MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
VINH UNIVERSITY

TRAN THI QUYET

USING PRE-WRITING ACTIVITIES TO
TEACH ENGLISH WRITING LESSONS FOR
THE 10th GRADERS AT MAI THUC LOAN
HIGH SCHOOL

MASTER THESIS IN EDUCATION

Nghe An, 2013


MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
VINH UNIVERSITY

TRAN THI QUYET

USING PRE-WRITING ACTIVITIES TO
TEACH ENGLISH WRITING LESSONS FOR
THE 10th GRADERS AT MAI THUC LOAN
HIGH SCHOOL
(SỬ DỤNG CÁC HOẠT ĐỘNG TRƯỚC KHI VIẾT ĐỂ DẠY NHỮNG BÀI
VIẾT TIẾNG ANH CHO HỌC SINH LỚP 10 Ở TRƯỜNG TRUNG HỌC
PHỔ THÔNG MAI THÚC LOAN)
FIELD:
CODE:

THEORY AND METHODOLOGY OF ENGLISH



the quantitative and qualitative research methods were employed in this study. Data
analysis is mainly based on quantitative method. The researcher analyzed, compared,
synthesized, commented, and presented the collected information under the forms of
tables and charts.
The result of the study provided encouraging evidence to indicate that most of
the teachers and students at Mai Thuc Loan high School appreciate the role of Prewriting activities in teaching and learning writing lessons. However, the survey
revealed that there were a number of difficulties that hinder the teachers and students
in exploiting Pre-writing activities. Such reasons as class size, handing activities
sometimes is out of control, difficulties in designing, students’ learning style, etc.
have negative influences on using Pre-writing activities in teaching writing skill.
Some detailed suggestions are recommended within the wish to contribute to
the improvement of the teaching and learning of writing skill with the current
textbook “English 10”. Besides, some suggested lesson plans of Pre-writing activities
are also offered to provide teachers as a reference in order to promote the success of
writing classes. The study suggests that the teachers should use various pre-writing
activities to motivate students and encourage them to write and teachers’
responsibility is to devise their own techniques and implementation of Pre-writing
activities to suit the needs of different groups of students, especially the students with
negative attitudes towards learning writing skill.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents

Page



percent

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LIST OF TABLES
Table 2.1: The differences between Process writing and Product writing
Table 3.1: Checklist of writing tasks in the current Textbook “English 10”
Table 3.2: Summary of the students’ questionnaire
Table 3.3: Summary of the teachers’ questionnaire
Table 4.1: Students’ attitude towards the teachers’ ways of teaching Pre-writing stage
Table 4.2: Students ’opinions about the importance of Pre-writing activities
Table 4.3: Students’ opinions about the frequency of using Pre-writing activities by
the teachers
Table 4.4: Students’ favorite ways for taking part in Pre-writing activities
Table 4.5: Benefits that Pre-writing activities bring to students
Table 4.6: Teachers’ opinions of three main stages in the current text book “ English
10”
Table 4.7: Teachers’ ways of teaching Pre-writing stage
Table 4.8: Teachers’ opinions on Pre-writing activities

LIST OF CHARTS
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Chart 4.1: Students’ opinions on the four skills in learning English
Chart 4.2 : Students’opinions on writing sections in the current textbook “English 10”
Chart 4.3: Students’ favorite Pre-writing activities
Chart 4.4: Students’ attitudes towards carrying out Pre-writing activities

school year 2006-2007. With this reform, There are some certain advantages and
disadvantages for both teachers and students when teaching and learning English.
Writing skill is important for creating and communicating information that
makes it a really important aspect of our teaching too. Students need to know how to
take notes as well as how to write essays and letters, which makes this basic skill as
important as speaking or listening. Writing is also one of the basic skills because it is
a good way to reinforce what a student has learned as they will benefit from seeing
new vocabulary in written form.
Writing, in general, is considered the most challenging one for not only
students but teachers to master. In writing section in the current textbook “English
10”, students are asked to do various tasks such as descriptions, narratives, letters, etc.
However, it seems that some of the writing tasks in the current textbooks have not

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supported students’language acquisition appropriately. Besides, teachers also face
certain difficulties in teaching writing skills.
Because of these reasons we need to make writing an interesting activity
therefore, our students will feel comfortable when learning writing skill. We need to
encourage students to write without worrying about the correctness of everything they
put to paper – get them to generate ideas and then edit their written English
afterwards. Being an English teacher at upper-secondary school for nine years, the
researcher has understood the reality of teaching writing in English. The researcher
realizes that the upper-secondary school students in general and 10 th form students in
particular do not acquire writing skill efficiently. Besides, the researcher find that
writing lesson is the most challenging one to both the teachers and the students.
Especially, when doing a writing task, students often begin writing immediately,
ignore pre-writing stage, or sometimes their teachers ask them to do a writing task
without preparing Pre-writing activities. That is why students usually complain that

collection and data analysis.
Chapter 4, “Findings and Discussion”, describes and discusses the main
results and data collected from teachers and students following the main contents in
the research questions. This chapter includes mainly description and discussion of
results from questionnaire and class observations.
Chapter 5, “Conclusion and implications”, presents an overall conclusion of
the study, implications for teachers, students and textbook designers, some suggested
lesson plans of Pre-writing activities applied to teach English writing lessons for the
10th graders at Mai Thuc Loan High School, limitations of the study and suggestions
for further research .

CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
2.1. Review of previous studies

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In the recent years, a number of studies on using Pre-writing activities in
teaching and learning writing have increased greatly. The following is a brief
summary of some recent works relating to our research topic:
Concerning the important of Pre-writing activities, in 1998, Zhang, Liru,
Vukelich, Carol wrote “ Prewriting Activities and Gender: Influences on the Writing
Quality of Male and Female Students”. This study explored the influences of
prewriting activities on the writing quality of male and female students with varying
academic achievement across four grade levels. Participants were public school
students in grades 4, 6, 9, and 11. At each grade level, students were assigned to one
of two groups: writing with prewriting activities or writing without prewriting
activities. Teams of appropriate grade level teachers developed a pool of writing
tasks, with one for each grade. The study was embedded into the 1996 Delaware
large-scale writing assessment field test. Students in the prewriting group had a


reading task types

(compare/contrast, description, cause/effect, and problem/solution) and their effect on
writing performance of pre and post-intermediate EFL learners. The findings of this
study indicated that, utilizing different reading task types as pre-writing activities,
have significant effects on pre and post-intermediate EFL learners writing
performance. Regarding the second main objective of this study, the statistical results
indicated that, post-intermediate EFL learners had better performance, using different
reading tasks, in writing in comparison with preintermediate EFL learners.
Furthermore, the effect of utilizing different reading tasks on both pre and
postintermediate learners writing performance was almost the same but the effect of
two reading tasks, cause/effect and problem/solution, is more tangible in comparison
with the effect of other two reading tasks, description and compare/contrast.
In Vietnam, according to the study on “Students' perception and attitudes
towards prewriting activities at Ngo Quyen High school ” by Do ( 2011), the results
of the research showed that: (i) The students had positive perception of pre-writing
activities, they had good grasp of the benefits of pre-writing activities. They said prewriting activities benefited them in many ways such as making the writing task easier
by activities of generating and organizing ideas, motivating learner and creating a
cheerful and cooperative classroom atmosphere. (ii) Students had possitive attitudes
towards these activities. They liked pre-writing activities asthese activities helped
them do the actual writing more easily. However many of the students did not
participate in the activities actively because of their low level of proficiency and the
teacher’s unmotivated ways of conducting these. (iii) When doing pre-writing
activities, students would rather perform these activities in groups or with the whole
class with the teacher’s guiding than individually or in pair. The most favorable
activities which could support students and fully satisfy their need pictures. The
findings also revealed that the use of pre-writing activities encounters some
challenges such as time management, organization problems.



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She also considers writing is a process and product, and writing aims at expressing
and impressing. The writers have to generate ideas, organize, draft, edit, read, re-read
to produce a product-a paragraph, an essay or a report and writers try to express their
ideas, feeling to impress their readers in certain ways. On the other hand, Tribble
(1996: 3) considers writing as language skill which involves not just a graphic
representation of speech, but the development and presentation of though in a
structured way and is difficult to acquire. He also emphasized that writing “normally
requires some forms of instruction” and that “it is not a skills that is readily picked up
by exposure” (1996: 11). In Ur’s point of view, “most people acquire the spoken
language (at least their own mother tongue) intuitively, whereas the written form is in
most cases deliberately taught and learned” (1996: 161). The researcher has been an
English teacher for 9 years so she agrees with Rivers’ definition (1981) that “writing
is not a skill that can be learned or developed in isolation but it should be taught and
developed in cooperation with other skills and aspects of the language studied”. 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. 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 others above –
mentioned writers.
2.2.2.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

With all these reasons mentioned above, writing really becomes an integral
part in teaching and learning language skills at any levels.

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2.2.3.The nature of the writing process
In West’s point of view (cited in Abisamra 2001), "Good writing does not just
happen. The best writers spend a great deal of time thinking, planning, rewriting, and
editing". Writing is a complex process that allows writers to explore thoughts and
ideas, and make them visible and concrete. Writing encourages thinking and learning
for it motivates communication and makes thought available for reflection. When
thought is written down, ideas can be examined, reconsidered, added to, rearranged,
and changed.
In the CLT approach, students are trained to generate ideas for writing, think of
the purpose and audience, write multiple drafts in order to present written products
that communicate their own ideas. Teachers who use this approach give students time
to tray ideas and feedback on the content of what they write in their drafts. A writing
process approach requires that teachers give students greater responsibility for, and
ownership of, their own learning.
During the writing process, students engage in pre-writing, planning, drafting, and
post-writing activities. However, as the writing process is recursive in nature, they do not
necessary engage in these activities in that order.
2.2.4. The roles of writing
Teaching and learning writing skill play an important role in the process of
language teaching and learning. White (1981) presents a number of reasons why
writing occupies a place in the language syllabus:
Firstly, writing is the commonest way of examining student performance in
English. Therefore, students’ writing ability is a key to examination success.
Secondly, from both parents and students’ views, ability to write may be

Primarily for entertainment: light magazines, comic strips, fiction books,
poetry and drama, film subtitles, games including computer games.
From the roles mentioned above, writing really becomes an integral part in
almost every language syllabus from elementary to tertiary level.
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2.3. Teaching writing
2.3.1. Approaches to teaching writing
Nowadays there are many different approaches to teaching writing. It seems to
be a challenging skill to teachers because it is supposed to require a higher level of
language skill than the others. Besides, there are many ways of teaching writing due
to various teaching and learning styles. That is why, it is necessary to identify
approaches adapted in teaching writing. From that teachers can find out effective and
useful techniques for their teaching.
According to Ann Raims (1983, p 5-10), there were six approaches to teaching
writing namely: Controlled - to - Free Approach, Free - Writing Approach, Paragraph
- Pattern Approach, Grammar - Syntax - Organization Approach, Communicative
Approach and Process Approach.
2.3.1.1. Controlled- to -Free Approach
According to this approach mistakes shown up in written work was regarded as
a major problem. The teacher assumed that students made mistakes because they
wrote what they wanted freely. This approach stressed the importance of control in
teaching writing skills to students in early stages. Students were taught how to write
and combine various sentence types and manipulation exercises were used to give
students the experience of writing connected sentences.
The amount of control would be reduced gradually and students were asked to
exercise meaningful choice. At the next stages, students might be given a good deal of
guidance and content, but allowed some opportunities for self – expression. This
approach also emphasized step – by – step learning and formal correction

2.3.1.6. The process Approach
In the Process Approach, particular stress is paid on a cycle of writing
activities which move learners from the generation of ideas and the collection of data
through to the “publication” of a finished text:
PRE – WRITING

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(Specify the task/ planning and outlining/ collecting data/ making notes)
↓
COMPOSING
↓
REVISING
(Reorganizing/ shifting emphasis/focusing information and style for your readership)
↓
EDITING
(Checking grammar/ lexis/ surface features)
Therefore, in the Process Approach, students did not write on a given topic in a
restricted time and gave their writing assignments to their teachers to correct. They
explored a topic through writing in an unrestricted time, showing their teachers and
each other their drafts, and using what they wrote to read over, think about, and
moved them on to a new ones. Teachers could give their feedbacks on the content of
what students have written in their drafts. The writing process became a process of
discovery. That was the discovery of new ideas and new language forms to express
those ideas.
Beside 6 approaches presented by Raimes (1983), the Product Approach is also
a famous one in teaching writing and is discussed by other writers.
(1) Product Approach
Product Approach is a traditional approach which is a largely “prescriptive and

Model text

comprehension/analysis/ manipulation

NEW INPUT

PARALLEL TEXT
(2)Process Approach
By contrast, Process Approach focuses on the process rather than the final
product. The typical sequence of activities are outlined as follows:

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Stage 1: Generating ideas by brainstorming and discussion. Students could be
discussing qualities needed to do a certain job, or giving reasons as to why people
take drugs or gamble. The teacher only provides language support if required so as
not to inhibit students in the production of ideas.
Stage 2: Students extend ideas into note form, and judge quality and usefulness
of ideas.
Stage 3: Students organize ideas into a mind map, spider gram, or linear form.
This stage helps to make the (hierarchical) relationship of ideas more immediately
obvious, which helps students with the structure of their texts.
Stage 4: Students write the first draft. This is done in class and frequently in
pairs or groups.
Stage 5: Drafts are exchanged so that students become the readers of each
others work. By responding as readers, students develop an awareness of the fact that
a writer is producing something to be read by someone else, and thus can improve
their own drafts.
Stage 6: Drafts are returned and improvements are made based upon peer