The effectiveness of using peer correction on improving writing skills to students in intensive english classes at hanoi law university

LÃ NGUYỄN BÌNH MINH THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING PEER CORRECTION ON IMPROVING WRITING SKILLS TO STUDENTS IN INTENSIVE ENGLISH CLASSES AT HANOI LAW UNIVERSITY NGHIÊN CỨU TÍNH HIỆU QUẢ C

LÃ NGUYỄN BÌNH MINH

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING PEER CORRECTION

ON IMPROVING WRITING SKILLS TO STUDENTS

IN INTENSIVE ENGLISH CLASSES

AT HANOI LAW UNIVERSITY

(NGHIÊN CỨU TÍNH HIỆU QUẢ CỦA VIỆC SỬ DỤNG PHƯƠNG PHÁP NGƯỜI HỌC CHỮA BÀI CHO NGƯỜI HỌC NHẰM NÂNG CAO KỸ NĂNG VIẾT TIẾNG ANH CHO SINH VIÊN CÁC LỚP

TĂNG CƯỜNG TIẾNG ANH – ĐẠI HỌC LUẬT HÀ NỘI)

M.A Minor Thesis

Field: Methodology Code: 60 14 10

HANOI - 2009

LÃ NGUYỄN BÌNH MINH

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING PEER CORRECTION

ON IMPROVING WRITING SKILLS TO STUDENTS

IN INTENSIVE ENGLISH CLASSES

AT HANOI LAW UNIVERSITY

(NGHIÊN CỨU TÍNH HIỆU QUẢ CỦA VIỆC SỬ DỤNG PHƯƠNG PHÁP NGƯỜI HỌC CHỮA BÀI CHO NGƯỜI HỌC NHẰM NÂNG CAO KỸ NĂNG VIẾT TIẾNG ANH CHO SINH VIÊN CÁC LỚP TĂNG CƯỜNG TIẾNG ANH – ĐẠI HỌC LUẬT HÀ NỘI)

M.A Minor thesis

Field : Methodology

Code : 60 14 10

Supervisor: Lê Văn Canh, M.A

HANOI - 2009

TABLE OF CONTENT

Declaration

Acknowledgements

Abstract

List of Abbreviations

Lists of figures, tables and graphs

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Identification of the problem 2

1.2 The Scope of the Study 2

1.3 The Purpose of the Study 2

1.4 The Significance of the Study 2

1.5 The Organization of the Study 3

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 4

2.1 Introduction 4

2.2 Approaches to Teaching Writing: Product vs Process Approach 5

2.1.1 The product approach 5

2.1.2 The process approach 6

2.3 Peer correction 9

2.3.1 Definition: What is peer correction? 9

2.3.2 Why peer correction? 9

2.3.3 How to incorporate peer correction into the writing lesson? Error! Bookmark not

defined

2.4 Previous study on peer correction Error! Bookmark not defined 2.5 Summary of the chapter Error! Bookmark not defined CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY Error! Bookmark not defined

3.1 Research Questions Error! Bookmark not defined 3.2 Research Design Error! Bookmark not defined 3.3 Subjects Error! Bookmark not defined 3.4 Procedures Error! Bookmark not defined 3.4.1 Data collection instrument Error! Bookmark not defined 3.4.2 Procedure Error! Bookmark not defined CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION Error! Bookmark not defined 4.1 Analysis of Students’ general information Error! Bookmark not defined

4.2 Students’ attitudes towards peer correction method 26

4.2.1 Students’ views on the effectiveness of peer correction 26

4.2.2 Students’ feelings towards the constraints of peer correction 35

4.2.3 Students’ preference for peer correction 38

4.3 Discussion 40

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 42

5.1 Pedagogical Implications 42

5.2 Limitations and Recommendations for further study 43

5.2.1 Limitations 43

5.2.2 Recommendations for further studies 44

Bibliography

Appendices

List of Abbreviations

List of tables

Page

post-questionnaire

27

1 – 12)

33

pre- and post-questionnaire (Item 1 – 12)

Table 10: Comparison of students’ attitudes towards some constraints of peer

correction in the pre- and post-questionnaire (Items 13-17)

37-38

List of figures and graphs

Page

List of Appendices

Appendix 1: Pre-treatment Questionnaire

Appendix 2: Post-treatment Questionnaire

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Identification of the problem

Of the four language skills, writing is considered a complex skill that most learners find difficult to study well That is because in language teaching, it is a productive and taught skill As Penny Ur (1996:11) puts it “it is a skill that is readily picked up by exposure” and that

“requires some forms of instructions”

Having taught EFL writing for some years, I realize that students face quite a few problems in learning writing Worst of all, many learners make mistakes and errors when they write in the target language, regardless of how competent they are at grammar Students rarely proofread their writings before handing in to teacher as she notices quite a few careless mistakes in grammar as well as spelling which can be avoided if students revise their work It

is, therefore, essential for teachers to find out effective methods to overcome this problem

In many countries, particularly in Vietnam, teaching EFL writing is included in the curricular and the teaching of writing is just to pass exams The traditional method employed

to teach writing is product-oriented approach As far as this approach is concerned, teachers focus on what a final piece of writing will be like and the normal procedure is to assign a piece

of writing, collect it, then return it for further revision with their errors either corrected or marked for the students to do the correction (Raimes 1983)

In recent years, EFL writing teachers have borrowed techniques from first language acquisition pedagogy, in particular the process approach to composition, which has been around since the early 1970s The process approach identifies four stages in writing: pre-writing, composing/ drafting, revising and editing (Tribble) These stages are recursive, or nonlinear and they can interact with each other throughout the writing process This approach emphasizes revision, also feedback from others, so students may produce many drafts with much crossing out of sentences and moving around of paragraphs

Peer correction is a strategy which has been strongly advised with the process approach to teaching writing and is a promising teaching tool to overcome the above mentioned problem However, its effectiveness has not been sufficiently researched within my teaching context This gives the rational for the present study

1.2 The Scope of the Study

This study limits itself to the examination of the effectiveness of peer correction on students’ writing in the context of the English language program of a university The effectiveness was measured by means of a student questionnaire rather than with a pre-test and post-test instrument In other words, the study did not aim to find out the casual relationship between peer correction as an independent variable and student writing proficiency as a dependent variable Rather, the focus of the study was just on the students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of peer correction on their writing

1.3 The Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this study is of two - fold First, this study aims at investigating students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of peer-correction used as an instructional strategy to improve the quality of learners’ English writings Second, the writer of this thesis would like

to suggest some pedagogical implications for teachers in implementing this method teaching EFL writing and suggestions for further research

1.4 The Significance of the Study

As stated in the previous part, the purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness

of peer correction on improving learners’ writing skills in the writer’s teaching context Therefore, the results of this study will contribute a new implication to teaching EFL writing, particularly, to the area of error treatment If peer correction is found to be effective, it will provide teachers at HLU an alternative method to treat errors in students’ compositions at

great opportunity for language teachers to review and to reconsider effective ways of responses to various writings, and so pave the way for a better teaching of writing at different scales More importantly, as being an alternative method, it may require revision of the currently used materials/ textbooks in order to incorporate peer correction in the writing lesson

1.5 The Organization of the Study

This minor thesis consists of five chapters In this chapter, the challenge as well as approaches to EFL writing is briefly discussed; scope and rational of the study stated The purpose and organization of the study are also mentioned Chapter two is the review of literature which attempts to put the study in a proper context Chapter three describes method and procedure Chapter four reports and analyzes quantitative and qualitative findings The last chapter presents the pedagogical implications of the study and points out its limitations and suggestions for further research

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

As stated in Chapter 1, the purpose of this study is to explore the effects of a new approach to L2 writing pedagogy, peer correction To help contextualize this study, we will briefly examine a variety of relevant literature that addresses the challenges of EFL writing, product and process approaches to teaching writing, and previous studies on peer feedback

We will also examine the possible advantages of peer correction and how to incorporate peer correction into the writing lesson

2.1 Introduction

Challenges of EFL writing Writing is considered a complex skill in foreign language

learning in general and in EFL learning in particular EFL teachers and students face certain problems in teaching learning writing As many teachers of English have noted, acquiring the writing skill seems to be more laborous and demanding than acquiring the other three skills In fact, Nunan (1999) considers it an enormous challenge to produce “a coherent, fluent, extended piece of writing” in one’s second language This is magnified by the fact that the rhetorical conventions of English texts – the structures, style, and organization – often differ from the conventions in other languages It requires effort to organize and manage these differences (Leki, 1991)

Teaching EFL writing is rather complex because of many dimensions of writing that need attention For example, consider the accuracy of what is written, the originality of the ideas that are expressed, the organization of those ideas, the attention to the purpose of the writing, including the tone and various needs of the audience, and so on These and other important dimensions of writing may compete for the attention of the teacher and student

throughout the writing process

For many students, the reason to practice writing is to pass exams or to get a good grade in the class because the education systems in their countries emphasize writing for

taking tests This focus on writing to pass exams reduces writing to producing a product and receiving a grade from the teacher This is not likely to make students interested in writing, which become decontextualized and artificial, giving students no sense of purpose

These challenges of EFL writing require an innovation in the teaching method to motivate students to learn and improve their writing proficiency at the same time

2.2 Approaches to Teaching Writing: Product vs Process Approach

2.1.1 The product approach

The product approach is the traditional approach to teaching writing which focuses on the end result of the act of composition, that is, the final draft of a paragraph, letter, an essay, story and so on The writing teachers who subscribe to the product approach are more concerned to see what a final piece of writing will be like and measure it against criteria of

“vocabulary use, grammar use, and mechanical considerations such as spelling and punctuations”, as well as content and organization (Brown, 1994: 320) Students in the classes adopting the product approach typically are provided a model and encouraged to mimic it in order to produce a similar product As mentioned in the previous chapter, the normal procedure is to assign a piece of writing, collect it, then return it for further revision with their errors either corrected or marked for the students to do the correction (Raimes 1983) A model for such an approach is outlined below:

Stage 1:

Model texts are read, and then features of the genre are highlighted For example, if studying a formal letter, students' attention may be drawn to the importance of paragraphing and the language used to make formal requests If studying a story, the focus may be on the techniques used to make the story interesting, and students focus on where and how the writer employs these techniques

Stage 2:

This consists of controlled practice of the highlighted features, usually in isolation So

if students are studying a formal letter, they may be asked to practise the language used to make formal requests, practising the 'I would be grateful if you would…' structure

Stage 3:

Organisation of ideas This stage is very important Those who are in favour of this approach believe that the organisation of ideas is more important than the ideas themselves and as important as the control of language

2.1.2 The process approach

Process approach to the teaching of English writing is an idea that began to flourish 30 years ago as a result of extensive research on first language writing and has been advocated in contrast with the traditional product-oriented method of teaching writing, and has been generally accepted and applied by English teachers in their classroom teaching of English writing In process writing, the teacher moves away from being someone who sets students a writing topic and receives the finished product for correction without any intervention in the writing process itself Nunan (1991) clearly states that the process approach focuses on the steps involved in creating a piece of work and the process writing allows for the fact that no text can be perfect, but that a writer will get closer to perfection by producing, reflecting on, discussing and reworking successive drafts of a text He adds that while the product-oriented approach aims at developing the learner’s writing skill at sentence level, process approach aims at developing the learner’s writing skill at discourse level

As the name of the method suggests, process approach to teaching writing requires learners to undergo certain steps before producing a final product Houpt advocates a three-

step process to writing: 1) in-class conversations, 2) a written draft, and 3) student editing of

her/his own draft According to Oshima and Houge (1991), the writing process embraces

essentially four steps: pre-writing, planning (outlining), writing, and revising drafts

Meanwhile, Hedge (1990) supposes that the process consists of different stages which can be

illustrated as followed: “being motivated to write – getting idea together – planning and

outlining – making notes – making a first draft – revising – replanning, redrafting – editing and getting ready for publication” All the ideas above share one common thing, that is,

process approach undergoes certain steps which require learners to fulfill different tasks in order to construct a good piece of work Here in this thesis, the writer introduces the basic process scheme: prewriting  drafting  revising  editing  publishing The steps involved in this process are described in the table below with some suggested strategies to achieve each step:

STEP D ESCRIPTION S TRATEGIES

Prewriting

An activity that causes the writer to think about the subject The writer understands the purpose of the writing, discovers the topic, thinks

thoughts before he begins to write

Drawing Talking Brainstorming Graphic organizers Research Listing Field Trips

Drafting

The process of putting ideas down on paper The focus is on the content and fluency of the writing, and the writer

is not preoccupied with grammatical accuracy or neatness of the draft

Taking notes, Organizing thoughts into paragraphs, Writing a first draft

Revising

The process of refining the piece of writing The writer adds to a writing piece The writer reorganizes a piece

of writing The writer shares his story

Peer editing Conferencing Share Chair or Author’s

Chair

and gets input from peers or teacher

Editing

Mechanical, grammatical and spelling errors are fixed in the writing piece

Checklists Editing Checklists Proofreading

Publishing

The writing piece is prepared in final form, including illustrations The writer shares his writing with others

Reading aloud Reading to a group Displaying in the room

Table 1: 5 Steps of the Writing Process

The process approach to teaching writing brings about quite a few pedagogical benefits To begin with, it helps writers develop skills to write on their own as well as develop thinking skills and learning strategies Moreover, the approach emphasizes the individual learner’s development of the ability to assess and manage his own learning through the use of strategies and a feeling of self-efficacy

Product vs Process Approach

Product Approach Process Approach

• Model text to be imitated

• Model text as resource for comparison

• Peer feedback as valuable tool

interactive feedback

Table 2: Product vs Process Approach

2.3 Peer correction

2.3.1 Definition: What is peer correction?

Peer correction is a fundamental element of a process approach to writing in which students read each other’s writings and give comments or suggestions Peer correction can simply mean correction from fellow students, compared to correction by teachers Liu and Hansen define it in a more detailed way: “the use of learners as sources of information and interactants for each other in such a way that learners assume roles and responsibilities normally taken on by a formally trained teacher, tutor, or editor in commenting on and critique each other’s drafts in both written and oral formats in the process of writing” (2002:1) If students are working on the same assignment as another student, peer correction can mean exchanging drafts and comments on each others' drafts Here in this study, it refers to any changes made on students’ compositions after the process of students’ exchanging their compositions and proofreading them on their own Throughout the process of peer correction, students make corrections without teacher’s slightest interference

2.3.2 Why peer correction?

As mentioned in the previous section, teachers are usually the one who provides correction models for students to follow They are, therefore, the sole evaluator of learners’ writing Over the past years, peer correction has been applied to replace the traditional method

of error correction This new strategy has brought about quite a few advantages to both teachers and learners themselves

For teachers, peer correction is obviously advantageous because it frees them from the heavy workload of correcting students’ writing errors, which is a time-consuming, “tedious and unrewarding chore” (Hyland, 1990) They therefore can spend more time preparing lesson plans carefully, developing teaching materials to suit learners’ need, and doing scientific research to improve their teaching method and quality Students themselves are the one who benefit from this

Peer feedback is no doubt beneficial to students for various reasons First and foremost, peer correction is the source of motivation and encouragement for students to write

It is clear that writers need to write for audiences, preferably those that can give more or less immediate feedback The students themselves know that they write for more than just the teacher That their friends are going to read their composition encourages them to devote more time and effort to produce good work Furthermore, peer audiences are more sympathetic than the more distant and judgmental teacher audiences, that makes learners self-confident in their writing Peer correction also provides a change from the one-way interaction between teacher and students, so students may find interests in the new learning environment As well, peer correction is considered a task-based learning In task-based learning, students are motivated because there are specific tasks’ outcomes for them to fulfill; hence, knowing that they have achieved the goals, they can enjoy the satisfaction

Second, peer correction provides more chance for students’ social interaction and collaboration According to Larsen-Freeman (2000: 164), cooperative or collaborative learning essentially involves students learning from each other in pairs or in groups Students benefit from the givens of the socio-cultural approach to teaching and learning as it is through the promotion of interaction with peers and teachers that new meaning is constructed and conveyed Vygotsky’s (1978: 57) work has shown us that cooperative interaction allowed students to progress As Johnson (1994: 4) suggests, cooperative learning can be described as

a process with the following qualities:

Cooperation is working together to accomplish shared goals Within cooperative situations, individuals seek outcomes beneficial to themselves and all other group member Cooperative learning is the instructional use of small groups through which students work together to maximize their own and each other’s learning It may be contrasted with competitive learning in which students work against each other to achieve

an academic goal such as a grade of “A”

Additionally, through group work and pair work, learners can build up confidence and progress more quickly than those who can only learn directly from teachers (Haines, 1995) Peer interaction is actually one of the means facilitating knowledge construction both formally

and informally as from the constructivist view of learning, people actively construct knowledge for themselves and knowledge is based on categories derived from social interaction but not observation (Biggs and Moore, 1993:22) Therefore, peer interactivity can

be applied to promote learning

Last but not least, a lot of research findings prove that students can help and get help from peer writers and readers On the one hand, peer readers can provide useful feedback There is some research evidence supporting this For example, Rollinson (1998) found high levels of valid feedback among his college-level students: 80% of comments were considered valid, only 7% were potentially damaging Caulk (1994) had similar results: 89% of his immediate/ advanced FL students made comments he felt were useful, 60% made suggestions that he himself had not made when looking at the paper He also found little bad advice Caulk added that peer comments were more specific compared to teacher feedback On the other hand, peer writers can and do revise effectively on the basis of comments from peer readers Rollinson (1998) found higher levels of uptake of reader feedback and 65% of comments were accepted either completely or partially by readers Mendoca and Johnson’s (1994) study showed that 53% of revisions made were incorporations of peer comments It may be that becoming a critical reader of others’ writing may make students more critical readers and revisers of their own writing

All in all, the advantages of doing peer correction in L2 writing class lie in one side of students’ benefits which mean to practice and improve students’ writing skills This is the right purpose that all teachers have been working towards

2.3.3 How to incorporate peer correction into the writing lesson?

The advantages that peer correction brings about to teachers and learners are obvious For teachers, peer correction helps reduce their heavy grading workload, especially when they teach large classes For students, it can give constructive information about their writing Therefore, peer correction is considered a common tool to optimize learning opportunities from mistakes learners make in written compositions and to encourage the editing stages of

process writing In order to make peer correction work, there are two important things that instructors must do First, it is of great importance to make students aware of the benefits of peer correction, so that they will responsibly take part in the peer correction process Second, modeling or training learners on how to do peer correction It is advisable to use worksheets or forms to guide responders to give appropriate and useful responses

There are a variety of ways to implement this learning strategy Students can exchange their work within their pre-assigned pairs The exchange can happen in or out of class Students can exchange with a neighbor in class or papers can be collected by the instructor and then re-distributed An in-class correction will allow students immediate feedback and the instructor can expect the finished assignments at the next class meeting time Some complicated assignments would require an out-of-class peer correction in order that students have enough time to complete the task well

It should be noticed that peer correction is included in the revising step Therefore, it can only be implemented in the writing lesson once students have finished writing the first drafts Depending on different lessons and schedules, learners’ compositions may be completed in the class time or at home Hence, peer correction can be integrated in the writing lesson following this procedure:

 Procedure

first draft Ask learners to double-space or leave a clear margin to reserve space for correction

 Ask students to exchange their compositions with a partner, or teachers collect the work and re-distribute it to all the students in the class to correct it using the correction code Learners underline the mistakes their partner made in his/her writing and add the codes, either underneath or in the margin

not enough class time, teachers can allow them to do the revisions at home, then submit both the draft with the improved version in the next class, so that teachers can make a comparison of students’ before and after peer correction performance

During collaborative work, it is important for instructors to touch base with each pair

in order to give help or advice promptly

2.4 Previous study on peer correction

Lyster and Ranta (1997) point out that the research that has focused on the issue of error treatment in second language classrooms in the past 20 years has continued to pose the questions framed by Hendrickson in his 1978 review of feedback on errors in foreign language classrooms These questions are:

• Should learners' errors be corrected?

• When should learners' errors be corrected?

• Which errors should be corrected?

• How should errors be corrected?

• Who should do the correcting?

Research on this area has pointed out different correction methods to tackle learners’ writing errors, such as teacher feedback and peer feedback In fact, teachers alone cannot sort out the problem, so student-student collaboration comes into play

Peer correction is becoming more popular nowadays as it “operates on a more informal level than teacher response” (Rollison, 2005) Research findings show positive results of this strategy to tackle learners’ writing errors (Karegianes et al, 1973:203; Jacob, 1988; Keh, 1990; Mangelsdorf, 1992, Storch, 1998; De Guerrerro & Villamil, 2000)

In the research conducted by Karegianes et al (1973:203), a quasi-experimental design was employed to determine the effects of a highly-structured peer editing treatment on essay writing proficiency of low-achieving tenth grade students After the ten-week period, the peer editing group had significantly higher writing proficiency than those students whose essays were edited solely by teachers

Jacob (1988) did an experiment on the third-year Thai students majoring in English They were asked to rewrite their drafts after considering peer comments on grammar The study concluded that there was relatively small amount of miscorrection and peer feedback

can play a role in the development of writing ability by giving students additional perspectives from which to learn and apply writing skills

In Keh’s experiment, she distinguished “high order concerns” such as ideas, organization, content, etc., and “low order concerns” which she regarded as linguistic errors (surface, mechanism errors) She also suggested when such feedback should be given in the writing process The result of her questionnaire reveals that students felt peer feedback was useful in gaining a conscious awareness that they were writing for more than just the teacher Students also found peer feedback useful for obtaining immediate feedback and “detecting problems in others’ papers”

Mangelsdorf (1992) explores the question from the perspectives of student writers whether peer review is helpful to their learning, with the result that it not only helps improve the “high order concerns” (Keh, 1990), but also helps them correct and reduce mistakes

Storch (1998) conducts a classroom-based study to provide descriptive accounts of students’ engagement in a collaborative text reconstruction task which pushes learners not only to produce meaningful text but also pay attention to grammatical accuracy with the purpose of investigating which type of grammatical items is of the students’ most concerns, and finding how students use the reasoning to arrive at grammatical decision

De Guerrero & Villamil (2000) adopt the theory of ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) and a microgenetic approach to observe the mechanisms by which strategies of revising take shape and develop in the inter-psychological space created when two learners are working at their respective ZPDs, with a conclusion that there is a reciprocal process for both readers and writers It can be concluded that all the research above shows that peer feedback is

a beneficial learning process

In short, the strategies to deal with error correction have undergone changes over the years, from having teacher be the sole evaluator to involving students themselves in the editing process The findings above are all conclusive that peer correction is an effective method on improving students’ writing proficiency

2.5 Summary of the chapter

This chapter has presented a variety of relevant literature to help contextualize this study This review has addressed challenges of EFL writing, approaches to L2 writing, peer correction and its advantages and relevant previous studies on peer feedback and how to incorporate peer correction into the writing lesson

Though developing writing ability is as important as developing other skills of at university training, many EFL writers struggle to produce adequate writing This is particularly true because of the challenges of L2 writing that impose on students The process writing model seems valuable for helping writers develop their writing skill, however, this model alone seems inadequate for improving learners’ writing ability One reason for this may

be the excessive number of errors on students’ compositions that teachers and students attempt

to manage Another reason may be associated with the fact that corrected feedback is often delayed and occurs infrequently to benefit the students Peer correction seems to be a new approach which can help to sort out the problems of corrective feedback Hence, this new technique is worth considering and integrating into the writing lesson

This literature review provides theoretical foundation for the interpretation of data and suggestions in the next two chapters

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the research methodology used to answer this study’s research questions It presents the research questions, provides a description of the participants, a brief rationale for the research design In addition, it contains a description of the instrument and procedure used to gather the data

3.1 Research Questions

This study aims at evaluating the effectiveness of peer correction on improving writing skills of students in intensive English classes at HLU basing on assessing participants’ perceptions towards this technique Therefore, a research question was formulated:

What are learners’ perceptions of peer correction?

This research question attempts to uncover:

(a) Do learners consider peer correction helpful?

(b) What are the learners’ perceptions of the value of giving and receiving peer correction?

3.2 Research Design

An experiment research was chosen for this study in order to investigate the effectiveness of peer correction on improving learners’ writing skills It was conducted to point out the differences in students’ attitudes towards peer correction before and after the experiment This research conforms to a design in which a single group is studied, subsequent

to a treatment presumed to cause change Therefore, this study is diagramed as follow:

Pre-treatment questionnaire

O

Treatment

X COMPARE

Post-treatment questionnaire

O

O in this diagram represents dependent variable (students’ attitudes), while X is the treatment administered to the participants acting as the independent variable Students’ attitudes before and after the experiment are compared to see if the treatment causes any changes

3.3 Subjects

The participants of this study are teacher’s students in her current intensive English class comprising of 26 students at HLU, all of whom are female This is not the single-sex class at all, but accidentally there is no male student in this class This is not unpopular because in most intensive English classes or main-stream classes, there usually have the imbalance ratios between male and female students The participants in this study are all third year students enrolled in this class, majoring in English for Law All of them have finished the second year with the TOEFL results from 470 to 500 It, therefore, can be included that their English level is quite high and homogeneous

3.4 Procedures

3.4.1 Data collection instrument

This study employs a single data collection instrument, questionnaires, which are considered to be “the most appropriate research instrument for gathering information concerning the attitudes of the respondents” (Gillham, 2000) There are some reasons for this First, questionnaires are very effective for studies involving large sample sizes Second, they are easy to analyze as the data entry and tabulation for nearly all surveys can be easily done with many computer software packages Third, as the respondents can be remained anonymous, information from questionnaires can be kept confidential Students also feel freer

to respond to the questionnaires compared to face-to-face interview

To gather data for the study, two questionnaires were administered to students, one before and the other after the experiment period The pre-treatment questionnaire was given to the subjects right before the experiment with the intention to generate data, which would help

to investigate the students’ initial perceptions about peer correction It set the foundation of comparison for another post-treatment questionnaire Both questionnaires were written in simple English to make sure that learners clearly and correctly understand them Each questionnaire includes two main sections which are described in detail as follow:

(1) The pre-treatment questionnaire

It consists of two main sections The first section has 6 questions aimed at gathering general information about the participants, their gender, age, experience in learning English and peer correction, and their attitudes towards writing and error correction The second part includes 17 Likert-scale items to generate data about students’ perceptions of peer correction before the treatment

(2) The post-treatment questionnaire

In the post-treatment questionnaire, the same 17 Likert-scale items were used to find out if there were any changes in the subjects’ attitudes towards peer correction after the experimental period The second part consists of two questions, one close-ended, one open-ended to investigate whether students like this new technique and will use it in the future or not The open-ended question is hoped to elicit respondents’ reasons for using or not using peer correction besides the reasons given in the questionnaire

The researcher used one-group pre-treatment questionnaire and post-treatment questionnaire design, so only one class was treated as the experimental group The pre- and post-treatment questionnaires were administered to all 26 students All the copies were collected and found statistically valid

The questionnaires of this study are in the Appendix

3.4.2 Procedure

a Training the learners

Training the learners on this technique is vital so that students have an idea of what peer correction is and how to do it One class-time period training was spent to equip learners

with the technique of peer correction and facilitate the treatment period Common error correction codes were used for both teacher and students during the training as well as treatment period All the codes were explained clearly with given examples to make sure that they were all explicit to the students A sample paragraph was also used as a pilot study with the intention that students would know exactly what they would do when proofreading and correcting their partners’ compositions

During this study, the participants were trained how to correct their peers’ compositions using correction codes, which are demonstrated in the table below:

Codes Meanings Examples

(Delete this)

I want to go to Holand to for see tulips

s – v

agr

W.O Word order I have a house beautiful

Table 3: Codes for peer correction

Those codes were chosen in this study because all the types of errors listed in the above table addressed the main types of errors in foreign language writing, which are:

Morphological errors: all errors in verb tense or form; plural or possessive ending

incorrect, omitted, or unnecessary; subject-verb agreement errors; article or other determiner incorrect, omitted, or unnecessary

Semantic errors: errors in word choice, including preposition and pronoun errors;

omitted words or phrases, unnecessary words or phrases; spelling errors

Syntactic errors: errors in sentence/ clause boundaries (run-ons, fragments, comma

splices), word order, other ungrammatical sentence constructions

* The pilot study

Before the implementation of the designed research, all the participants took part in a pilot study They were provided a short paragraph with errors on it They were to proofread the paragraph and correct all the mistakes using the correction codes provided Below is the sample paragraph and sample correction:

The improved version of this paragraph will be like this:

at the age of six and continued until he was 18 years He then went to New York University

to learn Medicine He decided on Medicine because he liked biology when he was at school While he was to Prep University P he met his wife P Cindy Cindy was a beautiful

They went along for yeers Sp

before they decided getting v.f

married Jack began to work like w.w

a doctor as soon as he graduated to Prep

Medical School They had two children named Jackie and Peter, and have lived in Queens since the past two years Jack is very interested ^ painting and likes to paint portraits of his sun Sp

Peter

During this training period, a pre-treatment questionnaire was given to all the participants (N=26) in order to gather data about students’ initial attitudes towards peer correction before they actually do it

b Treatment

Bearing in mind students may not proofread their peer’s compositions at home, or they may do that but for the sake of finishing the task, the teacher asked her students to peer correct their writing in the class time The pairs were not deliberately chosen, but they were chosen at random by the teacher, as having described in the subjects, the students’ writing proficiency was not so different After the correction period, all the compositions were returned to their student writers and they were asked to write the second draft basing on the correction suggestions made by their peers The first drafts with students’ marking as well as the second draft would be handed in to the teacher in the next class time The investigation period lasted

10 weeks (two months and a half) All the topics for writing practice were taken from the current textbook: New First Certificate Masterclass They are of various types: Formal and informal letters, objects description, essays and so on

After the period of 10 weeks, a post-treatment questionnaire was administered to the same number of students to collect data about students’ attitudes towards peer correction after doing it several times

Jack Friedhamm was born in New York on October 25, 1965 He began school at the age

of six and continued until he was 18 years old He then went to New York University to learn Medicine He decided on Medicine because he liked biology when he was at school While he was at University, he met his wife Cindy Cindy was a beautiful woman with long black hair They went out for years before they decided to get married Jack began to work as a doctor as soon as he had graduated from Medical School They have had two children named Jackie and Peter, and have lived in Queens for the past two years Jack is very interested in painting and likes to paint portraits of his son Peter

c Data analysis

Students’ responses to the pre-treatment and post-treatment questionnaire were collected and processed To investigate if students’ attitudes towards peer correction changed after the experiment, students’ scores were calculated and distributed in Table of Distribution

of mean scores to compare the difference of scores distributions between pre- and treatment questionnaire SPSS 17.0 was used to process the data statistically to compare the means, standard deviations, and variances of students’ scores between the two questionnaires

post-A paired-samples t-test was also employed to find out the t-values and p values of the compared scores of pre- and post-questionnaire Should the t-values and p values be found

statistically significant, there would be changes in students’ attitudes towards peer correction