The best writing of the group would be chosen to report to the whole class at the following class contact Each time, 5 representative writings would be read carefully for comments and revision and all the errors that could not be corrected in the group’s editing activities

would be presented so as to seek help first from the other groups and finally from the teacher Moreover, in this group, the theory of easy writing was introduced and explained during the editing process through discussions During the course- except the first two weeks, the teacher worked mainly as a facilitator and observer She went around observing how students worked with the new technique so as to give help in the right time

Phase 4: Data analysis

From the tests, the scores students got for the pre- and post-test were analyzed by Excel statistics tool for the findings on students general achievement Also, the mistakes they made in two tests were identified, sorted out and then computed for frequencies and percentages which were used for the discussion about students’ specific changes in terms

of their level of accuracy and fluency Besides, responses to the questionnaires were counted for percentages which were then analyzed and described when the problem was discussed

Phase 5: Reflection and report

After all the results from single instruments had been collected and analyzed, the researcher began to synthesize them for the findings These findings were then shared with teacher- participants for more discussions Finally, the researcher got down to

writing the report on the study once they had gained clear conclusions on the findings

In short, after a long time conducting the study with the employment of different methods, the researchers gained a great amount of data which are both qualitative and quantitative From those sources of data, four main findings about the use of Peer-editing

in teaching essay writing were achieved Each of them was described and discussed in the following section

CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

From the analyzed data, the following findings were obtained

4.1 Peer-editing has a positive influence on students’ writing skill in terms of

accuracy and fluency

Table 4.1: results of the pre-test & post-test of two groups

It can be seen from table 4.1 that after the experimental course there has appeared

a significant difference between the two groups in terms of their competence in writing essays Specifically, at the beginning of the study, the writing ability of two groups was nearly the same, which is reflected by their results in the pre-test For this test, the mean

scores the two groups got is approximately equal to each other: 5.76 (CG) in comparison

to 5.78 (EG) and 6 is what most students of both groups were given In addition, the

distribution of scores within each group was roughly unequal, referring to the fact that

Figure 4.1: change in the scores of CG

Figure 4.2: change in the scores of EG

students of the two groups did the test with their own ability and that students of each group were of different levels: from poor to excellent However, at the end of the study, a big gap between the two groups can be noticed Evidently, after 14 weeks’ learning

intensively with the employment of peer-editing activities in the classroom, students of

EG can write essays much better than they did before the experiment and also than the students of CG do Their improvement is shown clearly through their results in the post-test In particular, their mean score for the posttest is 0.9 point higher than it was for the pre-test; 7 is the common score of the group; and especially many students scored from 5.76 to 7.68, which is only 0.92 point from the mean score Statistically, the difference in the achievement students of EG could obtain in the posttest is estimated to be significant

by the t-test results (Table 4.2 & 4.3)

t Critical  2.001717484

It can be noticed from the two score comparisons- one of the scores within the EG and the other of those between students of EG and of CG- that the obtained t-test values are

bigger than the critical t-test: 2.0017 This means the difference observed from the two

comparisons is important and meaningful Moreover, with the two values of probation

gained in the two t-tests: p<0.0005 (Table 4.2) and p<0.02 (Table 4.3), there is about

80% of possibility that the noticed difference of EG is real, not by chance In the CG,

although there is an increase in the mean scores (6.02 against 5.76), it does not mean a

significant difference of the group as proven by the comparative t-test results on EG’ mean scores of the two trial tests (Table 4.4) In fact, the change of CG’s mean scores

Table 4.2: t-test on the EG’s

results of the two tests

Table 4.3: t-test on the posttest results of the two groups

was only resulted from some individuals of the group who are of high competence in writing themselves Concerning this fact, it can be seen from the score record of CG(table 4.1) that strong students could get higher marks, while many weak students got the same

or even lower marks, making the range between the highest and the lowest score in the post-test results larger than it was in the pre-test To a certain extent, the fact about the change of CG has strongly confirmed the role of practice in improving the language

skills- listening, reading, and writing as Harmer, J (2001) makes “practice makes

perfect” Obviously, although students of CG did not learn essay-writing with any new technique, during 14 weeks they were asked to write a lot Specifically, in addition to 7 essays students produced together with their group, each student was supposed to write 7 ones on 7 different topics at home and also in class Thus, it proved why many students

of this group got higher scores in the posttest (Fig.4.1)

improvement in the ability to compose an essay of most students of EG is related to the

increase in their level of accuracy and fluency in writing, among which accuracy is much

clearer

Accuracy

Table 4.4: t-test on the CG’s results of the two tests

In this study, the level of accuracy means student’ ability to use standard English

concerning grammar, sentence structure and mechanics and it was mainly measured by the average number of mistakes a student made in his/ her trial writing From students’ work on the two tests, many interesting findings about their language competence were found In particular, though most of the students were in the third year of university, they still made lots of sentence errors in their writings (Table 4.5) The researchers had identified many different kinds of errors from students’ writings, which were classified into 4 main groups according to what elements of the sentence they affect:

- Grammar errors refer to those of word forms, verb tenses, verb moods, comparison

and so on

- Sentence Structure errors are those related to word order or sentence elements

such as dangling modifiers, misplaced modifiers, or sentence fragment, faulty

parallelism

- Vocabulary errors are those concerning the use of words

- Mechanics errors: are those of capitalization, punctuation or spelling

Table 4.5: report on the kind and number of errors students of both groups

made in the pre-& post-test

PRETEST POSTTEST PRETEST POSTTEST PRETEST POSTTEST PRETEST POSTTEST PRETEST POSTTEST PRETEST POSTTEST PRETEST POSTTEST PRETEST POSTTEST

Comparing the number of errors

students of both groups made in the two

trial tests, the researchers found that

among the four kinds of errors, those of

Grammar takes the biggest proportion

of all and those of mechanics are

smallest in the number (Fig.4.3)

As seen, grammatical errors which appear most frequently in the writings of students of

both groups take the biggest proportion of all- 42.07% This might surprise any teachers

of FLF because of the fact that Grammar is not only taught as an independent subject in

two successive terms of the first year, but it is also often reminded of in the teaching of

Figure 4.3: report on the proportion

of each error type in students’

other skills like writing, reading, and even speaking However, when it came for the students of those groups to compose their essays; they still made a lot of grammatical

errors The second most common errors (22.38%) are those of Mechanics, which require

students’ only mechanic utilization of the language; thus, naturally errors of mechanics are not too difficult to avoid, but students still make lots of them in their writings The third group of common errors in students’ writings includes those involved in students’

use of sentence structures (21.16%) Structural errors are not as many as those of

grammar and mechanics, but they are considered much more serious in that they are usually difficult to be corrected and that they usually obstruct the conveyance of the

meanings And those with the smallest proportion (14.39%) are the mistakes of

vocabulary use They are related to students’ choice of words to express their ideas in the essay Despite being small in the number, like structural errors, those of word use will not easy to avoid unless students acquire a good vocabulary source

It is evident that the level of

accuracy of most students in EG has

increased considerably after the

experimental course It is proven by

the drastic reduction in the amount of

errors they made in the post-test

made by the 2 groups in the pre &posttest

GROUPS ITEMS

TESTS DIFFERENCE

CG

From figure 4.4 as well as the two tables above, we can see that in the pre-test, students

of both groups made lots of errors of the mentioned 4 groups: CG exceeded EG in the number of errors of Grammar and Mechanics; meanwhile, EG got much more errors of Structure and Vocabulary than CG did However, a clear change could be noticed from EG’s work in the posttest Within this group, students show to have written their essay with much higher level of accuracy than they had done in the pre-test In particular, they

could reduce the number of Mechanics errors down to 58.07%; Grammar and

Vocabulary, to about 45% and Structure, to 37.64%, in comparison to that in the

pre-test Compared with the errors produced by students in CG, those of EG are more

effectively lessened, especially in regard to grammatical (35.5% of reduction) and

mechanics errors (32.66%) This difference in the better ability of using language of EG

has been proven confident by the results the researchers obtained from the survey

Specifically, this improvement was then explained by the students’ responses in the

interviews as: when trying to correct their peers’ errors, they were forced to usually

review their grammar; as a result, their grammar use was improved gradually (22%);

and regular editing peers’ writings made them highly aware of the mistakes, so they formed for themselves the habit of thinking carefully when putting things down in their

own essays (44%) (see appendix 8 for more details)

Table 4.6: Report on the change in level of

accuracy within EG and CG

Table 4.7: Report on the change in level of accuracy between EG and CG

In short, while editing their peers’ writings, students have to detect problems in a text, diagnose them (deciding what’s wrong), and correct them (Flower, Haydes, Carey, Shriver, &Stratman, 1986) This has certainly increased their level of error awareness and therefore enhances their engagement in the study Meanwhile, when errors are just

corrected by the teacher, students often pay little attention to them (Lalander, 1982) Therefore, it is implied in teaching that in writing classes students should be exposed to

as many kinds of errors as possible since being aware of the errors and the way to correct them will help students carry out the proofreading in their own writing process