Peer correction in reducing errors in english composition by efl studens an action research study

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HANOI UNIVERSITY NGUYEN LE PHUONG PEER CORRECTION IN REDUCING ERRORS IN ENGLISH COMPOSITIONS BY EFL STUDENTS: AN ACTION RESEARCH STUDY SUBMITTED IN

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

HANOI UNIVERSITY

NGUYEN LE PHUONG

PEER CORRECTION IN REDUCING ERRORS IN ENGLISH COMPOSITIONS BY EFL STUDENTS:

AN ACTION RESEARCH STUDY

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ART IN TESOL

SUPERVISOR: NGUYEN DUC HOAT, Ph.D

ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

In the first place, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Dr Nguyen Duc Hoat,

my supervisor for his patient guidance, encouragement and constructive supervision throughout my research Dr Nguyen Duc Hoat’s enlightening suggestions and comments have shaped this thesis to a larger extent Without his help this study would have been impossible

Many thanks are also due to my teachers at Hanoi University, particularly to Mrs Nguyen Thai Ha, M.A, Deputy Head of the Department of Postgraduate Studies for her full support and recommendations on methodology for this thesis

I take this opportunity to express my thankfulness to my first - year students from Thanh Do College of Technology for their wholehearted cooperation in completing the questionnaires, interviews and participating in writing tasks to form a significant part of this study

I am indebted to all those who have kindly advised and helped me towards the completion of my study report

Last but not least, my sincere thanks go to my family and my friends whose support has been of great significance to the success of my thesis

ABSTRACT This study attempts to investigate the effectiveness of peer correction in reducing errors

in English compositions by first – year English major students in Thanh Do College of technology A class of first – year students (N=30; later N=29) took part in the study, in which they paired up themselves and checked their compositions Then teacher marked the compositions and did frequency count, comparing the total number of errors in the compositions before peer correction with the number of those that remained after peer correction Three sets of compositions were investigated T-test was employed three times to check whether peer correction led to a significant reduction in writing errors in the three sets of compositions respectively Our findings confirmed that peer correction led to fewer writing errors All the results of the three compositions were statistically significant Three pairs of subjects (high-high, high-low and low-low in term of English proficiency) were invited for deeper investigation of peer feedback with different competence levels

Interviews with these three pairs of subjects and questionnaires to all participants were also conducted It was found that peer correction was effective in all types of pairings (high-high, low-low and high-low), with the strongest effect in the last type, and 97% of the subjects considered peer correction useful and claimed that they would apply it in the future

The author has suggested some recommendations for teaching and learning writing skills, so that the teaching and learning writing at Thanh Do College of Technology can gain more effectiveness

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Tables:

Table 2.1.1: Comparison between the product – based approach and the process –

oriented approach 7

Table 2.1.2: Steps of writing in the product – based approach 8

Table 2.1.3: Steps of writing in the process – based approach 8

Table 3.2.1: Action research cycle 30

Table 3.2.2: Marking codes 32

Table 3.2.3: Example of using marking codes 33

Table 4.1: Final term test results 42

Table 4.2: Number of students per error types in the final term test 42

Table 4.3: Data on types of errors corrected 44

Table 4.4: Students’ attitudes towards teacher feedback 44

Table 4.5: Students’ attitudes towards self – monitoring feedback 46

Table 4.6: Paired Samples Statistics 50

Table 4.7: Paired Samples Correlations 50

Table 4.8: Paired Samples Test 50

Table 4.9: Mean of success rate of three tasks 51

Table 4.10: Mean of errors of students of different standards in three writing tasks 52

Table4.11: The success rate of peer correction (unit: %) 52

Table 4.12: The Mean of success rate of peer correction in different pairings 52

Table 4.13: Difference of errors suggested by the students in three writing tasks 53

Table 4.14: Examples of some grammatical errors suggested by the students 54

Table 4.15: Peaks of effectiveness of peer correction 56

Table 4.16: Students opinions about peer feedback when they received feedback 60

Table 4.17 Students’ opinions about peer feedback when they gave feedback 62

Figures

Figure 1: Feedback model 17 Figure 2: Differences of errors suggested by the students in the writing tasks 54 Figure 3: Time for peer correction 57

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

EFL English as a Foreign Language

ESL English as a Second Language

ELT English Language Teaching

L1 The Mother Tongue Language

L2 The Second / Target language

SPSS Statistical Package for Social Science CTD Thanh Do College of Technology

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEGEMENTS i

ABSTRACT ii

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES iii

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS v

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Background to the study 1

1.2 Aims of the study 3

1.4 Significance of the study 4

1.5 Outline of the study 4

CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW 5

2.1 Theoretical background to the teaching of writing 5

2.1.1 Definition of writing 5

2.1.2 Approaches to the teaching of writing 6

2.2 Theories on language learning and error treatment 9

2.2.1 Approaches’ views towards learners’ errors 10

2.2.2 Definition of errors 13

2.3 Ways to reduce writing errors and peer feedback 16

2.3.1 Definition of feedback 16

2.3.2 Feedback types 18

2.3.3 The role of feedback and peer feedback 23

Chapter III: METHODOLODY 28

3.1 Research questions 28

3.2 Research method 28

3.2.1 Action research (AR) 28

3.2.2 Action research procedures 30

3.3 Data collection instruments 35

3.3.1 Document analysis 35

3.3.2 Questionnaires 36

3.3.3 Interviews 38

3.3.4 Teaching log 39

CHAPTER IV: DATA ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION 42

4.1 Initial data 42

4.1.1 Results from students’ final term test 42

4.1.2 Results from questionnaire 1 43

4.1.3 Summary of the findings from the initial data 48

4.2 Data collected from the action plan implementation 49

4.2.1 The effectiveness of peer feedback in reducing students’ writing errors collected from three writing task paper analysis 49

4.2.2 Types of errors suggested by students in the three writing tasks 53

4.2.3 The effectiveness of peer feedback on students’ attitudes collected from the teaching log 56

4.2.4 Summary of the data collected from the action plan implementation 59

4.3 Post data 60

4.3.1 Students’ positive attitudes towards peer feedback 60

4.4 Summary 64

CHAPTER V: RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCLUSION 67

5.1 Recommendations 67

5.2 Limitations 69

5.4 Conclusion 69

REFERECES 71

APPENDIX 1: TEACHING LOG 75

APPENDIX 2: QUESTIONNAIRE 1 (ENGLISH VERSION) 76

APPENDIX 3: PHIẾU ĐIỀU TRA SỐ 1 78

APPENDIX 4: QUESTIONNAIRE 2 (ENGLISH VERSION) 80

APPENDIX 5: PHIẾU ĐIỀU TRA SỐ 2 82

APPENDIX 6: INTERVIEW 84

APPENDIX 7: CRITERIA FOR WRITING ASSESSMENT 85

APPENDIX 8: WRITING TOPICS 86

APPENDIX 9: WRITING DRAFTS OF SIX STUDENTS 88

IN THREE CHOSEN PAIRS 88

APPENDIX 10: NUMBER OF ERRORS BEFORE AND AFTER PEER CORRECTION FROM THE THREE TASKS 106

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION

This chapter introduces the background to the study, states the aims, the scope of the study and presents the outline of the rest of the thesis

1.1 Background to the study

Peer feedback is considered as a modern and effective way of giving feedback in writing along with a shift from the writing as a product to writing as a process in the pedagogy of ESL writing However, in spite of the fact that the use of peer feedback as

a ESL writing classroom has been generally supported in the literature as a potentially valuable way of correcting errors (Celce, 2001), English teachers as well as students still bear a lot of doubts about its value, procedures to carry it out and time control etc And these may prevent them from using peer feedback in right conditions and highly profitable interaction on many counts

There have been a number of studies done on the value of peer feedback and response

of both students and teachers toward it over the last decade According to Lewis (2002: 21), there are many reasons for introducing peer feedback to writing classes as follow:

 Proofreading other people’s work prepares you for proofreading your own

 You have a greater variety of suggestions

 Peer feedback is instant feedback

 It is boring if all your feedback comes from the teacher every day

They reported that peer feedback is effective and useful at various levels According to Rollinson (2005:25),

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

Moreover, some studies reveal that students feel relax and interested in discussing over

their partner’s writing (Sun 2006) In a study carried out at Hanoi university of Mining

and Geology (2007), Hang, Nguyen found out that there is a synergistic relationship between student homework completions within the organization of peer correction on students’ homework It not only improved students’ grammar competence but also their attitude toward learning English, toward homework, and teacher attitude toward students For this reason, researches confirmed that peer feedback was better than teacher feedback, where the students might end up making revisions without necessarily agreeing with or even understanding the teachers’ authoritative comments

Most of the studies focused on getting students and teachers’ responses towards peer feedback or that in comparison with other way of correcting errors In some other studies, there remains a controversial result that peer feedback that has been judged by the participants is less helpful than the teachers’ feedback (Ghosh, 1998)

In Viet Nam in general as well as in Thanh Do College of technology where the writer

of this paper is teaching, the product-oriented approach to writing, which requires single drafts and emphasizes on grammar corrections, has been adopted in most of writing course or program for quite a long time Thus, teacher error correction is highly considered as the traditional and most effective writing feedback As the ultimate purpose of marking is to draw the student’s attention to his errors so that he will not repeat them, teachers are strongly urged to mark students’ writings by many ways such

as locating writing mistakes with a set of standardized marking codes in school, showing what kind of the errors are or correcting all the errors for students Teachers are also encouraged to insist their students to read over their work carefully to avoid careless slips Despite these efforts, it is not uncommon to hear teachers complaining that some students still exhibit remarkable consistency in committing the same errors, and that students’ writing performance never justifies their considerable time and effort involved Students are also disheartened as their written efforts are always returned with many red markings Repeated frustration, of course, reduces their motivation to write

No wonder very often, English composition is a burden to many Vietnamese teachers and students And peer feedback, for them, is just a case in book and schedule only or carried out inattentively or without substantial care

From the fact mentioned above, it is of great urgency, scientific and realistic usage to

errors in English compositions, and to create a relaxing and enthusiastic learning environment for students in writing lessons or not This has inspired me to conduct the following study on peer feedback

1.2 Aims of the study

This research is designed to investigate peer feedback on 1st-year students’ writings at the Department of English, CTD The aims of the study are to:

1 evaluate the effectiveness of peer correction in reducing errors in written composition among the first year students, especially in CTD;

2 investigate students’ reactions towards peer correction in writing and

3 propose some recommendations and suggestions for using peer correction in reducing errors in composition by Vietnamese students

An Action Research, which concerns with finding solutions for problems in real and practical situations, was carried out in order to obtain above aims

1.3 Scope of the study

Feedback is such a broad topic that cannot be wholly discussed within the framework of this paper, therefore, only one specific and commonly-practiced aspect to feedback will

be central to the discussion that is peer feedback

Every EFL composition class needs feedback in order to revise their papers successfully; however, the ideal subject chosen for this research is not general English learners but the 1st-year major English students at the English Department, CTD In fact, the 1st-year students, when entering the university, are mostly beginners in academic writing Apart from teaching writing skill, teachers, therefore, are supposed to provide regular feedback on their writing as a motivation to their study as well as to inform students how much they have progressed in their writing Besides, these students are being taught writing skills under the process-based approach However, by the end of the first term, both teachers and students are not satisfied with result of students’ writing It seems that teachers’ feedback could help little in improving students’ writing This research therefore, tried to adapt another kind of feedback known as peer feedback

to first-year students’ writings to examine whether it is effective or not, and to propose recommendations to improve it for the benefit of the students’ revision This point would be made clear to the participants in the survey This would make the study more feasible and its results more applicable into the real classroom

1.4 Significance of the study

Although this research only looks at one type of feedback, peer feedback, the answers to the proposed questions hope to provide insights into both how students have actually provided feedback to their friends’ writing and what are the students’ attitudes towards the feedback they received This may probably lead to suggestions for improving peer feedback and helping the students utilize it more successfully in their revision

1.5 Outline of the study

This study consists of five chapters:

Chapter I introduces the background to the study, aims, scope as well as the significance and design of the study

Chapter II reviews the literature on the writing teaching, errors in general and peer feedback in particular

Chapter III describes the research methods used in the process of doing the thesis It consists of the justification of research methods and data collection, the data collection instruments, the procedure to collect data and the analysis of data The subject of the study is also mentioned in this chapter

Chapter IV presents the results and discussion of peer feedback, and of the student’s attitudes towards peer feedback

Chapter V offers some suggestions for further improvements in peer feedback on students writing and provides future directions for further research which are not touched upon in the limit of this thesis

CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter reviews important issues in the theories of teaching writing, errors in writing in general and feedback in particular Three main features will be taken under consideration, namely, theoretical background to the teaching writing, errors and theories on Language Acquisition and their perspectives on learners’ errors and theoretical background to feedback They are also the foundation on which the questionnaires for the teachers and students are set up

2.1 Theoretical background to the teaching of writing

Lannon (1989:9), however, sees writing as a far more complicated process than the

production of graphic symbols It is “a process of transforming the material you discover - by research inspiration, accident, trial and error, or whatever - into a message with a definite meaning In other words, “writing is a process of deliberate decision”

From another view of writing, Murray (1978:3) defines writing as "the most disciplined form of thinking It allows us to be precise, to stand back and examine what we have thought, to see what our words really mean, to see if they stand up to our own critical eye, make sense, will be understood by someone else” Thus, writer from his point of

view writes to learn, to explore beyond the known content and in fact, writing and rewriting is a process of discovery The writers often start writing without knowing exactly what they want to say, but discover it as they write their preliminary drafts

They then review and edit them till they are satisfied that the final writing adequately matches their message to the audience's expectations

Moreover, writing is also defined as a social process by Cadlin and Hall (1999:107)

They state, “Writing is therefore an engagement in a social process, where the production of text reflects methodologies, arguments and rhetorical strategies constructed to engage colleagues and persuade them of the claims that are made.”

Sharing the same idea with Cadlin and Hall, Pincas (1982:28) emphasizes writing as

“an integral part of everyday life” He indicates a vast range of writing activities that are used closely linked with social life of the writers: “from writing for oneself, where there are few conventions of style, through public and personal information, where there are some conventions, to largely impersonal written communication where there fairly strict formalities to be observed” In Pincas’ opinion, writing should be seen to

fulfill the sort of daily life communicative purposes, or functions Pincas also suggests a strong incentive for writing by the use of group activities and games within the writing lesson

That writing or composition has been defined in a variety of ways shows a lack of consensus as to what composition is, and reflects the complexity of the writing process Herein this study, the writer prefers Pincas’s opinion that writing should be as

“communicative or functional”, as possible Although it has got such a reputation of "a language skill which is difficult to acquire" (Tribble, 1996:3), it is of great importance

to find out appropriate approaches and techniques to obtain its optimal purposes of writing skill, not as a means to teach other aspects of language (Ur, 1996:162)

2.1.2 Approaches to the teaching of writing

There have been a number of conflicting views of the best ways of teaching writing Raimes (1992) identifies three principle ways of approaching the task; namely; the text-based approach, the genre based-approach and the process approach But the two most common and popularly known at the moment are product - based approach and the process –oriented approach (Nunan, 1991)

The product – based approach was considered one of the very common approaches to

production or with the nature of any learning that might be acquired” (Kroll,

2001:220) The purpose of this approach, as noted by Kroll, is primarily to reinforce language rules, not for purposes such as addressing a topic or communicating with an audience The writing tasks, therefore, are regularly tightly controlled in order to reduce the possibilities of errors It is also believed that after having grasped language rules and writing skills, students would be able to deal with writing that is more complicated, for instance, more complex sentences and sophisticated paragraphs

However, there were number of criticism and forces that converged in the 1970s to change the traditional way of teaching writing Thus, a process writing approach, which focuses on the process of writing instead of its products, the well-polished compositions, emerged and gradually had a profound influence on the teaching compositions This approach views that writing is a process which contains a number of distinct stages or activities the writers have to go through in order to produce a good piece of writing But this process is not a straight forward plan - outline - write process

that many believe it to be; rather it is “not as a fixed sequence but as a dynamic and unpredictable process” (Tribble, 1996:165) The process approach to teaching writing

emphasizes the writer as an independent producer of texts so that teachers allow their students' time and opportunity to develop students' abilities to plan, define a rhetorical problem, and propose and evaluate solutions Response is crucial in assisting learners to move through the stages of the writing process, and various means of providing feedback are used, including teacher-student conferences, peer response, audio taped feedback, and reformulation (Hyland, 2003) Obviously, process approach has been referred to as a dominant trend in teaching writing today in EFL settings today Nearly all writing courses provide for a process approach although they can be radically different in curriculum and types of writing skills It seems that student writers engage

in their writing tasks through a “cyclical” approach rather than through a “single-shot”

- Favour classroom activities in which - Favour collaborative group work and

the learners individually imitate copy

and transform models of correct

language, usually at the level of

sentences

conferencing to enhance motivation and positive attitude toward writing Model texts are only for comparison

- Organisation of ideas is more

important than ideas themselves

- Ideas are more important

- Emphasize grammar exercises and

correctness

- Emphasize quantity rather than quality, which means the learners are encouraged to get their ideas on paper without worrying too much about correctness

- Focus on the end result of the writing

process: the writing paper of learners

- Focus on the various forms of classroom activities which promote the development of language use

- Learners only produce one final draft - The final draft is the result of a long and

painful process of writing successive drafts

To be more specifically, it is of necessity to have a look at the stages of each approach

to have clearer view of them

The steps in a product – based writing class are similar like these:

Table 2.1.2: Steps of writing in the product – based approach

Stage 1: Model texts are read, and then features of the genre are highlighted

Stage 2: This includes an individual controlled practice of the highlighted

features

Stage 3: Organizing ideas

Stage 4: The end result of the writing process: learners use all the skills,

structures and vocabulary they have learned to produce the product Meanwhile, the number of stages constituting process-oriented approach writing remains controversial The process of writing, as stated by Harmer (2004:5), is not

linear, but rather “recursive” This means that writers plan, draft and edit but then often

re-write, re-draft and re-edit Zemarch and Rumisek (2003:3) view this process as a

classroom activity concluding the four following basic writing stages: Planning; drafting; reviewing and revising; and rewriting with six smaller steps in which steps

five and six can be repeated many times as follows:

Table 2.1.3: Steps of writing in the process – based approach

Pre-writing:

Step 1: Choose a The teacher gives students a specific assignment or some ideas of

ideas about that topic

Step 3: Organize Students decide which of the ideas they want to use and when

they want to use them Choose which ideas to talk about first, which to talk about next and which to talk last

Drafting

Step 4: Write Students write their own paragraph or essay from start to finish

using the notes about their ideas and organization

Reviewing and revising

if they have any unnecessary information They should ask classmates to change papers to each other to proofread Students may want to go on to step six now and revise the structure and content of their paper before proofreading

Together, steps five and six can be called editing

Proofread Students read the paper again This time, they check their spelling

and grammar and think about the words they have chosen to use

corrections

Students check that they have corrected the errors they discovered

in steps five and six and make any other changes they want to make Now the writing is finished

Yet, it should be pointed out that the choice of the most appropriate approach should always be made in relation to a particular group of learners and after a great deal of needs analysis, which means that in many cases the teacher might need to implement a teaching model that integrates principles of several approaches However, from the above summary, process writing seems to develop students’ autonomy in learning as well as train them to be masters in writing Thus, up till now process writing has been highly appreciated and adapted by many teachers

2.2 Theories on language learning and error treatment

Learning a foreign language is believed to be a complex process which involves a lot of variables There exists a belief that the deeper the understanding of this process is, the more significance it bears to foreign language learning and teaching Furthermore, this

belief is enhanced by the recent shift in focus from content to learners with learner – centred approach in which the learners are active participants and decisive of their own learning Therefore, researchers have carried out numbers of studies to investigate into the foreign language learning process in order to have a deeper insight into learners’ characteristics, attitudes and motivation Then, based on these insights into the foreign learning process, suitable and useful foreign language teaching methods would be built There have been numbers of theories with different views on language learning in general and errors in particular as the following mentioned ones

2.2.1 Approaches’ views towards learners’ errors

2.2.1 1 Behaviorism

Behaviourist ideas, which rejected the study of the mind as unscientific and sought to explain the learning in terms of imitation, practice, reinforcement and habit formation (Lightbown & Spada, 2002), dominated the field of language acquisition from the fifties

to sixties To the behaviorists, language is a verbal behavior and learning a language is not unlike leaning anything else Skinner (1957:10), a prominent behaviorist, stated,

“We have no reason to assume …that verbal behavior differs in any fundamental respect from non – verbal behavior, or that any new principles must be invoked to account for it” Their notion is that if a particular response is reinforced, it then becomes

habitual, or conditioned (Brown 1987) Behaviourist proponents consider language a fundamental part of total human behaviour that can be carried out without the conscious use of one’s cognitive processes (Wilkins 1972), and effective language behaviour is the production of correct responses to stimuli And for the language learning to take place there must be opportunities for imitation, repetition drill or practice

Audio-lingual approach, which advocated drills and practice, was thus in full swing in that period of time Students, under this approach, are to practise using basic sentence patterns and grammatical structures intensively With the stimulus-response method, should errors occur, the learners’ carelessness, inadequate teaching techniques or unsequenced instructional materials are to blame The making of errors is also said to largely arise from the mother tongue interference with the view that old habits inhibit the correct utterances to be established (Lightbown & Spada, 2002) The native and

predict the difficulties learners would encounter Then special treatments, teaching methods or drillings will be given so as to overcome the difficulties and avoid the

existence of errors This is known as “Contrastive Analysis” (Ellis, 1997:52) And as

Behaviourists believe that wrong forms are signs of failure, and are very difficult to eradicate, they contend that whenever a mistake is made, the teacher should correct it immediately and repeat the correct pattern for the learners to drill again and again until the target form of language acquired In a word, errors are like “sin” and must be avoided from Behaviourists’ point of view They are to be prevented or eliminated by frequent practice (Corder 1967)

2.2.1 2 Innatism

In reaction to what Chomsky saw as the inadequacy of the behaviorist theory of learning based on imitation and habit formation, he proposed a theory called innatism which asserts that language acquisition is innately determined (Le, 2004) According to

Chomsky, “children’s minds are not blank slates merely imitating language they hear

in the environment but they are born with a special ability to discover for themselves the underlying rules for a language system” (cited in Lightbown & Spada, 2002:16) He

argues that there is a central force guiding language acquisition Learners are able to create and understand an infinite number of sentences with a finite number of rules as they have internalised the underlying systems of rules Noam Chomsky called this

“Language Acquisition Device” Chomsky and his followers later refer to the child’s

innate endowment as Universal Grammar (UG) Although Chomsky had not made specific claims about the implications of his theory for second language learning, some linguistics working within this theory agued that UG offer best perspective from which

to understand second language acquisition The role of UG in second language acquisition is still under discussion with three possibilities as follows: UG operates in the same way for L2 (the target language) as it does for L1 (the mother tongue language); UG is no longer available to the L2 learners, or it is partly available in the acquisition of L2 (Richards, 1992)

In terms of UG’s perspective on error correction, researchers working within the UG framework have different ideas about how formal instruction or error correction will affect the learner’s knowledge of the second language (cited in Lightbown & Spada, 2002) While some UG linguistics argue that second language learners neither need nor

benefit from error correction and mental linguistic information, others suggest that some explicit information about what is not grammatical in the second language should be given to learners

2.2.1.3 Cognitivism

In contrast to Behaviourism is Cognitivism Language learning, according to Chomsky, cannot be scrutinized simply in terms of observable stimuli and responses (Brown 1987), but a process involving active mental processes During the process of learning, the learner is constantly forming and testing hypotheses In other words, learning

involves “mental processes in which the learner learns by thinking about and trying to make sense of what he or she hears sees and feels” (Le, 2004:37) Therefore, people are not “programmed animals” responding to environmental stimuli in the same way

Cognitive psychologists emphasize on the study of structures and components for processing information Cognitive psychology, as cited by Le (2004:39), is founded on three main assumptions:

 People develop at different rates

 Development is relatively orderly

 Development takes place gradually

In recent years, cognitive psychology has been related to mentalistic approaches to linguistics which links language structure to the nature of human cognitive processes (Richards, 1992)

According to cognitive psychologists, learners are responsible for their own learning Grammar must be taught but it can be taught deductively or inductively They claim that students learn by making mistakes and having them corrected Errors are viewed as inevitable and not an evil at all (Celce, 2001)

2.2.1.4 Interactionism

Interactionism is the reconciliation of the behaviorism and innatism From the interactionist view, language development is determined by the process in which the linguistics environment interacts with the child’s innate capacities It is believed that the social context, the relationship between the learner and the person with whom he

capacities as well as the cognitive development which allow people to associate the language with the physical world Vygotsky, on the other hand, attributes a lot of importance to the environment, the social interaction which helps to convert the internal representation into actual performance He claims that it is important for a language learner to interact with people called interlocutors who are more knowledgeable and more advanced than they are He gives out the notion of the Zone of proximal development (cited in Lightbown & Spada, 2002) According to him, through their interaction and collective activities, learners take control of the task, themselves, and their language, without which they would not be able to solve the linguistic problems posed by the task (Le, 2004) Drawing on Vygotsky’s work Tharn and Gallimore (cited

in Le, 2004:47) propose a new “teaching as assisted performance” in which learners’

participate in extended discussions, exploring ideas that make sense to them The teachers’ only duty is to manage to keep everyone engaged in extended topical discussion by providing language – promoting assistance of varying types to ease up the task Therefore, as stated by Long (1983) (cited in Lightbown & Spada, 2002), what learners need is not the simplification of the linguistic forms but rather an opportunity to interact with other speakers, in ways which lead them to adapt what they are saying until the learner shows signs of understanding By this it is meant that errors are best regarded as signs showing that the learners is investigating the system of the new language, taking succession of necessary learning steps and working his way toward the correct rules Apparently, the interactionists and the cognitive psychologists share the same view on errors And this trend seems to be preferred rather than others and is adapted into practice

2.2.2 Definition of errors

Along with different views of language learning approaches towards errors, there has been also no way of assuming that everybody agrees as to what constitutes an error Even the terms referring to errors in general are rather variously called such as “lapse”,

“goof” And “What is error?” is not an easily answerable question to researchers as

well as to teachers without taking into account some factors such as the knowledge of the learners, the context, the notion of acceptability, the standard of performance ect Error, according to Richards et al (1992:127), is the use of a linguistic item under the

regard of a fluent or native speaker of that language showing “faulty or incomplete

learning” Errors are sometimes classified into different types such as lexical error

(vocabulary), phonological error (pronunciation); syntactic error (grammar) ect Richard (1992) also distinguishes between a mistake and an error Errors are often described as gaps in a learner’s knowledge or resulted from incomplete knowledge They occur because the learner simply does not know what is correct A mistake, on the other hand,

is often considered the incorrect expression of something the learner already knows, but

is sporadically unable to put into practice

Norrish’s (1983) definition of errors is quite similar to that of Richard Errors, according

to Norrish, are types of anomalous language behaviour They can be categorized into three types, namely, the error, the mistake and the lapse An error is a systematic deviation which is made because the learner has not learnt the correct form After the learner is taught the language form, he may be able to use it correctly or may not sometimes The inconsistent deviation is termed mistake Another type of wrong usage which is neither an error nor a mistake is a lapse A lapse occurs due to lack of concentration, shortness of memory, fatigue, etc Many teachers, on the other hand, also name a similar kind of mistake caused by the learner's inattentiveness in class a careless slip

In second language learning, errors have been studied to discover the strategies of learning It is believed that errors were the result of interference in the learning of a second language from the habits of the first language (Corder, 1967 in Richard, 1974) Researchers have attempted to develop classifications for different types of errors on the basis of the different processes that were assumed to account for them (Richard, 1992) Errors, as stated by Corder (1967 in Richard, 1974), are categorized into two types, competence errors and performance errors Competence errors are systematic errors in the linguistic system of the learner, while performance errors are just an imperfect reflection of the learner’s linguistic competence The occurrence of performance errors does not imply that the learner does not know the language Rather, errors occur owing

to such factors as tiredness, drunkenness or external distraction

Errors can also be classified into another two types in relation to comprehensibility that are “global” and “local” errors given by Burt and Kiparsky (1972) (cited in Richard,

sentence, while the latter is just a part of it, a clause or a phrase It is suggested that errors that cause irritation but do not block comprehension should receive a lower priority of treatment than those errors impeding comprehension or misleading the listeners It is thus the “global” errors, rather than the “local” ones deserving most attention and correction (Norrish 1983) There, however, lies a risk that if a foreign language learner can be well understood by well meaning native speakers despite the errors made, the errors will become a permanent part of the learner’s competence and fossilization will be induced

Richard (1971) also gives out two other types of errors caused by the interference of the learners’ mother tongue They are called intralingual and developmental errors Both of these two types of errors reflect the learner’s competence at a particular stage and illustrate some of the general characteristics of language acquisition rather than reflecting the learner’s inability to separate two languages Intralingual errors reflect

“the general characteristics of rule learning, such as faulty generalization, incomplete application of rules, and failure to learn conditions under which rules apply”, whereas developmental errors illustrate “the leaner attempting to build up hypotheses about the English language from his limited experience of it in the classroom or textbook” (Richard 1971:174)

2.2.3 Summary

Even though there have been numerous definitions and types of errors that may make teachers who are supposed to be under pressure to treat learners’ errors embarrassed and the terms are often used with distinct meanings, throughout this paper the term “errors” was used to refer to both “errors” made when learners try to do something with the language which they do not know and “mistakes”, that is, inaccuracies that appear when students have learned something but have forgotten it or are careless in their composition And in this study, the classification of “global” and “local” errors offered

by Burt and Kiparsky (1972) (cited in Richard, 1992) was also adapted to check and count frequently the students’ errors in their writing tasks

In a nutshell, there has been a significant change in foreign learning theories on viewing errors over the past decades From the above, it appears that errors seem to have become more acceptable during the language learning process The writer of this study also

considers errors under the interactionist theory that even in writing which is thought to have less talk; students should be encouraged to interact with each other in order to learn from themselves Learners may create own rules in their learning process These rules may be different from their own native language rules or the target language rules The pedagogical focus has also shifted from preventing and correcting errors to accepting and learning from errors, from focusing solely on form to concentrating more

on meaning; and from having teacher be the sole evaluator to involving students themselves as well in the editing process These changes affect teachers’ ways of treatment of learners’ errors a lot However, it is of great importance for language teachers to make appropriate decisions on error treatment in order to improve learners’ writing In this case the following discussions on different error correction techniques may be useful

2.3 Ways to reduce writing errors and peer feedback

Along with the change in writing approach as mentioned in section 2.1, there has been also a shift emphasis from an endless stream of one-way composition writing that are assigned by teachers, written by learners, handed in for marking by teachers, handed back to learners and promptly forgotten by them as they start on the next assignment to the process of writing itself This emphasis on process, as stated by Charles (1990:286),

“has influence the teaching of writing in that revision has assumed a position of central importance” and formative feedback are important to help the student to improve his or

her writing Sharing the view with Charles, Keh (1990:294) sees feedback as an

essential part to the multiple – draft process and “pushes” the writer to the eventual end

- product” The importance of feedback in learners’ writing improvement has attracted a great deal of attention of researchers in the hope of finding out effective ways to give feedback This is also the main purpose of this study This section will deal with the definition of feedback, various types of feedback as well as role of feedback

2.3.1 Definition of feedback

Feedback has been defined by researchers in different ways

According to Ur (1996:242), “feedback is information that is given to the learner about

components: assessment and correction In terms of correction, from her point of view,

“some specific information is provided on aspects of the learner’s performance” This

will be done through explanation, provision of other alternatives or through elicitation

of these from the learners In principle, correction can be about what the learner did right, as well as wrong and why they did so That means feedback is not limited to commenting on errors but from a motivational point of view, it is important for students

to be told what they are doing well (Lewis, 2002)

Kroll (2001) also describes written feedback as one of the two components most central

to any writing course with the other being the assignments the students are given The goal of feedback, however, to his thought, is to teach skills that help students improve their writing proficiency to the point where they are cognizant of what is expected of them as writers and are able to produce it with minimal errors and maximum clarity

Kroll’s point of view, to some extents, is similar to that of Gabrielaos (2002) Gabrielaos states that feedback need not be limited to the overt correction of errors and the provision of comments and/or grades by the teacher Feedback can (and should) be a learning experience, which provides the link between consecutive writing lessons During feedback, learners are invited to identify the merits and shortcomings of their writing performance, understand the reasons for these shortcomings and discuss possible improvements The procedures of writing and giving feedback involved and their sequence are presented in the following diagram

Figure 1: Feedback model

In this diagram, the “Feedback” stage is linked directly to all other stages In other words, each stage takes into account the needs of the specific group of learners Another merit of the cycle is that there is no fixed starting point; that is, a lesson can start at any stage For example, a teacher starting lessons with a new group of learners can set a writing task and begin the first cycle with feedback on the writing product

In the last decade, the term “corrective feedback” is not strange to researchers as well as teachers This term is used as “an umbrella term to cover implicit and explicit negative feedback occurring in both natural and instructional settings” (Sheen, 2004: 264)

Researchers who follow this kind of feedback believe that “negative evidence” is necessary or even beneficial for language acquisition

2.3.2 Feedback types

In fact, the possible types of feedback are so varied and numerous However, the most

commonly employed types are: (a) teacher correction, (b) self-correction with the teacher's help and (c) peer-correction (Walz, 1982:50) Over the last decade, many

studies have been carried out to investigate the effects of these types of feedback on L2 writing class, of which peer-correction will be examined in the next section

2.3.2.1 Teacher feedback

In traditional teaching writing, the word “marking” brings to mind the pictures of teachers carrying bundles of students’ writing away to mark Many studies found that teacher feedback received a great deal of students’ attention, appreciation and seems to

be effective in helping students revise their drafts (Nguyen, 2005; Li & Lin, 2007) However, many other studies have discovered some troubles with this traditional method of correcting errors

One of the problems is that the outright correction of surface errors has been found to be inconsistent, unclear and overemphasizes the negative Cohen, & Cavalcanti (1993:84) reports that:

Part of the problem lies in the mismatch between student and teacher views

of feedback, namely, that it may frequently be unclear, inaccurate or

Therefore, students do not understand why the errors were indicated and simply guess the corrections as they rewrite Besides, it causes students to focus more on surface errors that on the clarity of their ideas, and it only stresses the negative (Williams, 2003) Teachers tend to point out only problems of students’ writing more than tell them what they are doing right Then students are, step by step, afraid of receiving negative comments from teachers (Nguyen, 2005)

Another problem is the mismatch between what the teachers often give and what the students would like to get For example, teachers of often correct students’ choice of words while students only wishes to know weather their writing is grammatically correct or not, and or they would not consider to make another choice of words indicated by teachers The teacher’s feedback, therefore, can not utilize its purpose to help students improve the quality of their writing (Nguyen, 2005)

Moreover, when teachers’ feedback is given, students spend little time looking at the corrections (Lewis, 2002) They just simply copy the corrections into their subsequent drafts or final copies The vast majority of students does not record nor study the mistakes noted in the feedback This kind of response to teachers’ feedback does not actually teach students how to recognize or correct errors on their own and it makes students become passive learners (Williams, 2003) Williams also reports that receiving teacher feedback without the engagement of revision tasks does not improve accuracy in such a classroom

In short, there exist many problems revealed by researchers in teachers’ feedback Thus,

teachers’ feedback appears to have “little impact on the long – term improvement in students’ writing quality” (Leki, 1990: 68) While students become passive when

receiving teachers’ feedback, they turn to be more active with their own learning when self-monitoring is adapted in writing classes, which will be discussed in the following section

2.3.2 2 Self – monitoring feedback

In terms of the purposes of error correction, it should be kept in mind that correction should firstly mean helping students to become more accurate, not insisting on completely standard English and secondly involving students in judgments about

correctness helps them become more accurate in their own use of language (Egde, 1989) Thus, students should be given as much chance as possible to self – correct Self – monitoring or self – annotation is defined by Charles (1990:298) as a type of feedback in which:

Writers annotate their texts with any doubts they have during the writing

process, so that a later date the teacher can give feedback not only on the

finished draft, but also on the queries which emerged during the writing

processes

By being given chance to correct their own drafts, students, as admitted by Makino

(1993:340) can “activate their linguistic competence” in correcting their own errors and

improve their linguistic creativity Furthermore, self – monitoring increases students’ autonomy in the learning of writing (Creswell, 2000)

Although self – monitoring is believed to be a highly effective way for error correction, there are still some problems of this technique

Considering conditions to form self – monitoring, it is clear that a student need at least four things as follows: (1) the desire or need to eradicate the errors; (2) the knowledge

of what the correct form is; (3) the realization of the error; and (4) the opportunity to make correction and repractise the correct form If there is a lack of one of the four conditions above, self –monitoring may not actually happen This is explained clearly

by Bates et al (1993:99) as below:

Some students may have developed no self – monitor and might not be able to

recognize errors they are making while composing or revising Others may

decide to focus entirely on content (choosing not to use the sentence – level

monitor) when writing under time pressure, assuming that they will have time

to clean up sentence errors in the proofreading stage Such under –

monitoring, however, is not realistic for ESL students

The situation is the same for students who focus primarily on form, not content

With regard to students’ perspective, students seem to not enthusiastic with the work of reading their own writing draft again and again unless the writing must be handed in for marking This is because the students themselves not believe in their knowledge Besides, they could find just few errors when proofread their own writing

Thus, although studies show that self – monitoring may helpful, especially when it

increase students’ autonomy – one of the most important thing for learning process, its

problems seem to overweigh the benefits it brings about

2.3.2 3 Peer feedback

There are many limitations in teacher feedback as well as in self – monitoring as above

discussed that reduce their effectiveness on students’ writing improvement Is there a

type of feedback that fills these limitations of these two techniques and help improving

students’ writing? This question inspires many researchers to have further studies on

peer feedback in hope that it can help to solve the problems concerned

The idea of peer responses was developed from the L1 process class and has become an

important alternative to teacher-based forms of response in ESL contexts Peer

feedback, actually, belongs to cooperative learning which is also known by other names

as “collaborative”, “peer interactive” and “peer - tutoring” Thus, before discussing

about peer feedback, it may be necessary to have a look at cooperative learning

Cooperative learning, as simply defined by Jacobs (1989:2), is “ways to maximize

student learning through student – student rather than teacher – student interaction” In

comparison with the traditional approach according to which teacher talk is dominant,

cooperative learning has progressed well with emphasis on students’ involvement and

student interaction (Slavin, cited in Jacobs et al, 1989) In Brown’s research (1982), he

pointed out seven advantages of this approach in language learning and teaching that

cooperative learning: (1) increases interaction; (2) encourages group responsibility for

work; (3) encourages sharing experiences and information; (4) gives mother tongue

support in multilingual classes; (5) allows the students to work in ability group; (6)

foster group interest; (7) allows for different learning styles

Like cooperative learning, peer feedback is referred to by many names such as peer

response, peer editing, peer reviewing and peer evaluation (Keh, 1990; Richard et al,

1992) Peer feedback, as defined by Richard et al (1992:268), is

an activity in the revising stage of writing in which students receive feedback

about their writing from other students – their peers Typically students work

in pairs or small groups, read each other’s compositions and ask questions or

give comments or suggestions

In Richard’s opinion, peer feedback is often used in the teaching of composition, particularly to the process approach Unlike teacher feedback and self – monitoring, ways to form peer feedback are various Lewis (2002) suggested some models that teachers have tried for giving peer feedback as follows:

1) Exchange papers

After changing papers, students report to each other on one good feature of writing and one aspect that could be improved The focus can be narrowed down to a particular feature, such as the use of cohesion or vocabulary

2) Role-play

Students work in groups of three, taking one role each The students’ has written a paragraph and the ‘judge’ comments on the quality of the teacher’s feedback Each has

a turn at each role so that all three paragraphs receive feedback

3) Pair work in a moving circle

This idea works in a class where chairs can be moved around easily Half the class stay seated in every a U – shape while the other half take their chairs and move around inside the U shape Every five minutes they have a different partner Students give each other oral feedback Having the feedback orally gives the opportunity for questions and comments and having a number of viewpoints increases the possibilities for improving the writing

4) Pass papers round

Students pass their papers round three places and write comments on the paper then in front of them Then the papers are passed another three places for different students to write comments

5) Read/listen/respond

One person read their writing aloud and other student comment on it

6) Compare writing

Students work in pairs to compare their two paragraphs

7) Summaries and photocopy advice

First students exchange pages and evaluate someone else’s work Then on a slip of paper they write one commendation and one suggestion These slips are then collated and photocopy so that each students has record of all the comments

8) Multiple feedbacks

Students’ draft writing is circulated so that each person reads several examples Instead

of writing on the sheet itself, they note suggestions and/ or commendations At the end, each student reports orally to the whole class on one good feature and one that could be improved, without naming the writer

9) Sentences on board

Each student expands a given topic sentence in one of several ways and then moves to the board to write it up Finally everyone gives feedback on the sentences This would well with a wide board and several pens or bits of chalk

In order to find whether peer feedback is helpful or not, the role of feedback, especially the role of peer feedback need having a deep look into So, in the following sections, these would be discussed about

2.3.3 The role of feedback and peer feedback

2.3.3.1 The role of feedback

In spite of many different types of feedback, feedback, eventually, serves some common purposes dealing with motivation and information provision summarized by Lewis (2002) as follows

First of all, feedback provides information for both teacher and students Through feedback, teachers describe their learners’ language that gives teachers information about individual and collective class process and indirectly evaluates their own

teaching Beside that, feedback is an ongoing assessment giving information about individual progress with comments about strengths and weakness Further more, the comment also give direct information about language by stating rule or by giving example

Secondly, feedback provides students with advice about learning Teachers not only provide students with descriptions of their language use but also comments on the students learning process, what they should do in the next time to learn better

Thirdly, feedback provides students with meaningful and individual language input Teachers’ words illustrate how language is used That is why it is important to extend students’ language by writing comments in language at a level slightly higher than the students’ own current language use

Fourthly, feedback is a form of motivation It can encourage students to learn and to use language to the best of their ability by taking into account whatever the teacher knows about the learners’ attitudes Feedback should be given in different ways to hardworking

as well as to underworking students

Lastly, feedback can lead students towards autonomy This is one long-term purpose of feedback that makes students find their own errors

In short, feedback is a powerful incentive for revision process, not only for experienced but also inexperienced learners Thus, it deserves to spend time and power discovering more effective ways of giving feedback (feedback techniques or feedback types) that work well with students in different situations Section 2.4.3 will report the results of related studies about feedback types

2.3.3.2 The role of peer feedback

Like other feedback techniques, peer response also has pros and cons that have been controversially debated

On positive points of view, the efficacy of having students correct their peer’s work is accepted by many L2 teaching theorists (Norrish, 1983) Not only do students get

exercises or tasks, this method is suitable for any L2 teaching situation and level (Rourke, 1998)

In perception of students, peer response is revealed to provide a means of improving writers’ drafts, developing readers' understandings of good writing, motivating students

in learning, bringing about comfortable learning environment to students and assisting students in gaining confidence in their writing

First of all, students’ writing would be improved with peer teaching That is in the first place because students could get useful feedback form their peer about their writing (Rollinson, 2005) In addition, when students work together on correcting each other’s work, the discussion helps each one to learn from his or her own errors Two heads are better than one And the more students are involved in correction, the more they have to think about the language used in the classroom (Edge, 1989) Moreover, as recommended by Rourke (1998), the students become more familiar with the language when they are asked to comment on the correctness of a piece Furthermore, writing then is considered to be continuous or a sequence of learning by the students The peers

as well as teachers help to move away from the pattern of lesson survival and into the development of techniques allowing her/him to vary the ways in which a range of new structures and skills are repeated and reinforced (Rourke, 1998)

Secondly, peer response increases students’ motivation for writing Student motivation

is heightened because the students know that their work will be subject to general scrutiny, and letter, at the correcting stage, they are fired by the competitive spirit to correct a classmate’s work In this way competitiveness is used in a positive way The teaching material is actually the students’ own production (Rourke, 1998) Besides, the novelty of learning from the peer group increases motivation This kind of activity helps

them “to integrate the foreign language with their own personality and thus to feel more emotionally secure with it” (Littlewood, 1981:94) Learners were found to be more

interactive and exhibited greater variety in their language use in peer-group

Thirdly, a comfortable learning environment and a feel of confidence for writing is what peer feedback would bring to students This, according to Rollinson (2005:29), may be

a more achievable pedagogical objective than getting students to do it right for the first time He concludes that

“by giving the students practice in becoming more critical readers, we are at

the same time helping them towards becoming more self – reliant writers, who

are both self – critical and who have the skills to self – edit and revise their

writing”

When the students become used to the idea that they can learn from each other, peer corrections, helps students cooperate and make them less dependent on teachers Moreover, in case of large class size, working with their peer helps to eliminate sense of isolation of students When classes are very large in number, adequate communication contact between every student and the teacher is limited Some students can too easily fall to a sense of isolation form the lesson and also perhaps from classmates Students, then, tend to be more relaxing than working individually

Last but not least, peer feedback is also “a multi- skilled procedure” (Rourke, 1998:43)

The students write, then they are obliged to read, analyze, and discuss, and perhaps, then write again This involves practice in reading and speaking even in this context of teaching writing

With regard to teacher’ benefit, peer correction alleviates some of the common problems faced by language teachers (Rourke, 1998) Firstly, when teacher encourages learners to correct each other’s mistakes, the teacher gets a lot of important information about the students’ ability (Edge, 2003) Added to that, peer correction would reduce time – comsumingly marking work of teachers Teachers no longer have to either go through a large number of similar scripts marking corrections to errors that are repeated

in many of the scripts, or find means of “making writing task less tedious” for her/ him while still providing “the required corrective instruction” for the students (Rourke, 1998:44)

Peer correction, however, has certain or also cause some problems The first problem is the students’ focus on feedback They have a tendency to focus on surface forms rather than ideas and organization, and their comments may be vague and unhelpful (Leki, 1990) In his research, Keh (1990) found that students only read for mechanical errors, not the development of ideas, organization and the overall focus of what they were writing Besides, students’ cultures and characteristics also account for the ineffectiveness of peer feedback If students are not used to correcting each other, they

to give useful advice Moreover, students are not willing to share their unsuccessful or unfinished writing with their peers The third problem is students’ attitudes towards peer feedback Rollinson (2005) explored that many students might need a significant amount of initial opinion, their peer might not qualified enough to assess their writing and their feedback might not be sufficient and reliable

2.3.3 Summary

To sum up, in comparison with other ways of correction, peer correction can be a potentially effective way of giving feedback for writing skill Although there still exist some problems in this kind of feedback, it seems that its benefits overweigh its short comes It also seems to fulfill the communication require for writing as well as chances for interaction of Vygosky Thus, it raises the interest in the study out the effect of peer feedback in improving students’ writing in Thanh Do College of technology

CHAPTER III: METHODOLOGY This chapter is designed to give a brief description of research methods used during the process of doing the study The research questions are firstly stated and then followed

by the justification of action research, data collection instruments and the procedures to collect data Detailed information about the participants is finally supplied here

3.1 Research questions

The study undertaken endeavoured to address the research questions below:

1) How effective is peer feedback in reducing students’ errors in writing composition?

2) How does peer feedback affect students’ motivation in learning writing?

3.2 Research method

There are some research methods offered to be used in the field of applied linguistics such as experimental method, case study etc However, because of its outstanding advantages discussed below, Action Research was selected as the research method for this study An Action Research (AR) was carried out in order to find answers to the above two research questions In the following sections, the rationale for choosing AR

as a research method for the study and the AR procedure are presented

3.2.1 Action research (AR)

This section states the definitions of AR and the reasons why action research was chosen as the major method for this study

Action Research has been defined in a number of different ways According to Wallace (1998), ‘An action research’ is done by systematically collecting data on teachers’ every day practice and analyzing them in order to come to some decision about what teacher future practice should be Sharing the same point of view, Cohen and Marion (1994) agree that the aim of AR is to identify “problematic” (in sense of areas that can

be problematized) situations or issues that participants consider worth investigating, and

to undertake practical investigations in order to bring about informed changes in

practice And in the research process, the participants are active members of the context

in which the research takes place Kimmis and McTaggart (1988) also see action research as an approach to improving social practice by changing it and learning from

of change They gives out clearly characteristics of AR that AR is a “collaborative”,

“self- critical”, “systematic” and “political” process and it not only involves people in

theorising about their practices, requiring that people put their practices, ideas and

assumptions about institutions to the test but also involves participants in “objectifying” their own experience According to Kimmis and McTaggart (1988), the ultimate aim of

AR is to bring about better change of current state of affaires within the educational context in which the research is being carried out Nunan (1992:18), however, standing from different points of view, considers AR simply as follow:

“A descriptive case study of a particular classroom, group of learners or even

a single learner counts as action research if it is initiated by a question, is

supported by data and interpretation and is carried out by and practitioner

investigating aspects of his or her own context and situation That said I know

a few of such study which have not resulted in change of some sort.”

In this study, the writer shares the same point of view with Nunan’s (1992) that action research must not necessarily be concerned with any change Yet, despite many definitions, the main feature of AR is that it concerns the practice of people in an immediate problematic situation It occurs when teachers reflect critically about the teaching situation, identify learning or teaching problems, and establish methods to solve them

Because the key features mentioned above met the need of the researcher, AR was selected as the main method for this study First of all, this approach is very practical and problem – focused with the optical goal of better outcomes AR, as stated by Nunan

(1992:18) “is initiated by the practitioner and is derived from a real problem in the classroom which needs to be confronted” That means a teacher can critically analyse

the problem in her/his own classroom and put forwards some changes that can make improvement in students’ study Besides, it is a helpful and methodological tool for teachers who wish to adapt new teaching or learning approach to their classes that might help to make changes if suitable

In short, as above mentioned of the definition as well as features of AR, it could be the effective research method for this study

3.2.2 Action research procedures

There have been many models of action research given by the researchers who have studied or used in their studies A typical action research, however, consists of the cycle

of activities or steps In Kemmis and Mc Taggart’s (1988) classic model, it possesses four steps: Planning – Action – Observation – Reflection

Nunan (1992: 190) gave out a clearer and smaller-stepped model that concludes seven steps as follows

Table 3.2.1: Action research cycle

Step 1 Problem identification

Step 2 Preliminary investigation

Step 3 Hypothesis Step 4 Intervention

12 weeks of teaching and learning in term 1, the students seems to pay no attention to the teacher’s feedback or they could not know what to do after receiving the feedback but glancing at it to know the marks and then put it into their bags In fact, though most

of students tend to appreciate teacher’s feedback, they do not seem to be completely satisfied with the teacher’s correction and comments They required a great deal of

writing and it takes her a lot of time correcting and explaining about students’ writing Either, if being asked to proofread their own drafts, they tend to be lazy to check over their writing again or hand in the same writing with few changes or even no change at all Considering what was discussed in the theoretical back ground, it was doubted that the causes for little or no progress in students’ writing might be the uselessness of traditional ways in giving feedback as teacher and self-monitoring feedback Therefore,

it is necessary to take action to solve the problem

The researcher further investigated students’ opinions towards their problems in error correction, aiming at searching for the reasons why the students seem to make the same errors in spite of teachers’ feedback or their own proofreading using questionnaire 1 (Appendix 2 & 3) before lessons to investigate the students’ opinion towards teacher feedback and self-monitoring feedback as well as their opinion about what should be done

to improve their writing Detailed description of Questionnaire 1 is presented in section 3.3.2 of this Chapter

3.2.2.3 Hypothesis

After reviewing the initial data from Questionnaire 1 and students’ final term test

writing paper analysis, the researcher formed the hypothesis that the causes for the

students’ lack of improvement in their writing might lie in the techniques used for providing feedback Therefore, an action plan was developed to try a new one called peer feedback to evaluate how it could help in this situation