VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES PHÙNG THỊ BÍCH NGUYỆN THE EFFECTS OF TEACHER DIRECT AND INDIRECT CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK ON GRAMMATICAL ERRORS IN THE WRITINGS OF 10TH GRADE STUDENTS AT KIM ANH HIGH SCHOOL Ảnh hưởng hình thức phản hồi trực tiếp gián tiếp giáo viên việc sửa lỗi ngữ pháp viết học sinh lớp 10 trường THPT Kim Anh MASTER’S THESIS Major: English Teaching Methodology Major code: 60140111 Program: Supervisor: Hoàng Thị Xuân Hoa, PhD HANOI - 2015 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Firstly, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Ms Hoang Thi Xuan Hoa, PhD for her helpful guidance, critical comments and enthusiastic support I would not have been able to complete this thesis without her great encouragement I am indebted to my colleagues for their valuable assistance for the pursuit and fulfillment of this course My heartfelt thanks go to the students who willingly spent their time participating in the study Last but not least, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my beloved family members and close friends, who always stand by me no matter what happens I ABSTRACT This study investigated the effects of teacher written direct and indirect corrective feedback on 10th grade students’ three types of grammatical errors, namely verb tenses and forms, attitudinal adjectives and articles, in their writings Forty five students were randomly assigned into three groups and received direct corrective feedback, indirect corrective feedback and no feedback respectively Students in each group produced three narrative paragraphs (a pretest, a revision, a post-test) The results of data analysis showed that both direct and indirect corrective feedback helped participants reduce errors related to verbs and attitudinal adjectives from the pretest to the post-test However, only direct feedback contributed to a significant reduction of article errors from the pretest to the post-test Between group comparisons of the posttest results revealed that direct corrective feedback appears to be slightly more effective than indirect corrective feedback in helping participants reduce errors related to verbs and attitudinal adjectives In addition, the effect brought about by direct and indirect feedback on reducing article errors compared to the control group was not statistically significant The findings are discussed in the context of the related literature and areas of future research are suggested CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Statement of the problem and rationale of the study II Obviously, writing plays an important role in communication because apart from speaking writing enables people to express their feelings and thoughts They use it to define themselves, clarify their knowledge and their ideas, to understand the problems that may face them as well as to find solutions for such problems Being so, writing is a means for self-actualization What people learn about themselves and develop within themselves through writing can help them to realize their individual potential and to achieve potential goals (Hughey, et al, 1983) In the field of second and foreign language learning and teaching, writing has been seen as essential integral part of any language syllabus as learning to write effectively seems to be of prime importance Writing also enhances language acquisition because learners experiment with words, sentences, and large chunks of writing to communicate their ideas effectively and to reinforce grammar and vocabulary they are learning in class (Bello, 1997) It helps to consolidate learning to render it available for use in other areas such as listening, speaking and reading (Mohamed, 2000) In spite of the importance of writing, it is one of the most difficult language skills to master According to Richards and Renandya (2002), the difficulty lies not only in generating and organizing ideas, but also in translating these ideas into readable text They argue that the skills involved in writing are highly complex, and learners have to pay attention to higher level skills of planning and organizing as well as lower level skills of spelling, punctuation, word choice, and so on The difficulty becomes even more pronounced if student writers are at a low level of language proficiency In Vietnam, of four skills that students learn in the subject of English, much attention has been paid to developing writing skill In 2005, the Ministry of Education and Training decided to reform the structure of the English test in Vietnam National High School Graduation Examination 2015 with more emphasis on the writing skill Accordingly, apart from multiple choice grammar questions, students were asked to write a short paragraph However, the result of the exam indicates that students’ writing performance was generally poor as a large number of students could hardly the task Regarding students’ attitude towards learning writing, according to Le (2008) III (as cited in Pham (2009), only 6.9% of students wanted to learn writing When asked about the reality of English writing at a specialized high school in the Mekong Delta, teachers reported that most of the students had problems with their writing such as (1) students have few opportunities to respond to teacher feedback thoughtfully and critically, (2) their written texts contain a lot of grammatical inaccuracies and (3) they have negative attitudes toward writing in English It can be seen that the teaching and learning writing English in Vietnam seems to face considerable difficulties Given the importance of writing in communication and in the field of EFL learning and teaching, the difficulties facing learners in developing their writing ability over time in EFL contexts, a lot of research has been conducted in order to explore the effects of various techniques on helping ELF learners become better writers, especially the impact teacher feedback on students’ writings However, the controversy over the effectiveness of corrective feedback remains unresolved According to the most extreme views, such as Truscott (2007), corrective feedback is seen as not only ineffective but also potentially harmful In contrast, a number of L2 researchers and practitioners (e.g Bitchener and Knoch, 2008; Chandler, 2003; Ferris, 2002; Sheen, 2007) claim that corrective feedback is of value in promoting greater grammatical accuracy Also, there have been studies that examined the relative effectiveness of varying feedback types, and direct and indirect corrective feedback has received due attention of researchers To date, studies examining the effects of direct and indirect feedback on L2 learners’ writing have yielded mixed results Furthermore, in Vietnam, there is little research addressing the issue Especially, most previous studies have participants who are university students, and hardly any studies whose participants are high school students can be found The above-mentioned 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