VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

******

CHU THỊ PHƯƠNG LINH

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE EFFECTTIVENESS OF PEER-WRITTEN
FEEDBACK ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF ESL WRITING FOR THE 11th
SPECIALIZED ENGLISH GRADE IN SONTAY HIGH SCHOOL
(Khảo sát về tính hiệu quả của phương pháp sử dụng ý kiến phản hồi của bạn
học tới việc phát triển kỹ năng viết Tiếng Anh đối với học sinh lớp 11 chuyên
Anh – Trường THPT Sơn Tây)

M.A. MINOR PROGRAMME THESIS

Field: English Teaching Methodology
Code: 60140111

Hanoi – 2015


VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

******

CHU THỊ PHƯƠNG LINH




ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With boundless love and great attitude, I would like to send my deepest sincere and
appreciation to the people who devote their valuable work and time for the
researchers during the time conducting the research. Without their help, this
research would have never been completed
First of all, I would like to express my special thankfulness to my supervisor, Prof.
Assoc. Nguyen Van Do for the guidance, support, consistence advice as well as
remarks and engagements through the process of this master thesis. All of his help
contributes to bring the success to the research.
I would also like to send my appreciation to all the participants of this thesis. They
are Mrs. Nguyen Thu Huyen- the former teacher of 11th English gifted class in
Sontay high school, Mrs. Le Phuong Lan- the teacher of English and 45 students in
this class, who willingly shared their precious time and efforts to help me complete
the questionnaire and conduct a long series of writing test during four months of
collecting data. Without their support, the thesis would never been fulfilled.
I hope to send my thanks to my colleague, teachers and English teaching staffs in
Sontay high school for their valuable critical feedbacks, comments and
encouragements.
Last but not least, I am very grateful to my family and friends, who always stand by
me and give me mental support as well as encouragement to complete the master
thesis

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ABSTRACT
The study is designed to investigate the effect of peer written feedback on the
development of ESL writing skill for the 11th grade. The study primarily aims to

Ken Hyland and Fiona Hyland, 2006). In most of the traditional ESL class,
especially writing section, giving feedback and correctness to students is one of the
important tasks of the teachers, as feedback takes benefits in creating supporting
learning environment, as well as instructing students a model sample of writing.
With the help of teacher, students have fewer burdens with their work.
However, the help of teacher‟s feedback in the proficiency of students‟ ESL writing
skill just has benefits in some aspects. The researchers found out that focusing on
the help of teacher only would be problematic as they just understand the „outer layout‟ of the problems without understanding the core reason of the errors and how to
make the writing improved. As a consequence, students will have short-term
improvement on their revised lesson and they will be easy to make the mistakes
again. Thus, one of the duties of teachers is to discover an effective way to facilitate
students‟ learning without the help of teacher‟s feedback and help them avoid the
above-mentioned troubles.
To prepare for students a good writing skill, teachers should try to combine
different strategies with the aim of helping students learn better and enhancing
writing skill because “Second language writers often benefit most and make most
progress when teachers contribute to this goal through a variety of intervention
strategies available in classroom settings” Skroll (2003). Among many
interventions, using students‟ peer feedback in writing is one of the effective
strategies. In this method, students conduct their first writing product. In the next
stage, they exchange it with their peer to receive their friend‟s feedback.

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Despite the effectiveness of written feedback to students‟ ESL writing skill, most
experienced English teachers in the school still blame the drawbacks of peer-written
feedback. The reason is that students‟ ability is inadequate to give useful feedbacks.
They have difficulty in indicating the errors and providing suggestions. Many
teachers do not take advantages of peer written feedback in their ESL writing period

4. Scope of the study
Feedback applied in writing is such a broad topic, which includes teacher
feedback and students‟ feedback. Students‟ feedback in particular contains many
forms; however, within the framework of the study, the researcher hopes to focus
on the students of 11th grade majoring English in Sontay high school to provide
written form of feedback to their peers applied in writing skill.
5. Previous findings about the study
The large numbers of researches and journal published articles have been carried
out to evaluate the relationship between peer-written feedback and the
improvement of students‟ writing proficiency. All of these may use different
research methodology and concentrate on their specific aspects; however, all of
them try to explore the roles of peer written feedback on ESL teaching and
learning writing. In this thesis, the author recommends to summarize some
previous findings related to the study.
The first research to be mentioned here is the journal “Effects of Teacher and
Peer Feedback on Students’ Writing at Secondary Level”, which was conducted
by Ghani, Manuna, Asgher and Tahira. The research‟s purpose is to investigate
the effectiveness of peer written feedback and teacher feedback on the written
record of students and then examine the attitudes of them toward feedback
activity. In order to give the result for the research, the author carried out an
investigation in the five government secondary schools in Bahawalpur with the
population of 100 students. In order to collect the data, the researcher used
survey questionnaires, students‟ pre-test and post test and students‟ written
remarks about the whole experimental feedback from the sample. The final

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REFERENCES
1. Brown, H.D. (1994), Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to


14. Tsui, A. &Ng, M. (2000). Do Second Language Writers Benefits from Peer
Comment?, Journal of Second Language Writing.
15. Ur, P.(1996). A Course in Language Teaching: Practice and Theory,
Cambridge: CUP.
16. Yang, M., Badger & Ju, Z. (2006). A Comparative Study of Peer and
Teacher‟s Feedback in a Chinese EFL Writing Class. Journal of Second
Language Writing, 15, 179-200.

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