(SKKN HAY NHẤT) the effects of pre writing activities on the grade 10 students motivation in writing

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 RATIONALE

Nowadays English has become an international language because it is

widely used in many parts of the world. In the tendency of integration of the

global economy, English is one of the effective communicative tools for

everybody. The role of English is considered to be very important in the fields of

economics, politics, science, culture and education.

Especially, Vietnam’s official membership of WTO opened a new door for

integrating into the world economy, and more and more people want to learn

English for communicating with foreign partners, tourism, study tours, etc.

Thanks to the innovation of ways in teaching English, English lessons are

taught with four skills (speaking, reading, listening, writing) in one unit.

Moreover, there exists three stages – Pre - while – post - teaching in one lesson.

This really helps students improve their skills beside the grammar exercises to

pass the exams.

Writing is more than a means to create a document; it can be a method to

discover topics and explore ideas. Pre-writing refers to practice or experimental

writing—writing that helps you get started and measure what you know, identify

new ideas, and indicate areas requiring further research. It is a way of putting

critical thinking into action. Pre-writing can help sharpen the skills of

observation and evaluation. Like an artist making quick sketches before

beginning a mural, students can test ideas, explore a range of topics, list ideas,

and get a feel for their subject. Pre-writing can help them save time by quickly

determining which ideas are worth developing.

When teaching writing skill to the 10

th

students at Ham Rong High

School the author found out that pre – writing stages are very important in

teaching writing and it also has significant effects on the students’ writing

performance. If students do not prepare well enough they can not write well,

they can not even write anything in their notebooks.

The author of this research decided to carry out a research work in :

“The impacts of conducting pre-writing activities on Ham Rong high school

grade 10 students”. Based on the results of this action research, some changes

and improvements could be applied in the author’s lessons, and some

appropriate strategies needed to be designed with the hope that students will

work more effectively in a writing lesson. Hopefully that the results of this

study would be shared with any colleagues who had the same problem or anyone

who is interested in this study.

1.2. Aim of study

1

UAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add [email protected]

The specific aims of the study are as follows:

- Clarifying the nature of writing in accordance with some important

points in teaching this skill.

- Investigating the present situation of teaching and learning writing of the

10th form students to find out advantages as well as problems facing both

teachers and students in writing lessons.

1.3. Scope and objectives of the study

The study will focus on improving the writing skill for 10th students at

Ham Rong High School and how pre – writing activities affect the student’

writing performances in writing lessons.This study was carried out in two

English classes with 104 10th grade students at Ham Rong High School in

Thanh Hoa province.

1.4. METHODS OF THE STUDY

The study is basically a qualitative research, which employs the following

methods:

1. Data is collected by means of three sets of questionnaires, one on the teachers

and the others on the students in pre – improvement stage and post –

improvement one. The questions are of the three – kinds: close – ended

questions, open – ended questions and scaling.

2. Other sources of data come from writing tasks from the textbooks.

The analysis of the data hopefully will bring about reliable findings useful

for the teaching of writing to non – major students at Ham Rong High School,

Thanh Hoa.

1.5. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

Writing, one of the two productive skills, has always a significant position

in language teaching. Nevertheless, how to teach and learn writing effectively

often poses great problems to both teachers and students. For the teachers of

English at high school, writing is considered a difficult skill to teach. Some of

them even ignore teaching writing skill and focus only on grammar excercises

for the exams. However, nothing is difficult if we, the teachers make decision to

make it easier. Hopefully , with a range of suggestions of how to make pre –

writing activities effectively in writing lessons introduced in this research, it will

be more motivating for the teachers to teach and make progress in teaching

writing.Therefore, their students will be interested in writing lessons.

2

UAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add [email protected]

2. CONTENTS

2.1. Theoretical Background

* What is writing?

In teaching a language, writing is considered one of the four language

skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing) that a learner is expected to

master. Writing is the process in which the writer expresses his thoughts or ideas

in the form of handwriting. “Writing is communicating. Good writing gets your

ideas out of your head and into the reader’s head without losing or distorting

those ideas” (Leki, 1976). To understand thoroughly the nature of writing, some

more academic definitions of writing should be studied.

According to “Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary” (1989), writing is

to “make letters or other symbols on a surface (usually paper), especially with a

pen or pencil”. Writing, in Davies’s point of view, involved two kinds of skills.

The first ones were low – level skills such as handwriting or typing, spelling,

constructing grammatical sentences, organizing and sequencing, structuring,

drafting, and editing. Byrne (1988) gave a long and complex definition which

might be summarized as follows: writing is the act of forming graphic symbols

(letters or combinations of letters) which were arranged to form sentences, and

we produced a sequence of sentences arranged in a particular order and linked

together in certain way, on a flat surface of some kind.

In conclusion, Byrne’s definition can be considered one of the most

complete definitions of writing because it covers all of the features of writing

given by three above– mentioned authors.

* Why teach writing?

When we learn a second or a foreign language, we learn to communicate

with other people: to understand them, talk to them. An integral part of

participating fully in a new culture setting is learning how to communicate when

the other person is not right there in front of us, listening to our words and

looking at our gestures and facial expressions. Visitors to another country will

often have to leave a note for the mailman, fill out a customs declaration form,

give written instructions, or write a thank – you letter.

Raims (1983,p3) thinks there is “….an additional and very

important reason: writing helps our students learn.”. She shows three ways in

which students can learn through writing:

- Firstly, writing reinforces the grammatical structures, idioms and vocabulary

that we have been teaching our students.

- Secondy, when our students write, they also have a chance to be

3

UAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add [email protected]