Hiệu quả của việc góp ý chỉnh sửa bài viết cho học viên cao học trường Đại học Mở TP.HCM (The Effects of E-comments on the Academic Writing Activities for Graduate Students at HCMC Open University) / Phạm Vũ Phi Hổ

BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO

TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC MỞ TP. HỒ CHÍ MINH

BÁO CÁO TỔNG KẾT

ĐỀ TÀI KHOA HỌC VÀ CÔNG NGHỆ CẤP TRƯỜNG

The Effects of E-comments on the Academic Writing Activities for

Graduate Students at HCMC Open University

Mã số: T2015.15.194

Chủ nhiệm đề tài: TS. PHẠM VŨ PHI HỔ

TP. HCM, 4/2016

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ABSTRACT

E-peer comments were widely investigated by researchers around the world. However,

comparing lecturer’s e-comments to e-peer comments with the purpose to help improve e-peer

comments were vacant in research. In addition, the effects of lecturer’s e-comments on the student

writing revision and e-peer commenting skills were not widely researched. The purpose of the

current study was to see if the instructional model of showing the lecturer’s sample e-comments

to the big size classes was effective in terms of training students how to become better e-peer

commenters. Comparison between lecturer’s e-comments and e-peer comments were also

investigated, including whether those e-comments affect on the writer revision. Finally, students’

attitudes towards the training and its effects were explored. Quantitative data collection from 26

written papers from those who received lecturer’s e-comments, including the e-peer comments

from group members were analyzed. Questionnaires responded from 86 graduate students from

two graduate classes (Dip 17A & TESOL 10) were also analyzes. In terms of qualitative analysis,

data recorded from the semi-structure interviews from 20 graduate students were analyzed as

supplementary data to obtain in-depth information.

The findings of the current study show that there was no a statistical significant difference

between the lecturer’s and e-peer comments in terms of the total number of words written in the

e-comments. In terms of the total number of e-comments deliveries on both global and local areas,

the graduate students provided more total of e-comments on both global and local areas on their

peers’ papers than those provided by the lecturer. In addition, there was no statistical significant

difference between the lecturer’s and e-peer comments on global areas although the e-peer

comments on local issues were more than those from the lecturer. However, in terms of qualified

comment deliveries or revision-oriented comments which trigger revision, there was a statistical

significant difference between lecturer’s e-comments and e-peer comments on both global and

local issues. The lecturer tended to provide more qualified comments on global areas whereas the

peers provided more on local issues. The findings of the study also reveal that the lecturer’s sample

e-comments illustrated in the classroom during the treatment had great effects on the quality of the

e-peer comments. The graduate students were able to provide more qualified e-comments

(revision-oriented comments) on global issues throughout the training to help each other improve

writing revision while local areas seemed to be less provided. In terms of comparing the effects of

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lecturer’s e-comments with the e-peer comments on writing revision, the study found that there

was no statistical significant difference between the effects of these two. However, there was a

statistical significant difference between the total number of qualified comments and the number

of total revisions. The graduate students were able to make far more revisions than expected.

Finally, the graduate students highly evaluated both the lecturer’s e-comment and e-peer comment

activities employed in the treatments. They confirmed that the e-comment activities helped them

learn how to write academic writing papers and contributed to the writing quality because those e￾comments helped identify the writing problems for revisions. The current study highlights the

effects of the e-peer comment training for graduate students to enhance not only the writing quality

but also the skills for e-peer comments.

Keywords: Lecturer’s e-comments, e-peer comments, areas of comments, global comments,

local comments, revision-oriented comments, non revision-oriented comments, qualified

comments, unqualified comments, sample e-comments.

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CONTENTS

Abstract.........................................................................................................................................................1

1 Rationale for the study..........................................................................................................................4

2 Literature review...................................................................................................................................5

2.1 Trained Peer Comments................................................................................................................7

2.2 Research questions......................................................................................................................10

2.3 Definitions of terms used in the present study............................................................................10

3 Research Methodology .......................................................................................................................11

3.1 Research setting ..........................................................................................................................11

3.2 Participants..................................................................................................................................12

3.3 Research design ..........................................................................................................................12

3.4 Training procedures....................................................................................................................13

3.5 Writing Assignments ..................................................................................................................15

3.6 E-comment activities ..................................................................................................................17

3.7 Areas of e-comments ..................................................................................................................21

3.8 Coding schemes..........................................................................................................................22

3.9 Data collection for analysis.........................................................................................................25

3.10 analysing the writing revision.....................................................................................................25

3.11 Interviews....................................................................................................................................26

3.12 Questionnaire ..............................................................................................................................27

4 Findings and discussion ......................................................................................................................28

4.1 Research question 1: ...................................................................................................................29

4.2 Research question 2: ...................................................................................................................37

4.3 Research question 3: ...................................................................................................................42

4.4 Research question 4: ...................................................................................................................48

4.4.1 Quantitative analysis...........................................................................................................48

4.4.2 Qualitative analysis.............................................................................................................55

5 Conclusion ..........................................................................................................................................57

references....................................................................................................................................................60

Appendix A: Lecturer's e-comments...........................................................................................................64

Appendix B: syllabus for academic writing for graduate students.................................................................

Appendix C: interview.....................................................................................................................................

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1 RATIONALE FOR THE STUDY

The course of Academic Writing for Graduate Students at the Graduate School of HCMC

Open University (HCMC OU) was introduced to the graduate students since 2012. Prior TESOL

classes (from 1 to 5) and Diploma courses (Dips. 1- 10) were not included for the training of this

Module. The occurrence of this course came from the fact that many MA students could not write

up their theses very well in terms of Academic written styles. Actually this was not something new

or weird because this phenomenon is found similarly in other contexts where the Master programs

in TESOL were offered. The MA students are often have writing problems when they composed

their thesis. That is the reason why the graduate program in TESOL at HCMC Open University

offers this course to train the students to do better in their writing.

In the graduate program in TESOL, the graduate students at HCMC OU are required to write

research projects for most of the courses. End of each course, the graduate students are normally

required to write a 2000-word paper to submit to the lecturers for gaining scores. This requires

students to use their critical thinking to compose their papers, which includes conducting broad

reading, provide critiques or argument for each session of the paper. This is not an easy job at all.

In the same situation from other context, Harris (2006) claims that he/she found frustrated with the

quality of students’ writing skills whenever he/she read the graduate projects or research proposals.

This suggests better teaching methods or other teaching activities in the academic writing

classrooms in order to help graduate students improve their writing skills.

Research on writing instruction has changed from controlled writing to process writing.

Writing is no longer viewed as a means of reinforcing structural patterns (Andrade & Evans, 2012).

Writing is now seen as a written means of communication, and has become an integral and

important part of language learning and is necessary for academic and professional purposes. The

instruction has gradually shifted from a product-centered approach to a more process-oriented

approach (Andrade & Evans). In the view of product approach, learning writing in L2 (Foreign

language) means learning how to produce sentences, grammatical structures without any errors.

Forms are the center of focus rather than the content or idea development. On the other hand,

process approach views writing as a developmental process in which multiple drafts were revising

based on lecturer/peer comment activities.

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In the context of the graduate training program at the Graduate School of HCMC OU in

TESOL, each class size is about 40 – 50 graduate students. This number is large in terms of training

students how to compose Academic writing papers. Particularly, using lecturer’s comments to all

students each week is impossible. In this training, the lecturer often provided e-comments for 5

fastest students (early birds) who submitted the papers during each week to provide comments and

used those e-comments as samples in the classroom to train the students how to revise their written

papers and how to provide e-peer comments efficiently. Make use of the models or framework of

trained-peer comments in the classrooms from Berg’s (1999), Min’s (2005), Pham Vu Phi Ho &

Usaha’s (2015), Stanley’s (1992), and Tuzi (2004) to help students enhance their comment

deliveries to improve peers’ writing revision is essential in the training process. Accordingly, the

lecturer applies the student-centered approach in the classrooms to help get involved all the

students in the learning process. The activities of training e-peer comments in current study were

not investigated in literature in the learning process of the graduate students about e-peer

comments (Using Microsoft Word) to enhance the quality of comments and writing revision.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

There are a number of research studies on comparison between lecturer and peer comments

in literature. Hyland (1998) conducted a study on the impact of lecturer written comments on

individual Writers’; Nelson and Carson (1998) investigated the ESL students’ perceptions of

effectiveness in peer comments; Tsui and Ng (2000) studied the roles of lecturer and peer

comments in revisions in writing among learners; Hyland (2000) investigated written lecturer

comments and how they interacted with other aspects of the context; Nguyen Thi Kieu Thu (2002)

conducted a survey in Vietnam to investigate the lecturer’s practices in giving errors comments to

second year and third year students’ writing; Yang et al. (2006) investigated two types of

comments from peer and lecturer to EFL students in China; and Jones et al. (2006) studied the

interactional dynamics in online and face-to-face peer-tutoring sessions for second language

writers. Recently, Pham Vu Phi Ho and Usaha (2015) conducted a study on training e-peer

comments to help student writer improve their writing quality and writing revision.

The findings of these studies remain questionable in terms of preferences of the lecturer’

comments to peer comments. Nelson and Carson (1998) found that students preferred the lecturer’s

comments to peer comments and considered comments on local areas as relatively ineffective.

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Tsui and Ng (2000) and Yang et al. (2006) found that lecturer comments were more favored by

most students than peer comments and led to more revisions which yield good results on the

lecturer’s comments. Tsui and Ng (2000) found that students have more confidence in lecturer

comments because the lecturer is seen as more experienced and more authoritative. Moreover,

lecturer comments were considered to be of better quality. They were more specific, were able to

explain what the problems were, and were able to make concrete suggestions for revision. Yang

et al. (2006) also found that students considered lecturer as more “professional,” “experienced,”

and “trustworthy” than their peers. In addition, Hyland (2000) found that cultural factors made

students feel uncomfortable with the peer comments and discouraged them from being critical of

each other’s work. In addition, Treglia (2006) indicated that the students appreciated receiving

comments of encouragement and found their lecturers’ written commentary helpful in improving

their writing. The most common reason for the rejection of peer comments was that the writers did

not accept the comments for the reason that it seemed “incorrect” to them. In another story, Hyland

(1998) conducted a case study to describe two students who received lecturer’s comments during

the course and found that the two students both started the course with positive feelings towards

writing but ended with demotivation and lacking in confidence in terms of receiving lecturer’s

comments. This indicates that the lecturer comments were sometimes inefficient in the training

writing process. Supported to this view, Nguyen T. K. Thu (2002) found a positive shift in

students’ priorities from traditional lecturers’ comments to more involving methods like peer

comments and self-comments. Jones et al (2006) argued that force students to make a choice

between peer comments and lecturer comments were not appropriate because peer and lecturer

comments should be mutual supported. Also, Jones et al. added, when students were not forced to

make a choice, they welcomed both peer and lecturer comments. Tsui and Ng (2000) asserted that

peer comments could not be replaced by lecturer comments. Hyland (2000) indicated that the

relationships between lecturers and students are both complex and unequal in terms of power.

Hyland (2000) argued that students were expected to take full responsibility for their own writing

process and to revise it on their own, using their own strategies. Lecturers should consider

measures to help student writers to do help themselves instead of controlling the commenting

process. Pham Vu Phi Ho and Usaha (2015) found that e-peer comments were effective to help

student writers revise their papers to enhance the writing quality and students highly evaluated e￾peer comments. Therefore, training students to provide qualified comments is a means to get