Së GI¸O DôC & §µO T¹O H¦NG Y£N
TR¦êNG Thpt CHUYÊN
 Sáng kiến kinh nghiệm
“Phát huy tính hiệu quả của việc
chữa bài trong khi dạy viết luận cho
đội tuyển HSG
trường THPT Chuyên”
Họ và tên giáo viên: Nguyễn Thị Hường
Bé m«n : Tiếng Anh
Năm học : 2013-2014

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TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE
CHAPTER I: REASON FOR CHOOSING THE TOPIC…………………… 2
1. Reasons for choosing the topic.
2. Aims of the study
3. Significance and scope of the study
CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW…………………………………… 5
1. Definition of feedback and correctives
2. Corrective feedback in writing
2.1. Corrective feedback in writing: varied feedback modes
2.2. Corrective feedback in writing: some related issues
2.3. Corrective feedback in writing: teachers’ beliefs and practices
CHAPTER III: APPLICATIONS & RESULTS ………………………………23
1. Applications
2. Results
CHAPTER IV: CONCLUSION ……………………………………… 38
1. Limitations of the study Results

feedback? How can teacher feedback enhance students’ ability to independently reflect on their writing?
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What are the implications of feedback for teacher control and text appropriation? And just as importantly,
what are students’ preferences for feedback and error correction? It is assumed that students’ beliefs about
what constitutes effective feedback and their expectations regarding teachers’ paper- marking techniques
may influence effectiveness of such feedback (Schulz, 1996).
In reality, when I teach writing skills for my gifted students in Hung Yen
Specialised High School , I have found that corrective feedback is of great
importance for students to make progress in writing essays. That’s the reasons why I
choose the topic as my study with the hope that the results will raise teachers’ awareness
regarding the way they provide feedback to their students. The importance of writing skill to students call
for adjustments to be made to the methodology of teaching writing and the use of written feedback and oral
feedback are of significant value in this research.
2 . Aims of the study
The purpose of this study is to investigate the practices related to corrective
feedback on student writing with respect to the correction focus and correction-
delivering strategies to improve writing skill especially writing an essay for gifted students in Hung
Yen Specialised school. Within this context, the thesis is expected to generate some recommendations and
suggestions for the teachers to deliver more effective feedback.
3. Scope and Significance of the Study
The study was conducted at Hung Yen Specialised High School, Hung Yen
province aiming at gifted students in English National Team.
In order for the mentioned-above aims to be achieved, the research attempts to answer the following
questions: What are teachers’ practices of giving corrective feedback?
The scope is narrowed down to those following aspects:
- What corrective feedback strategies the teachers are applying in their
writing class.
- How much the amount of the teachers’ attention is being given on different
aspects of students’ writing.
- Who is taking the main role in providing corrective feedback on different

and explanations, even suggestions to abandon inefficient strategies. In all such
cases these are supplied after the students have tried to learn on their own.
Correctives are often necessary in classes where there are a good number of students
with learning problems. Some students benefit from corrective instruction based on
traditional teaching strategies, while others require more innovative approaches. In
most whole- class teaching situations, it is inevitable that some students will exhibit
inadequacies in performance or errors in learning that need the use of correctives.
2. Corrective feedback in writing
2.1. Corrective feedback in writing: varied feedback modes
Since the late 1980’s, there has been a switch in the teaching of writing from a focus on product to a
focus on process. The process-oriented writing approach, therefore, shifts the core of writing instruction
away from students’ final products towards their writing processes, which include pre-writing, drafting,
revising and editing stages. Feedback, as a factor of great significance in the writing process, calls for wide
concerns from EFL/ESL teachers. For a long time, product-oriented approach dominates the writing
pedagogy and teacher feedback is used as the only way to respond to student writing. New feedback modes
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are burgeoning and varied feedback techniques are explored along with this new development in writing
pedagogy.
2.1.1 .Peer feedback
Peer feedback, also referred to as peer response, peer editing or peer review, is
one type of feedback frequently recommended by process advocates. It continues to
be a popular source of in EFL/ESL classroom. It is defined as working with
someone of relatively equal language proficiency and of one’s own age- usually
someone in the same class- to help improve, revise and edit his or her writing. The
beneficial effects of peer review have been outlined in substantial amount of
research.
Peer readers can provide useful feedback. For example, Rollinson (2005) found
high levels of valid feedback among college level students. 80% of comments were
considered valid and only 7% were potentially damaging.
It has also been shown that peer writers can and do revise effectively on the basis

objective view. This characteristic originates from the traditional thought that
writing is only the matter of the writer and writing is not for showing off but self-
learning. Another reason that explains why ESL writing learners tend to take a
negative attitude on their production is the traditional teacher-centered educational
model (Huang & Leung, 2005, cited in Chen, 2009). That is, getting used to this
teaching model, students prefer reception rather than production, being a good
listener and reader but an inexperienced thinker and writer. However, making
annotations reflecting the writer’s concern, student writers have to force themselves
to form an awareness of the audience for their writing. And this technique pushes
them to evaluate their work more objectively and to express motivation instead of
only writing without thinking. Besides, it encourages writing learners to develop the
responsibilities for what they write and drives them to participate in the whole
writing process.
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Secondly, self-monitoring encourages students to look critically and analytically
at their writings and helps enhance their learning autonomy. It meanwhile enables
the teacher to give tailor-made feedback to individual students and offers a match between
the feedback that students want or expect and the feedback that is actually given.
What remains a problem, nevertheless, is that this feedback seems inapplicable
to all students. Some self-monitoring learners cannot adequately describe their
concerns or cannot locate the problems in their writing. The questions they are too
general or some are written down too casually or many students still prefer to rely
on their teacher for comment rather than exercise their individual judgments. In
addition, the effectiveness of self-monitoring technique partly depends on the
feedback that the teacher provides. Hence, teacher-student conference is encouraged
after the teacher looks over students’ annotations, which means teachers and
students schedule a meeting time when the teacher explains the solutions to
students’ problems and points out the other important issues ignored. During the
conference, teachers should create harmonious atmosphere for substantial
negotiation and deep communication. They take an easy-of-approach attitude to

According to Li (2009), in Chinese EFL writing context, there is usually no
variation in teacher feedback technique. Teachers more often than not review students’ writings word by
word and correct every single problem they find in their writings which is really time-consuming and
labor-intensive. Unluckily, however, their great efforts are not fully valued, for students seldom reflect on
the mistakes they have made or trouble how to avoid repeating them. Even worse, teachers’ drowning on
students’ writings with red pens may harm students’ interests and motivation in writing. Literature on how
to make this conventional feedback mode benefit students better will be discussed further in subsequent
parts of this thesis.
2.1.4. Teacher-student conferencing
As written comments may prove very difficult for ESL/ESL students to
comprehend and to act upon, Zamel (1985) recommends that teachers and students
carry out a face-to-face dialogue that is known as the conferencing session so that
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"dynamic interchange and negotiation" as stated by Zamel (1985) can take place in
addition to written feedback. Xu (1989) contends that in one-to-one conferences,
perceptive teachers can reduce students' anxiety, trace the cause of the problems,
and apply strategies for enhancing language acquisition.
In many ways, one-to-one conferencing, whether it is student teacher or third-
party conferencing, is the most advantageous method for ESL students. Students
who have three or more conferences in a term not only improve their writing ability,
but also significantly improve their listening and speaking skills (Brender, 1995).
The teacher or tutor should, however, be aware of the special needs of these
students. Also, according to Brender (1995), one serious problem that often occurs
in conferencing is that teachers and tutors talk down to their students. Other areas in
which students are at a disadvantage in one-to-one discussions which include types
of questions asked, the length of pauses after questions, turn taking, and the
proportion of time each participant speaks per turn, methods of negotiating meaning,
and methods of wielding power. Harris (1986) contends that teachers and tutors
need to listen to students more attentively and become more adept at a certain kind
of listening in order to establish a non-judgmental setting where there is no penalty for

voice and share their beliefs, values and experiences. Teaching effective strategies at
each stage of the writing process became an important component of a writing class. As
Reid (1983, cited in Zeng, 2005) observed, "since the middle of the 1980s, many ESL writing teachers had
discovered, accepted and implemented the approaches and philosophy associated with the writing process.”
(p.64)
With respect to error correction, Zamel states that it is important to find out why
students are making certain errors before prescribing corrective measures.
Instructors can then determine which errors are the result of carelessness and can be
dealt with by closer proofreading and editing and which are the result of incorrectly
formed rules about the target language. In any case, issues of content and meaning
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must be addressed first language is of concern only when the ideas to be
communicated have been delineated (Zamel, 1985).
On the other hand, students, before they are initiated into process-oriented
writing, are very much concerned with the correctness of their writing and perceive
good writing as correct writing, whether or not they actually edit for errors. In a
survey of attitude towards writing, the researcher reported that 84% of ESL students
consider getting the grammar correct to be the most important part of their writing
in English, 52% getting the punctuation correct and a meager 20% communicating
ideas (Bosher, 1990).
Because the paradigm shift in ESL writing instruction form the product to the
process of writing is still very recent and incomplete, it is especially essential that
editing skills be understood within the overall context of writing, as the final, clean-
up stage in the process. We must be careful that students not become over-
concerned with correctness. Samuels’ 1985 survey also found that 85% of ESL
writers in the first year of college thought about grammar, spelling and punctuation
as they were writing the words of their paper and 15% after they had finished
writing the whole paper: This strengthens Raimes’s finding that inexperienced ESL
writers edit as they are working an idea, not afterwards as a clean-up operation.
Such a preoccupation with errors can interfere with, if not prevent, the writer’s

While reading on student writing, teachers often ask themselves, ‘how can I give
the best feedback to help my students improve their compositions?’ The answer is
hard to be found because there is little agreement among teachers and researchers
about how teachers should respond to students’ writing (Fathman & Whalley, 1990).
Much of the conflict over teacher response to written work has been whether teacher feedback should focus
on form (e.g. grammar, mechanics) or on content (e.g., organization, amount of details).
The second language research on composition has focused both on how teachers
correct form and how teachers respond to content. Authors of research studies in
this study draw different conclusions. Focus on form in some cases appears to be
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effective in helping students write better, in others it is not. Hendrickson (1978)
found that providing the correct form, in addition to noting the errors, has no
statistically impact on students’ writing proficiency. Lalande (1982), on the other
hand, found that his experimental group, which was given on the kind of errors
made, showed significant improvement over the control group, whose errors was
simply corrected.
In the area of teacher feedback on content, there are fewer studies. In one, Zamel
(1985) examined the way teachers give feedback on content. She reached the
conclusion that ESL teachers are very much like LI teachers. Their comments on
content are vague and contradictory. In addition, students tended to respond to
comments on form and ignored those on content.
In an experimental research study, Fathman and Whalley (1990), students in
various classes were randomly assigned to one of the four groups. The students on
each group received a different kind of teacher feedback on their compositions:
Group 1 received no feedback, Group 2 received grammar feedback only, Group 3
received content feedback only, Group 4 received both grammar and content
feedback. The results from this study suggest that grammar and content feedback,
whether given alone or simultaneously, positively affect rewriting. The
identification of the location of errors by the teachers appears to be an effective
means of helping students correct their grammar errors. Further, grammar feedback

widespread practice. Its popularity is based on a number of well-known problems
with the more traditional practice of comprehensive correction. For the teachers, the
latter can be extremely unpleasant and time-consuming, problems which are almost
certain to result in a lower quality of correction. For students, the sea of red ink on
their assignments is likely to prove quite discouraging, and even the most highly-
motivated students cannot be expected to adequately deal with every error on their
work (Truscott, 2001). Partly for these reasons, standard thinking is now that correction
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must be used selectively.
2.2.3.1 .Developmental sequences
Good evidence shows that much of grammar is acquired in more or less
predictable sequences, and that efforts to teach things and correct things out of
sequences are misguided. The existence of sequences thus imposes important
constraints on the prospects for correction - aspects of grammar for which learners
are not yet ready are not good candidates for correction. Identifying and respecting
the current stage for individual learners is impractical, therefore, teachers cannot be
expected to base their correction on students’ readiness for specific construction.
For this reason, errors that are related to developmental sequences are not good
targets for correction and errors that are related to any known order of acquisition
are more promising (Bardovi-Harlig, 1995)
2.2.3.2. Which errors are most correctable?
Truscott in his 2001 article ‘Selective errors for selective error correction’
classifies errors in terms of their level of correctability as follows:
Low-correctability errors
Syntactic errors in general make poor targets for correction. As they are
typically not simple or discrete, often involved in developmental sequences and
tend to be intimately associated with universal grammar.
Moderately correctable errors
All these form of grammar correction are most promising with the type of errors
that result from misapplication of known principles to an identifiable of an

uncoded error feedback. For editing a paper with indirect feedback on, the student is required both to
indentify the type of errors and to self correct the error whereas in direct feedback, what students do is
only to transcribe the teacher’s corrections into the paper (Ferris, 2003).
There is research evidence proving that indirect error feedback is more helpful
on long-term writing development than direct error feedback. Chandler (2003)
examined two ESL undergraduate groups receiving either direct or indirect error
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feedback for a 14-week semester. The result showed that indirect error feedback
with student selfediting contributes to accuracy more than direct error feedback. In a
similar study, Lalande (1982) compared two groups: one with direct feedback and
the other with indirect feedback using correction codes over a semester. All students
were required to second draft by using this feedback. It was found that the group
with indirect coded feedback had more accuracy in writing by the end of the
semester.
However, in another longitudinal study by Robb, Ross and Shortreed (1986), no
significant difference was found among for groups of students who received four
different types of error correction feedback. These were (a) direct correction; (b)
indirect code feedback; (c) indirect highlighted feedback (no codes); and (d) indirect
marginal feedback. The result is that all four groups improved in accuracy over time
but the differences among the groups are not statistically significant.
2.2.5. Timing of feedback and correctives
Cole and Chan (1994) suggest that teachers should give feedback and correctives
after students have made genuine attempts to complete assigned tasks. Students learn best from situations
in which they have been acquired to respond to questions before a teacher give feedback. Little learning is
achieved when students are consistently told the answers before they have had the chance to attempt the
task. It is well documented that students learn little from a set of problems when they simply copy or
imitate correct answers. Further, when the answers are provided in advance, students will not perceive the
need to try to find their own solutions.
Another principle regarding the timing of feedback is that it is vital for teachers
to give frequent feedback and corrective during the early stages of learning a new

if not corrected. In addition to grammar and sentence-level feedback, the teacher responded to content-
level issues such as structure and organization, development, logic and consistency, attention to audience,
and focus or thesis statement. Similarly, the follow-up interview with the teacher revealed that she
believed that such feedback to content is essential in responding to students’ writing.
As regarding the less traditional types of feedback, the teacher emphasized
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conferences and peer reviews as useful feedback methods and they can be
important. Also, the instructor seemed to differentiate between providing feedback
on a work in progress or rough drafts and providing feedback on a final draft. As
revealed in the think-aloud protocol during which the teacher was marking rough
drafts, she does not provide grade on such drafts. She stated that she tends to
emphasize students’ efforts more heavily when correcting a final drafts than a work
in progress because a final draft reveal how much effort students has shown in
revising and following the instructor’s comments and feedback on earlier drafts.
Saito, in her 1994 survey, provides more details on teachers’ practices of giving
feedback through class observation and the collection of students’ compositions in
three ESL writing classes A, B and C.
The class observation reports showed that teacher A focused on facilitating
rhetorical development throughout particular stages of students’ writing: planning,
writing and revising. The feedback teacher A actually gave on compositions was
mostly based on the five thinking prompts. For grammatical and other surface
errors, she either circled or underlined to indicate the error but no other correction was made. She also
provided feedback on organization and content as well by using the prompts Fit and Goal with some
comments. Revisions were required once or twice after students got their paper back.
Teacher B focused on the content and organization of compositions. From the
first session, how to identify and develop topic sentences or thesis statement
became the key issue for her students. In terms of feedback, students are involved
mostly in peer evaluation in using five thinking prompts before receiving any
teacher feedback. Teacher B provided both oral and written feedback to individual
students while they were’producing the compositions especially on their thesis

to find out good points and weak points in each essay, sometimes correct on their
papers.
Stage 6: Return their papers, let them ask questions about the mistake, and then
analyze every mistake as well as their good point and weak point in each essay.
Ask students to correct the mistakes of their own as well as of their friends’.
Here are a sample of the essays of my gifted students at the beginning of the
school year 2013-2014 and my corrections:
MAI HAI ANH
Writing:
Thanks to changes, the world can develop but to keep society stable, living
routines of residents are needed. Almost everyone is wondering which trend
should be followed-intending for the new or staying the same. From my point of
view, any individual has already experienced two approaches, each of which
fetches them a different life with its own merits
For youngsters, given their adventurous and curious characteristics, it
comes as no surprise that most of them love changing. Changes, to some
adolescents, are simply revealed through a new appearance perhaps haircut or
new clothes whilst others appear to be avid explorers getting themselves involved
in dangerous adventures. this approach to life is considered to either express
one’s courage, creation to slave their thirst for new knowledge or bring them
flexibility in life.
As opposed to that, a stable life is enjoyed by the middle aged, especially
those responsible for a new familly. That meeting new needs, looking after
children curtail their time and interest in new experience. Instead, they long for a
safe and constant life which their friends know the schedule to pay a visit for
example. Moreover, it is parents who need build a routine among children. this is
regarded as one of reasons, even a dominant characteristic of the trend of
staying the same.
It seems to me that the approach to life changes under certain
circumstances. When I am at the middle age I would like to remain stable but