MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
HO CHI MINH CITY OPEN UNIVERSITY
--------------------------

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE EFFECT OF CONTENT AND LANGUAGE
INTEGRATED LEARNING ON EFL LEARNERS’ WRITING MOTIVATION
AND WRITING PERFORMANCE AT YOLA

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (TESOL)

Submitted by HO THI NGOC THUY
Bachelor of Arts in English, 2013

Supervisor
LUU TRONG TUAN, Doctor of Philosophy

Ho Chi Minh City, September 2016


STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP

I certify that this proposal entitled “AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE
EFFECTS OF CONTENT AND LANGUAGE INTEGRATED LEARNING
ON

EFL

LEARNERS’

WRITING

List of figures ............................................................................................................xii
Abbreviations .......................................................................................................... xiii
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................... 1
1.1. Background of the study .................................................................................... 1
1.2. Problem statement ................................................................................................ 1
1.3. Research aims and research questions ................................................................. 3
1.4. Significance of the study ...................................................................................... 4
1.5. Organization of the study ..................................................................................... 5
1.6. Chapter summary ................................................................................................. 6
CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW .................................................................... 7
2.1. Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) ............................................ 7
2.1.1. Overview of writing teaching approaches ................................................ 7
2.1.1.1. The product approach ....................................................................... 7
2.1.1.2. The process approach ....................................................................... 9
2.1.1.3. The genre-based approach .............................................................. 10
2.1.2. CLIL........................................................................................................ 11
2.1.2.1. Definition of CLIL ......................................................................... 11
2.1.2.2. Characteristics of CLIL .................................................................. 13

vi


2.1.2.3. CLIL frameworks ........................................................................... 15
2.1.2.4. CLIL dimensions and outcomes ..................................................... 22
2.1.3. Comparing product approach, process approach, genre-based approach,
and CLIL ........................................................................................................... 23
2.2. Motivation .......................................................................................................... 26
2.2.1. Definition of motivation ......................................................................... 26
2.2.2. Motivation in writing .............................................................................. 27
2.3. Writing ............................................................................................................... 28

4.1. Results in writing tests ....................................................................................... 70
4.1.1. Distribution of the scores ........................................................................ 71
4.1.2. Comparison of mean scores .................................................................... 73
4.1.2.1. The similarities between pretest score of EG and CG ................... 73
4.1.2.2. The differences between posttest score of EG and CG .................. 81
4.1.2.3. The differences between pretest score and posttest score of EG ... 88
4.1.2.4. The differences between pretest score and posttest score of CG ... 92
4.1.2.5. The differences between mean score increase of EG and of CG
after the experiment ..................................................................................... 96
4.2. Results from LMQ ............................................................................................. 98
4.2.1. Learner motivation to write before the treatment ................................... 98
4.2.2. Learner motivation to write after the treatment ...................................... 99
4.2.3. The differences between learner writing motivation before and after the
treatment ......................................................................................................... 101
4.3. Chapter summary ............................................................................................. 102
CHAPTER 5: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION .................................................... 103
5.1. Findings ............................................................................................................ 103
5.1.1. The effect of CLIL on learner writing motivation ................................ 103
5.1.2. The effect of CLIL on learner writing performance ............................. 104
5.2. Discussion ........................................................................................................ 106

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5.3. Chapter summary ............................................................................................. 108
CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION ................................................................................ 109
6.1. Summary of findings ........................................................................................ 109
6.2 Limitations ........................................................................................................ 110
6.3. Implications ...................................................................................................... 111
6.3.1. Theoretical implications ....................................................................... 111

patience, expertise and professionalism in guiding me during time of this thesis
journey.
Second, I extremely appreciate for what my family do to support and
encourage me to complete my paper. There was a period of time that I extremely
demotivated and desperate to keep conducting the study, but luckily they have been
by my side, and offered me their extreme support. The debt of gratitude I owe to
them can never truly be reflected in my words here.
Third, I appreciate my colleagues at YOLA for their great understanding and
support to my workload so that I can arrange time to finish my thesis. Moreover, I
would also like to express my sincere thanks to the students for their voluntary yet
enthusiastic contribution, insightful comments, and valuable information. It is
unfortunate that I cannot acknowledge their willing and kind participation one by
one by revealing their names here; However, it must be emphasized that this study

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would not have been possible and successful if I had not received their help,
cooperation and input.
Finally, I would like to thank some friends of mine who are generous to
share their reference materials, and my best friend who help me proofread my
thesis.

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ABSTRACT
At YOLA, writing skill is one of important skills to help YOLA learners
pursue their academic goal at university. However, their writing performance is not
as high as they should be with writing score as in the last position after three other

Table 2.2: Typical features of four approaches......................................................... 26
Table 3.1: Levels and Pass/fail criteria of IELTS program at YOLA ...................... 42
Table 3.2: True Experiment and Quasi-Experiment ................................................. 44
Table 3.3: Quasi-experimental design of this study (Source. Creswell, 2012)......... 45
Table 3.4: The homogeneity and distinctions between 2 chosen classes ................. 47
Table 3.5: Treatment for EG and CG 49
Table 3.6: The 5-point Likert scale of this study ...................................................... 56
Table 3.7: The interventional procedure ................................................................... 60
Table 3.8: Timescale of the intervention and assessments. ...................................... 61
Table 4.1: Pretest score of EG................................................................................... 73
Table 4.2: Pretest score of CG .................................................................................. 73
Table 4.3: Posttest score of EG ................................................................................. 74
Table 4.4: Posttest score of CG ................................................................................. 74
Table 4.5: Descriptive Statistics of pretest results .................................................... 75
Table 4.6: Independent Samples Test of two groups’ pretest results ....................... 77
Table 4.7: Group statistics of writing factors of pretest score .................................. 79
Table 4.8: Independent Samples Test of writing factors of pretest score ................ 81

x


Table 4.9: Descriptive Statistics of posttest results................................................... 83
Table 4.10: Independent Samples Test of posttest results ........................................ 84
Table 4.11: Group Statistics of writing factor of posttest results ............................. 85
Table 4.12: Independent Samples Test of writing factors of posttest results ........... 87
Table 4.13: Descriptive Statistics of pretest and posttest of the experimental group
................................................................................................................................... 90
Table 4.14: Paired-Samples T-test of the experimental group before and after the
treatment .................................................................................................................... 91
Table 4.15: Paired Samples Statistics of pretest score and posttest score of EG

CLIL: Content and Language Integrated Learning
EFL: English as a Foreign Language
EG: Experimental Group
IELTS: International English Language Testing System
LMQ: Learner motivation questionnaires
M: Mean
SD: Standard Deviation
TOEFL ibt: Test of English as a Foreign Language Internet-based Test
TOEIC: Test of English for International Communication
YOLA: YOLA English School

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1. Background of the study
Throughout up and down cultivations, English has become the most important
and most popular language over the world, and spread its’ influences on many
different aspects of human lives including economy, politics, and education.
Therefore, learning and teaching English at non-English speaking countries have
turned into be more active than ever. Nowadays, there is a new trend in Vietnamese
education that is many students pursuing their academic knowledge in English
speaking countries (Ho, 2015), which makes writing much more important to
master to obtain academic achievements. Moreover, Schnee (2010) wrote ‘writing
has been identified as a threshold skill for employment and promotion.” However,
Olander (2007) acknowledged writing as an enormously complex activity that needs
time, efforts, teacher’s instruction, and practice.
1.2. Problem statement
In learning English, writing, especially academic writing is one of the four

IELTS Foundation, IELTS 5.5, IELTS 6.5, and IELTS Advanced as well as 7 levels
of TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language Internet-based Test) courses

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consisting of TOEFL Entry, TOEFL Foundation, TOEFL 60, TOEFL 70, TOEFL
80, TOEFL 90, and TOEFL 100. The result of the survey showed that most of
YOLA learners are not interested in writing counting to 87 percent of 120 learners
surveyed.
Moreover, the data analysis of an annual quality control (Source: YOLA School,
December 2014) showed that writing performance of YOLA learners is not high in
comparison with other language skills. The researcher realized that mean score of
writing was 4.38, which was much lower than the other three language skills (mean
of Listening = 5.57, mean of reading = 5.76, and mean of speaking = 5.89). Besides
assessing the mean score of writing skill at YOLA, teaching writing approach
should also be examined. Reviewing the training, and guiding materials for teachers,
they are encouraged to apply process approach to teaching and learning writing with
full of steps of process approach such as brainstorming, organizing ideas into
categories, writing the first draft, editing, rewriting, and proofreading.
1.3. Research aims and research questions
The study has the two aims:
1. To examine the effect of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)
on EFL learners’ writing motivation.
2. To unfold the effect of Content and Language Integrated Learning on EFL
learners’ writing performance.

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educational context. The results of this study were shown that CLIL affects writing
motivation and writing performance positively. Meanwhile, other works have
focused on CLIL in the contexts of Western (Dalton-Puffer, 2007b; Perez Vidal,
2009; Gil, 2010; Pokrivčáková, 2013; Bozdoğan & Karlıdağ, 2013) and other Asian
countries such as Iran, Saudi, Hong Kong and Japan (Jawhar, 2012; Pinner, 2013;
Leung, 2013; Yamano, 2013).
1.5. Organization of the study
The study contains 6 main chapters including (1) introduction, (2) literature
review, and (3) methodology, (4) data analysis and interpretation (5) findings and
discussion, and (6) conclusion. The first chapter describes background of the study,
problem statement, research gap, research aims and questions, why the researcher
needs to conduct this study, and finally its structure. The second chapter presents
previous studies, research gaps, general background of CLIL, overview of writing
teaching approaches, writing motivation, and writing performance as well as
analyses the relationship between CLIL and writing motivation and writing
performance. The third chapter discusses background of the research such as setting,
data collection, training procedures of EG and CG, and data analysis in which
validity, reliability, pilot study, and T-tests are also described. The fourth chapter
reports the results of the study, data analysis, and their interpretation. Major
findings, and contributions of the study are presented in the chapter 5. In the last

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chapter, limitations, implications of the study and recommendations for further
research related to this topic are also included.

1.6. Chapter summary
The first chapter discussed about background of the study, problem that
learners deal with when they write, how the previous research studied about to solve


product approach is to attempt to make the student familiarized with the
conventions of writing through a given model, before assigning a piece of writing,
and then return the writing paper for further revision.
The product approach engages the teaching writing process through four
sequential stages: familiarization, controlled writing, guided writing, and free
writing (Steele, 2004). Product Approach Model consists of four stages including (1)
Model texts are given to learners, and then the features of the genre are highlighted.
(2) Tasks of controlled practice of the highlighted features, usually in isolation, are
given to learners to be familiar with. (3) Organizing ideas is an important task in
this stage. (4) This is the end result of learning process with product approach. In
this stage, learners use linguistic knowledge, and skills to produce the product in
which is to show their fluency and competent use of language. Furthermore, the
product approach helps free learners from worries when writing by providing them
with knowledge of grammar, vocabulary, and writing structure through a given
writing model. Moreover, learning conventions of writing through a given model,
then practicing it controllably before doing free practice helps to build up learners’
self-confidence, and create an error-free piece of writing.
Besides the advantages, this approach has limits itself. First, due to writing
based on the given model, learners might have no sense of audience and/or purpose
of their writing. Nunan (2000) claimed learners form a false assumption that writing
is just for teachers to assess, not an useful skill to master to communicate with

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others people. Additionally, learners feel much discouraged and lose most interest
in writing when doing the writing tasks without motivation and target audiences in
mind. Second, the product-based approach prevents learners from creativity in
writing. Instead of being instructed and given time to practice how to write

considers writing as social and cultural practice like Genre-based approach (Hasan
& Akhand, 2010). Paltridge (2004) claims that using the Genre-based approach to
teach writing emphasizes “the teaching of particular genre students need for later
social communicative success” (as cited in Hasan & Akhand, 2010), and focuses
more on readers and on the conventions that a piece of writing needs to follow
(Munice, 2002). Badger & White (2000) are similarly supportive to Paltridge. They
wrote that the advantages of Genre-based approach are that it acknowledges that
writing occurs in a social situation and is reflection of a particular purpose.
Furthermore, Kim (2006) the genre approach brings together formal and functional
properties of a language in writing instruction, and it acknowledges that there are
strong associations between them. Actually, it is crucial for both writing teachers

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and learners to understand how and why linguistic conventions are used for
particular rhetorical effects (Bhatia, 1993, as cited in Kim, 2006).
There are some limitations that can be found in the Genre-based approach.
First, Swales (2000) mentions that a genre approach over-focuses on the reader
while paying less attention to learner expression (as cited in Hasan & Akhand,
2010). Moreover, this approach both places too much focus on conventions and
genre features, and is less useful for learners to discover the texts’ true messages;
therefore, the second limitation of genre approach is learners’ role which is largely
passive as it was stated in the study of Badger & White (2000). They pointed out the
negative aspect of genre approach that undervaluing skills needed to produce texts
is limiting learners’ creative thoughts about content, and overlooking natural
processes of learning and learners’ creativity.
2.1.2. CLIL
2.1.2.1. Definition of CLIL
The expression “Content and Language Integrated Learning”, abbreviated to