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Sawatdee krup,

I’m the new editor for the Journal, taking over for Dr. Sunanta Bell, who’s now happily settling

down with her family in the UK. In fact, this issue celebrates the English Department’sfi

rstinternational conference entitled “Voices in ELT” (June 10-11, 2011) by including several

papers that were presented at the event.

Further, I’m pleased to say that we’ve made a few major changes to the Journal. First, we have

twelve articles, as compared to five in the last issue, and nine are research based. Each author’s

profile is put at the end of the article. Also, there are some other interesting columns: Inspirational

Poems and Stories, and a book review. Second, the editorial board and reviewer team have been

enlarged, with 16 experts from Thammasat and 27 from other institutions, both in Thailand

and abroad. I’m glad so many well-known applied linguists have lent a hand. Third, due to the size

of the volume, we have had to resort to A4 size paper. An undergrad from Ubon Ratchathani

University Tanong Raksasiri has done the design for the covers.

The twelve articles included in this volume have undergone rigorous review. We start with a pair of

papers on ELT and education in general. Then, we move on to a research paper on teaching vocabu-

lary and four papers on teaching reading. Next is a group of three papers on teaching writing, one on

culture and the last on corpora and ELT.

Leading off, (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), the plenary speaker at

our June ELT conference, draws on her vast experience to talk about ELT teacher professional

development. Her speech included the changing views of professional development and its

models, and some new professional development approaches: Lesson Study, Reflective Inquiry,

and Study Circle or Professional Learning Community—while incorporating methods from other disciplines such as math and science. Also taking a macro view of education in Thailand,

, of King Mongkut University of Technology Thonburi, examines the

Educational Ministry’s views on ELT in Thailand. He analyzes several published documents to

arrive at some positive and some not-so-positive conclusions, but proposes steps to remedy the

situation. The research of (Thammasat University) goes to the heart

of language learning—vocabulary—especially as it applies to Thai students. Based on question-

naires and student interviews, he discovers and critiques a host of strategies perceived as useful but

not necessarily in frequent use. Next, we have use of graphic organizers in

English reading lessons for first-year engineering students at Thai-Nichi Institute of Technology.

He offers a simple lesson plan and materials based on graphic organizers. ,of Thammasat University, deals with undergraduate students’ use of cognitive and metacogni-

tive reading strategies. She suggests that reading teachers explain both types of strategies to both

high- and low-achievers, and that readers should be allowed to use a combination of strategies when

reading. In the sixth paper, (also from Thammasat University) shows how

writing a summary from an outline can improve undergraduate reading ability. She suggests writing

a summary from an outline.

Next, some KMUTT professors show how short stories can be used to improve engineering

students’ critical thinking skills, raising awareness of the importance of literature for science students.

Using Bloom’s timeless taxonomy, authors

have students form a book club to discuss ten short stories, revealing, among other



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things, that literature may yield more than one interpretation. (National

Kaohsiung University of Hospitality & Tourism, Taiwan) takes a new approach to teaching

English for Hospitality and Tourism to undergraduate Taiwanese students. Using Word-Smith

5.0, he derives a list of keywords from authentic tourist brochures, hoping to instill accuracy and

authenticity in the students’ ESP writing. Next, Ph.D. candidate in Applied Linguistics at KMUTT

interviews a small group of applied linguistics doctoral studentsabout their anxiety, and how they coped with it, when writing their first assignment in English.

Her respondents say their main problems were with organizing thoughts and presenting ideas.

Most dealt with their anxiety by stopping writing or reading more about it (“Focusing strategies”).

In a process-oriented study, (Thammasat University) explores how

first-year MA students deal with their teachers’ written feedback. He categorizes this feedback

as surface-level, clarification-level, and content-level. He finds out that direct feedback, or the

teacher’s corrections, seems to be the most effective. Next, (Zhejiang Agricultural and

Forestry University, China) examines the beliefs of a large group of secondary-school Chinese

teachers on the importance of culture in ELT. Unfortunately, despite the number of teachers who see

the value of teaching culture, little time is actually allotted to it as compared to grammar and other

“practical” aspects of communication.

In the last paper of this issue, plenary speaker (Chulalongkorn University)

describes how ELT teachers can benefit from corpora—via concordancing programs (e.g. AntConc)

and online websites (e.g. BNC)—and other innovations like blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Skype

and smart phones. Drawing on his computational linguistics and electrical engineering

backgrounds, he describes activities that enhance students’ knowledge of collocation, synonyms,

translation and culture—stressing edutainment. In describing the small amount of research done

in this area, he advocates more research on corpora in ELT. Lastly, he ends with a thoughtful

reminder: Instead of complaining about students being inattentive, teachers should try to adjust tothe rapidly changing technologies, something with which the new generation are more familiar—

so as not to let themselves be the main obstacle in the system!

In , we have a story beautifully written by Jerry McFarland, a retired school

supervisor of Student Services, in Fredericton, Canada. In , Thomas Hoy reviews

Stephen Conlon’s (2009) book Chaos in the Classroom.

Finally, I’d like to thank all the reviewers and language editors who have worked hard to improve all

the papers. My thanks also go to the editorial board which has done all the clerical work.

Now, without further ado, please enjoy the reading, krup! apisak……………

PS: Any comments/suggestions/complaints—please direct them to me at [email protected].



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The Editor’s Message

fl

JoAnn (Jodi) Crandall

Richard W. Todd

Suphawat Pookcharoen

Bundit Anuyahong

Melada Sudajit-apa

Usuma Chuenchompoo

Thanis Bunsom, Sompatu Vungthong & Wareesiri Singhasiri

Wen-hsien Yang

Supong Tangkiangsirisin



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Montarat Rungruangthum

Han Hui

Wirote Arunmanakul

Inspirational Poems & Stories: “An April Evening”

C. Jerome McFarland

Book Reviews:

Chaos in the Classroom



1

Teaching as Lifelong Learning: Reflections on Professional Development

JoAnn (Jodi) Crandall

Professional development for language teachers has undergone a paradigmaticshift in the past decades: from top-down, short-term, generic professionaldevelopment to bottom-up, sustained, and situated learning focused on teachingand student learning. The Internet has also made it possible for teachers to interactand learn from and share ideas with colleagues globally. In this presentation, Isummarize the major shifts in language teacher professional development,identify common features of effective professional development, and then focuson three initiatives that share many of these features: lesson study, reflectiveinquiry, and study circles/professional learning communities. I also highlight anumber of other interesting professional development opportunities, includingthose that have been made possible by new technology.

Keywords: professional development, reflective practice, lesson study, learningcommunities, study circles

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Introduction

A number of experiences have led to this talk. Recently, I have been working on the fourth edition

of my chapter on “Keeping up to date as an ESL or EFL Professional” for what many of us refer to

as the “Apple Book”: Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language, edited by Marianne

Celce-Murcia (Crandall, 2001), making me think about all the new professional development



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opportunities that the Internet has made available, as well as some exciting professional

development projects that I or my students have been involved in.

Teacher education and professional development have been central in my professional life.

For the past 20 years, I have been teaching in a MA TESOL Program at the University of

Maryland, Baltimore County. In that time, I have also been a member of a national accreditation

association, visiting teacher education programs in several parts of the country to analyze and

evaluate their teacher education programs, and have also been invited to engage in professional

development seminars, institutes, and webinars in a number of countries.

During that time, as well, I worked for five years with a local school system, creating a

university and school district partnership focused on helping four secondary schools to improve the

academic achievement of immigrant students (Project WE-TEACH) through tailored graduate

courses and other professional development initiatives for teachers and administrators in the

schools (Crandall, 2000a). I also recently worked for two years with five community colleges in the

United States, identifying promising professional development practices (Chisman & Crandall,

2007). And for the past 13 years, I have also been involved in working with a Post Graduate TEFL

Certificate Program at Sookmyung University in Seoul, Korea, visiting and providing support to

the faculty.

And I’ve researched and written extensively on language teacher education and professional

development and will draw upon some of that in this talk.

I often begin my talks by asking how many in the audience are doing what they thought

they would be doing or had been prepared to do, and usually find that the number of hands is

limited, revealing the many lives of language teachers and language teacher educators, and the

many phases in their professional life cycles. I often follow this with additional questions: Where

did you learn to be a teacher? Who has helped? Are you still learning? If so, how?

The responses reflect the different phases of our own professional life. As we become more

experienced, we need and want different opportunities and different kinds of support. In a famous

study of teachers (not just language teachers), Martin Huberman (1989) identified (and Tessa

Woodward reviewed in her 2010 IATEFL talk on “The professional life cycles of teachers”) thefollowing stages in a teacher’s career, moving from the early years where we are just trying to stay



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afloat—spending every night preparing for classes and trying to figure out how to manage those

classes and keep our students on task; to years in which we become more confident and thinking

about ways in which we might change our classes or our instruction (even when we have

difficulties convincing others that this is the right thing to do), to periods of “burn out” and

questioning if we should continue in the field, and then in our later years, either finding peace in

what we are doing or becoming bitter from maybe having stayed in teaching too long.

Where we are in our professional teaching cycle will have a profound effect on the types of

professional development that we want and also on what professional development will be

effective. But even when we have been teaching a long time, there will be times when we really

want to learn something new, and it just might be that new teacher who can help us with that,

especially if it has something to do with technology!

However, not all professional development opportunities are good ones. Sometimes the

people who are leading the efforts have little sense of how these will fit in with our teaching

contexts. Other times, new approaches or activities are discarded before there has been enough time

to reflect upon and adapt them.

Professional development: Both training and development

Professional development needs to provide both teacher training and teacher development

(Schaetzel, Peyton, & Burt, 2007). Richards and Farrell (2007) explain that teacher training focuses

on meeting teachers’ current needs and short-term goals, or what Henry Widdowson (1997) refers

to as “specific instruction in practical techniques to cope with predicatable events” (p. 121).

Teacher development, according to Richards and Farrell (2005), is focused on teachers’ long-term

goals, facilitating “growth of teachers’ understanding of teaching and themselves as teachers” (p 4).

In the early stages of our career, we need much more training and mentoring to help us get through

our days and learn techniques for both teaching and managing our classes, but as we become more

experienced and more reflective, we need opportunities to focus on our own growth and change,

often through longer-term, collaborative professional development models such as study circles or

reflective teaching groups (Richards & Farrell, 2005; Garet et al., 2001) often with colleagues in

our own institution or using the possibilities offered by the Internet, with others who are interested

in the same questions globally. Or we may find ourselves mentoring or coaching new teachers, and

learning a great deal in the process. Professional development related to one’s daily practice,involving colleagues we work with or with shared interests, and taking place over time is likely to



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have greater impact, since it is more relevant, intensive, and sustained (Darling-Hammond, 1995;

Hargreaves & Fullan, 1992; Garet et al., 2001; Schaetzel, Peyton & Burt, 2007).

Still, even experienced teachers may find that there are new techniques that we want to

learn or a need to learn something new to enliven our teaching, and more traditional, short-term

training through workshops or seminars or conference attendance (Garet, et al., 2001) can help

provide opportunities to learn from those outside of our regular sphere and give us new ideas to try

out in our classes. If we can find ways to keep in touch with those who have provided us with

some new ideas, after we have tried them out, or to share them with our colleagues at our own

institution and reflect upon how they can be made even more relevant to our program, then that

training has a better chance of having a lasting impact.

Research on professional development (Schaetzel, Peyton, & Burt, 2007) has found that

effective initiatives share the following features:

x It is relevant to our work and the stage in our professional life (focusing on a specific

English level, or skill, or curriculum that we are teaching);

x It is something we have helped to identify that we need, we help plan it, and it fits in with

our other responsibilities;

x It involves opportunities for active learning (we can apply and adapt what we are learning);

and

x It lasts long enough that we can both apply and reflect on what we are doing and learning.

Dennison & Kirk (1990), in their “do, review, learn, apply, do, review, learn, apply” model

provide one example of a professional development initiative that exemplifies those features.

Here’s what that might look like, according to Schaetzel, Peyton & Burt (2007):

For example, a professional development activity in which teachers learn about studentlanguage errors and the possible effects of students’ first language on their production of English might have teachers analyze a sample of writing for errors (do), review their analysis with the trainer (review), ask questions about the patterns they see (learn), bringsamples of their students’ writing to analyze in class (apply), develop a lesson for their students to address one of the types of errors identified (do), and so on.



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A changing perspective on what constitutes appropriate professional development

In my 2000 synthesis of “Language Teacher Education” in the millennial issue of the Annual

Review of Applied Linguistics (Crandall, 2000b), I identified several major shifts in perspective on

effective teacher education that I believe apply not only to pre-service teacher training but to

professional development as well.

The first is a shift from transmission, product-oriented theories to more constructivist,

process-oriented theories of learning, teaching, and teacher learning. Traditional approaches to

professional development often view teachers as passive recipients of transmitted knowledge rather

than participants in the construction (or re-construction) of their own views. As teachers, we are

used to being decision makers, and our professional development must provide opportunities for us

to research and reflect upon our own practice (for example, through action research). As teaching

professionals, we need to be engaged in lifelong learning, but we need to help plan that process and

have opportunities to actively reflect upon what we are learning. As Michael Wallace (1991) has

explained, in clarifying the difference between teacher training (or education) and professional

development: “training or education is something that can be presented or managed by others; …

development is something that can be done only by and for oneself” (p. 3)

The second shift is from “one size fits all” workshops to a recognition that effective

professional development reflects the different contexts in which we teach—the differences in

learners, programs, curricula, materials, policies, and the socio-cultural environment—with a shift

from separation of theory and practice to increased focus on “situated learning.” When I ask most

teachers where they learned their craft, they respond that it’s “on the job” and that they are still

learning. It is not surprising, then, that experienced teachers are more likely to accept professional

development that links theory with their current practice (Finch, 1999).

It is interesting to note that in the United States, and I suspect in many countries, there is no

preservice teacher education required for university faculty, and in many states in the United States,

very limited preservice teacher education for teaching adults, certainly nothing close to the

expectations for those preparing to teach elementary or secondary education (Crandall, Genesis, &

Lopez, 2008). What that means is that most university and adult education teachers obtain most of

the training and development on the job—either learning through their own practice, or through

professional development opportunities that they seek or are planned for them. On our owncampus, there is a Center for Teacher Development that faculty members can seek out for



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assistance (or be assigned to visit if student evaluations of their teaching are sufficiently poor) and

many adult education programs (for nonformal or workforce or professional education) provide a

range of opportunities by which teachers can learn as they are practicing their profession. However,

even those teachers who have extensive preservice teacher education need to continue to learn what

works from within their own contexts after they have begun teaching.

A third shift involves a “recognition that teachers’ prior learning experiences (what Lortie,

1975, refers to as ‘the apprenticeship of observation’) plays a powerful role in shaping teachers’

views of effective teaching and learning and their teaching practices.” We teachers tend to teach the

way they were taught. We likely were successful students, and we believe that the way we were

taught will result in equally successful learning with our students. Unless we have opportunities to

reflect upon our beliefs about teaching and learning and our experiences as teachers, we’re not

likely to change our views or our teaching practices.

The fourth shift involves a recognition that successful professional development

recognizes that we teachers—like doctors, lawyers, or engineers—are professionals who must

have a major role in our professional development through collaborative planning of study or

inquiry groups, opportunities for mentoring or coaching, and sustained professional development

programs, as well as short-term workshops or seminars (Crandall, 1993; 1998; 2000a; 2000b;

Darling-Hammond 1995). In place of top-down decisions on what teachers need for their

professional development, effective professional development begins with the teacher in more

innovative bottom-up, teacher-directed professional development (Atay, 2008; Richards &

Farrell, 2005), with teachers involved in all stages of planning and implementing their

professional development (Darling-Hammond & Sykes, 1999). In their introduction to the series,

Language teaching: A scheme for teacher education, Candlin and Widdowson explain it this

way: “If language teaching is to be a genuinely professional enterprise, it requires continual

experimentation and evaluation on the part of the practitioners whereby, in seeking to be more

effective in their pedagogy, they provide at the same time. . . for their continuing education.”

Perhaps what is most significant in current theories of effective professional development is

the role that collaboration plays and the focus on development of learning communities or

communities of practice to which both novice and experienced teachers bring their knowledge and

experience and learn from each other. These learning communities provide continuous professionaldevelopment because they are linked to the classroom or teaching context and foster collaborative



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learning (Hassan, 2011; Hargreaves, 1992; Lieberman, 1996). It also begins with teachers reflecting

upon their own practice, in contrast to more common top-down approaches that focus on

decontextualized knowledge or skills.

Models of professional development

There are a number of ways of conceptualizing or thinking about the opportunities we as teachers

have for continuing professional development. Wallace, in his book on Training foreign language

teachers: A reflective approach (1991), describes three major approaches to teacher education that I

believe also serve as a way of thinking about professional development. The three approaches

include:

1) a craft or apprenticeship approach in which novice or less experienced teachers learn from

those with more experience (or what Donald Freeman, 1991, 1996; has referred to as

teaching as doing);

2) an applied science or theory-to-practice approach in which teachers learn from experts and

then apply what they have learned to their own contexts (or what Freeman 1991, 1996; has

referred to as teaching as thinking and doing); and

3) a reflective approach by which teachers critically analyze, reflect upon, and adapt their own

practice (or what Freeman 1991, 1996; has referred to as teaching as knowing what to do).

In actual practice, many professional development activities involve aspects of all three, especially

with the availability of podcasts, webinars, lists, social networking sites, and all the other resources

that the Internet makes available to us. For example, we may find that when we want to learn more

about ways in which we can better apply technology in our language teaching, we find that there is

a TESOL Virtual Seminar on “Tech Tools for Busy Teachers” being provided by Deborah Healey

and Robert Elliott in May 2011. We talk with others in our program and agree that this is

something that several of us are interested in, so we decide to participate. Following that, we try out

some of those tech tools and find that some of our colleagues (undoubtedly the younger ones) seem

to be having more success, so in a reversal of the usual roles that more experienced teachers mentor

newer ones, our newer colleagues begin coaching and mentoring us, helping us through some of the

complexities of using these new tools. In doing so, however, we find that we want to learn more

about these tools and how they are being applied, so we decide to do some research and begin

meeting informally to discuss what we are learning, maybe sharing some of those new insights atour next regularly-scheduled faculty meeting, where time has been set aside (in the best of all



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worlds) for that kind of professional sharing. And as we learn more, we innovate and reflect more

on our practice in a sustained cycle of professional learning.

Some exciting professional development initiatives

That sustained cycle of professional learning appears in the following exciting professional

development initiatives. Some of these I have been involved in, and others I have learned of

through my students.

Lesson study

Lesson Study is a professional development approach that began in Japan as a means of improving

elementary education, but has now spread far beyond that, in Japan and in the United States

(Murata, 2002; Yoshida, 1999; Stigler & Hiebert, 1999; Richardson, 2004). In a lesson study cycle,

a group of teachers, usually teaching the same subject and level, work together in a small group,

meet to discuss their learning goals and collaboratively plan a lesson (called a “research lesson”) to

improve student learning. One of the teachers then teaches the lesson, while the others observe,

focusing on student learning. Then the teachers meet again, reflect upon the class and discuss their

observations, revise the lesson, and then often, another teacher teaches the revised lesson (Lewis,

2002; Richardson, 2004; Cerbin & Kopp, 2006). While lesson study has been widely used in math

and science education in Japan, it has now become much more popular as a professional

development process in elementary, secondary, and higher education in the United States (Lewis,

2002; Fernandez, 2002; Fernandez & Chokshi, 2002; Lewis, Perry & Hurd, 2004).

The lesson study project I want to talk about is one that my doctoral student, Asli Hassan,

developed in her work as the newly-appointed Academic Affairs Coordinator of the first-year

Foundation Program at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi, which prepares students for five

fields of engineering, where the medium of instruction is English. Since many of the students have

had most of their academic instruction through Arabic, they need additional English preparation

before they can take their classes through English, as well as additional learning in mathematics,

physics, and chemistry. As so often happens in programs of this type, where English becomes a

gatekeeper--allowing or preventing students from moving into their fields of study--there was little

integration among the various subjects and some frustration on the part of students. Hassan,

drawing upon her knowledge and commitment to content-based instruction, thought there might be

ways to integrate instruction in the curriculum, without intruding upon any of the faculty’s ownacademic subjects. She raised the idea of Lesson Study; said that she would like to explore its



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possible effectiveness and use the research for her dissertation; invited her colleagues to participate

in the project; and then made materials about lesson study, a video, and a website available. Twelve

teachers who taught Level 2 chose to participate. They decided to first develop an integrated lesson

plan that drew content from mathematics, physics and English for one cycle, with three teachers

each teaching that portion of the lesson in their subject area and the other members of the team

observing and taking notes. After discussing the results and revising the lesson, they taught it again

to another group of students. They did this through two cycles over the course of one term, with

chemistry replacing physics in the second cycle. In both cases, the lessons were videotaped to allow

those who were unable to be in the class for observation to be able to participate in the reflection

and revision process (Hassan, 2011).

As you might imagine, the results of this cross-disciplinary project were quite powerful.

Although there was some concern, in the beginning, about being observed by colleagues (not

surprising, since observation is often used for evaluation and university faculty may not be

accustomed to being observed), the focus on student learning helped alleviate that, and in the

process of collaborating, the teachers became a much closer learning community or community of

practice.

Teachers became aware of how much they were already integrating language and content in

their instruction, but also of how much more they could do this when they had the opportunity to

develop an integrated lesson plan and observe it being taught by someone in another discipline.

They also learned different instructional strategies that arise out of teaching subjects as different as

physics, mathematics, and English. Of particular interest to us as English teachers is that both

teachers in other disciplines and students became more aware of the importance of English. As

Hassan, explains, “Both language and content teachers stated that integrating the different

disciplines was of value for all the subjects taught (English, mathematics, physics, and chemistry)

and a benefit for the students’ long-term learning” (p. 63). As one teacher explained, “And they

[students] saw how connected, how integrated the math and the science and the English parts are if

they stop and think about it. Often times, you know, even though we're teaching the same subject,

the same theme, they don't see it that way. They see it as, ‘Okay this is English class; this is math

class; now this is science class’” (pp. 71-72). Another teacher noted that the integrated approach

motivated some of the less motivated students: “maybe certain individual students that were laid

back and lackadaisical and didn't give a darn . . . perked up during these lessons” (p. 77).



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So why is lesson study so effective? It meets many of the criteria of effective professional

development: it is teacher-directed, focused on the current teaching context and content (Lewis,

2002), collaborative (and in this case, collaborative across disciplines), and occurs over time.

Moreover, it builds from research on effective practice and is focused on student learning. As

Hassan explains, it is reflective of the paradigm shift in professional development, where teachers

are “professionals who can initiate and create collaborative environments that enhance their

professional growth. As a result, teachers become experts in their fields and in their classrooms (p.

16). Through lesson study, teachers are able to move out from their isolation and share their

knowledge with colleagues in a way that also benefits students (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999; Hassan,

2011).

Moreover, through lesson study, a learning community or community of practice evolves

with teachers observing and learning from each other through their professional work as they

collaboratively plan, develop, teach, revise, and re-teach their lessons (Wenger, 1998).

Reflective inquiry

Next I’d like to talk about a professional development program that I was involved in with a local

family literacy programs. “Family literacy” programs are adult, nonformal programs that provide

education and support for parents (almost always mothers) and their young children. While the

mothers are in ESL class where they not only focus on English, but also on job training and ways to

support their children’s education, the children are in early childhood education programs, where

they also engage in a number of educational activities focusing on language and literacy

development. Parents and children also come together on a weekly basis, where parents and their

children might look at a picture book and “read” together. One of the ESL teachers in the school (a

neighbor) asked if I’d be willing to talk with them about professional development activities. After

some discussion with the program leaders and their discussion with the teachers, we decided to

engage in a Reflective Inquiry Project, since the majority of teachers were very experienced and

wanted to focus on specific issues related to their own teaching.

This Reflective Inquiry Project, a combination of action research and group inquiry, is

based on the work of the Teacher Knowledge Project and the Reflective Teaching Project at the

School for International Training (Rodgers, 2002), as well as the extensive literature on reflective

practice. The goal of the Reflective Teaching Project, according to Rodgers, is to help teachers become more reflective practitioners (Cf. Dewey, 1933) and to develop a community of teachers



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reflecting on their teaching and their students’ learning. I had first learned of the Reflective

Teaching Project in some research I undertook to identify promising professional development

practices in US community college ESL programs. In this research (Chisman and Crandall, 2007;

Seymour, 2007) I learned of the experiences of City College in San Francisco, where a number of

faculty were engaged in researching their own practice with a focus on student learning after

discussing their classroom concerns and sharing ideas with colleagues in a structured discussion

session. The project was so successful, that though it was intended for experienced teachers, less

experienced teachers asked to join.

We held sessions on a monthly basis, and before each session, I met individually with one

of the teachers to discuss an issue or problem that this teacher was going to share with the group.

Then at the meeting, we used an approach similar to the “cycle of inquiry” in the Reflective

Teaching Project. To begin, that teacher described the issue or problem, using what were

appropriate of Wh-Questions as a guide. Then the other teachers asked open-ended questions for

clarification, but not giving advice (which could have closed down the discussion). Next, the

teacher and then the group moved from description to interpretation, reflecting or theorizing on the

source of the problem. Based on their interpretation of the problem, the teachers then gave

suggestions about possible ways of addressing the situation, which the teacher could reflect upon

before deciding on a course of action. The session then was closed with the participants providing

feedback on the process. Before the next session, the teacher applied what s/he has decided was the

best course of action and then shared the results and insights from that action research, at the next

session describing what they did and why, how well it worked, what changes they might make, and

what they learned from the process before another teacher introduced a new issue or problem.

Our sessions began with a focus on better ways to engage problematic students who for a

variety of possible reasons were not engaged in the process, perhaps because they were more

educated than the other learners or had educational aspirations that were not being addressed.

Because of the size of the program, most of the teachers knew these students and could share their

thoughts and interpretations, as well as what they had tried with these students in the past. Another

session, quite by surprise, involved two new teachers who had heard me discuss how learning

centers might be used to meet the diverse needs of the adult learners in the program, though they

have been principally used in elementary (and to some extent, secondary) education in the US.

These two new teachers read about centers and then set up their own centers and reported back tothe group on their effectiveness and what they learned in the process. This led to a follow-up



12

workshop, provided by a doctoral student who had applied this approach in adult ESL as part of her

doctoral dissertation research, something I knew quite well since I was on her doctoral committee

(Lovrien, 2011).

Why is reflective inquiry effective? First, it provides all participants with a chance not only

to research one aspect of their practice, but also to draw upon the insights and experiences of

colleagues as they think through ways to address the issue or concern. As one participant at City

College explained, the “process encourages discussion of the thorniest problem issues in a

supportive environment” and “gives teachers time to sort out and understand these issues better”

(Chisman & Crandall, 2007:97). It also nurtures a learning community, in this case, even bringing

in first-year teachers and interns. And it promotes critical reflection on practice, which Paulo Freire

in Pedagogy of Freedom, (2000) has identified as “the essential moment” “in the process of the

ongoing education of teachers.” As Kenneth Wolf (1991) explains, “Reflection is what allows us to

learn from our experience. It is an assessment of where we have been and where we want to go

next.”

Moreover, while action research can be a very effective individual professional

development approach, it may not be easy to undertake. Action research undertaken by individuals

can also be quite lonely, only underscoring the isolation that many teachers feel in their work. This

reflective inquiry project provides a process for identifying and interpreting a teaching problem and

identifying and planning action to address it. It also engages a group of colleagues in the process of

reflection and discussion, providing more ideas about both the sources of the problem and possible

avenues to address it, and nurtures a stronger community of practice (Hassan, 2011; Lave &

Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). While collaborative action research may also pair novice teachers

with more experienced teacher mentors, providing new teachers with the benefit of their mentor’s

experience and experienced teachers with the enthusiasm and new theories and instructional

strategies of the novice teacher (Farrell, 2007), in this project, the new teachers decided to work

together, only later having the benefit of a mentor.

Study circle or professional learning community

The last professional development approach that I want to describe in detail is an elementary school

study circle focused on helping children (both native and non-native speakers) who are having

difficulty learning to read in English using an approach called Reading Recovery (Clay, 1993,2002), a one-on-one tutoring program with a trained instructor.





14

ongoing learning community, where teachers with different backgrounds and experience were able

to discuss and learn from each other.

What is also interesting in this program is the way in which teachers who are interested in

the program can not only train and receive professional development to teach part-time in the

program, but also the ways in which a teacher can through extensive graduate education become a

teacher leader working in a new capacity with former colleagues. Also of note is the partnership

with a local university, where the training is provided. The teacher leaders from a number of

districts also meet regularly (four to six times a year) with the teacher trainer at the university, thus

creating broader learning communities or communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991;

Wenger, 1998)

Common features

These professional development programs all share the following features of effective teacher

professional development:

x They engage teachers in research on their classrooms and programs;

x They provide an opportunity for teachers to share insights and learn from each other,

leading to professional learning communities;

x They involve or lead to further reading on relevant issues related to the teachers’ teaching

and learning;

x They promote critical reflection on practice; and

x They occur over a sustained period of time.

Other promising professional development initiatives

In this final section, I want to highlight other promising professional development initiatives:

x An open door policy by “master teachers” who invite colleagues in to observe their classes

(usually at specified times) and also function informally as mentors to new teachers.

Extensive mentoring and coaching, especially for new teachers or even for experienced

teachers when a new instructional approach is being introduced, can be very effective,

providing support for the less experienced teacher and offering the prospect of learning

some new techniques for the more experienced. But mentoring and coaching can also be



15

exhausting for the mentor, and in small programs with extensive turnover of teachers, the

same experienced teachers may be asked to take on this role too often. This open door

policy with observation and informal mentoring may make it possible for even small

programs to provide this type of support.

x Team teaching, either by teachers who share the same subject and level or by teachers from

different disciplines who share the same students (for example in a ESP Program) providing

an opportunity for language and other subject matter teachers to learn not only something

about each others’ content areas, but also new instructional strategies.

x Paired, peer-observation of student learning and follow-up discussion or analysis (Richards

& Lockhart, 1994). This approach is especially effective when teachers share a student who

is having difficulty.

x Faculty meetings that routinely provide time for teachers to share and receive feedback on

things that they are trying in their classes. This is especially important when colleagues

have attended conferences and have new ideas they want to discuss.

x Engaging students in bringing their family and community “funds of knowledge” into the

classroom, helping to create a larger community of teachers and learners (Moll, 1992;

Edmonds, 2009).

The Internet has also made it possible to engage in most of Wallace’s three approaches, sometimes

resulting in global learning communities. For example:

x A TEYL (Teaching English for Young Learners Facebook Page that my colleague Joan

Kang Shin has been maintaining for some time, with teachers and teacher educators from

around the world who have participated in online TEYL courses.

x An online library of videos of teachers, the Media Library of Teaching Skills

(http://mlots.org) that “shows what teachers are doing in their adult classrooms and in

tutorials.” (Although the current adult ESL videos are limited, the idea is one that other

institutions or professional associations might want also to consider implementing.)



16

x A self-instructional course developed by the Center for Applied Linguistics on “Developing

Oral Proficiency of Adults Learning English,” with texts, videos, self-assessments, and

other resources (www.cal.or/adultspeak) that helps teachers understand the nature of oral

proficiency and factors that affect it and also provides activities for building speaking and

listening skills and assessing them.

x A series of Webinars like the Virtual Seminars provided free to TESOL members, offering

opportunities to listen to ask questions and listen to discussions by major theorists and

practitioners. Among those offered in May-June, 2011, are “Teaching Large Heterogeneous

Classes in ELT Contexts Worldwide,” with Penny Ur, and “Tech Tools for Busy Teachers”

with Deborah Healey and Robert Elliott.

x An Adult Education Wiki [ http://wiki.literacytent.org ] created at a national conference for

practitioners and researchers so they could continue the dialogue following the conference,

that has now become a community of practice, with ESOL as one of 30 topics, but also a

number of others such as Action Research or Project Based Learning that would also be of

interest.

Conclusion

As these initiatives make clear, there are many exciting and professionally satisfying ways in which

we can grow professionally, by learning from or with our colleagues, from or with colleagues in

other disciplines, as well as our students, both locally and globally. Sometimes, all that is needed is

to take action to implement these changes.

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Biodata

Jodi Crandall teaches in the MA TESOL Program and directs the interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Language,Literacy and Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She was formerly the Vice Presidentof the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL). Her research focuses on ESL/EFL/EIL curriculum and instruction, teacher education, professional development and intercultural communication Recent publications (some co-authored) include: American Ways: An Introduction to American Culture, Content-based Instruction in Higher Education Settings,

Content-based Instruction in Elementary and Secondary School Settings, Passing the Torch: Strategies for Innovationin Community College ESL.. Dr. Crandall is a former President of AAAL, TESOL, and WATESOL; a foundingmember and former Secretary-Treasurer of the TESOL International Research Foundation (TIRF); and a currentmember of the CAL Board of Trustees. Among her awards are the AAAL Distinguished Scholarship and ServiceAward, the James E Alatis TESOL Award, and the University System of Maryland Regents Award. Professor Crandall

can be contacted at [email protected].



21

What do Thai Policy Makers Think about Education? A Critical Analysis of Published Policy

Makers’ Statements

Richard Watson Todd

If English language teaching is to flourish and be successful in Thailand across awide range of contexts, government support for valuable initiatives andinnovations is needed. Although there have been a large number of educationalinnovations in the last few years, most have had little effect on the Englishlearning of Thai students. To understand why certain innovations are promotedand why most innovations have little impact, we need to understand the thinkingof the policy makers, especially at the Ministry of Education. This paper presentsa critical analysis of quotations from Ministers of Education, senior educationofficials and others influential in Thai education from the last few years to attemptto uncover their concerns and their conceptions of education. The analysis reveals

that the policy makers subscribe to the ideology of social and economic efficiencyas the philosophy driving Thai education, that they promote preconventionalmorality, that they view ‘traditional’ methods as necessarily detrimental, and thatthey believe there is a single best way of teaching. The implications of theseviews for the development of English language education in Thailand arediscussed.Keywords: Thai education, educational policy makers, educational innovation

¼ oÎµ®Ã¥µ¥°¦³Á«Å¥·°¥nµÅ¦µ¦«¹¬µ? µ¦ª·Á¦µ³®rª·µ¦r-µ¦°¼ oÎµ®Ã¥µ¥ µ¦-°£µ¬µ°§¬°¦³Á«Å¥³¡µÂ¨³¦³-ªµ¤-ÎµÁ¦ÈÄ¦·¸ É®¨µ®¨µ¥

Åo´ Ê µ¦-´-»µ£µ¦´Äµ¦¦·Á¦· É¤-¦oµ-¦¦r¦ª¤´ Êª´¦¦¤¸ É¤¦³Ã¥rº°Á}-· ÉÎµÁ}°¥nµ¥· É ¹Â¤oªnµ³¤¸ª´¦¦¤oµµ¦«¹¬µÎµª¤µÄnª®¨µ¥e¸ Énµ¤µ ª¦¦¤-nªÄ®n-n¨n°µ¦Á¦¸¥¦¼ o£µ¬µ°´§¬°´Á¦¸¥Å¥Á¡¸¥Á Èo°¥Ánµ´ Ê Á¡º É°ÁoµÄ-µÁ®»°µ¦-nÁ-¦·¤ª´¦¦¤nµÇ Á®¨nµ´ ÊÂ¨³-µÁ®» Éª´¦¦¤-nªÄ®n-n¨n°µ¦Á¦¥¦¼ oÁ¡¸¥Á Èo°¥ Á¦µÎµÁ}o°ÁoµÄÂª·°¼ oÎµ®Ã¥µ¥ Ã¥Á¡µ³°¥nµ¥· É¦³¦ª«¹¬µ·µ¦ µª·´¥· Ê ÊÎµÁ-°µ¦ª· Á¦µ³®rª·µ¦r-µ¦°¦´¤¦¸ªnµµ¦¦³¦ªµ¦«¹¬µ·µ¦ oµ¦µµ¦¦³´-¼oµµ¦«¹¬µ Â¨³¼ o¤-nªÁ É¥ªo° É¤°Îµµ

-·ÄÁ É¥ª´µ¦«¹¬µ°¦³Á«Å¥Änª®¨µ¥e Énµ¤µ Á¡º É°Á¥¹ªµ¤´ª¨Â¨³Âªªµ¤·oµµ¦«¹¬µ µµ¦ª·Á¦µ³®r¡ªnµ ¼ oÎµ®Ã¥µ¥Äo¦µµÂª·oµ¦³-··£µ¡µ-´¤Â¨³Á«¦¬·Á}®¨´¦´µ É´Á º É°µ¦«¹¬µÅ¥ -nÁ-¦·¤µ¦Äo¦·¥¦¦¤Á}®¨´ Éo°¥¹º°Â¨³·´·µ¤ ¡·µ¦µªnµª·¸ ‘´ ÊÁ·¤' Á}ª·¸ Én°Ä®oÁ·¨Á-¥ Â¨³¤ªµ¤Áº É°ªnµ¤Âªµµ¦-°¸ É¸¸ É-»Á¡¸¥ª·¸Á¸¥ª ¨µµ¦ª·´¥-µ¤µ¦Îµ¤µ°£·¦µ¥ªµ¤®¤µ¥Ã¥´¥°´«³Á®¨nµ¸ ÊÁ¡º É°ÎµÅ-¼ nµ¦¡´µµ¦«¹¬µ£µ¬µ°´§¬Ä¦³Á«Å¥n°Å

Îµ-Îµ: µ¦«¹¬µ°¦³Á«Å¥ ¼ oÎµ®Ã¥µ¥µ¦«¹¬µ ª¦¦¤oµµ¦«¹¬µ



22

The quality of Thai education is a continual cause for concern. Despite the promulgation of the

progressive National Education Act twelve years ago (Office of the National Education

Commission, 1999), criticisms of the quality of both Thai education in general (e.g. Feigenblatt, et

al., 2010) and of English language teaching in particular (e.g. Baker, 2008; Prapaisit de Segovia &

Hardison, 2009) are common. Similarly, despite numerous efforts to initiate beneficial innovations

(e.g. British Council, 2006), very little seems to change. One of the key reasons for this bleak

picture is that Thai education is dominated by top-down centralised decision making (Watson

Todd, 2000). If initiatives are to become reality and Thai education is to change for the better, the

main top-down decision makers need to be on board, since, with the way Thai education is set up, it

is these policy makers who have the power to ensure that initiatives receive the attention and

support they deserve. With the key policy makers having substantial power over the future

development of Thai education, it is important to understand their thinking and beliefs, and the

purpose of this paper is to gain some insights into the conceptions of education, concerns and issues

of interest of some of the key educational policy makers in Thailand.

Methodological approach

To investigate the thinking of key Thai educational policy makers, we need to examine what they

say and write. Taking such statements at face value, however, does not necessarily provide

information about their thinking, since public statements are affected by many other factors than

just beliefs. We therefore need to take a critical approach to examining their statements. Such an

approach has three main benefits for the purpose of this paper. First, critical approaches can

uncover hidden meanings behind opaque language (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2006); second, they can

help in the analysis of underlying ideologies (Wallace, 2003); and third, they are particularly suited

to the analysis of situations involving dominance and inequality (Flowerdew, 2008) such as the

Thai education system where the Ministry has power over schools and teachers.

The data for the critical analysis is taken from newspaper articles published in the last six

years which were either written by policy makers or extensively quote from them. A total of 32

articles were found which fit these criteria, and these include writings or quotations from Ministers

of Education, directors of major sections at the Ministry, chairs of influential educational

organisations, and presidents of major universities or other influential educational institutions.

The statements made by the policy makers in these articles were examined for commonly

recurring themes. Themes were identified by searching the data for keywords that could act as shellnouns (Aktas & Cortes, 2008) with broad implications for education (e.g. goal , objective, method )



23

and then examining the specification of the shell noun in the given context. To avoid analysis of the

idiosyncratic concerns of a single policy maker, identified themes need to have been discussed at

some length by at least three different policy makers. By identifying themes in this way, it is likely

that the themes reflect the ideologies or issues that are driving Thai education. From the data, four

key themes were identified and these are discussed below in turn.

Theme 1: The curriculum ideology of economic efficiency

Perhaps the most important issue driving educational policy is the perceived purpose of education.

One of the most influential statements on educational purposes is the Dearing Report on Higher

Education in the UK. This report identified four main purposes of education (Miller, et al., 1998):

1. To inspire and enable individuals to develop their capabilities to the highest potential

through life.

2. To increase knowledge and understanding for their own sake.

3. To serve the needs of the economy.

4. To play a major role in developing society.

These four purposes fit the four main curriculum ideologies: learner-centredness, academic

rationalism, social and economic efficiency, and social reconstructionism (similar to critical

pedagogy) respectively (Richards, 2002), which, in turn, reflect progressive (for the first two),

reproductionist and reconstructionist value systems (Wright, 2005). Given that these ideologies and

value systems are likely to have a massive impact on educational policies, which of the four do

Thai policy makers subscribe to?

Perhaps the clearest ideological statement of a Thai educational policy maker was made by

Wijit Srisa-arn, then-Education Minister, in 2007:

Education is important to Thailand because quality education will produce a valuableworkforce that could serve the demand in the globalised world and improve the country’scompetitiveness ... The objective is to develop quality people so we will haveknowledgeable workers for the globalised world. The country’s competitiveness willimprove significantly and noticeably over the next 10 years. By then, we will be able tocompete with any rivals in the region.

The driving ideology behind Thai education would therefore appear to be social and economic

efficiency. However, nearly halfway through the projected ten-year period, the goal of economic

efficiency is still a concern. In 2010, Veeravat Wannasiri, Chair of the Private Vocational SchoolsAssociation, stated



24

the Education Ministry’s panel on human resources planning put the blame [for graduatesnot finding jobs] squarely on the universities for turning out graduates who fail to matchthe needs of the labour market

and a year later, Tej Bunnag, former-Foreign Minister and Chairman of the Asian Institute of

Technology, said

Top level companies only hire the best, and if the institutes or universities are not producing graduates who match the market requirements, chances of them getting hiredare remote. The private sector, on the other hand, has been complaining regarding theunder-supply of globally competitive graduates and the lack of skills required by themarket place.

Economic efficiency as an educational ideology would appear to be a desirable goal. After

all, no teacher would be happy if their graduating students could not find employment. However, it

is not without its criticisms.

Although the National Education Standards (Office of the National Education Council,

2004) support the goal of economic efficiency by arguing that education is an essential factor for

“vigorous competitiveness in the international arena” (p. 1), the National Education Act (Office of

the National Education Commission, 1999) appears to prioritise learner-centredness over economic

efficiency. In Section 22, “The teaching-learning process shall aim at enabling the learners to

develop themselves at their own pace and to the best of their potentiality”; and in Section 28, “The

substance of the curricula, both academic and professional, shall aim at human development”. The

over-riding emphasis placed on economic efficiency by Wijit Srisa-arn, therefore, appears to

contradict the main purpose of education as stated in the Act.

A potentially more serious criticism of economic efficiency has been made most

influentially by Bloom (1987), an advocate of academic rationalism. He argued that focusing

education on what is effectively job training results in a dumbing down of education and missedopportunities for deeper learning.

A more political criticism is that reproductionist ideologies of education serve the status quo

and devalue critical thinking (Wallace, 2003). As applied to Thailand, this position has been most

cogently stated by Feigenblatt et al. (2010, p. 301) which is worth quoting in full:

Greater educational opportunities were viewed as important by the Bangkok elite as a

way to jump on the modernization bandwagon. Nevertheless, it should be noted that thisinstrumental need for education viewed people as tools for economic growth. Children



25

were supposed to learn how to become efficient and obedient workers and subjects. Thegoal was not for most of those children to enjoy the fruits of development during their lifetime but rather for them to work for the good of the “nation” which truly meant thegrowth of Bangkok and the interests of the elite.

Such an argument presents the goals of economic efficiency from a different, and far moreworrying, perspective. Whether one thinks that such a hidden agenda is behind the Ministry’s

emphasis on economic efficiency is a matter of political belief, but, whatever the reality, it does

cast doubt on the use of the economic efficiency ideology as the driving force behind educational

policy.

Theme 2: Promoting morals

In recent years, policy makers have repeatedly stated that Thai education should incorporate two

key broad objectives. The first of these is the need to teach morals (in Thai: ¦·¥¦¦¤ or jariya-tham).

The goal of education as producing moral people and a moral society is one of the most commonly

recurring themes discussed by policy makers:

“The ultimate goal is producing capable people with good morality, not just capable people¨ (Wijit Srisa-arn, Minister of Education, 2007)“[The goal is for students to] have knowledge in their brain and also have good socialskills and moral virtues in their heart” (Virachai Techavijit, Chairman, Regent’s School,

2010)“Parents and school staff are placing too much emphasis on exams and competition

between students, despite the fact that fostering virtue, social skills and a positive attitudetowards learning is the most important thing for children.” (Abhisit Vejjajiva, PrimeMinister, 2010)“Education is everything that leads to a happy and healthy populace, a better society, anda society that is more just - a society that we would like to call a society governed bydharma. It is a society that is moral and ethical in every way.” (Arthit Ourairat, former-House Speaker and President of Rangsit University, 2009)

While it may seem that instilling morals in students is a valid goal for education, none of the

policy makers state what they mean by ‘morals’. Research into children’s moral development hassuggested that they typically go through three stages: preconventional morality (based on obedience

and reciprocity), conventional morality (based on interpersonal harmony), and postconventional

morality (based on the social contract and universal principles) (Tan et al., 2003). Implicitly in the

statements of policy makers and explicitly in the national test of morals organised by the National

Institute of Educational Testing Services (NIETS), it appears that the policy makers believe that

there is a ‘correct’ set of morals and that morality is largely preconventional in that students are

expected to obey the morals decided upon by their seniors. Such a view allows a hidden purpose behind the promotion of morals. As Feigenblatt et al. (2010) state, the Thai educational curriculum



26

includes “a disproportionate number of hours in morals and religion. Students were and are still

taught mostly about how to behave and what to believe in primary school ... The ideal is to shape

children into submissive workers who are satisfied with what they have and who do not question

authority” (p. 302). In this way, the promotion of morals may have the same underlying ulterior

motives as the ideology of economic efficiency.

Theme 3: Promoting critical and analytical thinking

The second key broad objective is the promotion of critical and analytical thinking skills. This

objective is mentioned in the National Education Act which says that education should “enable

learners to think critically” (Office of the National Education Commission, 1999, Section 24) and

has been stressed by Ministers of Education, such as Jurin Laksanavisit in 2009:

The first pillar is a new generation of Thai people who will be able to think critically andanalytically ... I assigned all MOE agencies to design methods whereby students candevelop increased critical thinking skills and analytical acumen ... OBEC will beinstructed to adopt methods which focus on critical thinking.

Also in 2009, retiring Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Education, Khunying Kasama

Voravan Na Ayudhaya, while similarly stressing the importance of analytical thinking as a key

educational objective, had a slightly different take on how this objective could be achieved:

In other countries, they define analytical thinking of students as far broader than forcingthem to practise analytical skills in class and only as specified by the school curriculum... Developing an analytical culture in Thai society should be the place to start.

The most noticeable effect of the push to promote critical and analytical thinking has been

the adoption of tests of analytical thinking as part of the university entrance system in the form of

the General Aptitude Test and the Professional Aptitude Test (similar to the Scholastic Aptitude

Test of the US). This move, however, may have had the opposite effect to its goal. Uthumporn

Jamornmarn, Head of the NIETS, in 2010 talked about recent increases in GAT and PAT scores:

Special tuition classes outside of school may have helped enhance their skills. But howthe skills were improved was of secondary importance to the fact that more studentsactually made substantial gains ... When children are familiar with analytical tests, theywill be able to understand the subjects better.

The improvements in test scores suggest that Khunying Kasama´s warnings about taking a

surface approach to analytical skills have not been addressed. If a short period of studying at a cram

school can lead to an improvement in analytical thinking scores, the tests do not appear to beaiming at “developing an analytical culture,” but rather at practising a limited set of predetermined





28

The arguments about teaching methods made by Education Ministers are as obsolete as the

methods they criticise. For over twenty years, it has been widely accepted that the search for an

ideal teaching method is misguided (e.g. Kumaravadivelu, 1994). The influence of context and

participants on the potential effectiveness of teaching methods far outweighs any benefits inherent

to a particular method, and such influences also mean that ‘modern’ methods are not necessarily

preferable. Even if there was an ideal method, experience of previous attempts to implement

methodological innovation in Thailand has shown that policy demands have very little influence on

classroom practice (e.g. Darasawang & Watson Todd, forthcoming; Prapaisit de Segovia &

Hardison, 2009). Given that there is no one-method-fits-all, it is probably beneficial that English

language learning in Thailand is not overly restricted by methodological policy demands, since

competent teachers are relatively free to make methodological decisions appropriate to their

immediate context.

Implications for English language teaching initiatives in Thailand

There are three ways of viewing the beliefs of the policy makers. First, if we as teachers follow the

seemingly preferred educational model of becoming obedient, submissive workers, we can simply

accept and follow the conceptions and demands of the policy makers. This would mean that

curricula should be set up with objectives meeting the needs of employers, that we should attempt

to instill obedience and preconventional morality in our students, that we should teach surface-level

critical and analytical skills, and that we should ditch many of our proven teaching methods and

strive to be as modern as possible. It would also mean that we would need to ignore the inherent

contradictions in the beliefs of the policy makers - that any real critical thinking stands in

opposition to preconventional morality, and that reproductionist value systems promote rote

learning. Fortunately, it seems unlikely that many teachers will follow this route.

Second, if we have taken on board the critical thinking apparently promoted by the policy

makers, we can resist their initiatives, either actively by arguing against them or passively by

ignoring them. Given the lack of evidence of any real progress being derived from policy

initiatives, the last choice of ignoring policy makers’ initiatives may be the most common reaction,

allowing teachers to make the changes they feel are most appropriate for their situation.

Third, if we would like to promote and gain acceptance for our own initiatives, we can

couch them in terms reflecting the beliefs of the policy makers. When setting up a new curriculum,include morals and critical and analytical thinking skills among its stated objectives and show how



29

its graduates can enhance the country’s competitiveness (even if such issues are barely dealt with in

the curriculum). When promoting a methodological innovation, imply how modern it is. While

such an approach only pays lip-service to policies and smacks of manipulation, in the Thai

educational context where the power differences in the hierarchy are large, this approach may tip

the balance between an initiative being implemented and it being ignored.

The key issue here is who decides what happens in ELT classrooms in Thailand: the policy

makers or the teachers? While there are enough horror stories of appalling teaching in Thai

classrooms to justify a need for a measure of central control, the problem is that such control may

penalise good teachers by reducing their freedom to make decisions more than it curbs bad

teaching. For example, a teacher may, for the best of reasons, decide to reduce students’ propensity

for making grammatical errors by teaching formulaic phrases on the basis that this leads to

improved performance (Yu, 2009). The teaching of formulaic phrases, however, may lead to

increases in the use of rote learning, and thus the teacher who has implemented a potentially

beneficial innovation with the goal of promoting learning becomes open to criticism for not

following the preferred methodology of policy makers. For the future development of Thai

education, a delicate balance between central control to implement policy makers’ initiatives and

individual freedom for teachers to make their own decisions is needed. While it is beyond the scope

of this paper to suggest how such a balance can be achieved, awareness of what policy makers

really believe is crucial.

References

Aktas, R. N. & Cortes, V. (2008). Shell nouns as cohesive devices in published and ESL studentwriting. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 7 (1), 3-14.

Baker, W. (2008). A critical examination of ELT in Thailand. RELC Journal , 39(1), 131-146.

Bloom, A. (1987). The closing of the American mind: How higher education has failed democracy

and impoverished the souls of today's students. London: Penguin.

British Council (2006). Future Perfect - English language policy for global transition Conference

Report . Bangkok: British Council.

Cook, G. (1994). Repetition and learning by heart: an aspect of intimate discourse, and itsimplications. ELT Journal . 48(2), 133-141.

Darasawang, P., & Watson Todd, R. (forthcoming). The effect of policy on English language

teaching at secondary schools in Thailand. In Low, E. L. & Azirah, H. (Eds.), English inSoutheast Asia: Features, policy and language in use. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.



30

Ding, Y. (2007). Text memorization and imitation: The practices of successful Chinese learners of English. System, 35(2), 271-280.

Feigenblatt, O. F. von, Suttichujit, V., Shuib, M. S., Keling, M. F., & Ajis, M. N. (2010). Weaponsof mass assimilation: A critical analysis of the use of education in Thailand. Journal of Asia

Pacific Studies, 1(2), 292-311.

Flowerdew, J. (2008). Critical discourse analysis and strategies of resistance. In Bhatia, V. K.,Flowerdew, J., & Jones, R. H. (Eds.), Advances in Discourse Analysis (pp. 195-210).Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Kumaravadivelu, B. (1994). The postmethod condition: (E)merging strategies. TESOL Quarterly,28(1), 27-48.

Miller, A. H., Imrie, B. W., & Cox, K. (1998). Student Assessment in Higher Education. London:Kogan Page.

Office of the National Education Commission (1999). National Education Act of B. E. 2542 (1999).Bangkok: Office of the National Education Commission.

Office of the National Education Council (2004). National Education Standards. Bangkok: Officeof the National Education Council.

Prapaisit de Segovia, L., & Hardison, D. M. (2009). Implementing education reform. ELT Journal ,63(2), 154-162.

Richards, J. C. (2002). Planning aims and objectives in language programs. Singapore: RELC.

Tan, O. S., Parsons, R. D., Hinson, S. L., & Sardo-Brown, D. (2003). Educational psychology: A

practitioner-researcher approach (Asian edition). Singapore: Thomson.

Thurlow, C., & Jaworski, A. (2006). The alchemy of the upwardly mobile: symbolic capital and thestylization of elites in frequent-flyer programmes. Discourse and Society, 17 (1), 1-30.

Wallace, C. (2003). Critical reading in language education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Watson Todd, R. (2000). Top down education reform doomed to failure. Bangkok Post, 16 January,

2000.

Wright, T. (2005). Classroom management in language education. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Yu, X. (2009) A formal criterion for identifying lexical phrases: Implication from a classroomexperiment. System, 37 (4), 689-699.

Biodata

Richard Watson Todd has worked at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi for nearly 20 years wherehe is Associate Professor and Head of the Centre for Research and Services in the School of Liberal Arts. He is theauthor of Much Ado about English and Classroom Teaching Strategies, and has published numerous articles in theareas of text linguistics, computer-based analyses of language, and curriculum innovatio





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Introduction

For over two decades, much research in the area of second language learning has emphasized the

significance of vocabulary acquisition. In particular, vocabulary has received increased attention as

witnessed by the substantial amount of empirical research on vocabulary learning strategies in the

1990s (e.g. Haastrup, 1991; Mondria & Wit-de-Boer, 1991; Wang, Thomas, Inzana, & Primicerio,

1993). Vocabulary is the very foundation of language use, be it for a receptive or productive

dimension. Nation (1990) defined receptive learning as being able to recognize a word and recall its

meaning when it is encountered in reading or listening, whereas productive learning not only refers

to recognition and recall but also includes the ability to use the word at the appropriate time

through speaking or writing. He further indicated that most students’ difficulties in both receptive

and productive language use result from their inadequate vocabulary. Hence, promoting students’

vocabulary knowledge has become an educational priority as it is inextricably associated with

knowledge acquisition and, therefore, academic achievement.

Due to the complexity of word knowledge, students often struggle with the vocabulary-

learning task, particularly in a second language-learning context in which they devote their time

and energy to take responsibility for their own learning process. Researchers have claimed that the

learner’s use of language learning strategies correlates with various aspects of their success (Nyikos

& Oxford, 1993). They also argue that most language learning strategies are used for vocabulary

tasks, and they attempt to identify a link between the learner’s success and their preference for

strategy use.

A number of recent studies reported that many Thai EFL students’ repertoire of vocabulary

learning strategies was limited, which has, in turn, become one of the factors leading to their

lacking the four skills necessary to communicate in the English language effectively (e.g.,

Pookcharoen, 2007; Siriwan, 2007). Nevertheless, very little is known about how Thai learners

perceive the use of vocabulary learning strategies, and why they occasionally fail to use certain

strategies they consider useful. In addition, with regard to methodology, most of the research

studies have only been conducted quantitatively using questionnaires to investigate vocabulary

learning strategies employed by students at different levels. This common practice is often deemed

inadequate at yielding a profound understanding of the complex vocabulary acquisition process

(Gu, 1994; Lawson & Hogben, 1996).



33

The present mixed methods study investigates the use of vocabulary learning strategies

among Thai EFL university students. The aims of the project were threefold: (a) to identify the

strategies used most and least frequently by the students and those they perceive as most and least

useful; (b) to examine how the students’ frequency of strategy use relate to their perceptions of the

strategy usefulness; and (c) to document the factors contributing to their failure to employ certain

strategies they consider useful.

Literature Review

Language Learning Strategies

The past few decades have witnessed an enormous growth in research activity in language learning

strategies. Much of the research conducted in this area has been influenced by developments in

cognitive psychology (Williams & Burden, 1997). Even though there is no consensus on a

definition of the term learning strategies, an often-quoted one is “specific actions taken by the

learner to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective, and

more transferable to new situations” (Oxford, 1990, p. 8). Adding to its functions, Oxford and

Cohen (1992) further proposed a detailed definition of the term as: …steps or actions taken by learners to improve the development of their language skills.These strategies have the power to increase attention essential for learning a language, toenhance rehearsal that allows linkages to be strongly forged, to improve the encoding and

integration of language material, and to increase retrieval of information when needed for use (p. 1). After thirty years of research and practice, Cohen (2007) devised a comprehensive survey to

examine the use of terminology by an international group of strategy experts in the field of

language learner strategies. To define what language learner strategies are, each of the seven major

themes was taken into consideration: level of consciousness, degree of mental activity, extent of

describable actions, degree of goal orientation, strategy size, amount of strategy clustering, and

potential for leading to learning. Their collective self-reflection reveals that the construct ismultidimensional and elusive. Even though disagreements in various respects exist, there is some

consensus among these experts that language learner strategies are “conscious or semi-conscious

thoughts and behaviors employed by learners, often with the intention of enhancing their

knowledge about and performance in a second language (L2)” (Cohen, 2007, p. 57).

Definition and Classification of Vocabulary Learning Strategies

Vocabulary learning strategies constitute a subcategory of language learning strategies. Catalan(2003) defined vocabulary learning strategy as “knowledge about the mechanisms (processes,



34

strategies) used in order to learn vocabulary as well as steps or actions taken by students (a) to find

out the meaning of unknown words, (b) to retain them in long-term memory, (c) to recall them at

will, and (d) to use them in oral or written mode” (p. 56).

Ellis (1994) pointed out that some influencing factors in classifying language learning

strategies include, but are not limited to, the particular subjects in the study, the research setting,

and the specific interests of the researchers. In classifying vocabulary learning strategies, different

researchers have their specific ways that are also reflected in different names used to refer to an

individual strategy.

According to Oxford (1990), language learning strategies can be divided into two main

classes: (1) direct strategies, which directly involve the target language such as reviewing and

practicing; and (2) indirect strategies, which provide indirect support for language learning such as

planning, co-operating and seeking opportunities. These two categories constitute six

subcategories: memory (helps learners to store and retrieve information), cognitive (allows learners

to make sense of and produce new language), compensation (enables learners to communicate

despite lack of language knowledge), metacognitive (allows learners to regulate their learning

through planning, monitoring, and evaluating), affective (enables learners to manage their

emotions, attitudes, motivations, and values), and social strategies (helps learners to interact with

other people to improve language learning). While memory, cognitive, and compensation strategies

belong to the direct strategy group, the indirect strategy group consists of metacognitive, affective,

and social strategies.

By the same token, Schmitt (1997) proposed a vocabulary learning strategy inventory with

two main categories: strategies for the discovery of a new word’s meaning, and strategies for

consolidating a word, once it has been encountered. Similar to Oxford’s classification system,

Schmitt’s taxonomy adopted four categories, namely social, memory, cognitive, and metacognitive.

In order to cover cases where meanings of new words are discovered without other people’s

assistance, Schmitt introduced a fifth category, determination strategies. Thus, his final taxonomy

of vocabulary learning strategies contains five categories with 58 individual strategies in total.

Research on L2 Vocabulary Learning Strategies

Most studies on vocabulary learning strategies were directed at individual strategies or a smallnumber of them. Gu and Johnson (1996) conducted a large-scale study to examine the relationship



35

between vocabulary used by 850 Chinese learners of English and their vocabulary size and general

language proficiency. They reported that visual repetition of new words did not contribute to

positive learning outcome, as opposed to such deeper strategies as contextual guessing, dictionary

use skills, note-taking, and metacognitive strategies. In the same vein, Schmitt (1997) surveyed a

sample of 600 Japanese learners to explore the use of different vocabulary learning strategies and

their perceptions of how helpful they were. He pointed out that learners used more dictionary and

repetition strategies and considered them more useful than other strategies. Fewer imagery and

semantic grouping strategies were used than other strategies and were considered the least useful.

Based on the findings of studies related to learning and vocabulary learning, Schmitt further

concluded: 1) many learners were aware of the importance of vocabulary learning; moreover,

strategies for learning vocabulary were used more often than those for other linguistic aspects; 2)

such mechanical strategies as memorization, note-taking, and repetition were used more often than

deep strategies such as guessing, imagery, and the keyword technique; and 3) good learners used a

wider range of vocabulary learning strategies than poor students and actively engaged in their own

vocabulary learning process.

More recently, in Hong Kong, Fan (2003) extended the scope of previous studies by

revealing the relationships among how frequently strategies were used by 1,067 students, how

useful they were perceived to be, and how useful they actually were in enriching the vocabulary of

learners. Lip (2009) conducted another study to determine 36 Cantonese-speaking learners’

frequency of use of vocabulary learning strategies and their perception of the strategies’ usefulness.

Both studies reported that the frequency of strategy use among the students was positively and

significantly correlated with their perceptions about the usefulness of strategy. In other words, the

more often a learner used a strategy, the more useful he or she would find it for learning

vocabulary.

While a large number of vocabulary studies have been conducted in the Thai context and

have added to our understanding of what strategies student use (e.g. Kongthong, 2007;

Pookcharoen, 2009; Siriwan, 2007), there is a dearth of research that seeks to document the

relationship between students’ frequency of strategy use and their perceived usefulness. Thus, the

current study is primarily aimed to help identify the relationship among Thai EFL learners.



36

Research Questions

Aiming to investigate the frequency of use and perceived usefulness of vocabulary learning

strategies employed by Thai EFL undergraduates in several dimensions, the current study addresses

the following research questions:

1. What are the strategies used most and least frequently by the students, and what strategies

do they perceive as most and least useful?

2. To what extent does the students’ frequency of strategy use relate to their perceptions of the

strategy usefulness?

3. What are the factors contributing to their failure to employ certain strategies they consider

useful?

Methodology

Participants and Context

The participants of the study included 400 Thai EFL students who were enrolled in EG221 Reading

for Information at Thammasat University in the second semester of the 2010 academic year. This

reading course focused on three principal aspects: (1) studying strategies used in reading

informative texts; (2) analyzing the content and the writer’s presentation of information; and (3)

practicing outlining and summarizing as well as giving opinions about the texts through oral

discussion or writing. In addition, the course reinforced a wide range of vocabulary learning

strategies, which played a pivotal role in enabling the students to read informative texts effectively.

The participants were diverse in terms of age, academic discipline, and English proficiency.

Of all the students, 286 students (71%) were female and 114 students (29%) were male. Their ages

ranged from 19-23 years old. These students were from various faculties including Liberal Arts (N

= 179 or 45%), Commerce and Accountancy (N = 105 or 26%), Political Science (N = 64 or 16%),

Science and Technology (N = 16 or 4%), Economics (N = 15 or 3.75%), Law (N = 8 or 2%),

Journalism and Mass Communication (N = 7 or 1.75%), and Social Administration (N = 6 or

1.5%). These students had an average of 15 years of learning English as a foreign language in

school.

Instrumentation

The questionnaire used for the current study was adapted from Schmitt’s (1997) taxonomy of

vocabulary learning strategies (see Appendix A). It included six strategies in each of the fivecategories: determination (DET), social (SOC), memory (MEM), cognitive (COG), and



37

metacognitive (MET). The frequency of use and perceived usefulness were measured by five-point

Likert scales (1 = Never to 5 = Very Often; 1 = Not Useful to 5 = Very Useful). A section eliciting

the respondents’ background information, their grade for EL172 (the EG221 course prerequisite),

and the factors preventing them from using certain strategies they considered useful was also

included. For all participants to provide as accurate and complete information as possible, the

questionnaire was translated into Thai and reviewed by an expert before the actual questionnaire

administration.

This study was designed as mixed methods research which Johnson and Onwuegbuzie

(2004) defined as “the class of research where the researcher mixes or combines quantitative and

qualitative research techniques, methods, approaches, concepts or language into a single study” (p.

17). Even though this research paradigm has been implemented in a small proportion of vocabulary

studies, this innovative approach helps acquire a better understanding of students’ vocabulary

learning process in different aspects.

In this study, a one-hour semi-structured interview was conducted with each of 20 randomly

selected students who previously provided their email address in the survey questionnaire (see

Appendix B). A two-week vocabulary learning journal was also used as data. The aim of this

instrument is to allow the students to describe their actual use of vocabulary learning strategies as

well as their difficulties and limitations for using some strategies when engaging in different tasks

at school and at home without the presence of the researcher.

Data Collection and Analysis

Working collaboratively with the instructors who taught the course, the researcher asked for their

permission and assistance to recruit students during a class session. A total of 400 students from a

wide range of majors responded to the questionnaire on vocabulary learning strategies. Although

not timed, the entire survey took approximately 15 minutes to complete. The mean scores and

standard deviations of responses to 30 strategy items were calculated to identify which strategies

were reported as being used most and least frequently and which were perceived as most and least

useful. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients were also calculated to ascertain whether

there were any significant relationships between the frequency of use and perceived usefulness of

strategy.







40

Table 2: Most and Least Useful StrategiesStrategy M SD

Most Useful

METDET

METDETCOG

25. Use English-language media (songs, movies, etc.)5. Bilingual dictionary

26. Interact with native speakers4. Guess from textual context23. Take notes in class

4.614.39

4.364.354.21

0.690.79

0.890.780.81

Least Useful

METCOGSOCSOCSOC

29. Skip or pass new word22. Flash cards11. Discover new meaning through group work activity10. Ask classmates for meaning12. Study and practice meaning in a group

2.943.503.653.693.71

1.151.080.910.920.94

Based on the ranking shown above, the means of individual strategy items which were

perceived as useful by the respondents ranged from a high of 4.61 (item no. 25) to a low of 2.94

(item no. 29) with an overall mean of 4.00.

Comparing the two lists aforementioned, the study found that four out of the top five

strategies were both very often used and perceived as very useful: 1) Bilingual dictionary

(frequency of use 4.29/0.86; perceived usefulness 4.39/0.79); 2) Use English-language media

(4.19/0.92; 4.61/0.69); 3) Guess from textual context (3.98/0.90; 4.35/0.78); and 4) Take notes in

class (3.89/0.95; 4.21/0.81). However, only one strategy from the bottom five strategy ranking was

found to be both never used and perceived as not useful: Flash cards (2.54/1.11; 3.50/1.08).

Evidently, the mean values of the most and least useful strategies (as shown in Table 2)

were comparatively higher than those of the most and least frequently used strategies (as shown in

Table 1), which postulates that, in general, the students in the present study failed to employ each

of these reported strategies as frequently as the degree they perceived them as useful in learning

vocabulary. Furthermore, such high usefulness ratings imply that the students might be ready or

willing to try new strategies to enrich their vocabulary repertoire if they are introduced to them and

provided an explicit instruction.

Research Question 2: To what extent does the students’ frequency of strategy use relate to their

perceptions of the strategy usefulness?

The focus of the second question was on the relationship between frequency of use and perceived

usefulness of the Thai EFL undergraduates’ vocabulary learning strategies. To address the question,



41

quantitative data from the questionnaire were used. The means, standard deviations, and correlation

coefficients of the five strategies achieving the strongest correlation were calculated and are

presented in Table 3 that follows.

Table 3: Strategy Items with the Strongest Correlation

Strategy Frequency Usefulness Corr

M SD M SD r

MEMMEMDETMEMMEM

18. Say new word aloud when studying17. Study the sound of a word3. Analyze any available pictures or gestures13. Image word’s meaning14. Connect word to a personal experience

3.533.353.773.303.56

1.081.110.991.151.05

3.863.813.983.904.11

1.031.080.911.050.92

.722*

.711*

.698*

.673*

.646** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).

It was found that a number of vocabulary learning strategies used by the students with highfrequency had strong and significant correlative relationships with their perceived usefulness, as

displayed in the preceding table. To illustrate, the strongest correlation (r = .722, p < 0.01) was

achieved by strategy item 18— Say new word aloud when studying . Strategy item 17— Study the

sound of a word —reaches the second strongest correlation between frequency of use and perceived

usefulness (r = .711, p < 0.01). Similarly, the determination strategy item 3— Analyze any available

pictures or gestures achieves the third strongest correlation between two variables (r = .698, p <

0.01).

It is particularly noticeable that four out of the five strategies in the preceding table belong

to the memory category, which involves relating the new word with some previously learned

knowledge in order to retain the information about the word. To provide further insights into the

students’ attitude toward using such strategies, the qualitative data were also incorporated in this

research question. The following excerpt illustrates the point: For me, the best way to learn vocabulary is to understand each element of a word rather

than just reciting it. Also, to learn new words by heart without having to devote too muchenergy, I try to create scenarios in my head that helps me to remember how the words areused. Most importantly, I need to use them often in daily life before they are kept in mymemory (Student 3, interview).

With regard to the strategies with the weakest correlation, as identified in Table 4 that

follows, four out of five items are metacognitive strategies. These include item 30 Continue to

study word over time (r = .302, p < 0.01), item 28 Use spaced word practice (r = .335, p < 0.01),

item 26 Interact with native speakers (r = .351, p < 0.01), and item 27 Test oneself with word test (r

= .365, p < 0.01).





43

the category that achieves the strongest correlation was memory strategies (r = .650, p < 0.01),

followed by determination strategies (r = .577, p < 0.01), cognitive strategies (r = .546, p < 0.01),

social strategies (r = .479, p < 0.01), and metacognitive strategies (r = .345, p < 0.01).

Research Question 3: What are the factors contributing to their failure to employ certain strategies

they consider useful?

For responses to this research question, the data were gathered from multiple sources. First, based

on the survey, the students’ responses to the open-ended question as to the factors that prevented

them from using certain strategies they considered useful were analyzed. Qualitative analyses of

data obtained from both interviews and vocabulary learning journal entries were also implemented.

A total of 274 (69%) students who completed the survey provided responses to the open-ended question. Figure 1 below summarizes and reports the percentage in each of the four factors,

which contributed to the students’ failure to make use of the strategies they considered useful in

enhancing their vocabulary knowledge.

As indicated in Figure 1, lack of practice is reported by 154 (56.20%) students as their

major factor. They regarded their time limitation and limited opportunities for practice as their

principal problem. A total of 60 (21.90%) students considered their lack of motivation their main

obstacle to employing a wide variety of useful vocabulary learning strategies. In addition to these

two factors, lack of English proficiency and complexity of word knowledge were reported by 41

(14.96%) and 19 (6.94%) students, respectively.

Complexity of Word

Knowledge 6.94%

Lack of English

Proficiency

14.96%

Lack of Motivation

21.90%

Lack of Practice

56.20%

Figure 1: Factors Contributing to Failure to Use Strategies





45

not that good, and I’m afraid of misinterpreting the information. So I’d better ignore or stay away from it (Student 1, interview).

One of the problems I usually encounter during reading is my English proficiency islimited, and I struggle with so much unknown vocabulary that I feel overwhelmed and

demotivated to continue learning English and its vocabulary (Survey respondent 79).

Complexity of Word Knowledge

Unlike the three aforementioned factors, this factor pertains to the word knowledge itself. Nineteen

students claimed that even though they usually attempted to derive word meanings or learn words

through different strategies, there were times when they were not successful in doing so. They

clarified:

I enjoy guessing word meanings through context and word parts, which wasrecommended by all English teachers and proficient English users. I found it boring at

first but later gained more and more words using these techniques, and it was fun.Unfortunately, I have a difficult time applying them to many academic words andtechnical terms. The vocabulary learning task then becomes too complicated and boring(Survey respondent 15).

A whole lot of vocabulary words have different meanings, so it’s quite hard to pick theright meaning when I consult a dictionary. Or for writing, because of nuances inmeaning, it’s not easy at all to pick the right word to use (Student 9, journal entry).

Summary

The study has addressed the first research question and arrived at the conclusion that the students

reported using each vocabulary learning strategy item with either high or medium frequency,

suggesting they made use of a wide range of strategies on a regular basis. Three of the top five

items are determination strategies while three of the bottom five items belong to the metacognitive

category. It was also revealed that, in general, the students failed to employ each of these reported

strategies as frequently as the degree they perceived them as useful in learning vocabulary.

As for the second research question, a number of vocabulary learning strategies used by the

students with high frequency had strong and significant correlative relationships with their

perceived usefulness. It was noticeable that four out of the five strategies with the strongest

correlation belong to the memory category whereas four out of five items with the weakest

correlation are metacognitive strategies.

In relation to the third research question, the study identified four major factors contributing

to the students’ failure to use the strategies they considered useful: lack of practice, lack of

motivation, lack of English proficiency, and complexity of word knowledge.



46

In line with previous studies conducted in the Thai EFL context (e.g., Kongthong, 2007;

Pookcharoen, 2009; Siriwan, 2007), the current study revealed the most and least frequently used

strategies among university students. What this research added to existing knowledge of vocabulary

learning strategy use pertains to the complicated relationships between their frequency of use and

their perceived usefulness. The data obtained also provided valuable insights into the students’

learning process and how to help them become a better vocabulary learner.

Pedagogical Implications

The findings pointed out that there is no secret recipe to success in vocabulary teaching and

learning. What strategy one uses and how he or she uses it appear to be dependent upon the

contexts in which learning occurs. This study, however, suggests a number of pedagogical

implications, especially in EFL settings. First, taking into account the students’ frequency of use of

vocabulary learning strategies and their perception of usefulness, I propose the following three

types of strategies to facilitate the implementation of vocabulary strategy instruction:

1) Strategies which were perceived as useful and reported to be often used (e.g., bilingual

dictionary, use English-language media, guess from textual context, and take notes in class).

Teachers may not need to introduce the preceding strategies to students; however, they are

beneficial for students when teachers provide assistance should the need arise. Some students

voiced their concerns about using bilingual dictionary effectively. Also, others expected that

teachers, as expert vocabulary learners, model extensively and provide verbal explanations as to

how to use such strategies as guessing word meanings using clues provided.

2) Strategies which were perceived as useful and reported to be seldom used (e.g., continue to

study word over time, use spaced word practice, interact with native speakers, test oneself with

word tests, and ask teacher for an L1 translation).

Teachers may need to explain and discuss with students the value of strategies before providing an

explicit instruction or other types of assistance. Several factors, as outlined earlier in the current

study, should also be taken into consideration. Most importantly, students should be encouraged or

reminded to apply these strategies in actual task situations.

3) Strategies which were perceived as not useful and reported to be seldom used (e.g., flash cards,

discover new meaning through group work activity, ask classmates for meaning, and study and

practice meaning in a group).

Teachers may find it appropriate to initially identify the reasons why these strategies are notfavored by many students. Should there be any strategies they consider useful for vocabulary



47

learning among students, they may decide to introduce those to them. However, it should be noted

that the selection of strategy varies greatly from one learner to another, and it may prove

advantageous to allow students to choose their own effective strategies that suit their specific needs

and learning styles.

Limitations

Although all research questions have been addressed, it should be admitted that some limitations

exist in the study. First, the data obtained from the questionnaire were self-reported, and one of the

problems with this self-report measure is that the participants may not report what they actually do

in vocabulary learning. However, interviewed and self-reported strategies generally tended to

match, though the quality of application varied. Another limitation is related to how appropriate

and effective strategy use is related to several interrelated variables (e.g., learner autonomy,

learning styles, gender, and motivation). Rather than scrutinize the very specific details, this study

only intends to give a general overview of the topic being discussed. Hence, the data obtained

should be cautiously interpreted.

Suggestions for Further Research

As discussed earlier, part of the data in this study was obtained from the survey questionnaire.

Future research should be conducted to document students’ actual use of strategies to provide

empirical evidence as to their learning process, which can subsequently be compared with their

attitude toward using those strategies. In attempts to report detailed observation of the learners’ use

of strategies, researchers may conduct their studies by means of the think-aloud procedure.

This specific type of verbal report offers various advantages. Oxford and Burry-Stock

(1995) indicated that think-aloud protocols provide the most detailed information on how students

implement strategies while performing a language task. Even though this procedure, when

compared with silent conditions, increases the time for undertaking the task, it does not affect the

sequence of thoughts (Ericsson & Simon, 1993). Kuusela and Paul (2000) added that reporting

which happens concurrently while performing a task offers more and better information than

reporting what they did retrospectively.



48

References

Baddeley, A. D. (1990). Human memory: Theory and practice. Hove, UK: LawrenceErlbaum Associates.

Catalan, R. M. J. (2003). Sex differences in L2 vocabulary learning strategies. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 13, 54-77.

Cohen, A. D. (2007). Coming to terms with language learner strategies: Surveying theexperts. In A. D. Cohen & E. Macaro (Eds.), Language learner strategies: Thirty years of

research and practice (pp. 29-45). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ellis, R. (1994). The study of second language acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ericsson, K. A., & Simon, H. A. (1993). Protocol analysis: Verbal reports as data.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Fan, M. (2003). Frequency of use, perceived usefulness, and actual usefulness of secondlanguage vocabulary strategies: A study of Hong Kong learners. Modern

Language Journal, 87 , 222-237.

Gu, Y. (1994). Vocabulary learning strategies of good and poor Chinese EFL learners. In N. Bird,P. Falvey, A. Tsui, D. Allison, & A. McNeill (Eds.), Language learning . Hong Kong:Government Printers. Retrieved from ERIC database. (ED 370411)

Gu, Y., & Johnson, R. K. (1996). Vocabulary learning strategies and language learning

outcomes. Language Learning , 46 , 643-695.Haastrup, K. (1991). Lexical inferencing procedures or talking about words. Tübingen:

Gunter Narr Verlag.

Johnson, R. B., & Onwuegbuzie, A. J. (2004). Mixed method research: A research paradigmwhose time has come. Educational Researcher , 33, 14-26.

Kongthong, J. (2007). A survey study of L2 vocabulary learning strategies of 4th year

students, the Faculty of Fine Arts, at Rajamangala University of Technology

Tawan-Ok Chakrabongse Bhuvanarth campus. (Unpublished master’s paper).

Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand.

Kuusela, H., & Paul, P. (2000). A comparison of concurrent and retrospective verbal protocolanalysis. American Journal of Psychology, 113, 387-404.

Lawson, M. J., & Hogben, D. (1996). The vocabulary learning strategies of foreign languagestudents. Language Learning, 46 , 101-135.

Lip, P. (2009). Investigating the most frequently used and most useful vocabulary languagelearning strategies among Chinese EFL postsecondary students in Hong Kong.

Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching , 6 , 77-87.



49

Mondria, J. A., & Wit-de Boer, M. (1991). The effects of contextual richness on theguessability and the retention of words in a foreign language. Applied Linguistics, 12,249-267.

Nation, P. (1990). Teaching and learning vocabulary. New York: Newbury House.

Nyikos, M., & Oxford, R. L. (1993). A factor analytic study of language-learning strategyuse: Interpretations of information-processing theory and social psychology. Modern

Language Journal , 77 , 11-22.

Oxford, R. L. (1990). Language learning strategies: What every teacher should know. New York: Newbury House.

Oxford, R. L., & Burry-Stock, J. (1995). Assessing the use of language learning strategiesworldwide with the ESL/EFL version of the strategy inventory of language learning (SILL),System, 23, 1–23.

Oxford, R. L., & Cohen, A. D. (1992). Language learning strategies: Crucial issues of concept and classification. Applied Language Learning , 3, 1-35.

Pookcharoen, S. (2007). Exploring how teaching morphemic analysis fosters Thai EFL students’vocabulary development. Journal of English Studies, 3, 85-105.

Pookcharoen, S. (2009). What makes a good vocabulary learner: A qualitative investigation. Paper presented at the 7th Asia TEFL International Conference, Bangkok, Thailand.

Schmitt, N. (1997). Vocabulary learning strategies. In N. Schmitt & M. McCarthy (Eds.),Vocabulary: Description, acquisition, and pedagogy (pp. 199-227). Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Siriwan, M. (2007). English vocabulary learning strategies employed by Rajabhat university

students (Unpublished master’s thesis). Suranaree University of Technology, NakhonRatchasima, Thailand.

Wang, A. Y., Thomas, M. H., Inzana, C. M., & Primicerio, L. J. (1993). Long-term retentionunder conditions of intentional learning and the keyword mnemonic. Bulletin of the

Psychonomic Society, 31, 545-547.

Williams, M., & Burden, R. L. (1997). Psychology for language teachers: A social constructivist

approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.







52

7. Any other vocabulary learning strategies you use or think they are useful? (Please specify)

___________________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________________

8. What are the factors that prevent you from using certain strategies you consider useful?

Please explain below:

9. Are you willing to participate in the interview phase of the study?

If yes, please provide your e-mail address _________________________________________

Ŷ Thank you very much for your time and cooperation Ŷ





54

Using Graphic Organizers to Enhance English Reading Instruction: A Case of First-Year

Information Technology Students at Thai-Nichi Institute of Technology

Bundit Anuyahong The purposes of this research were 1) to develop and test the efficiency of thegraphic organizer technique of English reading instruction; 2) to compare thestudents’ English reading achievement before and after using the readinginstruction; and, 3) to survey the students’ satisfaction with this type of instruction. 30 first-year Information Technology students at the Thai-NichiInstitute of Technology were taught with eight reading units using a graphicorganizer technique, an English reading achievement test, and a questionnaire tosurvey their satisfaction of the materials. The results were positive: 1) The readinglessons were highly effective, with the students scoring 80.25 on the formativetests and 81.00 on the post-test; 2) The students’ reading achievement after the

lessons was significantly higher than before, with lessons constructed at 0.05level; and, 3) The students were very satisfied with all of the reading lessons.

Key words: English reading instruction, Graphic Organizer technique

µ¦Äo¦µ¢d °°¦rÂÅÁ°¦r Á¡º É°-nÁ-¦·¤µ¦-°°nµ£µ¬µ°§¬: ¦°«¹¬µÁÃÃ¨¥-µ¦-Á«´ Êe¸ É 1 -µÁÃÃ¨¥ Å¥-¸ É» i

µ¦ª·´¥¦´ Ê Ê¤ª´»¦³-r-µ¤¦³µ¦º° 1)Á¡º É°¡´µÂ¨³®µ¦³-··£µ¡°Á¦¸¥µ¦-°µ¦°nµ£µ¬µ°´§¬Ã¥ÄoÁ·¦µ¢d °°¦rÂÅÁ°¦r 2) Á¡º É° Á¦¸¥Á¸¥

ªµ¤-µ¤µ¦Äµ¦°nµ£µ¬µ°´§¬n°Â¨³®¨´µ¦ÄoÁ¦¸¥µ¦°nµ Ê Â¨³ 3) Á¡º É°-Îµ¦ªªµ¤¡¹¡°Ä¸ É¤n°Á¦¸¥µ¦°nµ» Ê » n¤´ª°¥nµº°´«¹¬µ³ÁÃÃ¨¥¸-µ¦-Á«´ Êe É1 -µ´ÁÃÃ¨¥¸Å¥- É» i Îµª 30 Á¦º É°¤º° ÉÄoÄµ¦¨° ÅoÂn Á¦¸¥µ¦°nµÃ¥ÄoÁ·¦µ¢d°°¦rÂÅÁ°¦rÎµª8 Â-°ª´ªµ¤-µ¤µ¦Äµ¦°nµn°Â¨³®¨Á¦¥ Â¨³Â-°µ¤ªµ¤¡¹¡°Ä ¨µ¦ª·´¥¡ªnµ 1) ¦³-··£µ¡°Á¦¸¥µ¦°nµ¸ Ê ¤¸nµÁnµ´ 80.25/81.00 ¹ Éº°ªnµ°¥¼ nÄ¦³´¸¤µ

2) ªµ¤-µ¤µ¦Äµ¦°nµÃ¥Äo ¦µ¢d °°¦rÂÅÁ°¦r-¼ªnµn°µ¦ÄoÁ¦¸¥°¥nµ¤¸´¥-Îµ´ É¦³´ 0.05 3) » n¤´ª°¥nµ¤ªµ¤¡¹¡°Ä´Á¦¸¥ É¼ oª·´¥-¦oµ¹ Ê°¥¼ nÄ¦³´¸¤µ

Îµ-Îµ: Á¦¸¥µ¦°nµ£µ¬µ°§¬, Á·¦µ¢¢d °°¦rÂÅÁ°¦r

Introduction

In recent times, the instructional curriculum for foreign languages taught in Thailand has been

based on the National Education Act, B.E. 2542 section 22. This act stipulated that Education shall

be based on the principle that all learners are capable of learning and self-development, and thateach student should be seen as most important. It further stipulated that the teaching-learning



55

process should aim at enabling the learners to develop themselves at their own pace and to their full

potential. Moreover, section 24 stipulates that, in organizing the learning process, educational

institutions and agencies concerned shall provide substance and arrange activities in line with the

learners’ interests and aptitudes, bear in mind individual differences, provide training in the

thinking process, provide proper management, teach students how to face various situations and

apply their knowledge in obviating and solving problems, organize activities for learners to draw

from authentic experience, drill in practical work for complete mastery, enable learners to think

critically and acquire the reading habit and continuous thirst for knowledge, achieve, in all subjects,

a balanced integration of subject matter, integrity, values, and desirable attributes; enable

instructors to create the ambiance, environment, instructional media, and facilities for learners to

learn and be all-round persons, and be able to benefit from research as part of the learning process.

In so doing, both learners and teachers may learn together from different types of teaching-learning

media and other sources of knowledge, enabling individuals to learn at all times and in all places.

Co-operation with parents, guardians, and all parties concerned in the community shall be sought to

develop jointly the learners in accord with their potentiality (Ministry of Education 1999, 14)

The Thai-Nichi Institute of Technology has been operating under the philosophy of

“disseminating knowledge and building the economic base.” One of the TNI objectives is to

generate human resources who have abilities in the advancement of technology and industrial

management. Moreover, the TNI concept of program administration focuses on the students’

language skills, so that students will be able to communicate in Japanese and English. In order to

achieve the TNI objectives, TNI has provided an English for Communication course which is

divided into 3 core courses for students from all faculties, as well as elective courses for students

from each faculty (TNI Student Handbook, 2010, 24).

Graphic Organizers (GOs), concept maps, and mind maps are spatial representations of

linear textual knowledge in the form of graphics, pictures, and diagrams. GOs visualize thoughts

and organize knowledge, providing the reader with a whole picture of the concepts contained in the

text, and the relationships between them. The hierarchical organization of concepts in a graphic

display not only help avoid rote learning and pure memorization, but also prompt ideas and prepare

the reader to articulate ideas in composition, including both major and minor points, and to

synthesize newly acquired knowledge. GOs have long been used in learning sciences and have also

proved their usefulness in second language learning (Jiang & Grabe, 2007). Some studies (Carrell,Pharis, & Liberto, 1989; Palincsar & Brown, 1989) revealed that non-proficient L1/L2 readers



56

either do not know any reading strategies, or generally employ bottom-up strategies. The findings

suggest that strategy instruction should focus on comprehension monitoring to help non-skilled

readers overcome their difficulties. In reading comprehension, research claims that GOs play a

particularly valuable role and are recommended as a way to teach students awareness of discourse

structuring in texts, an important part of a reader’s overall comprehension abilities (Pearson &

Fielding, 1991; & Trabasso & Bouchard, 2002). GOs that represent text discourse structures have

been more effective in facilitating comprehension and retention of content area reading material

than the GOs that do not (Jiang & Grabe, 2007). Review of the available literature on GOs has

revealed contradictory findings and thus raised questions about the overall effectiveness of GOs in

reading instruction. The first issue is the lack of a clear distinction between the two GO types and

understanding of their effectiveness when employed for instructional or research purposes. The

second issue regards students' insufficient exposure to differing types of textual discourse structures

and the amount of GO training required to teach students this knowledge through visual means. The

third problem lies in the lack of GO studies with learners of English as a second/foreign language.

It is important to know if GOs will facilitate reading comprehension for these learners who

potentially face more language trouble in the academic setting. And finally, previous GO research

studies have not investigated the effectiveness of GOs with different groups of learners.

Ellis (2004) provides three reasons language teachers should use GOs in their classrooms.

First, learners are considerably more likely to understand and remember the content since GOs help

them identify what is important in a text. Second, because the semantic processing demands are

minimized, teachers can address the content at more sophisticated or complex levels. Showing how

the information is structured might be powerful aid in understanding. Third, learners are more

likely to become strategic readers as they recognize the patterns of thinking, constructing, and using

graphic organizers.

TNI students have problems in reading and also tend to lack motivation to read because the

content of instructional materials is not interesting. The content is generally not suitable to their

culture nor useful in the daily life of TNI students. Moreover, the problem often in teaching reading

is that instructional contents are dated and too difficult, and learners are not interested and do not

understand the culture in which the language is spoken. Thus, instructional management must

depend on the learner’s interests and ability, and his motivation to read. A suitable method for use

in teaching-learning English for information technology students of TNI is the Graphic Organizer technique, in which images can be used to clarify verbal elaborations. The use of visual imagery is





58

2. Contents used in experiment

The topics consisted of Design, Education, Advertising, Business, Work, Language, Trends, and

Arts and Media which were chosen based on a survey of needs questionnaire.

3. Duration in experiment

The experiment ran for 16 weeks (1 hour per week)

4. Variables

Variables in this study were as follows:

4.1 The English reading ability of first year Information Technology students before and after the

class.

4.2 The satisfaction of first year Information Technology students with graphic-organizer based

English reading instruction.

5. Research Instruments

5.1 Eight lessons of English reading instruction using graphic organizers.

5.2 A 1-hour English reading proficiency test (30 items: 30 scores).

5.3 A questionnaire constructed by the researcher assessing satisfaction with English reading

instruction using graphic organizers.

6. Construction and Development of Research Instruments

The researcher constructed the English reading instruction and the proficiency tests in the following

way:

First, the researcher studied the objectives of English reading instruction, and focused on

English reading skills and strategies. Emphasis was placed on reading for main ideas, reading for

topic sentences, reading for pronoun references, reading for facts and opinions, reading for

sequencing events, reading for author’s purposes, reading for inference, reading using a graphic

organizer, and concept mapping.

Second, the researcher derived eight topics from the survey of needs questionnaire and

interviewed the participants regarding topics required for first year Information Technology

students. The topics were as follows:



59

Rank Topic Mean S.D Meaning

1 Design 4.80 0.45 Strongly agree2 Education 4.73 0.50 Strongly agree3 Advertising 4.71 0.55 Strongly agree4 Business 4.65 0.60 Strongly agree

5 Work 4.62 0.58 Strongly agree6 Language 4.59 0.72 Strongly agree7 Trends 4.52 0.69 Strongly agree8 Arts and media 4.49 0.77 Strongly agree

Third, these eight topics were modified to suit first year Information Technology students

by giving the students vocabulary guidelines and meanings, simplifying structures of language,

finding pictures, and applying the contents to English reading instruction. Then, the table of

contents specification was designed by determining the objectives, contents, topics, desired reading

skills, reading activities, and evaluation.

Last, the constructed table was examined for IOC by experts and lesson plans were written

for all 8 lessons. Each lesson plan was composed of learning objectives, topics and contents, and

reading activities consisting of a pre-reading activity, a while-reading activity and a post-reading

activity.

The pre-reading activity included presenting pictures and answering the questions in order

to lead the students to lessons and matching vocabulary with pictures.

While-reading was categorized into 5 groups: True/False; Yes/No Question; Information

gap; Matching; and Sequencing events.

Post-reading activities were divided into several types: semantic maps, information tables,

concept mapping, graphics, pictures, and diagrams.

The lesson test consisted of a multiple choice test, sequencing events, information gap,

question answering, concept mapping, and diagrams.

Proficiency test

Students were given pre- and post-class proficiency tests. The tests had the same format and

consisted of 30 items (30 scores). The duration of each test was 60 minutes. The researcher usedthe textbook, journal articles and related research as an outline to create the test. The researcher



60

also, created a table of specifications including reading skills and goals for each lesson, and then

created one set of proficiency tests following this table of test specifications. The researcher

derived the difficulty and discrimination of the tests (P-R value) from standard criteria consisting of

30 items. Five experts examined, corrected and improved the accuracy, validity and reliability of

the language and contents of the test. The test had a difficulty level between 0.20-0.80 and a rank of

discrimination at 0.20 or over. The calculation of the test reliability was used K-R 20 by Kuder-

Richardson (Cited in Boonriang Khajonsil, 2000, 165). Then, the proficiency test was used to

sampling of the research.

Satisfaction Questionnaire

The researcher created a questionnaire to investigate student satisfaction with this type of reading

instruction. The questionnaire was constructed using both closed-end and opened-end questions

based on Best (1981, 168-183). The answer to each question was separated into five rating scales as

demonstrated by Likert. The rating scales in the questionnaire were

5 refers to strongly agree

4 refers to agree

3 refers to moderate

2 refers to disagree

1 refers to strongly disagree

There were four components of satisfaction which were content, instructional design, teaching-

learning activities and instructor. The data from the experts was applied with the following

formula:

IOC = ȈR

N

IOC replaces Index of item-Objective Congruence

R replaces Experts’ opinions

N replaces Number of experts

Questions rated less than 0.5 by the experts were considered and improved. The data obtained from

a small group experiment was analyzed to find reliability by using Į-Coefficient formula stated by

Cronbach (1974: 161). Coefficient of reliability was 0.82.



61

Data Collection

The program was first tested on a single student, and then on a small group of students, before

being used on an actual class. Therefore, there were three phases of data collection:

Phase 1

One TNI student who was not included in the test group went through the English reading

instruction using graphic organizers, and took the 30-question pre- and post-tests. This enabled the

researcher to investigate behavior, listen to the student’s point of view, answer questions, and

troubleshoot problems with the 8 units and the proficiency tests.

The student scored 63 out of 80 on the 8 lesson tests, or 78.75%. On the post-test, the student

scored 23 out of 30, or 83.33%. The effectiveness of the instruction was 78.75/83.33. The highest

score was on lesson 3 Advertising (90%), and the lowest on lesson 4, Business (70 %).

Phase 2

A small group of 9 students then took the English reading instruction, with tests after each lesson,

and took the post-test. In this phase, the researcher recorded the problems and suggestions in order

to improve the effectiveness of the lessons. The scores derived from each lesson and scores from

the ability posttest were calculated as 77.77/79.62. These nine students scored 560 out of 720

(77.77 %) on the lesson tests. On the post-test, the students scored 215 out of 270, or 79.62%.

Hence, the effectiveness of the English reading instruction was 77.77/79.62. The highest scores

were from lesson 1 (82.45%), the lowest from lesson 5 (71 %).

Phase 3

Next, 30 students took the reading course and the post-test. The scores derived from each lesson

and scores from the posttest were calculated at 80.25/81.00. Students scored 1926 out of 2,400

(80.25 %) on the lesson tests. On the posttest, the students scored 729 out of 900, 81.00%, with an

improvement of .75%. The highest scores were from lesson 1 (81.00%), the lowest from lesson 4

(70 %).

Statistic Used in Data Analysis

1. The lesson effectiveness was determined by using E1/E2 formula followed 75/75 criteria.

2. The comparison between the pretest and posttest was done using t-test, which was calculated by

SPSS/PC for Windows XP.



62

3. The data from the questionnaire were rated to find the mean and standard deviation and then

translated based on criteria developed by Best (1981) as follows:

1.00 d x ¯ 1.50 indicates the lowest satisfaction

1.50d

x ¯

2.50 indicates low satisfaction

2.50 d x ¯ 3.50 indicates moderate satisfaction

3.50 d x ¯ 4.50 indicates high satisfaction

4.50 d x ¯ d 5.00 indicates the highest satisfaction

Results of data analysis

Phase 1: Tests were given to all 30 students after each of the eight units. The statistics used in the

data analysis consisted of mean (x ¯ ), standard deviation (S.D), percentage and rank order of scoresin each unit. The lesson tests got a mean score over 75% for each unit. The highest score came

from unit 8, Arts and media (88%). Unit 4, Business, received the lowest score.

Phase 2: The comparison of the before and after tests for the 30 students were as follows:

Test Totalscore

(x ¯ ) S.D (D) S.D.(D)

t Sig

Pretest

Posttest

30

30

11.41

23.70

2.57

2.38 12.29 2.47 25.613* 0.000* Statistical significance at 0.05 level

The post-test scores were higher than the pretest scores by 0.05 (Sig = 0.000 < 0.05). The

mean score of the posttest was 23.70, higher than the pretest (11.41 out of 30). The difference

between the pre-test and post-test scores was 12.29, and for the t-test it was 25.613. Results

indicated that students reading ability was improved by the course, affirming hypothesis 2.

Phase 3: The results of the student satisfaction questionnaire were as follows:

The mean scores of all eight units was 4.52 (S.D. =0.49). The highest mean score was on unit 1 (x ¯ =

4.69, S.D. =0.61 ). The second highest mean score was on unit 8 (x ¯ = 4.62, S.D. =0.53 ). The lowest

mean score was on unit 5 (x ¯ = 4.39, S.D. =0.62). The overall mean score of eight units was 4.52

(S.D.= 0.49). The results indicate high student satisfaction with the course, affirming hypothesis 3.



63

Discussion

The results of the study indicate that:

1. The efficiency of English reading instruction using graphic organizers was higher than the

determined criteria. This may be on account of following:

1.1 The English reading instruction using graphic organizers used general English contents

which the TNI students were able to analyze critically, and students had the necessary background

knowledge to understand the contents. This is advocated by Sadoski, Paivio, & Goetz (1991) who

stated that background knowledge has played an important role in reading comprehension

development for two decades. The effectiveness of background knowledge in improving reading

comprehension indicates the constructive nature of comprehension, and the critical role of the

reader’s prior knowledge in that construction. In addition, the TNI information technology students

were already familiar with the contents of the instruction because they had background knowledge

about it which would make it easier to understand (Goodman, 1994).

1.2 The teaching-learning activity in each unit was constructed according to an English

reading theory developed by Freebody & Luke (1992), Harris & Sipay (1979), and Williams

(1994). They started learners with easy activities, progressing to more difficult activities for pre-

reading, and asking question in while-reading activities to check the students’ understanding. In the post-reading stage, the researcher created semantic maps and information charts to help the learners

fill in information in the correct way. Moreover, the learners used graphic organizers to aid in

reading comprehension (Blachowicz & Ogle, 2001; Grabe, 2003; Gunning, 2003; Jones, Pierce, &

Hunter, 1988-1989; Mohan, 1986; Pearson & Fielding, 1991; Threster, 2004; Trabasso &

Bouchard, 2002).

1.3 The course was designed in accordance with experts’ views on objective learning, pre-

reading, while-reading, and post-reading activities. The contents fell in the category of generalEnglish. The learners were able to use a reading strategy in learning because comprehending

textual discourse structures is an important aspect of a reader’s overall reading abilities (Grabe,

2004; Kintsch & Rawson, 2005; Trabasso & Bouchard, 2002). Further, the importance of GOs in

reading comprehension is made clear when we understand the role of knowledge on text structure

in reading research. Text structure can be understood as knowledge-structures or basic rhetorical

patterns in texts (Grabe, 2003), or the organization of ideas in text (Taylor, 1992), or the way ideas

in the text are interrelated to convey a message to the reader (Meyer & Rice, 1984).



64

2. The students reading ability improved at the 0.05 level. This may be accounted for by the

learners’ satisfaction with, and interest in the required contents. The course integrated teaching

English reading with visual aids, semantic maps, spider maps, and charts which were familiar to

TNI students. The use of GOs increased students’ comprehension, retention and retrieval of

knowledge as indicated by encoding and note-taking (Kulhavy, Stock, Woodard, & Haygood,

1993).

3. Survey results indicated students were highly satisfied with the course, confirming hypothesis 3.

This seemed to be because they understood and applied reading strategies. Results also confirmed

statements of the educational theorist, Honsefeld (1977), who reported that skilled readers tend to

keep the meaning of the passage in mind, read in broad phrases, skip words, and read with

confidence. Moreover, the knowledge of graphic organizer and textual awareness can enhance

comprehension, and students can be trained to improve their reading ability (Carrell, 1984; Ghaith

& Harkouss, 2003; Jiang & Grabe, 2007; Kintsch & Yarbrough, 1982; Koda, 2005; Martinez 2002;

Taylor, 1992).

Conclusion

According to the study and data analysis, the results of this study were as follows.

1. The efficiency of English reading instruction using graphic organizers for first year Information

Technology students in this experiment was 80.25/81.00 which was higher than determined criteria

(75/75). It was demonstrated that English reading instruction using graphic organizers for this

group of L2 learners was very effective, confirming hypothesis 1.

2. Ability in English reading after learning by this method of instruction was improved at statistical

significance at 0.05 level, confirming hypothesis 2.

3. These L2 learners indicated high satisfaction with English reading instruction using graphic

organizers, confirming hypothesis 3.

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68

A p p e n d i x A

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p l a n o f U n i t 1

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1

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d e s i g n

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L a n g u a g e f o c u s :

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69

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71

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Biodata

Bundit Anuyahong is a lecturer and Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at College of General Education andLanguages, Thai-Nichi Institute of Technology, and is also a doctoral student at Silpakorn University in Curriculumand Instruction-Teaching English. He obtained a Master of Education in TEFL from Silpakorn University in 2008. Hehas taught English as a foreign language at TNI for four years. His research interests include CALL, English readinginstruction, ESP, and teaching English as a foreign language.



72

Learners’ Reported Use of Cognitive and Metacognitive Reading Strategies: A Study of Thai

Undergraduate Students

Melada Sudajit-apa

Research on EFL readers’ reported use of cognitive and metacognitive strategiesin reading can shed light onto classroom teaching approaches. In this study,

perceived use of strategies reported by Thai undergraduate students at ThammasatUniversity—both higher and lower-reading-ability groups— while they wereengaged in an academic reading task was investigated. The participants wereasked to complete a reading strategy self-report form immediately after they hadcompleted their academic reading task. The results show that the two groups of learners had a significantly different awareness of cognitive but not of metacognitive strategy use; that is the high-proficiency group deployedsubstantially more cognitive strategies—particularly higher-level processing

ones— than their low-proficiency peers. All the findings obtained from this present study have implications for strategy training and could lead to useful practical applications in the EFL reading context.

Key words: Cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies, EFL readinginstruction

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Introduction

This paper describes a quantitative and qualitative investigation of Thai EFL learners’ reported use

of cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies when they deal with an IELTS academic readingtask. The study was designed to shed light onto what particular strategies two groups of learners—

higher-reading-ability and lower-reading-ability—employed and what they did and did not do when

handling the IELTS reading text and test. This was assessed through their self-report. Insights into

their perceived use of strategies and the nature of this particular group of learners’ use of strategy

were gained which could have implications for practical applications for EFL strategy instruction.

A great deal of research on both L1 and L2 reading comprehension over many years has

emphasised the significant role of readers’ use of strategies in achieving their reading goals (Cohen

& DÖrnyei, 2002; Ediger, 2006; Gascoigne, 2008; Sheorey & Mokhtari, 2001). The literature on

strategic reading has shown that a high number of appropriate strategies used and readers’

awareness of ‘when’, ‘how’, and ‘why’ to use them are likely to increase their ability to

interactively construct a text meaning (Ediger, 2006). The research in this area is quite well-

developed and a cluster of good strategies consciously deployed by successful readers have now

been identified, leading to some practical implications on how teachers can actually use them in a

classroom. Combining cognitive and metacognitive strategies has been considered to be the most

effective method for reading success (Erler & Finkbeiner, 2007; Gascoigne, 2008).

The term ‘ strategies’ is defined in this study as both mental processes and behaviours which

are subject to conscious use (Macaro, 2006). They are differentiated from ‘ skills’, which are used in

an automatic manner. Macaro (2006), who proposes a notion of strategies grounded in cognitive

psychology and information processing, emphasizes that strategies must be also goal-oriented to

serve learners’ satisfaction in their learning goals and to enable them to transfer from one task to

another. Macaro also proposes that the habitual use of a cluster of strategies can result in learning

styles and the automation of strategies over time can contribute to the development of skilful

behaviours. Cognitive strategies are involved in working memory processing, which consists of

“perception, decoding, processing, storage, and retrieval” (Macaro, 2006, p. 328). Ediger (2006)

explains that cognitive strategies “include strategies for interacting with the author and the text,

strategies involving different ways of reading, strategies for handling unknown words, and those

making use of one’s prior knowledge in some way” (p.305).



74

While cognitive strategies are directly engaged with working memory processing,

metacognitive strategies are rather the strategies a reader deploys to indirectly support and evaluate

their use of cognitive strategies (Macaro, 2006; Oxford, 1990). The term ‘metacognition’ involves

two important aspects of reading: awareness of a reader’s strategy use and their ability to regulate

the comprehension process. ‘Strategic awareness’ or ‘knowledge about cognition’, according to

Baker & Brown (1984, p. 353), is comprised of “the ability to reflect on one’s own cognitive

process, to be aware of one’s own activities while reading, solving problems and so on”. The other

critical element of metacognition, or regulation of cognition, entails activities such as having a

purpose or reading goal in mind, planning one’s action, monitoring reading activities to ensure

comprehension, repairing and evaluating one’s strategy use (Chamot, 2005; Stoller, 1994).

Research on Cognitive and Metacognitive strategies in L2 reading

There have been attempts to investigate the characteristics of both successful and less successful L2

readers in terms of their reported use of L2 reading strategies since 1970s to shed light on what

strategies good readers deploy and propose instructional implications to improve learners’ strategic

reading. However, most of the work in 70s and 80s (e. g. Block, 1986; Hosenfeld, 1979; Papalia,

1987; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983) appeared to explore and classify only types of cognitive strategies

which are commonly trained rather than metacognitive ones. Overall, these studies, which started to

view reading as a process not a product, confirmed the existence of differences between good and

poor readers, explaining that good readers appeared to have better decoding skills, recognize every

word with an automatic process, thereby achieving the meaning without relying excessively on

guessing strategies. Or even when they did rely on contextual clues, they tended to do so without

much difficulty. By contrast, poor readers were unable to recognize words correctly and spent

considerable amounts of time decoding word by word.

According to Hosenfeld (1984)’s classification of 13 good L2 reading strategies, only one

strategy ‘evaluating their guesses’ can be categorized as metacognitive whereas the remaining

strategies are cognitive such as ‘identifying the grammatical category of words’, ‘examining

illustrations’, and ‘recognizing cognates.’ Likewise, Van Dijk & Kintsch (1983), who regarded the

linguistic knowledge of more successful readers as an advantage, reaffirm that ‘The good reader is

more adroit at exploiting the regularities and redundancies inherent in language and does not bother

much with laborious bottom-up decoding letter by letter or word by word’ (p. 23).



75

The studies focusing on what good readers did and what poor readers did not do have still

continued with the development of more or less different classification of reading strategies

throughout 1980s and 1990s. However, a clearer picture of reading strategy classification was

marked by the work of Anderson (1991), who investigated the reading strategies three individual

L2 readers employed while handling a reading comprehension test and reading academic texts.

With the use of think-aloud protocols, his analysis of the three subjects displayed individual

differences in strategies used between the good reader and the two weaker ones. He explained that

the good reader tended to use strategies in his five categories in the same way— supervising

strategies, support strategies, paraphrase strategies, strategies of establishing coherence in a text ,

and test-taking strategies (p. 463). The good reader’s strategies included ‘monitoring

comprehension by identifying when comprehension fails’; ‘relating sentences from one part of the

text to another’; and ‘monitoring affective feelings about the text’ (p. 466). Interestingly, the

weakest appeared to use the same strategies as the student who gained the highest score, but

appeared to lack the knowledge of how to monitor the use of strategies. Anderson, thus, proposed

that ‘strategic reading is not only a matter of knowing what strategy to use, but also the reader must

know how to use a strategy successfully and orchestrate its use with other strategies’ (p. 469).

The study of Anderson (1991)’s work has sparked researchers’ interest in exploring the use

of metacognitve strategies in L2 reading and a number of them stressed the importance of

introducing not only cognitive but also metacognitive strategies in the classroom context (Block,

1992; Carrell & Grabe, 2002; Nassaji, 2003; Phakiti, 2003). These studies argued that cognitive

strategies alone cannot assist both high and low-proficiency L2 readers in overcoming

comprehension barriers. Phakiti (2003), for instance, focused on the use of cognitive and

metacognitive strategies of Thai L2 test-takers in performing a reading comprehension test. The

results suggested that high use of metacognitive strategies, such as evaluating whether the text

makes sense, monitoring and maintaining one’s understanding of the text, significantly correlated

with high scores on a reading comprehension test. The higher the subjects’ scores, the higher their

reported use of metacognitive strategies while performing the test. A closer investigation revealed

that the high-scoring test-takers were aware of why and how to use both cognitive and

metacognitive strategies to succeed on the test. This suggests pedagogical implications for the way

that both cognitive and metacognitive strategies should be promoted in L2 reading strategy

instruction.



76

Until recently, the trends in L2 strategic reading research have focused on an exploration of

individual learners’ use of both cognitive and metacognitive strategies in a more localized context

(Benson & Gao, 2008; Cohen, 2007; Grenfell & Macaro, 2007; Takeuchi, Griffiths, & Coyle,

2007). Among these studies, the work of Ikeda & Takeuchi (2006), who explored 10 Japanese EFL

learners’ learning process of reading strategies, was able to disclose six major differences in the

learning process of reading strategies between the higher and the lower proficiency students

through the use of portfolio analysis. Interestingly, the higher proficiency group tended to deploy

more cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies than their counterparts as well as displaying

their clear understanding of the purpose and merit of those strategies while the other group did not.

This study further explained that the higher proficiency group could understand the conditions that

increased the effectiveness of strategy use as well as using reading strategies in an orchestrated

manner and in a variety of contexts. The last difference between the higher and lower proficiency

group was that the former knew how to evaluate the efficacy of their strategy use. The pedagogical

implications were specifically tailored to improve Japanese EFL learners’ use of reading strategies.

The recent reading strategy research conducted by Malcolm (2009), who again paid much

attention to the localization rather than globalization concept of learners, investigated reported

academic reading strategy use of 160 Arabic-speaking medical students in Bahrain. The students

were divided into two groups according to their English proficiency level and year of study—low

and high-proficiency groups. The study showed significant differences in reported use of

metacognitive strategies that were related to translating from English to Arabic. To be precise, the

low-English proficiency reported translating the text more whereas the high-proficiency group did

not translate that much and deployed more metacognitive strategies, such as skimming to note text

characteristics, using text features and critically evaluating. Such an emphasis on the “view of the

learner as individual” (Benson & Gao, 2008, p. 36) has played a critical role in the area of current

strategy research as the way to discover individual use and specific problems and offer pedagogical

implications appropriate for each particular group of learners.

With the significance of the ‘learner as individual’ view in mind, the center of interest for

this study lies on the survey of my Thai students’ perceived use of both cognitive and

metacognitive strategies in the localized context. The fact that all participants in the study have

undertaken a strategic reading course that emphasizes cognitive strategies intrigued me to further

investigate whether a different level of proficiency causes them to deploy cognitive and



77

metacognitive strategies in a different way. This research aims at answering the following

questions:

a) Were there any differences between the higher-reading-ability and the lower-reading-

ability students in their perceived use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies while

reading an academic text?

b) Did the higher-reading-ability and the lower-reading-ability students report using

cognitive strategies in the same way as they took control of metacognitive strategies

while reading an academic text?

c) What cognitive and metacognitive strategies did the higher-reading-ability and the

lower-reading-ability students report using to a significantly different level of

frequency?

The significance of the study is two-fold. First, this study provides insights into patterns of

cognitive and metacognitive strategies currently used by both higher- and lower-reading-ability

students while dealing with the IELTS reading text and test. It also offers implications for

classroom instruction in the EFL reading context.

Method

Participants

The participants in this study were 32 undergraduate students at Thammasat University who had

previously undertaken a Reading for Information, a course which focused on building up learners’

basic reading strategies. All the participants came from the Humanities and Social Sciences field

despite the fact that they were majoring in different disciplines—English, Linguistics, Japanese,

Commerce and Accountancy, Drama, and History. This particular group of students was also a mix

of 17 second and 15 third-year students.

In order to investigate whether good and poor reading-ability learners reported using

cognitive and metacognitive strategies in the same way, the participants were divided into two

groups, called the higher-reading-ability and the lower-reading-ability group, according to the mean

score ( M = 11.37, SD = 2.57, total score = 20) on their IELTS academic reading test, conducted

through SPSS statistical procedures. The total number of 18 students or those whose scores were

above the mean score were placed in the higher-reading-ability group, whereas the remainder ( N =

14) whose scores were below the mean were labelled as the lower-reading-ability group. Table 1illustrates the details of the participants’ disciplines in both groups.



78

Table 1: Details of the Participants’ Disciplines in both GroupsMajors Higher-Proficiency Group Lower-Proficiency Group

Frequency Percent Frequency Percent

English 11 61.1 3 16.7Accounting 4 22.2 3 16.7

Linguistics 2 11.1 1 5.6InternationalRelations

1 5.6 -

Japanese - 3 16.7Drama - 2 11.1Marketing - 1 5.6History - 1 5.6Total 18 100 14 100

Concerning their prior strategy training, these participants were introduced to L2 reading

strategy instruction in their high school years as well as in their first two years in university. Nevertheless, they might not yet be able to resort to a cluster of good reading strategies while

reading the L2 text. This could be that the teaching and learning at high school in Thailand is

mainly teacher-oriented and intensive, with an emphasis on the Grammar-Translation Method, as

well as a predominant focus on test-taking strategies to enable students to pass the entrance

examination for university. Insufficiency of learners’ opportunities to apply reading strategies when

doing their own reading has been claimed to have a negative impact on the effectiveness of their

use of strategies (Oxford & Leaver, 1996). However, this study does not aim to focus on these twofactors but the association between the students’ reading proficiency and their reported use of

strategies.

Experimental Tools

Academic Reading Text and Test : The reading passage entitled Working in the Movies was selected

from Harrison and Whitehead (2006)’s Exam Essentials: IELTS Practice Tests to be used as a tool

to test the students’ reading proficiency and to solicit their use of reading strategies. The Working in the Movies text discusses step-by-step methods on how to subtitle a film and the difficulties that

are faced by people whose work involves subtitling films. The thematic content of the text which

was familiar and of general interest was one of the factors making it an appropriate choice for this

group of learners. Even though the text seemed to be quite difficult for the participants in terms of

vocabulary and sentence structures, given the element mentioned earlier—content familiarity—the

students were expected to be able to make use of a variety of strategies in order to understand the

overall text meaning. The Working in the Movies text is approximately 600 words in length, a

moderate text length which the students were expected to complete within an hour.



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The rationale for using the IELTS’ 13- item questions was that they focused on three

different levels of comprehension—literal, analytical, and inferential levels. The students were

expected to employ different kinds of strategies they had previously learnt. In addition to these

follow-up questions taken directly from the IELTS test, I added a summary section requiring the

participants to summarize the reading passage as a whole, suggesting that they begin the first

sentence with the main idea or thesis and then give the necessary major supporting details to

support the thesis. The 13-item follow-up questions were worth one point each whereas the

summary part accounted for 7 points. Table 2 illustrates the test specifications.

Table 2: Test SpecificationsTest Items Test Specifications

Items 1-5 Skimming for main ideas, Identifying major supporting details

Items 6-9 Making inferencesItems 10-13 Understanding the text as a whole, Retrieving

specific informationPart 2: Summarizing Summarizing

Reading-Strategy Report Form: The reading-strategy report form used in this present study

consisted of two major sections: (a) the reported use of metacognitive and cognitive strategies in

the form of a checklist and (b) the participants’ reading journal. The first part of the reading-

strategy report form was adapted from Ediger’s (2006) Key Reading Strategies (pp. 305-307), in

which Ediger proposed a list of a variety of metacognitive, cognitive, and affective and social

strategies an L2 reader employed while dealing with a text. To design the report form, 12

metacognitive out of 16 Ediger’s purpose-oriented, comprehension-monitoring and repair strategies

and another 12 cognitive out of 12 Ediger’s strategies for interacting with author and text were

selected. The remaining metacognitive strategies listed by Ediger—such as ‘comparing information

from one text with that of another’ and ‘evaluating the quality of a text’ were excluded from the

report form because they were not relevant to the nature of the IELTS reading text and test. Each

reading strategy shown in the report form appears with its L1 equivalent translation to assist the

students to grasp the idea of what each strategy concerns.

The second section of the reading-strategy report form was presented in the form of a

reading journal requiring the students to describe their reading processes in detail. The students

were expected to describe what strategies they used first and which ones they used next and why

they decided to employ them. They were also asked to describe their feelings or problems, if any,while coping with the text. This part of the reading-strategy report form was used to provide



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qualitative data in the form of participants’ revelation of their own reading processes, which would

be used to support the discussion of the participants’ self-report strategy checklist (Carson &

Longhini, 2002).

Data Collection

The participants were told to read the Working in the Movies text and then to complete the test.

They were also informed at the beginning that they would have to complete the reading-strategy

report form immediately after they completed the test. They, however, had neither seen nor been

explained what the report form was exactly about at that stage. The time spent on the reading and

the follow-up questions was one hour and 30 minutes. Immediately after they completed the test

within the time limit, they were asked to complete the reading-strategy report form. At this stage,

clear oral instructions and explanations of each strategy shown in the checklist were given to the

students in Thai, to ensure that the participants would do as directed. In relation to the reading

journal, they were asked to describe their observations of strategy use in Thai, to encourage them to

be elaborate on their use of reading strategies and reading processes. The time spent on the reading-

strategy report form was approximately 30 minutes.

Data Analysis

My first two research questions aimed to investigate whether or not there were any differences

between the higher-reading-ability and the lower-reading-ability students in their perceived use of

cognitive and metacognitive strategies and whether the higher-reading-ability and the lower-

reading-ability students displayed their awareness of cognitive strategies in the same way as they

took control of metacognitive strategies while reading an academic text. To answer these questions,

I collected the data from the checklist section of the reading-strategy report form in a simple tally.

In addition, I conducted independent-samples t -tests to explore any significant differences between

the two groups of students’ perceived use of both cognitive and metacognitive strategies as well as

to investigate any significant differences between the reported use of these two types of strategies

within each group.

To answer the third research question, What cognitive and metacognitive strategies did the

higher-reading-ability and the lower-reading-ability students report using to a significantly

different level of frequency?, the chi-square test for independence was performed to determine

whether there was any difference in the proportion of the higher-reading-ability and the lower-reading-ability students reporting using each particular strategy while dealing with the text. The



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data collected from the checklist section of the reading-strategy report form was also collected in a

tally and presented in the form of frequency tables showing the number and percentages of

frequency of reported use of each individual strategy (see Tables 7-8).

In addition to the quantitative analysis, the participants’ written description of their actual

reading processes and their feelings towards the way they read were collected and translated into

English (all participants wrote their journals in Thai). This qualitative data was presented to support

and strengthen the discussion of students’ use of strategies.

Results and Discussion

This study was designed to investigate three distinctive aspects of Thammasat students’ perceived

use of reading strategies: (a) differences between the higher- and the lower-reading ability students

in their reported use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies; (b) differences in the students’ use

of cognitive and metacognitive strategies within each group of students; and (c) cognitive and

metacognitive strategies which the higher- and the lower-reading-ability students reported using to

a significantly different level of frequency. Both quantitative and qualitative data collection was

conducted and the participants’ reported use of the two types of reading strategies is described as

follows.

Research Question 1: Were there any differences between the higher-reading-ability and the

lower-reading-ability students in their perceived use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies


In response to this research question, the independent-samples t -test revealed no significant

difference in the perceived use of metacognitive strategies between the higher- and the lower-

reading-ability group (t (30) = .89, p = .38, two-tailed test , d = .59), although the higher-reading-

ability group reported using metacognitive strategies slightly more than their counterparts. This

statistical data showed that both higher- and lower-reading-ability students displayed an awareness

of metacognitive strategy use, while coping with the text Working in the Movies, in more or less the

same way. Table 3 presents the means of the students’ perceived use of metacognitive strategies.

Table 3: Higher- and Lower-Reading-Ability Students’ Means of Metacognitive Strategy UseThammasat Students N Mean S.D S.D Error

Mean

Higher-Proficiency 18 5.44 2.28 .54Lower-Proficiency 14 4.86 1.02 .27



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Unlike the results obtained in relation to their use of metacognitive strategies, the

independent-samples t -test showed a significant difference in the perceived use of cognitive

strategies between the two groups of students (t (30) = 2.26, p = .03, two-tailed test , d = 1.58). To

be more precise, the higher-reading-ability group ( N = 18, M = 6.44, SD = 2.01) reported using

cognitive strategies significantly more than the lower-reading-ability group did ( N = 14, M = 4.86,

SD = 1.92). Table 4 reveals the means of the students’ reported use of cognitive strategies.

Table 4: Higher- and Lower-Reading-Ability Students’ Means of Cognitive Strategy UseThammasat Students N Mean S.D S.D Error

Mean

Higher-Proficiency 18 6.44 2.01 .47Lower-Proficiency 14 4.86 1.92 .51

The higher-reading-ability group’s descriptive written journals are also in agreement with

the quantitative data discussed above. They provided a number of positive descriptions confirming

the survey reports of their perceived use of cognitive strategies employed during their actual

reading processes as follows:

I felt there were a number of words I didn’t know the meanings of. So I tried to guess themeaning of those unknown words from context clues. I also scanned for the answers fromthe passage. I didn’t read every word in each paragraph. When I found the part that wassupposed to be the answer, I translated it into Thai to increase my understanding...I first skimmed the text to roughly grasp its overall meaning and then I tried to connectdifferent parts of the text together. I also reread part of the text for greater detail. When Igot stuck with some difficult words, I guessed their meaning from context clues. But toomany difficult words could sometimes discourage me from reading...

Research Question 2: Did the higher-reading-ability and the lower-reading-ability students

report using cognitive strategies in the same way as they took control of metacognitive strategies


To answer this research question, an independent-samples t -test was implemented toexamine any differences in reported number of metacognitive and cognitive strategies used within

each group. In the case of the higher-reading-ability group, an independent-samples t -test revealed

no significant difference in the number of metacognitive and the number of cognitive strategies

used by this group of students (t (34) = -1.39, p = .17, two-tailed test , d = -1.0), even though they

reported using cognitive strategies more than metacognitive ones. Table 5 presents the means of the

higher-reading-ability group’s metacognitive and cognitive strategy use.



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Table 5: Higher-Reading-Ability Group’s Means of Metacognitive and Cognitive Strategy UseTypes of Strategies Higher-

Reading-Ability Reported Using

N Mean S.D S.D Error

Mean

Metacognitive 18 5.44 2.28 .54Cognitive 18 6.44 2.01 .47

Likewise, an independent-samples t -test was conducted with the data from the lower-

reading-ability group and it also showed no significant difference between the number of

metacognitive and the number of cognitive strategies used by the lower-reading-ability group (t (26)

= .11, p = .91, two-tailed test , d = .07). Nevertheless, unlike their higher-ability peers, the lower-

reading-ability students reported using metacognitive strategies slightly more than they reported

using cognitive ones when dealing with their academic reading. Table 6 shows the means of the

lower-reading-ability group’s metacognitive and cognitive strategy use.

Table 6: Lower-Reading-Ability Group’s Means of Metacognitive and Cognitive Strategy UseTypes of Strategies Lower-

Reading-Ability Reported Using

N Mean S.D S.D Error

Mean

Metacognitive 14 4.86 1.03 .27Cognitive 14 4.79 2.19 .58

The data obtained from the participants’ reading journals also reflect their awareness of not

only cognitive but also metacognitive strategies. The first sample excerpt written by a higher-level

participant whose score was relatively high (16 out of 20) displays a well-balanced proportion of

cognitive and metacognitive knowledge while coping with his academic reading. He was aware of

a number of good cognitive strategies including ‘identifying the main points,’ ‘connecting one part

of the text to another,’ ‘guessing the meaning of unknown words from context,’ while at the same

time he was conscious of his own reading weaknesses and of ways to improve them.

I made all efforts in identifying the main points of each paragraph and then I tried toconnect all the main points together to see how they were related to each other. I alsotried to specify the writer’s purposes in writing each section and guessed the meaning of some unknown words from context clues. While reading, I felt that I needed toconcentrate a lot on this passage because English was not my mother tongue. Sometimes,well, actually a lot of time when I got lost, I wasn’t able to understand and grasp the main

points. On top of that, I thought not knowing the meaning of vocabulary could be a great barrier to text understanding. We need to have sound vocabulary knowledge...(Descriptive journal writing of a higher-level participant)

Another example is the descriptive journal written by a lower-level student who received

9.5 out of 20. Similar to his high-proficiency peer, he was able to make use of some cognitive

strategies—‘scanning,’ ‘rereading,’ ‘identifying the main points’—despite his negligence of ‘guessing the meaning of unknown words.’ Apart from the cognitive strategies, it is obvious that he





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questions7. Summarizing information 13 72.2% 71.4% .01 .968. Checking comprehension 9 50% 28.6% 1.49 .229. Identifying difficulties 8 44.4% 28.6% .84 .3510. Judging how well objectivesare met

8 44.4% 35.7% .25 .61

11. Taking steps to repair faultycomprehension

9 50% 28.6% 1.49 .22

12. Reflecting on what you havelearnt from the text

13 72.2% 64.3% .23 .63

Table 8: Higher and Lower-Reading-Ability Group’s Reported Use of Cognitive StrategiesStrategies High-Proficiency Low-Proficiency X² P

Cognitive N Percent N Percent

1. Skimming 11 61.1% 9 64.3% .03 .85

2. Connecting text to backgroundknowledge

13 72.2% 8 57.1% .79 .37

3. Making inferences 8 44.4% 2 14.3% 3.33 .064. Connecting one part of the textto another

14 77.8% 6 42.9% 4.09 .04*

5. Paying attention to textstructure

5 27.8% 2 14.3% .83 .36

6. Rereading 16 88.9% 14 100% 1.65 .197. Guessing the meaning of a newword from context

18 100% 11 78.6% 4.25 .04*

8. Using discourse markers to seerelationships 11 61.1% 4 28.6% 3.34 .06

9. Critiquing the author 2 11.1% 2 14.3% .07 .7810. Critiquing the text 3 16.7% 2 14.3% .03 .8511. Analyzing words and sentencestructure

5 27.8% 2 14.3% .83 .36

12. Translating a word or phraseinto L1

8 44.4% 5 35.7% .24 .61

In addition to the significant differences found in the students’ use of ‘connecting one part

of the text to another’ and ‘guessing the meaning of a new word from context’, there were two

cognitive strategies which the higher- and lower-reading-ability groups used in a different level of

frequency—‘using discourse markers to see relationships’ ( X 21 = 3.34, df = 1, p = .06, N = 32) and

‘making inferences’( X 21 = 3.33, df = 1, p = .06, N = 32). Around 61 and 44 percent of the higher-

reading-ability group reported using discourse markers to see relationships and making inferences,

while 29 and 14 percent of their lower-proficiency peers reported using them. Even though the P

value received from the chi-square test for these two higher-level strategies did not establish a

significant difference, it was very close to the critical value.



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Interestingly, the data from the participants’ reading journals appear to be consistent with

the quantitative findings. That is the higher-reading-ability students displayed their awareness of

those higher-level cognitive strategies whereas their lower-proficiency peers tended not to resort to

them in the same quantity as their counterparts did. Examples from the descriptive journals are

provided below.

I read the title and the first paragraph of the text first to help me visualize what the wholetext was about. I read the text paragraph by paragraph and tried to locate the topicsentence of each paragraph and then underlined or marked it. When I came across somedifficult vocabulary, I tried to guess their meaning from context and also marked theclues. When I finished reading, I summarized the whole text to see what I had learnt fromit. (Descriptive journal writing of a higher-level student)

I read through the text and then read the questions. Then I tried to find out the answers by

reading each paragraph focusing on key words. I read it again and again until I could findthe answers. I felt the text was difficult and that was because I personally don’t likereading, but I knew that it’s important. I, therefore, tried to do my best. (Descriptive

journal writing of a lower-reading-ability student)

In analyzing the individual strategies which the higher- and lower-reading-ability group

frequently employed and tended not to pay attention to, based on their perception, I performed a

simple tally, counting the number of participants who reported their use of each individual strategy.

This type of quantitative analysis showed that the higher-reading-ability group viewed these

metacognitive strategies—‘summarizing information,’ ‘reflecting on what you have learnt from thetext,’ ‘predicting the contents of the text,’ ‘specifying a purpose for reading,’ ‘checking

comprehension,’ and ‘taking steps to repair faulty comprehension’—as their preference. All these

strategies might more or less associate with their reading performance on the test. However, some

of the metacognitive strategies, such as ‘planning what to do,’ ‘checking predictions,’ and ‘posing

and answering questions to oneself’ were the least frequently used. One reason why they did not

resort to these strategies might be that they could be very competent at them and thus used them

unconsciously as skills. In contrast, it might simply be that they were not aware of them and eventhat they might rarely resort to them when they read texts in their L1.

On the students’ perceived use of cognitive strategies, the higher-reading-ability group

placed importance on strategies such as ‘guessing the meaning of a new word from context,’

‘rereading,’ ‘connecting one part of the text to another,’ ‘connecting text to background

knowledge,’ and ‘skimming the text,’ whereas ‘critiquing the author and text,’ ‘paying attention to

text structure,’ and ‘analyzing words and sentence structure’ were overlooked in their academic

reading. In addition to the reasons mentioned previously, the reasons why this group did not make



87

use of the critiquing strategies might be related to the text type and purpose for reading. The higher-

reading-ability students, furthermore, might aim at global comprehension and that might answer

our question as to why they did not focus on analyzing words and sentence structure (Alderson,

2000).

When compared to their higher-level peers, the lower-reading-ability group resorted to

similar cognitive strategies. Among the cognitive strategies, ‘rereading’ was the most frequently

used, followed by ‘guessing the meaning of a new word,’ ‘skimming the text,’ ‘connecting text to

background knowledge,’ and ‘connecting one part of the text to another,’ while the least frequently

used ones were ‘critiquing the text,’ ‘analyzing words and sentence structure,’ ‘paying attention to

text structure,’ ‘making inferences,’ and ‘critiquing the author.’ What seemed to be a distinctive

difference between the two groups was that the lower-level group was not aware of the use of

‘drawing inferences,’ whereas the higher-level students were.

With regard to the lower-reading-ability students’ perceived use of metacognitive strategies,

they placed a priority on ‘predicting the contents of the text,’ ‘summarizing information,’

‘reflecting on what you have learnt from the text,’ ‘specifying a purpose for reading,’ and

‘checking predictions.’ In spite of the fact that they used a variety of these strategies, they displayed

their lack of awareness of the strategies, such as ‘planning what to do,’ ‘posing questions about the

text to yourself,’ ‘checking comprehension,’ and ‘taking steps to repair faulty comprehension.’ In

contrast, the latter two were in fact used very frequently by the higher-level group.

Pedagogical Implications and Practical Classroom Applications

I will now reflect on the implications I drew from the findings of the students’ perceived use of

both metacognitive and cognitive reading strategies. These cover four crucial areas of EFL strategy

instruction: combination of cognitive and metacognitive strategy training, significance of cognitive

strategies, roles of higher-level type of reading strategies, and important strategies to be

emphasized in the classroom context.

First of all, this study offers clear evidence that a combination of cognitive and

metacognitive strategy use can contribute to learners’ reading performance. This research paper has

led to a solid conclusion that no readers seem to use a single type of processing as they read. Yet,

good readers are likely to resort to both types of reading strategies, to a widely varying degree. This

conclusion is also consistent with Carrell & Grabe (2002), who suggested that L2 readers should be



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taught to use a wide variety of reading strategies, not merely a single one, over an extensive period

of time in order to make use of them effectively.

It also provides support for the argument that cognitive strategies seem to be the key to

learners’ academic reading success. Even though not only cognitive but also metacognitive

strategies contribute to reading comprehension, it seems that cognitive strategies are directly related

to more chance of success in comprehension, requiring great effort and time in practicing using

them until they become automatized.

Given the fact that the higher-reading-ability students were able to display a significantly

higher awareness of four types of cognitive strategies—‘connecting one part of the text to another,’

‘guessing the meaning of a new word from context,’ ‘using discourse markers to see relationships,’

and ‘making inferences,’ we can conclude that higher-level processing strategies can maximize

learners’ academic reading success. Islam & Mares (2003) highlight the importance of higher-level

cognitive strategies stating that they enable learners to “hypothesize, predict, infer, make

connections and associations and visualize” (p. 90). These types of higher-level processing

strategies can also engage readers with the text.

Finally, the study offers evidence that metacognitive strategies which are likely to be

associated with a high reading performance are ‘summarizing information,’ ‘reflecting on what you

have learnt from the text,’ ‘predicting the contents of the text,’ ‘specifying a purpose for reading,’

and ‘checking comprehension.’ In addition, it leads us to conclude that ‘guessing the meaning of a

new word from context,’ ‘rereading,’ ‘connecting one part of the text to another,’ ‘connecting text

to background knowledge,’ and ‘skimming the text’ are major cognitive strategies of high-reading-

ability readers and thus can contribute to reading performance.

Considering the implications drawn from the data in this study, I shall propose some

recommendations for practical classroom applications, particularly in the Thai university context.

First of all, reading strategy training as well as reading materials design should integrate the

training of both metacognitive and cognitive strategies throughout to maximize learners’ success in

reading. This can be done by implementing explicit strategy training of why and how to apply a

cluster of cognitive and metacognitive strategies in various specific reading situations to serve

students’ reading needs. As outlined in the literature review section, strategies are defined asconscious or deliberate mental and behavioral process, and thus they can be taught. Explicit



89

strategy training can raise students’ awareness of which strategies to employ and how to employ

them, despite their low proficiency, to promote their ability to remedy reading difficulties and,

more importantly, to increase their autonomous learning and self-regulation during reading

(Oxford, 1996; Weaver & Cohen, 1998)

It is also recommended that higher-level strategies—such as ‘connecting one part of the text

to another,’ ‘guessing the meaning of a new word from context,’ ‘using discourse markers to see

relationships,’ and ‘making inferences’—should be emphasized in the classroom context and in

materials design and development. Despite the fact that they have an awareness of all these higher-

level cognitive strategies, low-proficiency readers might not yet be able to apply them fluently and

skillfully in their contextualized reading. Since these are advanced strategies, long-term strategy

instruction, preferably over two consecutive semesters, which emphasizes the use of high-level

processing strategies in the actual reading context, should be used to provide students with

sufficient practice. In addition to this, clear purpose and importance of all higher-level processing

strategies and of reading itself should be incorporated. Understanding the purpose and importance

of each strategy can motivate readers to apply strategies more effectively and thus contributes to

their better performance.

Specific tasks and activities also need to be implemented to improve learners’ use of those

higher-level reading strategies (e.g. using discourse markers to see relationships). The use of story

grammar (Gascoigne, 2008), for example, is likely to enhance learners’ understanding of how the

author organized his ideas throughout as well as how ideas are connected. Such a task specifically

tailored to serve learners’ needs is required, in addition to using only traditional multiple-choice

questions.

As the data of this study illustrates, both higher- and lower-reading-ability students were not

aware of some metacognitive strategies—‘posing questions about the text to yourself’, ‘finding

answers to your posed questions’, ‘checking predictions’ and ‘planning what to do’. Therefore,

strong emphasis, in terms of direct explanation and task design, on these in the classroom context

would assist them to take more control of their reading activities.

Conclusion

The study provides information about the patterns of cognitive and metacognitive strategiescurrently used by Thai undergraduate participants when asked to deal with academic reading.



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Significant differences between the higher- and lower-reading-ability groups were merely

established in their use of cognitive reading strategies, particularly in their use of higher-level

cognitive types. The study substantially supports the focus on higher-level processing in the

classroom context as a way to promote EFL learners’ reading performance. Future instructional

research should be conducted to investigate (a) students’ perceptions of the emphasis on higher-

level cognitive strategies in the classroom context (b) their progress in reading performance after

being trained to apply higher-level strategies and (c) teachers’ views on implementing higher-level

strategy-based training.

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Appendix 1: Reading Text and Test

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on the following passage.

Working in the moviesSubtitling is an exacting part of the translation profession. Melanie Leyshon talks to VirginieVerdier of London translation company VSI about the glamour and the grind.

When people ask French translator Virginie Verdier what she does for a living, it must be temptingto say enigmatically: ‘Oh me? I’m in the movies’. It’s strictly true, but her starring role is behindthe scenes. As translating goes, it doesn’t get more entertaining or glamorous than subtitling films.If you’re very lucky, you get to work on the new blockbuster films before they’re in the cinema,and if you’re just plain lucky, you get to work on the blockbuster movies that are going to video or DVD.

Virginie is quick to point out that this is as exacting as any translating job. ‘You work hard. It’s notall entertainment as you are doing the translating. You need all the skills of a good translator andthose of a top-notch editor. You have to be precise and, of course, much more concise than intraditional translation work.’

The process starts when you get the original script and a tape. ‘We would start with translating andadapting the film script. The next step is what we call ‘timing’, which means synchronizing thesubtitles to the dialogue and pictures.’ This task requires discipline. ‘You play the film, listen to thevoice and the subtitles are up on your screen ready to be timed. You insert your subtitle when youhear the corresponding dialogue and delete it when the dialogue finishes. The video tape carries atime code which runs in hours, minutes, second and frames. Think of it as a clock. The subtitlingunit has an insert key to capture the time code where you want the subtitle to appear. When you

press the delete key, it captures the time code where you want the subtitle to disappear. So eachsubtitle would have an ‘in’ point and an ‘out’ point which represent the exact time when the subtitlecomes in and goes out. This process is then followed by a manual review, subtitle by subtitle, andtime-codes are adjusted to improve synchronization and respect shot changes. This processinvolves playing the film literally frame by frame as it is essential the subtitles respect the visualrhythm of the film.’

Different subtitlers use different techniques. ‘I would go through the film and do the wholetranslation and then go right back from the beginning and start the timing process. But you could do

it in different stages, translate let’s say 20 minutes of the film, then time this section and translatethe next 20 minutes, and so on. It’s just a different method.’

For multi-lingual projects, the timing is done first to create what is called a ‘spotting list’, a subtitletemplate, which is in effect a list of English subtitles pre-timed and edited for translation purposes.This is then translated and the timing is adapted to the target language with the help of thetranslator for quality control.

‘Like any translation work, you can’t hurry subtitling’, says Virginie. ‘If subtitles are translated andtimed in a rush, the quality will be affected and it will show.’ Mistakes usually occur when thetranslator does not master the source language and misunderstands the original dialogue. ‘Our work

also involves checking and reworking subtitles when the translation is not up to standard. However,the reason for redoing subtitles is not just because of poor quality translation. We may need to



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adapt subtitles to a new version of the film: the time code may be different, the film may have beenedited or the subtitles may have been created for the cinema rather than video. If subtitles weredone for cinema on 35 mm, we would need to reformat the timing for video, as subtitles could beout of synch or too fast. If the translation is good, we would obviously respect the work of theoriginal translator.’

On a more practical level, there are general subtitling rules to follow, says Virginie. ‘Subtitlesshould appear at the bottom of the screen and usually in the centre.’ She says that differentcountries use different standards and rules. ‘In Scandinavian countries and Holland, for example,subtitles are traditionally left justified. Characters usually appear in white with a thick black border for easy reading against a white or light background. We can also use different colours for eachspeaker when subtitling for the hearing impaired. Subtitles should have a maximum of two linesand the maximum number of characters on each line should be between 32 and 39. Our companystandard is 37 (different companies and countries have different standards)’.

Translators often have a favourite genre, whether it’s war films, musicals, comedies (one of the

most difficult because of the subtleties and nuances of comedy in different countries), drama or corporate programmes. Each requires a certain tone and style. ‘VSI employs American subtitlers,which is incredibly useful as many of the films we subtitle are American,’ says Virginie. ‘For anEnglish person, it would not be so easy to understand the meaning behind typically Americanexpressions, and vice-versa.’

Source: Harrison, M & Whitehead, R. (2006). Exam Essentials: IELTS Practice Tests. London:Thomson ELT. 96-97.



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Directions: After finishing reading the text, answer the following questions or do as directed (20 points).Questions 1-5 (one point each)Complete the flow chart below.Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.

The Subtitling Process

Stage 1: Translate and adapt the scriptStage 2:

x (1) ______________________________-matching the subtitles to what is said

x Involves recording time codes by using the (2) ______________________ and ____________________ keys

Stage 3: (3) ______________________- in order to make the (4) _________________ better Multi-lingual projects

Stage 1: Produce something known as a (5) _________________________ and translate that

Questions 6-9 (one point each)Do the following statements agree with the information given in the reading passage?Write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the informationFALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this6. For translators, all subtitling work on films is desirable. __________________ 7. Subtitling work involves a requirement that does not apply to other translation work.

____________ 8. Some subtitling techniques work better than others. ____________________ 9. Few people are completely successful at subtitling comedies. _____________

Questions 10-13 (one point each)Complete the sentences below with words from the reading passage.Use NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.10. Poor subtitling can be a result of the subtitler not being excellent at ________________.11. To create subtitles for a video version of a film, it may be necessary to ______________.12. Subtitles usually have a __________________________ around them.13. Speakers can be distinguished from each other for the benefit of ___________________.

Source: Harrison, M & Whitehead, R. (2006). Exam Essentials: IELTS Practice Tests. London:Thomson ELT. 98-99.



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Write a summary of the reading passage. Begin the first sentence with the main idea and then provide some major supporting details (7 points)

_________________________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________________

Biodata

Melada Sudajit-apa, Director of Graduate Diploma Program in English for Business and Management at ThammasatUniversity, holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her PhD thesis entitled“Systematizing EAP Materials Development: Design, Evaluation and Revision in a Thai Undergraduate ReadingCourse” focuses on three main areas: materials design and development, reading strategies, and collaborative learning.She is currently interested in materials development, learners’ strategies, motivation, reading instruction, andsystematic functional approach to text analysis. She can be reached at [email protected]



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Empowering Thai University Students to Cope with English Texts Using Outlines and

Summaries

Usuma Chuenchompoo

Thai university students still need help with reading. Generally, many students tend toread word by word or sentence by sentence; they do not pay attention to readingstrategies such as reference, transition, text organization and so on, which would helpenhance their comprehension. Many of them find it difficult to separate main ideas fromsupporting details, and cannot summarize and communicate what they have read either verbally or in writing. The author has tried to find ways to increase her students’ readingability, and found that an effective approach is to write a summary from an outline.Conducting an action research in a reading class, she found that this method improved thestudents’ performance in their reading comprehension tests.

Keywords: Outlining, summarizing, reading comprehension

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´«¹¬µ¦³´¤®µª·¥µ¨´¥°Å¥Îµª¤µ¥´¤¸{®µÄµ¦°nµ ¨nµªº° Å¤n-µ¤µ¦´Äªµ¤-Îµ´Åo Å¤n-µ¤µ¦-¦»ªµ¤µ-· É É°nµÅo {®µº° ´«¹¬µÁ® nµ Ê¤³°nµ ¸¨³Îµ ®¦º°¸¨³¦³Ã¥ Â¨³Å¤nÄ®oªµ¤-Ä¨¥»rnµÇ Énª¥Äµ¦°nµÁn µ¦-ÁÎµ°oµ°· Îµ®¦º°ª¨ É¼ oÁ¸¥ÄoÁº É°¤Ã¥ªµ¤· ¦¼Â°µÁ¥ ¨°

¹µ¦Â¥Äªµ¤-Îµ°°µ¦µ¥¨³Á°¥ Â¨³µ¦-¦»ªµ¤ µ¦nµ¥°ªµ¤ Å¤nªnµ³Á}µ¦¡¼®¦º°µ¦Á¸¥ ¼ oÁ¸¥Åo¡¥µ¥µ¤®µ¨¥»rÁ¡º É°nª¥Ä®o´«¹¬µ°nµÅo¸¹ Ê Â¨³-µ¤µ¦ÎµÁ¦º É° É°nµ¤µnµ¥°Ä¨´¬³µÁ¸¥Åo ¹ Éª·¸µ¦®¹ É Éo¡º° µ¦Ä®o´«¹¬µ°nµÂ¨³Á¸¥ÁoµÃ¦ (outline) Â¨³µÁoµÃ¦Ä®oÁ¸¥Á}¥n°ªµ¤ (summary)

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Introduction

The idea to do this action research started in an English class called ‘EG 221: Reading for

Information.’ The purpose of this course is to help the students develop effective reading strategies

for understanding informative texts such as articles in newspapers, magazines and textbooks (see

details in Appendix 1). It is the first reading course designed for the 2nd year English majors of the

English Department, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Thammasat University (TU), who have 6-9 years

prior knowledge of English, plus two prerequisites they have to study in the freshman year, unlessexempted. EG 221 is also a required course for other students in the Faculty of Liberal Arts, and



98

those from other faculties—the Faculty of Political Science, the Faculty of Science and

Technology, and the Faculty of Commerce and Accountancy. It is offered every semester and

available for all TU students, with a fixed number of 30 students per class. Thus, the total number

of students taking this course reaches approximately 800-1,000 a semester and the students are of

mixed abilities. As for the instructors, they are all qualified teachers of English with at least a

master’s degree in English language teaching.

The problem that led to this research project was that many students did not do well, getting

only a C average, because they did not fully comprehend the texts they read and could not express

their ideas in writing either. (In the achievement tests, the students had to answer open-ended

questions, which were about 60-75% of the test.) The author found that the majority had problems

with vocabulary, long complex sentence structures, and text organization. It seemed that when the

students read, they concentrated only on vocabulary or short phrases, and paid no attention to the

context, references, transitions, text organization, and other features of the text, which could help

them understand the text better. In other words, they do not make use of reading strategies. Then

comes the instructor’s problem. How could the instructors empower the students to read more

carefully and strategically, using reading strategies to improve their comprehension and increase

their writing ability up to the level that they could express their ideas clearly in writing? In this

regard, the author thought of writing a summary from an outline, which was controlled summary

writing, in contrast to free writing.

In each unit in the textbook used in this course, there was an outline activity in which the

students were asked to write an outline of a paragraph, or 3-5 paragraphs, and produce a summary

from that outline (see details in Appendix 1). If the students did not fully comprehend the text they

read, they could not get a correct outline or a logical summary. If they got everything right, all

supporting details would support or clarify the main idea. If any of the supporting details did not go

well with the main idea, there must have been something wrong, and so the students had to go back

to the text and reread it. This was meant to encourage the students to use reading strategies to

increase reading proficiency and learn to monitor their comprehension by themselves. Three

‘research’ questions were posed then:

- Can teaching reading that emphasizes outlining and summarizing help improve

reading comprehension?

- Can this controlled method of writing summaries help improve writing ability?- Would the students be satisfied with this approach?



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Literature review

Before starting, the author reviewed literature on teaching reading to confirm the idea of using

writing to help reading and vice versa, and found that the approach was supported by many

researchers and theorists, including Bean & Steenwyck (1984); Gordon & Braun (1982); Grabe

(1991); Kirby (1986); Pearson & Fielding (1996); Shanahan (1984); Shanahan & Lomax (1986,

1988); Taylor & Beach (1984); Tierney & Pearson (1983); and Tierney & Shanahan (1991).

Shanahan & Lomax (1986), for example, found reading and writing connections, when

examining 256 second and fifth graders, and offered the following conclusion:

Reading influences writing and writing influences reading; theories of literacy

development need to emphasize both of these characteristics similarly. These findingssuggest that reading and writing should be taught in ways that maximize the possibility of using information drawn from bothreading and writing. (p. 208)

Bean & Steenwyck’s studies about summary writing (1984) with sixth graders and Taylor &

Beach’s (1984) with seventh graders showed that writing led to improved reading achievement,

reading led to better writing performance, and combined instruction led to improvement in both

reading and writing in the long run.

Many studies showed that reading and writing influenced each other, but they generallylacked the detail description necessary to allow such findings to be applied to instructional practice

(Tierney & Shanahan 1991). Most importantly, little was known about this area in second

language literacy. Grabe (1991 & 2009) also supported this idea, and suggested that reading and

writing be taught together in advanced academic preparation, because many cognitive skills were

mutually reinforcing, and the integration of literacy skills developed strategic approaches to

academic tasks.

From the above literature review, it could be concluded that reading and writing, when taught

together, could help increase the students’ reading and writing abilities. The next step was to search

for instructional strategies to enhance reading and writing relationships in order to achieve the

desired effect. In regard to summary writing, Pearson & Fielding (1996) proposed that helping

students learn how to summarize had a positive effect on their comprehension and recall of text.

However, the strategies used varied, and all the research surveyed had been done with young

English native speakers. Little had been done with L2 learners.



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Among the summarization methodologies found were Day (1980)—which provided students

with five summarization rules and promoted their independent monitoring of their own rule use;

McNeil & Donant’s experiment (1982)—in which students received a set of summarization rules

with instruction on how to apply the rules to simple passages; the intuitive discovery approach, or

‘getting the GIST procedure’ (Cunningham, 1982)—in which students got continuing feedback

about the quality of the summaries they made from short passages; and Rinehart, Stahl, & Erickson

(1986)—which applied three of Day’s rules and a general rule concerning main ideas and

supporting details derived from Taylor (1982; Taylor & Beach, 1984), all of which produced

favorable effects.

From these studies, Rinehart, Stahl, & Erickson’s work was closest to the approach planned

to be employed in this research project. However, similar to other studies, this research was done

with young L1 learners (sixth-grade students), and so a question arose — Would it also work well

with L2 university students?

Comprehension monitoring and summarizing are effective reading comprehension

strategies under the umbrella of metacognition (Casanave, 1988; Grabe, 1991& 2009).

Metacognitive knowledge is defined as knowledge about cognition and the self-regulation of

cognition (Baker & Brown, 1984; Brown, Armbruster & Baker, 1986). Metacognitive strategies are

behaviors undertaken by the learners to plan, arrange, and evaluate their own learning (Singhal,

2001). As related to reading, metacognitive strategies includes recognizing the more important

information in the text; using context to sort out a misunderstanding segment; skimming portions of

the text; previewing headings, pictures, and summaries; using search strategies for finding specific

information; formulating questions about the information; using a dictionary; using word-formation

and affix information to guess word meanings; taking notes; summarizing information; self-

monitoring and correcting errors; and so on (Grabe, 1991; Singhal, 2001). Numerous studies have

shown that good readers are more effective in using metacognitive strategies than less fluent

readers (Singhal, 2001; Grabe, 2009).

Monitoring comprehension is commonly discussed as a major reading strategy that improves

comprehension (Grabe, 2009). According to Grabe, almost any strategy that supports main-idea

comprehension could be seen as a choice for monitoring comprehension. Making an outline is an

activity that allows the students to check whether or not they fully comprehend what they haveread. If they find something out of the realm of the writer’s focus or illogical, they have to go back



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to the text, read more carefully, and clarify misunderstanding, all of which are strategies used for

comprehension monitoring (Grabe, 2009). Thus, outlining and summarizing could possibly help

improve the students’ comprehension, making them become fluent readers.

Research methodology

The research method would be action research. Having studied action research methodology, the

author decided to follow the basic process: planning, acting, observing, and reflecting (Kemmis &

McTaggart 1988).

Planning

The author thought about what she would have to do in class, and found that the following items

were needed: a suitable text, a reading comprehension test, two questionnaires, and progress sheets.

A suitable text

The text that was being used consisted of 6 units, each of which contained quite a long text (about

1,000-1,300 words, taking about 7-9 hours to finish each unit), and presented reading strategies bit

by bit throughout the text. In this research project, it would be more appropriate to review all the

reading strategies the students had learned from the prerequisites, and give them shorter texts in the

beginning (about 500-800 words, taking 4-6 hours to cover) prepared specially to help students

learn how to write an outline and a summary. The author started by surveying commercial texts, but

could not find any that suited the need stated above. Thus, a suitable text was prepared, and in late

2008 it was ready for use, with permission from the English Department. (Later on it became a

textbook used for the EG 221 course, called Pathways to Reading Comprehension). It consisted of

two parts. The first part was a review of all the reading strategies that the students had already

learned from the prerequisites (i.e. prediction; text organization and transitions; skimming;

scanning; dealing with new words; references; and inferences). Furthermore, it detailed how to

write an outline and a summary with four articles (about 600-800 words) for practicing outlining

and summarizing. The second part consisted of six longer texts (about 1,000-1,300 words) for

practicing all the learned strategies.

A reading comprehension test

Together with the text, a test paper was also prepared to be used in the beginning (pretest) and at

the end of the course (posttest), the interval of which was three months. The test consisted of areading passage, which was an article from the Time magazine called Stressed-out Kids (Gorman,



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2000), the length of which was 600 words. This test was used on six trials by three instructors (with

128 students) and improved before being used in this research. The test tasks included five

multiple-choice questions, six open-ended questions, and a completion task on outlining, the same

features as the test tasks on the examination papers for EG 221. The same form of test was used

because it would test not only reading but also writing, the latter of which covered about 60-75% of

the EG 221 examinations. In this way, the students’ writing abilities could be compared, both pre-

treatment (their proficiency) and post-treatment (their achievement). More importantly, writing was

a crucial part in this action research since it was part of the problem mentioned earlier as to why the

students did not earn good grades for this course.

Two questionnaires

Two questionnaires were written in Thai to avoid language problems. The first one was used after

the students had learned how to write an outline and a summary from the outline for the first time

(see Appendix 2). The purposes were 1) to see whether or not the students had prior knowledge or

experience of outlining and summarizing; 2) to survey their attitudes towards outlining and

summarizing; and 3) to encourage the students to think about advantages of these activities. The

outcome would be useful for making lesson plans.

The second questionnaire, used at the end of the course, concerned the students’ satisfaction

about the course, self-evaluation, and recommendations. The students would have a chance to

reflect on what they had learned. This would also be helpful for further planning (see Appendix 3).

Progress sheets

A progress sheet was designed to record the students’ scores on outlining and summarizing, as well

as notes on their problems or weak points such as sentence structures, vocabulary, transitions, etc.

The purpose of this was to monitor their progress and assist them when and where needed.

Acting and observating

The research was conducted with a group of 17 second-year TU students in the second semester of

2008. The class started by discussing the course outline, in which the emphasis was on outlining

and summarizing , and then the students were tested (using the pretest paper) before beginning the

lesson to evaluate their reading proficiency.



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After a few weeks of practice on general reading strategies (e.g., recognizing transitions and

relationships between ideas; dealing with unfamiliar words and expressions; recognizing

references; skimming; and predicting), the work on outlining and summarizing was introduced. At

this stage, the students learned how to identify main ideas and supporting details, all at a paragraph

level. When they understood what they were expected to perform, the first questionnaire was given

to survey their prior experience on outlining and summarizing and attitude towards these activities.

This was meant to encourage them to think about the advantage of the activities. It turned out that

88.33% of the students had learned outlining and only 11.76% had done summary writing before,

but it was free writing. As for advantages of doing outlining and summarizing, all the students said

it would help enhance their comprehension. However, all of them anticipated two main problems:

1) More than 70% were concerned about vocabulary, comprehension, and how to identify the main

ideas and supporting details. 2) 23.52% worried about how to express their ideas in writing. This

provided useful information for further planning.

In teaching how to make an outline from an article, the author started with a very short article

called “Is Going Nutty Good for You?” (see Appendix 4), and demonstrated the techniques for

separating the main idea from the supporting details: using questions; and using text organization.

From this article, the author did the following:

1) Showed the title of this article on the screen, and asked the students to

guess what the topic was. In the first place, no one knew what it was.

Without the context, they could not link the word going nutty with nuts, but

after they were encouraged to think about the word nutty, especially its

sound and spelling, some of them said, “It’s about nuts.”

2) Asked them to skim through the text to find out whether their answer was

correct. Their answers were: Nuts; Benefits of nuts; A health benefit of nuts; and

Nuts and diabetes.

3) Asked them, “What does the writer say about this topic?”

4) Told them to read the text carefully to find the answer.

The answers were:

A. Nuts are good for you.

B. Nuts reduce the risk of diabetes.

C. According to a study in the Journal of the American Medical

Association, nuts in all forms, including peanut butter, reduce the risk of adult-onset diabetes. (Some of them copied the whole sentence.)



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5) Held a class discussion in which the students gave their opinions about each

choice. Upon reflection with some notes taken immediately after the class,

a conversation between the instructor (I) and the students (S) can be produced as

shown below:

I: Which one do you think is the best answer to the question in the title?

S: C

I: Why?

S: It gives more information.

I: Do you need all the information in C to answer this question?

(Are nuts good for you?)

S: No.

I: OK. Tell me all the words in C that you think are needed for your answer.

S: nuts/nuts in all forms/reduce/diabetes/the risk of diabetes/adult….

What does ‘adult-onset diabetes’ mean?

I: A good question! Let’s look at the word diabetes first. What part of

speech is it? It’s in the pattern…to reduce (v.)+ the risk (n.)+ of +(adult-

onset) diabetes, right?

S: of+ noun. It’s a noun. (This pattern had been discussed before.)

I: Right! The text is about health, right? So, what should it be? Nuts can

reduce the risk of …..what?

S: A disease.

I: Yes. It’s an illness or a medical condition dealing with sugar in the blood.

What do you think it’s called in Thai?

S: It’s….(in Thai).

I: Right! As for onset , it means the beginning of something. OK. Now,

we’re going to put this idea into a sentence, using our own words. Think

of the pattern: SVO. What is the subject?

S: Nuts/Nuts in all forms.

I: Nuts in all forms is ok. This means in the particular way they exist or

appear. What about the verb? What can be used in place of reduce?

S: lower/ minimize

I: Very good. So, we’ve got…Nuts in all forms can lower/minimize the

risk of diabetes. And what about adult-onset ? ………. Adult-onset diabetes is a medical term, so you can’t change it. If you find an



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expression you think is a medical/legal/technical/scientific term like this,

check by using Google search. It’s a useful tool. So’ we’ve got: Nuts in all

forms can lower the risk of adult-onset diabetes. This sentence answers the

question why nuts are good for you. It’s the main idea of this article. Now,

you have to find the details to support this idea, and I’ll show you how to do

this……..

After the students got the main idea, the author asked them to reread the text more carefully to find

out why nuts could minimize the risk of adult-onset diabetes. Most of the students found the answer

in sentences 5-8, which showed an analysis and assumption that polyunsaturated fats, fiber, and

magnesium in nuts may help maintain the levels of blood sugar. This was the major supporting

detail. It presented the reason why nuts could lower the risk of adult-onset diabetes. The author then

led the students to a discussion of text organization, and how to write an outline and a summary

(see Appendix 4).

It can be argued that such a summary may be obtained from the three questions asked

above: 1) What is the topic?; 2) What does the writer say about this topic?; and 3) Why can nuts

minimize the risk of adult-onset diabetes? That might be true, but this strategy (using an outline to

write a summary) helps the students become aware of text organization, and learn how to monitor

their comprehension, which in the long run will make them become strategic readers, being able to

separate the gist from details automatically, even with long complicated texts.

As stated earlier, if the students got an inaccurate main idea or supporting detail(s), they

would get an illogical summary. The article entitled “Bamboo Cures Earthquakes” (see Appendix

5) was a good example of this. In this case, text organization really helped. Many students had

problems with the first paragraph. Some talked about the Iranian earthquake; others thought about

bamboo housing. The class had a long discussion why the latter idea was correct. (If the students

put the Iranian earthquake in the outline, they would learn later when they wrote the summary that

it would not go with the other two paragraphs, which described the prototype house, the testing,

and the reason why bamboo was used.)

In addition to the practice of general reading strategies including outlining and summarizing

presented in the text, extra work on outlining and summarizing was given every other week, and thestudents’ progress was recorded on an Individual Progress Sheet. At the same time, they had to do



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the reading project in groups. The author gave them advice from the start when they tried to find

suitable articles to produce outlines and summaries, helped them get the gist or thesis of the text

and the main idea of each paragraph, and worked closely with them on the outline. After that, they

had to produce a summary from the outline by themselves. After 36 hours of instruction (about 3

months), they were given the posttest. The scores of the pretest and the posttest were recorded and

then analyzed. Also, the scores and the written work from the outline part in the two tests (5

points), and the class work were analyzed.

Reflecting

In this part of the process, the first indicator of effectiveness that needed discussion was the

findings from the pretest and posttest scores. The first question leading to this action research was:

Can teaching reading that emphasizes outlining and summarizing help improve reading

comprehension?

The pretest scores ranged from 30%-70%. The average score was 57.65%, which meant the

majority of the students were somewhat capable of reading. The posttest scores ranged from 32% to

82%, the average of which was 70.82%. When the pretest and posttest scores were analyzed using

T-test, there was a significant increase [t = -3.931, p < .01]. This meant teaching reading that

emphasizes outlining and summarizing could enhance the students’ reading capability.

However, since the number of population was only 17, the statistical analysis of data alone

might not be reliable. The author, therefore, went back to the original test papers, and compared the

outline items in the pretest with those in the posttest papers of each student. Some interesting points

were found, as discussed below.

The content in the outline (see Appendix 6) was part of the main point of the article, in

which Gorman, the writer, discussed why children and teens today seemed more anxious, and

suggested what parents should do to help their kids cope with stress. After the pretest and posttest

scores of this part were compared, it was found that 64.70 % of the students earned more marks in

the posttest, getting 1-2 more points.

In addition to the item in the pretest and posttest mentioned above, another important

evidence of success was the students’ reading project. Three out of five groups (60% of the class)



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had a considerable improvement. Their first draft outlines showed that they understood more than

70% of the texts.

Another point that indicated the students’ reading achievement was the two tests (for the

midterm and the final examinations) produced by the 14 instructors teaching this course that

semester. The midterm and the final tests were more or less at the same level of difficulty as the

pretest and posttest used in this research project. And the subjects in this study did well in both the

midterm and the final examinations. The average scores of the pretest, the midterm and the final

examinations, and the posttest (all after transferred to percentage) increased from 57.65%,

63.33 %, 66.92 %, to 70.82%, respectively.

The students’ self-evaluation from the questionnaire completed in the last month of the

course also confirmed the achievement. 12.5 % of the students said their reading ability had

increased dramatically, and 50 % said it had improved a lot. From the results, 50% of the students

who expressed their opinions about reading said they had gained more understanding of the text

they read and were able to find the main points more quickly. Some said they had also learned to

read in chunks and were able to separate a main clause from a subordinate clause, making them

comprehend more. Other students said this approach made them visualize the outline of what they

read, making them clearly understand the whole story and enjoy reading. 23.52% of the students

said they had some improvements, but still had problems with vocabulary. As a whole, all the

students said they were pleased with this instructional strategy.

As for writing, the question was: Can this controlled method of writing summaries help

improve writing ability? Unlike reading, the progress of which could be achieved more quickly and

seen more easily by means of comprehension check, the improvement in writing in this case could

not be proved easily since the students tended to copy the answers from the texts, instead of

paraphrasing. However, when going through all the students’ writing tasks, the test papers and the

class work, the author found that there was an indication of improvement, although it was not

statistically significant.

The first improvement was that the students appeared to gain more understanding of sentence

structure. This could be seen from the main idea of the outline item in the posttest when compared

with the pretest (see Appendix 6). 58.82 % of the students got the right answer in the posttest



108

(about a 35% increase from the pretest). These students were able to use their own words and write

in chunks and sentences, as shown below:

x How to deal with kids’ anxiety

x

How to help children reduce stressx The way to protect children against stress

x The way to help the next generation cope with stress

x There are many ways to help the next generation deal with anxiety.

x There are many ways to help you cope with your children’s anxieties.

Another example of progress was that the students were more thoughtful and showed an

attempt to express their ideas, though they still copied the answer from the text. The example of this came from the same source. In the pretest, half of the class copied the answer from the text:

Adults can still do plenty to help the next generation cope. However, in the posttest about half of

this group still copied the text, but added more information (see the underlined part): Adults can

(still) do plenty to help the next generation cope with stress/anxiety. This kind of improvement

could also be seen in many cases in their class work and the reading project.

There was also an improvement in vocabulary, some of which could be seen in the students’

class work and the reading project. For example, they used words outside the texts such as subject

and divide to summarize a paragraph: The subjects who were at high risk of cardiovascular disease

were divided into three groups.

In addition, the students were aware of cohesive devices. This could be seen in their

summaries in which they used expressions like moreover, however, therefore, this practice, such

questions etc.

The most welcome improvement of all was the students’ attitude. From the second

questionnaire, more than half of the students said they understood English structures better and

could write better sentences. Some said they could apply the knowledge from this course (both

reading and writing) to other subjects.

Still, 23.52% said their writing ability had improved, but they could write only short

sentences and could not express everything they wanted. This problem was discussed in the last





110

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Reading Research (Vol.II). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Bean, T. W., & Steenwyck, F. L. (1984). The effect of three forms of summarization instruction on sixth graders’ summary writing andcomprehension. Journal of Reading Behavior, 16, 297-306.

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instruction (pp. 42-47). Rochester, NY: National Reading Conference.

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research (Vol. II, pp. 246-280). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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research (Vol. II, pp. 815-860). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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Rinehart, S., Stahl, S., & Erickson, L. (1986). Some effects of summarization trainingon reading and studying. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 422-438.

Shanahan, T. (1984). Nature of the reading-writing relation: An exploratorymultivariable analysis. Journal of Education Psychology, 76 , 466-477.

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112

Appendix 1

EG 221: Reading for Information

Time allocation / semester: 48 hrs. (3 hours / week)

Course description: Study and practice of reading skills used in reading informativetexts, outlining and summarizing, giving opinions about the textsthrough oral discussion or writing.

Course outline:x Predicting what the text to be read is aboutx Identifying text organizationx Skimming and reading for main ideasx Dealing with new wordsx Recognizing referencesx

Drawing inferencesx Finding specific informationx Recognizing relationships between ideasx Outliningx Summarizing ideasx Expressing opinions about the subjects discussed in the text

Text: Reading for Information by Pimonpun Rajatanun and an outside reading, whichis changed every semester. The main text is comprised of six units, each of which consists of a long story, all authentic texts from such magazines as The

Time magazine, The Economist , etc., the length of which is about 1,000-1,300

words, and exercises designed to teach the points mentioned in the courseoutline. The exercises in each unit start with text organization, in which thestudents have to write a sentence summarizing each or some paragraphs. Othersinclude reading comprehension, and an outline and a summary of 1-5

paragraphs from the story, the approach of which is writing a summary from anoutline.

Evaluation:Midterm exam 60 pointsFinal exam 90 pointsClass work 50 pointsTotal 200 points

Types of Exam Questions:There are seen passages (including outside reading) and unseen passages, eachof which consists of 5-10 multiple choice questions and 10-20 open-endedquestions.

Types of Class work: This includes quizzes, project work, and class participation.



113

Appendix 2

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1. nµÁ¥fÎµ outline ¤µn°®¦º°Å¤n ____ Á¥Îµ ____ Å¤nÁ¥Îµ

2. nµÁ¥fÎµ summary ¤µn°®¦º°Å¤n ____ Á¥Îµ ____ Å¤nÁ¥Îµ

3. Á¥Îµ ______ outline ®¦º°/Â¨³ ____ summary Äª·µ ____________________ ´ Ê/e ___________ º É°-µµ¦«¹¬µ ________________________ Ã¦¦³»ª·¸µ¦Ã¥¥n° ________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________

4. nµ·ªnµµ¦Îµ outline / summary µ¤ ÉÅoÁ¦¥Å ³¤¦³Ã¥r®¦º°Å¤n Ã¦Ä®oÁ®»¨ ____ ¤ Á¡¦µ³ _________________________________________

_________________________________________ ____ Å¤n¤ Á¡¦µ³ ________________________________________

_________________________________________

5. nµ·ªnµ ³¤¸{®µÄµ¦Îµ outline / summary ®¦º°Å¤n ____ ¤ ÅoÂn _________________________________________

_________________________________________ ____ Å¤n¤

6. ªµ¤·Á®È°º ÉÇ ®¦º° o°Á-°Â³

___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________





115

Appendix 4

Is Going Nutty Good for You?

They may be greasy and fat- that researchers suspect may helptening, but nuts are also good keep bloodsugar levels stable. (7)for you.(1) According to a study in The high levels of fiber andthe Journal of the American magnesium in nuts may have a

Medical Association, nuts in all similar effect.(8) “Just aboutforms, including peanut butter, everything in nuts is healthy,”reduce the risk of adult-onset says Frank Hu, the study’s leader diabetes.(2) After analyzing the and a nutrition professor at themunching habits of more than Harvard School of Public Health.(9)

83,000 nurses for up to 16 years, To get the most benefit, it’s bestresearchers found that women who to use nuts as a substitute for consumed 150 g. of nuts each week high-carb snack foods such as(about five handfuls) were 30% potato chips and pretzels.(10)less likely to develop diabetes than But because nuts weigh in at anwomen who rarely touched them.(3) average of 5 calories per gram,Five tablespoons of peanut butter you shouldn’t go overboard.(11)reduced the risk 20%.(4) What’s thesecret?(5) It’s fat—but the good kind. (6) --By Janice M. Horowitz

Nuts contain polyunsaturated fats

(From Time December 23, 2002)

Outline

Is Going Nutty Good for You?

Main idea: Nuts in all forms can lower the risk of adult-onset diabetes.Supporting detail(s): Polyunsaturated fats, fiber, and magnesium in nuts may help

maintain the levels of blood sugar.

Summary

Nuts in all forms can lower the risk of adult-onset diabetes. This might be because polyunsaturated fats, fiber, and magnesium in nuts help maintain the levels of bloodsugar.





117 Appendix 6

The Outline Part of the Test

Stressed-out Kids

From paragraphs 4 to 10, complete the following outline. (4 points)

(There are many) ways to help (your) kids cope with stress.

Main idea: _______________________________________________ (1)

Supporting details:

A. Developing a better appreciation of the limits of individualismand strengthening social ties.

Limiting the amount of violence your kids will face.

B. _________________________________________________ (1)

C. Not sharing your worries with your children.

Keeping reasonable expectations for your kids.

D. _________________________________________________ (1)

Doing regular exercise to reduce your own anxieties, and give your kids

a good model.

E. _________________________________________________ (1)

Biodata

Usuma Chuenchompoo is an assistant professor at the Department of English, Faculty of Liberal Arts, ThammasatUniversity. She obtained an MS in Technological and Adult Education from the University of Tennessee, U.S.A., and aDiploma in Teaching English Overseas from Leeds University, U.K. Her research interests include reading strategies,

and reading and writing relationships. She has been teaching reading and writing for more than 17 years and has writtentwo books: Pathways to Reading Comprehension (2007), and Writing through Reading (2010).



118 Developing Engineering Students’ Critical Thinking Skills through Reading Short Stories

Thanis Bunsom1, Sompatu Vungthong2 and Wareesiri Singhasiri3

As stated in section 28 of the National Education Act of B.E. 2551 (2008), the

substance of the curricula, both academic and professional, places an emphasis onhuman development with critical thinking. Therefore, the purpose of this studywas to investigate how critical thinking can be developed through close andanalytical readings of short stories. A book club was established to facilitate theconduct of the research in which eleven participants comprising KMUTT studentsfrom different departments were assigned to read nine English short stories anddiscuss their opinion and understanding of each text in groups. Further data werecollected through the participants’ personal written journals. They were used asevidence to demonstrate the subjects’ individual interaction with the texts whichaccording to the ‘reception theory’ (Fish 1980; Holland 1975) have independentmeanings and are open to interpretation. The implementation of the research was

based on Bloom’s taxonomy (1956) which classifies cognitive behaviours into sixcategories, ranging from the fairly simple to more complex. The results revealthat some of the subjects were able to read and understand the texts in a morecritical manner and their perceptiveness broadened. Also, it is hoped to shed lighton the application of literature in developing critical thinking skills.Key words: reading, short stories; Bloom’s taxonomy; critical thinking skills

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¡¦³¦µ·µ¦«¹¬µÂ®nµ· ¡.«. 2551 ¤µ¦µ 28 ¤Âª·Á É¥ª´®¨´-¼¦´ Êµoµ

ª·µµ¦Â¨³µ¦°µ¸¡ªnµª¦Ä®oªµ¤-Îµóµµ¦¡µªµ¤Á}¤»¬¥roª¥¬³µ¦·ª·Á¦µ³®r µª·´¥· Ê Ê¹¤¸ª»¦³-rÁ¡º É°«¹¬µª·¸µ¦¡´µ´¬³µ¦·ª·Á¦µ³®roª¥µ¦°nµÁ¦º É°-´ Ê°¥nµ¨³Á°¥ ¼ oª·¥Åo´ Ê¤¦¤µ¦°nµÁ¡º É°¸ É³ÎµÁ·µ¦ª·¥ Ã¥¤«¹¬µµ£µª·µnµÇ¸ É-ÄÁoµ¦nª¤Ã¦µ¦ ´ Ê Ê«¹¬µ³o°°nµÁ¦º É°-´ Ê´ Ê-· Ê 9 Á¦º É° Â¨³®¨´µ É°nµÂ oªo°Â-¹ªµ¤ÁoµÄÂ¨³Â-ªµ¤·Á®Èn°Á¦º É° É°nµ ¼ oª·¥ÅoÁÈo°¤¼¨Ã¥µ¦Ä®o´«¹¬µÁ¸¥´¹¦³Îµª´»¦ Ê¸ ÉÁoµ¦nª¤·¦¦¤Â¨Á¨ É¥ªµ¤·Á®È Ã¥ÄoÁ}®¨µÁ¡º É°Â-·-´¤¡´r°¼ oÁoµ¦nª¤n°Áº Ê°®µ¸ ÉÅo°nµµ¤§¬

Reception ° Fish (1980) Â¨³ Holland (1975) Ã¥§¬ ÊÅo nµªÅªoªnµ Áº Ê°®µ®¦º°Á¦º É° É°nµÄÇ Èµ¤´ Ê¤ªµ¤®¤µ¥°·-¦³Â¨³ÁdªoµÄ®o¼ o°nµªµ¤Åo °µ ÊÂ oª¼ oª·´¥¥ÅoÄo§¬µ¦Á¦¸¥¦¼ o° Bloom (1956) ¹ ÉÅoÂnµ¦Á¦¸¥¦¼ oÁ} 6 ¦³ Á¦· É¤´ ÊÂn¦³´¨nµÅ¹¦³´ É¤ªµ¤ó°¤µ µ¨µ¦ª·´¥¡ªnµ¼ oÁoµ¦nª¤Ã¦µ¦µ-µ¤µ¦°nµÁ¦º É°-´ ÊÅo°¥nµÁoµÄ -µ¤µ¦·ª·Á¦µ³®rÅo¸Â¨³¤¤»¤¤°¸ Éªoµ¹ Ê ¼ oª·´¥µ®ªªnµµª·´¥· Ê Ê³¤¦³Ã¥rÄoµµ¦¦³¥»rÄoª¦¦¸Äµ¦¡´µ¬³µ¦·ª·Á¦µ³®r

Îµ-Îµ: µ¦°nµ Á¦º É°-´ Ê §¬µ¦Á¦¸¥¦¼ o° Bloom ¬³µ¦·ª·Á¦µ³®r



119 Introduction

King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, as the name suggests, is an academic

institution that offers a wide variety of technology-oriented courses, most of which belong to the

faculties of Engineering, Science, Industrial Education and Information Technology. Therefore, it

is not surprising to learn that the teaching of English at KMUTT forms only a small part of the

curricula, making up nine compulsory credits. In order to graduate, students are required to take

three English subjects, LNG 101 Fundamental English 1, LNG 102 Fundamental English 2 and

LNG 103 Fundamental English 3. If the students have higher scores of English from the entrance

examination, they may be allocated to other elective courses that suit their level such as Oral

Communication 1-2 or English for Work.

Due to the limited number of elective or optional courses that the students are required to

take and the nature of their studies, the department of Language Studies feels obliged to comply

with their academic needs as well as interests. The department has tried to accommodate the

students’ main concentration by designing the materials of each English course in a technology-

orientated manner. To clarify, an example is the subject LNG 103 in which a whole chapter is

dedicated to the topic “gadget/technology design.” The students are required to invent an imaginary

technological tool and explain the process of its function in writing and oral presentation. The input

they are given before the work begins includes technology-related reading passages and relevant

sets of vocabulary and expressions.

As a result of this, the research team felt that the students’ reading abilities were not fully

developed because of the limited type of passages they have been exposed to. We also believed that

technology-related passages were straightforward, consisting of sets of fixed expressions and ideas

that did not require further elaborate thinking skills above the comprehension level. Hence, the

research team agreed that extensive reading should be used in order to stimulate the students’

critical thinking skills, one of the skills the Thai government would like to promote as stated in

section 28 of the National Education Act of B.E. 2551 (2008). Although the students have access to

the Self-Access Learning Centre, organised by the School of Liberal Arts, where a large number of

fictional works are available, there has been no concrete evidence as to how the students really

make use of the materials nor has there been any prior attempt to investigate whether the students

develop any critical thinking skills after reading the materials.



120 The book club was the research team’s solution for the two aforementioned problems. By

exposing the students to a number of short stories, we would like to answer the two following

research questions:

1. Based on Bloom’s taxonomy, which levels of thinking do students’ reflections belong to?

2. How will the reading of short stories develop the students’ critical thinking skills?

Literature review

What is critical thinking?

Over the past several decades, many definitions of critical thinking have been proposed. Critical

thinking can be defined as reasonable, reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to

believe or do (Ennis, 1987) or thinking that is purposeful, reasoned and goal directed (Halpern,

1989). According to Bensley (1998), critical thinking is reflective thinking involving the evaluation

of evidence relevant to a claim so that a sound conclusion can be drawn from the evidence. Facione

(1990) argues that the keys of critical thinking include interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference

and self- regulation. Analysis is identifying the relationship between statements, questions, or

descriptions to express judgment. For evaluation, it is assessing the credibility and the logical

strength of statements, descriptions or questions. Inference refers to the ability to draw reasonable

conclusions based on facts and judgments. Self-regulation, the last skill, is seen as the ability of an

individual to monitor their own personal cognitive activities to make sure that they are engaged in

critical thinking.

Importance of critical thinking in learning and teaching

Since critical thinking is highlighted as one of the six major intellectual and practical skills to be

gained during undergraduate study (Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2004) and

in Thailand is stated in the National Educational Act of 2008 as a skill that must be offered through

the curricula, the importance of critical thinking seems to be recognised. However, most students

are still deprived of this necessary skill. Many educational reports including the National

Assessment of Educational Progress demonstrated that the American educational system was

failing to teach many of its students to think effectively. Mckinnon and Renner (1971), for

example, found that only 25% of all first-year college students after being tested showed the ability

to reason logically and abstractly. Langer and Applebee (1987) found that students often had

difficulty in persuasive and analytic writing, two kinds of writing that require critical thinking. For

Thailand, very little research has been done and very few courses are designed to address thisconcept. Khuankaew (2010) investigated the impact of using literary and non-literary texts as



121 supplementary reading in a writing class focusing on critical writing. Quantitative results from a t-

test analysis show the development of writing and critical thinking in both experimental and control

groups. From the findings of her study, it shows that reading literature and critical thinking are

interrelated as it is believed that reading literature is a common practice for the students to analyse

the themes, plots, characters, setting and others so that they can criticise works of literature.

Regarding the methods of teaching critical thinking, in the Western world, there have been

numerous attempts to address the topic. Gokhale (1995), for example, contends that collaborative

learning can help improve students’ critical thinking skills. However, the idea of critical thinking

through the act of reading seems the most prevalent; the intricate link between reading and critical

thinking has been emphasised. Students can substantially develop their thinking skills while

reading. Based on the ‘reception theory’, texts have independent meanings and are open to

interpretation. This approach focuses on readers. Readers interpret the meanings of the text based

on their individual cultural background and life experiences. In essence, the meaning of a text is not

inherent within the text itself, but is created within the relationship between the text and the reader.

Tierney and Pearson (1983) maintain that reading offers the potential for higher level thinking as

readers draw on background experiences to compose a text and engage in an ongoing negotiation to

gain the meaning. According to Wilson (1988), critical literacy allows the use of strategies and

techniques such as formulating questions before, during, and after reading, responding to the text in

terms of the student's own values, anticipating texts, and responding to texts through writing

activities which ask readers to interact with the text in personal ways.

Literature, especially as a critical text, can be used to stimulate students’ critical thinking.

Through literature, students learn to read personally, actively, and deeply (Sweet, 1993). Tung &

Chang (2009, p. 291) have elaborated the inextricable link between literature reading and critical

thinking:

Literature reading is a complex process that requires readers to recall, retrieve and reflecton their prior experiences or memories to construct meanings of the text. While they aredoing so, they need to demonstrate the following capacities: to differentiate facts fromopinions; to understand the literal or implied meanings and the narrator’s tone; to locatedetails related to the issues discussed; to find out the causal relationship or theconnections between the events or actions; to detect an inferential relationship from thedetails observed; to be perceptive of multiple points of views; to make moral reasoningand fair-grounded judgments; and most of all, to apply what they have learned from this

process to other domains or the real world.



122 Similarly, according to Riecken and Miller when literature is approached from a problem

solving perspective, students are asked to evaluate evidence, draw conclusions, make inferences,

and develop a line of thinking (1990). Even for children, literature offers them more opportunities

to consider ideas, values, and ethical questions (Somers & Worthington, 1979).

Measuring critical thinking

How to measure critical thinking is also a significant topic. This paper will use Bloom’s taxonomy

as the basis for measuring students’ critical thinking level. Benjamin Bloom established a hierarchy

of educational objectives, which can be called Bloom’s taxonomy. It divides cognitive objectives

into six levels moving from basic to high levels of thinking. These include knowledge,

comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. All of these stages relate to how

the brain processes information and thoughts (Bloom et al., 1956).

Bloom’s taxonomy classifies cognitive behaviours into six categories, ranging from fairly

simple to more complex. These categories are described by Orlich et al. (1998) as follows:

a. Knowledge: This category emphasises remembering - either by recall or recognition. Both

processes involve the retrieval of information stored in the mind. The information is

retrieved in basically the same form as it was stored. For example, in a reading class, theteacher may ask students to name the main characters of the story in the previous lesson. In

answering this question, students would be retrieving the knowledge in the same form as it

was received.

b. Comprehension: This involves transforming information into more understandable forms.

There is a distinction between this processing and recalling. Through the act of processing,

students transform information into a form that makes sense to them. For example, after reading a story, students may summarise the story in a diagram or paraphrase by using their

own words. That is they can state the differences and similarities of the two characters; in

other words, they are making comparisons and contrasts.

c. Application: This category involves using information to find a solution to a problem. The

activity that can be used to enhance this level of thinking is asking them to help the

characters in the story solve the problem. Students have to propose ideas which are

applicable to the problem.







125 6. Katherine Mansfield’s The Doll’s House: The story of a girl who extends her compassion to the

pitiful girls who are shunned by the society

7. Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery: A woman’s protest against the traditional lottery drawing that

aims to sacrifice people for the sake of a community

8. William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily: A mad woman who kills a man and covers up her crime

until her death

9. Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (excerpt): A visit to an orphanage run by Mrs. Jellyby whose

preoccupation lies in a project to help African people

Steps of Running the Book Club

The book club was established to serve the members’ desire to develop their reading and critical

thinking skills. The research team gathered KMUTT engineering students of different years and

departments and we met twice a week for six weeks, starting from 2nd of January to 11th of

February 2011 at the department of Language Studies, School of Liberal Arts, KMUTT.

Each session lasted between 45 and 70 minutes. The first ten minutes were for

comprehension checking i.e. to check if the members understood the plot, the vocabulary and other

linguistic features. Comprehension checking was done through researchers’ explicit questioning

and peer supporting explanations.

Afterwards, the discussions of the meanings of symbols and settings as well as the analysis

of characterization (characters’ development, conflicts, motivations and actions) were led by the

researchers through a series of questions. The research team responded to the members’ questions

with more questions. Answers were rarely given unless the discussion halted due to the depth of

analysis with members having no background in the topics. It is noted that the discussion was

conducted in both English and Thai.

Limitation of the study

The results of the analysis may be affected by some of the following problems encountered during

the conduct of the research:

The subject’s inconsistent participation was mainly caused by the sessions being too close

to the end of the semester. The fourth year participants, in particular, were expected to finish their



126 graduate project which required a lot of time and energy. Some first year participants also claimed

that they had a lot of homework and that time management was a big problem for them. We

believed that the lack of consistency prevented us from cultivating a higher level of critical thinking

skills in them. Also, the lack of consistency resulted in the number of journal entries submitted by

the participants.

The members of the book club were pre-selected by the research team. We selected subjects

with a medium to high level of proficiency in English as seen from their performance in the courses

they took, the grades they received and other experiential exposures to English such as travelling

abroad. However, it turned out that they still found certain texts too difficult to follow when the

language was unfamiliar to them such as William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily in which the stream-

of-consciousness style of writing was employed. They also found that some short texts such as an

excerpt from Dickens’s Bleak House were short yet very tense and therefore, required more effort

and concentration. This also leads us to another major problem found in Thai students: the lack of

reading habit. The subjects admitted that they hardly read any other types of written texts, let alone

literature. This corresponds with a research report, written by the Ministry of Education (2009:55),

regarding the assessment of Thai educational institutions, that stated that “only 16.3% of Thai

students read regularly.”

As the findings mainly focused on the written journals and questionnaires, the oral

discussions and the in-depth interviews which we believed could yield more effective and fruitful

results were not included. It was an issue of technicality as some files were unintelligible to

transcribe the sound. However, the research team did not find this exclusion of the sound files

problematic as we believed that the discussion during the session could also be biased by a series of

questions led by the researchers and the peer influence on an individual’s point of view. The

subjects’ journals, usually written one or two days after the discussion and the interview, conducted

after the termination of the book club, should produce more authentic results in this aspect.

Data analysis

The method used to analyse the journal entries is content analysis. The first two researchers read

the journals and broke the content into small chunks based on the definitions and key words of six

categories of Bloom’s taxonomy. After that, the third researcher would read to check if he agreed



127 upon on the results of the analysis. Negotiation was conducted to recheck if there were some

disagreements.

Results

Levels of subjects’ critical thinking

To answer RQ 1 ‘Based on Bloom’s taxonomy, which levels of thinking do students’ reflections

belong to?’ , thirteen journal entries written for six short stories by four subjects were analysed.

Only four out of eleven subjects’ journal entries were scrutinised in detail because they reflected

several categories of critical thinking, while the rest tended to merely summarise the stories briefly.

It should also be noted here that the extracts selected from the subjects’ journals are copied

verbatim as they were written originally by the subjects including the grammar mistakes and typo

mistakes. Table 1 below shows how the students’ reflections were grouped and identified into each

category of thinking levels. It can be seen that that the subjects’ reflections cover almost every

aspect except synthesis level. The subjects obviously could reflect their ideas well in knowledge,

comprehension, and analysis levels; however, not all subjects could do well in application and

evaluation levels.

Table 1: Subjects’ thinking levels

Short Story Subject Thinking Levels

1

Knowledge

2

Comprehension

3

Application

4

Analysis

5

Synthesis

6

Evaluation

A Very Short Story

1 3 3 - - - 3

2 3 3 - 3 - -

3 3 3 3 - 3

4 3 3 - 3 - -

A Telephone Call

1 - - - 3 - -

2 3 3 - 3 - 3

3 3 3 - 3 - -

Lamb to the Slaughter 1 3 3 - 3 - 3

4 3 3 - 3 - 3

The Overcoat 1 3 3 3 3 - 3



128 The Happy Prince 1 - 3 3 3 - 3

Bleak House 1 - - - 3 - -

4 3 3 - 3 - -

To support the findings above, here are the extracts of the subjects’ reflections in each thinking

category.

Category 1: Knowledge (Remembering, memorizing, recognizing, recalling)

Subject 1: The Happy Prince

“Many days passed and Swallow help him as a habitat. The winter came, Swallowdecide to died with happy prince.”

Subject 2: A Telephone Call

“ÄÁ¦º É° ÊÁ}Á¦º É° É¤»¨®¹ ÉÎµ¨¦°Ã¦«´¡rµµ¥®¹ ÉÃ¥¤°µµ¦¡¦É ÎµÁ¡o°Á É¥ªµ¦¸ Éo°µ¦Ä®oµ¥¼ o´ ÊÃ¦¤µ”[“This is a story of a person who is waiting for a call from one man. The person’smind is occupied with the strong desire for that man to call him/her.”]

Subject 3: Lamb to the Slaughter

“Á¦º É° ÊÁ¦· É¤o É¼ o®·®¹ ÉÁ}Â¤noµ É°¥Îµ»Ç°¥nµ£µ¥Äoµ Á°´ É°¥-µ¤¨óµÁ¤º É°-µ¤¨´¤µÈ°¥¦·´·-µ¤Ân-µ¤°Á ·´Á°Ã¥Ä®oÁ®»¨ªnµ¤´Å¤n-³ªµ¦Îµµ°Áµ”[“The story starts with the portrayal of a housewife who looks after everything inher house. She is waiting for her husband to come home. When her husbandreaches home, she takes care of him. However, the husband tells her that he isgoing to break up with her, giving a reason that it is not convenient for hiswork.”]

In this category, all the subjects were able to summarise the plots of the texts. Their journal entriesdemonstrated a satisfactory account of recalling the structures of the texts, the sequences of events

and the importance of each character and their roles in the stories. In Subject 1’s entry, the subject

stated the facts of the relationship between the swallow and the prince and the swallow’s decision

at the end of the story. In Subject 2’s entry, the story was clearly summarised and the role of the

female character was directly mentioned. Similarly, Subject 4 recalled the story of a woman whose

husband was going to leave her despite her complete wifely duty.

Category 2: Comprehension (Interpreting, translating from one medium to another, describing inone’s own words)



129 Subject 1: A Happy Prince

“Before he is the statue, he’d never met sorrow. Surely he never met truehappiness.”

Subject 2: A Very Short Story

“Ä»¸ Ê³Á®ÈÅoªnµÄnªÁª¨µ´ ÊÁ}£µª³-¦µ¤ µ¦¸ É³®µªµ¤-»Ä-n´ª´ Ê³®µÅoÅ¤nnµ¥´……. ¹Å¤nnµÂ¨Ä´¸ É´ Ê-°³Á·ªµ¤¦¼ o-¹¸ÇÂ¨³¤ªµ¤-´¤¡´r´¤µªnµ¡¥µµ¨Â¨³Åo”[“During the war, it is hard to find happiness. ….. It is therefore not surprisingthat they develop a good feeling and have a relationship beyond that of a nurseand a patient.”]


“Á°Á}Á®¤º° É°¥¼ nÄ£ª´r°ªµ¤¦´ É¤°Å¤n Á®È-· ÉnµÇ¤°Ânªµ¤¦´¸ É°¥¼ n¦®oµ¸ ÉÅ¤n¦¼ oÂ¤o¦³´ ÉªnµÁµ¦Á°¦·®¦º°Å¤n Á°È¥Áoµoµ´ªÁ°ªnµÁµo°¤ÄÄ®oÁ°oµ-·ÂnÇ Á¡¦µ³ÁµÁ¦¸¥Á°ªnµ É¦´¹-°¦´ Ê…..°µ³Á}Á¡¸¥ÎµÁ¦¸¥¦¦¤µ ÉÅ¤nÅo·°³Å¦ÈÅo Ân®·-µªÈ¥Ájµ¦° ¦°°¥Ã¦«¡rn°Å”

[“It is like she is under the spell of love. She is so blinded by love that she cannotsee other things. Her mind is occupied with her love for him; she is not reallysure whether he loves her. However, she tries to come up with a sign of his love

for her. She cites the fact that he calls her “darling” two times….. Anyway, it may be just an empty word and the man may have no feelings for her. However, thewoman still keeps on waiting for his call.”]

Subject 4: Lamb to the Slaughter

“ÁoµÄªnµ¼ o®· Ê°µÅ¤nn°¥Åo¡¼ oÁ¨¥·¢» jnµªnµ¼ oµ¥³o°¦´ªÁ°¤µ -nª´ª¼ oµ¥Á°Áº É°´ É¼ o®·Îµº°°¥¦·´·nµÇµÇÊ Îµµ – Å¤¸¼ o®·°º ÉÂ¨³Å¤n¤ªµ¤¦·°¸ É³· Ê ¼Á¤¥°”

[“I think that this woman rarely meets people; she believes that her husband lovesher so much. As for the husband, he is bored with this woman who repeatedlytakes care of him. So he has another woman and is not responsible for his childand wife.”]

For the second level of higher thinking, moving beyond the knowledge level, the subjects in

the research exhibit understanding of ideas from the selected short stories provided in the book club

by interpreting, translating from one medium to another, and describing in one’s own words.

Subject 1, for example, after illustrating what was going on in A Happy Prince, further interpreted

that as the prince was alive and had never faced misery, he had surely never realised the realmeaning of happiness. Similarly, instead of simply depicting an account on a couple’s affair during



130 the wartime in A Very Short Story, Subject 2 interpreted this kind of relationship as stemming from

an individual need to gain happiness as it was rarely found in the wartime. Subject 4 tried to come

up with the embedded reasons behind the characters’ action in Lamb to the Slaughter , postulating

that the fact that the male character left his wife was quite comprehensible as he was bored with the

constant or even excessive care and attention his wife always paid to him. As for Subject 3, this

participant elaborated his/her comprehension by paraphrasing the story in his/her own words and

simultaneously interpreted that in A Telephone Call the dear name the man called the female

protagonist might be just an empty word.

Category 3: Application (Problem solving, applying information to produce some result)

Subject 1: The Happy Prince

“This is the evidence that money can’t buy everything. …. (may be it’s commonfor them and in their perspective I think they don’t feel bad as in happy prince’s

perspective.) …… I think he know too that the families that had been helped mayhave problems again like an unstoppable loop but it’s happy when you helpsomeone right?”“There’s mottos in this story teach me new things and give me new perspective of this world.”

In this category, only one subject illustrated the ability to apply information (i.e the moral of

the story) to his/her real life. According to the subject’s journal, it clearly reflected the subject’sability to understand the underlying messages of the text which the story was implying. Despite

having a lot of money and power, the prince finally found his true happiness in helping other

people. Having understood this, the subject posed a question relating to his/her life (it’s happy

when you help someone right?) and claimed to have learnt “new things” and “new perspectives of

this world.”

Category 4: Analysis (Subdividing something to show how it is put together, finding the

underlying structure of a communication, identifying motives)


“I will call you at five, darling” make me hesitate that what position are theystand together. She seem very blissful after she hear the word “darling”. ……….It is not the word that the couple should be so much happy like this. After that,she wait for the call madly. The evidence has showed by she count “5, 10, 15,…”rather than “1,2,3…” or her feeling can told us obviously. And why is she insultherself.. What’s her fault after the man said “I’ll call you at five, darling” nothingto nervous at all. Nothing weird and unnatural in this sentence except there are

something separate them.



131


“ÂnÁ¤º É°¡·µ¦µÄ¦µ¥¨³Á°¥°Áº Ê°Á¦º É°Â oª ¤®¨µ¥»Ä®oª·Á¦µ³®r°¥¼ n®¨µ¥¦³ÁÈ Á¦· É¤

µÄ°Â¦¸ É°nµÂ¨³oµÁ¦µÅ¤n·µµ¦Áº Ê°Á¦º É°ÅÁ° Ânª·Á¦µ³®rµ¤-· É¸ É¼ oÁ¥Á¥¤µ ³Á®ÈÅoªnµ ª¨³¦¸ ÉÎµ¨¡¦É ÎµÁ¡o°ÄÁ¦º É° Å¤nÅo¤-¦¦¡µ¤ ®¦º°ÎµÄÇ¸ Én°Á¡«°ª¨³¦´ Ê Á¡¦µ³ª¨³¦Á¡¥ÂªÁ°oª¥Îµªnµ ‘I’”

[“After considering the details, there are many aspects to analyse. From the firsttime of reading this story, if we don’t use our own imagination but objectivelyanalyse what the author wrote, we can see that there is no pronoun to signify thesex of the person waiting for a call. That person just represents himself/herself with the pronoun ‘I’.” ]

Subject 3: A Very Short Storyªµ¤¦¼ o-¹ ÉÁ·¹ ÊÄnª´ ÊÁ}ªµ¤¦¼ o-¹ ÉÁ®¤º°-· Ê®ª¡¥µ¥µ¤®µµ-· Éµ°¥nµ¤µÁµ³Á¡º É°¥¹Á® É¥ª·Ä Å¤nªnµ-· É´ Ê³Á}°³Å¦®¦º°Ä¦Èµ¤ °Á¡¥Ä®o¤Á®¤º°µ

-· É° -µ¸ É Ä®o¨Å ÈÁ®¤º°³¤Â¦Ä¸ É³oµªÁ·n°ÅÅo”[“People in that time are desperate and look for something to hold on to. If theyhave something to hold on to (whether it is a person, a thing, or a place), they willhave motivation to live on.”]

“n°¤µ®¨-¦µ¤Â oª ªµ¤¦¼ o-¹ ÊÅo®µ¥Å Á¡¦µ³Å¤n¤Îµªnµ “ªµ¤µ¥” ¤µ°¥´ Ê

·Ä ÎµÄ®o´ Ê-°¤ªµ¤¦¼ o-¹Ádªoµ oµ¸ É³¨°-· ÉÄ®¤nÇ ÎµÄ®o¡»¨nµÇÅ

Â¤oªnµ³¹¹Á¦º É°¸ Énµ¤µ Ân°¸Èº°° ¤nµÅÂ oª °µ³ÁÈÁ}ªµ¤¦Îµoµ ÂnÅ¤nÎµ°¤µÁ}ªÎµ®ª·Ä³´ Ê nµªº°®¨-¦µ¤Ân ³È¤µÁ·°Ân ³”

[“After the war ends, the desire to have something to hold on to is gone becausethe idea of death does not weigh on their minds. They both open their hearts andtry new things. They get to know various people. Although they may think of the

past, what is done cannot be undone (the past is the past). It is already gone. Theymay remember the past but they will not allow the past to determine their present

lives. That is, after the war, they both have their own paths.”]

Subject 4: Mrs. Jellyby

“Åo¢{°¥nµ´ ÊÈn°oµ¦³®¨µÄÁ¡¦µ³ªÁ°Å¤nn°¥¦¼ oÁ¦º É°¦³ª·«µ-¦r¤µÁ¦º É°°µªÈÅ¤nÁ¥Åo¥·¤µn°ÂnÈÁoµÄªnµ¼ oÁ¸¥°¥µ-º É°ªµ¤®¤µ¥°-· ÉÄ®nÃ¥ÄoÁ¡¸¥µ¦Á¦¥Á¸¥ª¨³¦ Á ÈÁ¡¸¥ªÁ¸¥ª”

[“After the discussion, I feel amazed because I don’t know much about history. Ihave not heard about the white man’s mission before. However, I understand thatthe author wants to use the single character to represent the bigger idea or concept.”]





133 Subject 4: Lamb to the Slaughter

“Ã¥ªµ¤Á®È-nªª·ªnµ°¥nµ¦´¥Èµ¤¼ o®·Å¤nnµ³ÎµÄ®o-µ¤µ¥ÄÃ¥µ¦¦· Á¡¦µ³oµ¼ o®·Å¤nÎµÁ}¦³Îµ°¥¼ nÂ oª-µ¤Ènµ³Á®ÈÂ¨³Á·µ¦--´¥Äµ¦¦³ÎµÁ® nµ´ ÊÈÁ}Åo”

[“In my opinion, the woman should not have taken care of her husband just to make himfeel unguarded because if she had not always done it this way, her husband would haverecognised her premeditated intention to murder him when she tried to please him.”]

The highest level of higher thinking according to Bloom’s taxonomy, evaluation, was

reflected in the journal entries of the three subjects. They could present and defend their opinions

by making judgments about characters portrayed in the short stories and subject matters revolving

around those stories. To illustrate, subject 1 pondered over the female protagonist’s action in Lamb

to the Slaughter and reached the conclusion that despite her murder of her husband, she was not

really a “bad” person, arguing that when the fact that her husband was trying to leave her was taken

into consideration, her action was quite comprehensible. Different from Subject 1, Subject 4 made

the decision about the controversial topic in Lamb to the Slaughter proposing that the wife was to

blame as she should not have always taken care of her husband to make him feel unguarded and

become unaware of the imminent threat leading to his own death. The ability to make judgments

was also manifested in Subject 3’s journal which maintained that the subject matter of a transient

affair of a couple in A Very Short Story was not extraordinary whereas many other readers found

the story rather contradicting to their expectation of a happy ending which is a common practice in

a traditional narrative.

Developing students’ critical thinking skills

To answer RQ2, ‘How will the reading of short stories develop the students’ critical thinking

skills?’ , the findings of the book club running show that teachers’ perspectives, interviews, and

questionnaires can prompt and solidify the development of students’ critical thinking. After the

book club sessions were over, the members were individually called in for a questionnairecompletion and an in-depth interview. The results were classified into three main themes as shown

below:

From the researchers’ personal experiences of teaching at a technology institution, we have

found that in order to truly promote our students’ critical thinking, we need to venture out of the

“comfort zone” (relying on science-oriented texts) and be more willing to deploy literary texts in

our teaching despite the literary genre being out of context for our students’ concentration. In using



134 short stories to enhance the development, we discovered that leading questions in each session’s

discussion were the most significant component to stimulate not only students’ curiosity but also

their enthusiasm in thinking more profoundly. There were seven stages of questionings conducted

respectively in the book club. They were:

a. Questions regarding overall comprehension: What is the story about? What is the

sequence of events in the story?

b. Questions regarding content and specific details: What is the significance of different

elements of each story: exposure, conflict, denouement and ending?

c. Questions regarding characterisation: How are the characters in a story related? How do

they interact? What are the motivations of their actions? How do they develop as

characters?

d. Questions regarding writing techniques: How do certain particular or taken-for-granted

words contribute to or change the course of the meaning of the text? What do metaphors,

similes or understatements signify and how do they affect your understanding?

e. Questions regarding meanings beyond text: What is the tone of the story? What do you

think is the writer’s intention?

f. Questions regarding application: How does the story relate to your own experience? What

is the moral of the story?

g. Questions regarding evaluation: Do you like the story? Do you agree with the writer?

Would you do the same if you were the character? Why or why not?

The seven stages of questions were created to build up the subjects’ critical thinking in a

more efficient way. Question A is meant to check the subjects’ comprehension of the texts they

read. Question B, C, and D encourage them to examine and analyse certain events, characters and

settings more closely as well as to look carefully for symbols and signs which may have greater

significance to the texts. After going through the previous questions, the researchers used Question

E to let the subjects make informed critical decisions about the tone and the writer’s intention. By

this stage, the subjects already had their arguments to support their alternatives. The last two

questions, F and G, give them an opportunity to interact directly with the texts. The subjects got to

apply what the stories showed them to their real world and evaluate them in a more reliable and

reasonable way.



135 Most of the subjects said that they learned from other students. That is, they had chances to listen to

their peers’ comments and opinions. They learned that people could think differently and there

could be different angles in any story. Furthermore, they learned to think contemplatively and at the

same time learn to appreciate the differences in thoughts and opinions of other members. Most

importantly, the subjects came to realise that literary texts, like life itself, yield more than one

conclusion or no conclusion at all, as expressed in ten (out of eleven) questionnaires.

As for self-reflection, one subject quoted a popular saying “read fictional characters and

look at oneself in the mirror.” They agreed that the characters they read about had the same kind of

experiences as any other human beings. The chosen stories feature characters who share the same

stories, feelings, dilemmas, problems and struggles to cope with their lives as all of us. They are

driven by different forces such as their individualistic needs, social expectations as well as their

positions in the society dictated by gender and class. Having stood in the characters’ shoes, the

subjects reflected upon their lives and the conditions attached to them. For example, one subject

compared the characters’ relationship in Lamb to the Slaughter to his/her own and questioned

him/herself whether he/she would kill the man or he/she would cope with his/her problem in a

different way.

Most of the students revealed that when they read short stories, they found that they read

them differently from other types of texts. That is, they had to read and interpret the story. They

could not ignore words and they had to pay attention to details in the stories. They could not just

skim through the text to grasp the main ideas. According to one subject, he/she asserted that

although the literary language was difficult, it was worth it because it was challenging and thought-

provoking. He/she further elaborated that every single word or even a pause between each dialogue

could mean a lot and could represent a far deeper idea than it might appear. In this respect, the

research team agrees that the subjects have developed an awareness of “reading between the lines,”

a necessary tool for the development of critical thinking skills.

Discussion and Conclusion

Literature develops critical thinking and self-reflection

The analysis of the reflective journals shows different levels of critical thinking skills in accordance

with Bloom’s descriptions of taxonomy. The findings demonstrate that all the four subjects can



136 successfully reach the first category (knowledge). They could easily recall the synopsis and

remember the characters and their functions in the story. In the second category (comprehension),

all four subjects were able to express their interpretive understanding of the story such as the

characters’ feelings and internal conflicts. In the third category, however, there is only one subject

that conveyed the notion of application. His/her journal reflects an attempt to relate the story to

his/her own experiences in the real world. In the fourth category (analysis), all four subjects

exhibited the ability to understand the underlying structure of the text and identify motives. All

subjects could identify different elements in the story that help create an effect to the reader such as

the fourth subject’s journal that mentions the deployment of Mrs. Jellyby as a representative of the

larger establishment. In the fifth category, none of the subjects achieved the definition of synthesis.

This is explicable as the way the book club was conducted did not leave room for the synthesis

process. We did not have a plan to assign them to do the activity which requires synthesis. The last

category, evaluation, appeared in three subjects. They made informed choices about what was right

and what was wrong.

The self-reflection stage leads the subjects to the development of critical thinking skills. The

subjects were at first startled by the inconclusive nature of literary work. Different from science-

related passages, short stories as well as other genres of literature bear no absolute ultimatum nor

could one final conclusion be attained. The members, who are engineering students, found this kind

of indefinite ending very hard to understand. To initiate the subjects’ critical thinking skills, the

research team applied Fish and Holland’s reception theory. We explicated that reading is an

interaction between the text and the reader; therefore, each reader has his/her own expectations

stemming from his/her existing background knowledge. Like life itself, there cannot be one right

way to read and understand a book and its characters. The subjects were then trained to make an

informed choice with convincing, logical arguments and well-supported evidence found in the

texts. After the first session, the subjects started to get used to the nature of reading short stories

and that allowed the discussion to be smoother.

Literature promotes reading enjoyment

Although developing the subjects’ reading skills was not primarily our research goal, the impact on

enjoyment of reading short stories at the book club was far too great to be ignored. Therefore, the

discussion on how reading short stories could create a reading habit and equip readers with a new

dimension of ‘refined’ vocabulary and expressions is briefly included at this stage.



137 All the members mutually agreed that reading short stories brought a lot of benefits to their

reading knowledge and gave them pleasure. All the participants were excited and glad that they had

been introduced to the world of extensive reading. They had opportunities to read well-known short

stories which they normally would not choose to read. They exposed themselves to new words and

language structures because all members of the book club agreed that they acquired a lot of new

‘refined’ vocabulary and expressions through the activity. They explained that after having been

put outside their reading comfort zone (i.e. science/technology-related passages), they had to

struggle to understand the chosen texts because of their lack of exposure, training and familiarity.

However, after the first ten minutes of each session, they felt more confident and satisfied with the

new vocabulary and expression they learnt. Some included the new words in their journal writings,

showing their attempt to put the new words into use. This inspires them to find other short stories to

read in the future. All the participants were excited and glad that they had been introduced to the

world of extensive reading.

Literature needs a bigger space in English classroom teaching

Two big questions regarding this piece of research have arisen in the process of analysing the data

and they are worth considering:

1. “Why should only four students be included in the analysis and the rest left out?”

2. “Does literature truly promote critical thinking when the number of subjects who reflected

with several categories of thinking seems very little?”

The answers are not straightforward yet explanations can be offered. The four students who

were selected demonstrated a variety of their arguments in the written work whereas the rest

seemed to enjoy retelling the synopsis in their journals. The research team decided to include the

four subjects and present their works in this paper in order to show that literature can certainly

make a useful tool to promote and develop critical thinking. We did not intend to disregard the rest

of the participants whose development of thinking skills fell into the first two categories:

knowledge and comprehension. The seven participants were able to summarise the stories and put

them in their own words with further elaboration of certain interesting points. Surely, their

development was explicit enough, considering their engineering backgrounds and their scarce

exposure to literary texts. However, the research team felt that the data presented in this paper

should illustrate what a reader could potentially achieve from reading short stories and the four

subjects make quite a good example. Therefore, to answer Question 2, the research team believesthat literature can be very beneficial for students’ development of critical thinking whether they are



138 arts or science students. The number of subjects presented merely exemplifies the different

categories of thinking a reader could accomplish, not a discouraging sign of failure.

We believe that English teachers in Thailand should be more willing to include literature in

their English classrooms. The book club was run for five weeks and the subjects showed their high

potential in thinking more deeply and reasonably. The most important aim of the club was for the

subjects to ‘start thinking’ and not be afraid to ‘share’ their thoughts. In this respect, the research

team found the data of all eleven subjects’ journal entries very satisfactory. It was a good start for

KMUTT. If English teachers make use of literature in their English classrooms in the long run, the

results should be very interesting to see.

Recommendations for future research

From the problems previously stated in the methodology section, the research team became aware

of the possible causes of the problems and different ways to improve the book club in order to

enhance the development of critical thinking skills. First of all, the book club should begin early in

the semester so that the prospective subjects will not feel that it is a burden to their full-time

studies. In addition, due to the limitation in terms of time permitted for each session, a variety of

texts should be used such as poems, short plays and pictures. Furthermore, in order to

accommodate the right level of difficulty, there should be a more concrete way to evaluate the

subjects’ reading abilities and their vocabulary knowledge. Pre-tests may be necessary. Also,

questionnaires should be distributed at two different stages: before and after the session. This will

help the research team detect the development of critical thinking skills in a more tangible way.

Finally, recording the oral discussion should be done to check the consistency of the subjects’

opinions as their viewpoints can be influenced by external factors such as leading questions and

peer arguments. This voice record, along with written evidence, will certainly produce a more

reliable result.

References

-ÎµµÁ¨µ·µ¦-£µµ¦«¹¬µ ¦³¦ª«¹¬µ·µ¦ (2551). ¦µ¥µµ¦ª·³¥µ¦ª·Á¦µ´®r

¦´ªµ¦¡³µµ¦«¹¬µ°Ã¦Á¦¥£µ¥®¨³µ¦¦´Á¤·£µ¥°¦°Â¦. ¦»Á¡:

Ã¦¡·¤¡rÂ®n» µ¨¦r¤®µª·¥µ¨¥.

(Office of the Education Council, Ministry of Education (2008). Analysis of the educational

development process conducted in schools after the first assessment . Bangkok:Chulalongkorn University Press.)





140

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Biodata

Thanis Bunsom, a lecturer of English at the School of Liberal Arts, King Mongkut’s University of Technology

Thonburi, completed his BA and MA in English at the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University. He is interested inAsian Englishes, literature in classroom and postcolonial literature in English, French and Portuguese. His previousworks include modern Brazilian novels, neo-realistic approaches to modern Portuguese novels and Chinese identity incontemporary Australian novels.

Sompatu Vungthong is currently a lecture of English at the School of Liberal Arts, King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi. She was a recipient of a Chulalongkorn University Graduate Scholarship to Commemorate the72nd Birthday Anniversary of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej and received her MA in English from the Facultyof Arts, Chulalongkorn University in 2010. Her research interests include post-modern literary theories, semiotics andcritical discourse analysis. She is now conducting a research on semiotics and travel advertisements.

Wareesiri Singhasiri is an assistant professor in the Department of Language Studies, King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi. She was awarded a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Essex, UK. Her researchinterests include research methodology and learning strategies and styles.

lecturer



141 Enhancing Authenticity in Composing Informative and Promotional Texts by Analysing Key

Words in a Genre-based Writing Course

Wen-hsien Yang

This study aims to examine the lexis used in the texts of tourism English. 78Printed authentic tourist attraction brochures together with 24 ESP learners’

productions. A computerised package was used to generate the wordlists of theused lexis as well as the keywords. Besides, non-Chinese readers’ evaluation of the students’ writings was treated as the qualitative data. The analysis show thatthe students’ choices of the lexis differed to some extent from the authentic ones.The possible reasons stem from contextualised differences, students’ fossilisationof English learning, and their unilateral lexical knowledge. The results of thisstudy pedagogically imply that key words need to be prioritized. It also arguesthat “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a

large matter” (Twain, 2011). ESP teachers are advised to draw learners’ attentiononto lexis choices and constraints to enhance the authenticity and trust of theinformation.

Key words: genre-based writing instruction; tourist attraction brochures; keywords analysis

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143 on analysing keywords of tourist attractions is still scant in Taiwan, which makes this study

significant from others. Hopefully this study can serve as a starting point for establishing a well-

planned ESP writing instruction for hospitality & tourism purposes and setting up a model for

analysing key words in other disciplines in higher education.

Literature review

The application of genre analysis in ESP

Genre analysis is one stream of discourse analysis, which investigates specific uses of language. “It

is driven by a desire to understand the communicative character of discourse by looking at how

individuals use language to engage in particular communicative situations (Hyland, 2004b: 195).”

Then, it is hoped to support language education by applying this knowledge. Hyland specifies some

purposes of analysing genres (2004b). First, genre analysis seeks to identify how texts are

structured in terms of move, stage and strategy, and to distinguish the characteristic features in

certain texts to realise their communicative purposes. Secondly, genre study explores the

knowledge of the readers, writers, speakers and listeners in one particular community and tries to

discover how they relate to user’s communicative activities. In addition, genre study also provides

explanations for how and why linguistic choices are made in terms of social, cultural, and

psychological context; therefore, it helps to support language teaching, which is one of its purposes

in pedagogy.

Swales (1990) provided approaches to research genres in academic settings but indeed there

are still many different ways of analysing genres for different approaches have their respective

goals and they have differentiated theoretical frameworks and concerns (Paltridge, 2001). In ESP

contexts, most approaches tend to research the structural and patterning elements in grammatical

terms; furthermore, genre analysis in ESP area also “highlights the importance of social and

cultural context in their descriptions and explanations of genres, discussing how these impact the

language features of a text” (Paltridge, 2001: 13).

Genre analysis or corpus-based research on teaching English, especially the form-focused

approach, has been greatly advocated and conducted in English for academic purposes ( see

Carstens, 2008; Cheng, 2006; Henry & Roseberry, 2007; Hyland, 2010; Hyon, 2008; Johns, 1995,

1997, 2007; Maingueneau, 2002; Samraj & Monk, 2008; Woodward-Kron, 2005; Wennerstrom,

2003; Wrigglesworth & McKeever, 2010; Zhu, 2005 ) and for non-academic (or occupational) purposes ( see Hafner, 2010; Henry & Roseberry, 1996, 1998; Karlsson, 2009; Matt, 2007; Osman,



144 2008; Schneider & Andre, 2005; Wennerstrom, 2003) and much of the research proves the positive

effects on teaching English writing (Lee & Chen, 2009). However, genre analysis in EAP or EOP

can be too broad, and as Hyland (2008) and Hyland and Tse (2007) assert, it would be more

pedagogically fruitful if only a specific type of texts in a discipline is focused.

The benefits of conducting a genre-based writing instruction in classroom

According to Hyland (2003), genre-based pedagogy is a social response to the process approach.

He criticises that the process approach makes writers isolated from the contexts, and requires

writers to ‘discover’ appropriate forms in writing by themselves, which may only work for L1

writers but not for L2 writers. Besides, it also deprives learners’ chances from constructing texts

with social codes, purposes, audience and message. In other words, process approach is different

from GBI in that genre-based instruction is able to provide learners with real world writing and thus

generates their interests and enhances confidence to cope with specific genres; however, process

approach seems not (Osman, 2004). Other difficulties are that the process approach gives writers no

access to cultural knowledge and makes them lack engagement with sociocultural realities.

Contrarily, “genre-based pedagogies address these deficits by offering students explicit and

systematic explanations of the ways language functions in social contexts” (Hyland, 2004a: 18),

and this makes students acquire the specialist culture (Bhatia, 1997). As Ur (1996) argues, a genre-

based syllabus, as a mixed syllabus, combines characteristics of different syllabus types all together

in a coherent and principled way, which includes the features of the structural syllabus, functions

and notions syllabus and content-based syllabus (Paltridge, 2001).

Furthermore, conducting a genre analysis can provide ESP teachers insights into how a

particular language is used by its members in a discourse community, as discussed in the preceding

sections. Similarly, Paltridge (2001: 3) argues that “making this genre knowledge explicit can

provide language teachers with the knowledge and skills they need to communicate successfully in

particular discourse communities (and) it can also provide learners with access to socially powerful

forms of language.” Now more and more ESP curricula are planned on the basis of generic

pedagogy in hopes of facilitating learners’ generic competence including rhetorical, linguistic and

socio-cultural awareness of a particular situation (Cheng, 2006, 2007; Johns, 2006; Martin, 2009).

Genre-based writing instruction is targeted, relevant and supportive for ESP learners. They

realise the texts they are exposed to are relevant to their need in their future workplaces and thus

supportive to their social participation in the world outside the classroom. Likewise, genre-basedinstruction or curriculum can “give language educators a more central role in preparing individuals



145 to teach second language writing and to confidently advise them on the development of curriculum

materials and activities for writing class” (Hyland, 2007: 148). It helps not only language teachers

to realise “how writing is shaped by individuals making language choices to achieve purposes in

social contexts” (p. 163) but also helps learners to identify the texts used in particular ESP

situations, and thus to meet their needs in learning a targeted language course.

The importance of studying the key words in a genre

This study is also form-focused and narrows a whole text to vocabulary for it is believed word

choices would greatly affect the descriptiveness, accuracy and quality of writing (Read, 1998).

However, the emphasis is put on ‘key words list’ rather than ‘wordlist’. Wordlist lists all the words

used by frequencies in all texts but a keywords list only displays the words which have unusual

occurrences in a genre in comparison with a reference corpus. Why the key words in a genre are

crucial is because they display two concepts of the selected words i.e. ‘keyness’ and ‘aboutness’.

“Keyness” is defined as “a quality words may have in a given text or set of texts, suggesting they

are important, they reflect what the text is really about, avoiding trivia and insignificant detail”

(Scott & Tribble, 2006: 55-56) while “aboutness” refers to what a key word can talk about in its

particular genre i.e. what do these key words mean in this targeted situation (Scott & Tribble,

2006). Keyword analysis can ‘awaken the learners to the influence of subject matter and academic

discourse on lexical units, which might vary in accordance with the different subjects and genre

categories’ (Chen and Ge, 2007: 511). Besides, as Baker (2009) and Archer (2009) argues,

keyword list is a useful instrument to help researchers to identify significant differences between

texts, to determine what the texts are about and styles of them, and to direct researchers’ attention

on aspects of texts which deserve further examination.

Indeed, research on wordlisting has been greatly examined in academic and some highly

professional settings such as medical or engineering (e.g. Chen & Ge, 2007; Martinez et al., 2009;

Mudraya, 2006, Wang et al., 2008; Ward, 2009). Yet, studies on the wordlists or key words in

some lower-skilled vocations like hospitality and tourism, which presumably still have their

specific technical words, apparently do not receive equal attention,. This situation also makes the

curriculum planning in English for hospitality and tourism purposes scant in literature. Hence, this

study hopefully can bridge this gap to some extent.



146 Research Methodology

Participants and quantitative data collection

In total, there are 78 tourist attraction brochures in English, which were collected in the U.K. for

the purpose of analysis in this study. For the students’ texts, they all came from the productions in a

genre-based writing course. Twenty four senior English-major students attended an 18-week course

i.e. ‘English Writing for Hospitality & Tourism’ in National Kaohsiung University of Hospitality

and Tourism in Taiwan. The course was delivered in a genre-based instruction manner (informative

and promotional brochures), following the procedures of reading the authentic texts, identifying the

genre and its features, analysing the obligatory and optional moves, the 1st drafting and submitting,

analysing the lexis used in the authentic texts and the students’ writings, the 1 st revising and

analysing the lexis differences again, the 2nd revising and finalising, and the instructor’s grading

and outsiders’ evaluation as the final step. In other words, each student’s self-designed brochure

should be revised and resubmitted for three times (termed as the V1, V2, and V3 versions)

following the instructor’s feedback on the contents, moves arrangement, lexis choices and

grammar. Therefore, I had 24 student texts for each version and 72 texts in total. The students were

given 6 weeks to complete the three versions of their tourist attraction brochures and there was no

limitation of length provided that the information was sufficiently, clearly and appropriately

supplied in the texts. As to the 78 printed authentic brochures, they were all collected in the U.K.

by the researcher to ensure they are still currently used for business purposes. In the following

sections, I would explain how to wordlist and keyword the H&T writings by using the 1st version

(V1) of the students’ designed brochures to exemplify the procedures of wordlisting and

keywording.

Quantitative data analysis

After the texts were gathered, firstly, all the words in the authentic and students’ brochures were

transcribed and saved in a text-format in order to be analysed by the computer tool i.e. Word Smith

v.5.0 (WS) (Scott, 2008). Then, the second step was to wordlist by importing all the texts to WS.

The two major categories of the texts i.e. the 78 authentic texts and the 24 students’ texts were

imported to the working area of the WS to generate two separate wordlists.

Next, I did the keywording, which followed the similar procedures as wordlisting. The

major difference lies in that there should be two word-lists in order to generate a key word list. One

is the study/main corpus from which keywords would be identified and the other is a wordlistserving as the reference/comparison corpus. The reason why it needs two different corpora is that



147 keywording tries to examine the items of unusual frequency (Scott & Tribble, 2006), and this helps

researchers locate the specific words in one genre in comparison with a reference corpus. In other

words, it is these keywords that characterise a specific language.

To generate the keywords of the authentic tourist attraction texts, I used British National

Corpus (BNC) as the reference corpus, which collects 100 million of British words from written

and spoken samples from a wide range of sources, and the wordlist of the authentic texts was used

for the study corpus. Similarly, to generate the students’ overused and underused keywords, the

main corpus is the wordlist of their texts and the comparison corpus is the wordlist of the authentic

texts.

There are two different keywords lists but they have different implications. On one hand,

the keywords generated from the authentic texts mean that they are essential words for designing

tourist attraction texts for information and promotion purposes and these words should be treated in

priority in class. On the other hand, the overused keywords generated from the students’ texts

should receive less emphasis for these words appear too frequently compared with the authentic

texts but the underused words should be paid more attention due to the higher frequencies in the

authentic texts when students compose this genre.

Qualitative data collection and analysis

Aside from the above quantitative data, I also had a number of non-Chinese readers make

qualitative judgements on the three versions of the brochures. They were asked to evaluate which

version was the best brochure3 KW lists based on the criteria of authenticity and motivation. In

other words, these non-Chinese readers, who would probably visit Taiwan one day and read these

students’ produced brochures beforehand, were requested to select the version which was read

more authentically in words and accordingly can trigger their motivation to pay a visit to the tourist

attraction in the near future. The reason why this evaluation was made was because I would like to

know whether or not these self-designed brochures can provide sufficient information and also

interestingly promote Taiwan and its tourist attractions to potential visitors, which was exactly what

a tourist attraction brochure aims for i.e. being informational and promotional. Their preferences

were calculated by EXCEL and tabulated in the next section. The following are the results of these

quantitative and qualitative data together with discussion.



148 Results and discussion

The wordlist for authentic tourist attraction brochures

Table 1 shows that there are 50,805 tokens which have 6,414 distinct words used for the word list

of the authentic texts. The mean words are 651 in length on average in each brochure. In

comparison, there are only 2,756 distinct words of 13,199 tokens on average in the students’ 72

texts, and the mean in words is 550 per text on average across the three versions. It also shows that

in general a student’s text is shorter than an authentic text by around 100 words. Students’

inexperience of composing an informative & promotional brochure or applying the ‘avoidance

strategy’ to elude making errors may account for this gap. This was the students’ first time to write

about a specific professional genre and thus unfamiliarity with this genre made them cautious with

the word choices. Firstly, they may not have a clear idea of what words they have learnt could be

used, or secondly they may not have learnt the essential words needed for composing a tourist

attraction brochure. Hence, writing with fewer words is surely a good strategy to avoid making

errors for them.

Though there are 6,414 distinct/ different words (DW) calculated by WS in the end;

however, it cannot be assumed that these words are so-called ‘key words’ in authentic tourist

attraction brochures. A wordlist simply lists all the words used with their frequencies, which may

also appear frequently in other kinds of genre texts like the articles ‘a’ or ‘the’ . Therefore, to

identify the key words in tourist attraction brochures it needs to do keywording.

Table 1: Total tokens, distinct words (DW) and key words (KW) in the authentic texts (AT) and thestudents’ texts (ST)Authentic tourist attraction brochures (AT)

*Total tokens/DW/KW in AT

50,805 tokens(78 texts)651 tokens/AVG.

6,414 DW728 KW12.62 DW/ per 100 tokens1.43 KW/ per 100 tokens11.35 KW/ per 100 DW

Students brochures

(ST)

The 1st

version The 2nd

version The 3rd

version

#Total tokens/DW inST

12,450(24 texts)

2,708 DW

13,376(24 texts)550 tokens/AVG.2,767 DW

2.756 DW/ AVG.

13,722(24 texts)

2,793 DW

DW/ per 100 tokens 21.82 20.68 20.35



149 20.95 AVG.

Total KWRef. to BNC

260 284 293

-KW per 100 tokens/DW

2.089.60

2.1210.26

2.1310.49

Total KWRef. to AT

58 70 69

-KW per 100 tokens/DW

0.462.14

0.522.52

0.502.47

Total KW excl. specialterms

36 45 42

^KW per 100 tokens/DW

0.281.32

0.331.62

0.301.50

Note: *:used for wordlisting and served as the reference corpus, #: used for wordlisting and served as the study

corpus, ^: excl. special terms, DW: distinct (or different) words, KW: key words; AVG: on average of that category

The key words in the authentic tourist attraction brochures compared to BNC

There are 728 key words in total, 661 of which are overused words and 67 words in italics are

underused compared to BNC. The higher ranking a word is, the more keyness it has in the study

corpus. Hence, the token “#”, referring to any digits such as 12, 254 or 100 etc., has the highest

keyness in tourist attraction brochures. While the words ranking from the 662th to the 728th are

underused words when compared to BNC, which implies these words are not as essential as the

overused words from ranking 1 to 661. Hence, for pedagogical implication it is these 661 words

that teachers should treat in priority for they are exactly the vocabulary which is used in authentic brochures.

I, then, classified the above 728 words into two main categories i.e. content words and

function words, and the content words were further divided into nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and

verbs as partially shown in Appendix 1. Many adjectives used in tourist attraction brochures are the

past participles like ‘themed’, ‘guided’, or ‘located’ , which may also imply that the passive voice is

commonly seen throughout authentic brochures. If the words are examined closely, these keywords may collocate with certain words mainly in this genre. Take the verb ‘enjoy’ for instance, the

usage of gerunds following it is not commonly seen in the texts; one of the few examples is ‘enjoy

exploring the family-friendly paths’. Instead, nouns or noun phrases mostly follow the verb ‘enjoy’

such as ‘enjoy the peace and serenity’, ‘enjoy unlimited visits’ or ‘enjoy waiter service’. An excerpt

of its collocations is shown below in Table 2. Indeed, a keyword list like this is more significant

than the previous wordlist in terms of ESP genre teaching.



150 Table 2: The partial concordance of the verb ‘enjoy’ in authentic tourist attraction texts

N Concordance

1 …can sit back, relax and enjoy. Enjoy a variety of hot meals…2 …so you can sit back, relax and enjoy. Enjoy a variety of hot…3 …A beautiful outdoor terrace to enjoy your meal as well as th…

4 …ilt Study Centre. The Pavilion Enjoy morning coffee, a light…5 …ne experience Terrace tea room Enjoy light lunches, homemade…6 …urne House and Garden Explore, enjoy, unwind Restored to its…7 …come groups and individuals to enjoy the delicious treats we…8 …ng back 400 years. Golfers can enjoy a leisurely round on th…9 …hat they used. The White Tower Enjoy the surprising serenity…10 …wine list. Pay us a visit and enjoy! The Old Joint Stock is…

The wordlists for students’ texts

Again, I calculated how many words in total the students’ texts contain and how many distinct

words exist and then tried to compare the results with the authentic texts (AT). Table 1 indicates

that on average the students used around 2756 distinct words across three versions of their texts

while 6414 distinct words were identified in the AT. Apparently, there are more different words

used in AT than those in the ST; nevertheless, the number of total tokens in AT is much larger than

that in ST. Surprisingly, it is found that in fact the number of DW in every 100 tokens in AT is only

about half of that in ST i.e. 12.62: 20.95. This means that the students used more different or

distinct words than displayed in AT. However, these figures cannot be inferred that the students are

equipped with a strong base of English vocabulary and accordingly they could have more choices

of words in tourist attraction brochures. The fact may be that the students used many of ‘their’

words which are not ‘the’ words used in the AT. Teachers should be cautious with whether or not

students use the ‘right’ words in their writing, as it is these subtle differences of word choices and

constraints that make genres different from one another and look authentic or not.

The 3 versions of key word lists in the students’ texts compared to the authentic texts

Table 1 also demonstrates two types of keywording in ST with reference to BNC (which is shown

in dark shaded rows) and AT (which is shown in light shaded rows). With reference to BNC, there

are 260, 284, and 293 words, which are identified as key words in the three versions of ST

respectively but these words mostly overlap with the key words in AT. It would be more significant

to examine which words are overused and underused by the students in terms of creating an

authentically-flavoured tourist attraction brochure. Hence, I used the ST as the study corpus and the

AT as the reference corpus to locate these words.



151 In the end, 3 KW lists were generated and I will offer possible reasons to explain why some

words are overused and why some are underused. It is believed that the first reason stems from the

‘contextual differences’ i.e. the cultural factors existing in Taiwan and the UK. Following are some

obvious examples. The students preferred using the words ‘bus’, ‘No.’ (number), ‘highway’ , or

‘road’ in the brochures. However, in the UK brochures highway is replaced by ‘motorway’, and

‘road’ is replaced by ‘street’ . The address of an tourist attraction is necessary information but ‘No.’

does not appear in printing an address; therefore, instead of ‘No. 1, Hsung-ho Rd….”, the authentic

usage is “1, Hsung-ho street…”. Besides, in the UK a tourist attraction brochure advises visitors

how to get to the tourist attraction by ‘driving’ rather than taking a ‘bus’ due to the longer distance.

Another example of this category is an underused key word ‘house’. It is believed that visiting a

historic house is an attractive activity in the UK but this is not always the same case in Taiwan.

Some underused key words like ‘house’ were generated due to the contextual differences in the

interest of choosing an attraction to visit. After all, cultural factors or community constraints greatly

affect textual conventions and writers need to consider these boundaries while working (Johns,

2002).

The second reason is the ‘ fossilisation of English learning ’, which means in Taiwan ESP

learners, also formerly known as ELT learners, tend to use ‘formal’ English, especially a number of

so-called ‘elegant sentence patterns’ to demonstrate their English proficiency. Therefore, the

patterns like “It is…to…” or the participle construction “Having…., someone…’ make the words

‘it’, ‘is’ or ‘having’ become overused words. These patterns make the brochures sound too formal

and somewhat inauthentic in style, which would create unseen distance from visitors. In other

words, some patterns, which Taiwanese students are used to applying, cannot express the spirit of

hospitality and friendliness; nevertheless, this spirit is exactly the indispensible elements of H&T

industries. A sense of belonging for visitors is crucially important in H&T and appropriate choices

of words can enhance such touch. For example, the words ‘we’ and ‘our ’ are much more frequently

used than ‘ you’ and ‘ your ’ in hotel brochures (Yang, 2010a; 2010b). This problematic usage is also

found in this study because students are inclined to use ‘ you’ (one of the overused words) instead of

‘our’ (one of the underused words) in the texts. To improve this situation would take much ESP

teachers’ efforts for ‘culture awareness’ can be purposefully and explicitly raised and then fostered

but to change a student’s linguistic habits is not an easy task in contrast. Language teachers are

suggested to conduct a genre-based instruction to handle this problem because a GBI involves

analysing grammar, moves, patterns, styles and lexis required for a certain genre while learners arecomposing texts.



152

Finally, the last reason comes from the users’ ‘unilateral lexical knowledge’, which can

explain most of the overused words in the three keyword lists. This indicates that learners simply

know one side of a word but not the other, or they have limited vocabulary and thus are unable to

choose the right word. They tend to continuously use certain words, which become overused words

then. The following Table 3 compares the different usages of some key words in ST and AT.

Table 3: Different usages of overused & underused key words in ST and ATStudent texts Authentic texts

HERE…can’t miss here.…how to get here.…you can do…here.

Here you’ll + Verb. (find, get)…

GET

…how to get here/ there…… get off at… … get + prep. (off, away, out of..)..… get + Adj./p.p. (clear, married, involved, wet,lost, locked, fit…)… get 1/ another free…

CAN…you can… …we (visitors, children) can…PERSONancient person, # persons, in person,handicapped person

per person, 1 person free…

ACTIVITY(Used to mean any activities, not specified.)

(Specific nouns)exercise, tour, experience, adventure…(Nouns

are specified)DIY…you can DIY here…(Used to mean anyexperiencing activities, not specified.)

(Specific verbs)You can operate, experience, touch,

make…(Verbs are specified.)

AREAscenic area (with limited usage) dining/ play/ picnic/ function/ viewing area

(with various usages)GREEN(referring to colour only) (referring to grassy land)DIFFERENTdifferent kinds of …different varieties of…

different + N. (species/ routes/ levels)

KNOWYou can know…Do you know….?

Did you know…?…to know…

VISIT (underused)..to visit ..(limited usage)

pay …a visit , …for your visit , to visit , andvisit …, …with a visit , a visit to…, visit this…,

please visit …,

WORLD (underused)



153 …around/on the world … …world heritage/ famous/ class…

…a fascinating/ wild/ spooky/ whole/ early/marine…world ..

It is believed that this situation can also be gradually improved through teacher’s explicit

teaching of vocabulary in class. For the underused words, the teacher can address the varieties of

each word and encourage learners to try using it in a more creative way. With regards to the

overused words, students can be taught how to replace the overused words with other similar words

which may appear either in the wordlist of AT or in the keyword list of AT. For example, rather

than using the verb ‘DIY’ to refer to an action, students can try other more specific words like

‘explore’, ‘discover’, ‘ride’ or ‘learn’ .

The evaluation of the three texts

As Table 1 above shows, it seems that in ST the numbers of KW across three versions do not

obviously decrease i.e. 58, 70, 69 and the KW in every 100 DW are 2.14, 2.52 and 2.47.

Apparently, the first time writing generated the fewest KW; however, it cannot be presumed that

the instruction was invalid completely. In fact, the students wrote with fewer words in the first

version than those in their second and third versions. There may be three possible reasons

accounting for this insignificant change. First, it is difficult to change students’ fossilised habits of

overusing the certain words or patterns. Secondly, the students were not given sufficient time todigest what they were taught and to revise the returned text. Due to the constraint on time, the

students were required to submit their revised version within one week. Perhaps, time pressure

made them only focus on correcting grammatical errors rather than word choices. Besides, for a

writing class the size of 24 students is not small, which makes it difficult for the teacher to instruct

individually and thus the effectiveness is not obvious (Henry & Roseberry, 2007).

Quantitative data above is not the only criterion to measure the students’ progress. In fact, Ialso used a qualitative measurement to evaluate their productions as discussed in the research

methodology section i.e. outsider evaluation. The following Table 4 displays the result of

perceptions on the better production among the three texts of the non-Chinese speakers’, over half

of whom are native English speakers as Table 5 shown.



154 Table 4: The percentages of the non-Chinese speakers’ choices of the better brochure

The 1st

version

The 2nd

version

The 3rd

version Non-Chinese

readers (%)

ANR.* MVV.* ANR. MVV. ANR. MVV. EL1.* EL2.*

Tourist

AttractionBrochure

0 0 8.32 8.32 91.66 91.66 66.66 33.33

Note: * ANR.: authenticity to read, MVV.: motivation to visit, EL1.: English as the 1 st

language, EL2.: English as the second/foreign language.

Table 5: The distributions of the non-Chinese readers’ nationalitiesEnglish as the 1st language( EL1)

UK., USA., South Africa, Australia,

English as the

2nd

/foreignlanguage ( EL2)

Hungary, Thailand, Malaysia*, Singapore*, South Korea,

Philippine*, India*, Japan

Note: *denotes the nations where English is spoken as one of the official languages.

As shown in Table 4, we can see that nearly all the outsiders perceived that the third version

was the best brochure among all in terms of authenticity of reading and motivation to pay a visit.

The reason why one of the second versions was chosen as the better brochure was that the evaluator

regarded it as good as the third one, so I marked one preference in the second column. Hence, it

still can be asserted that the third version was distinguished from the previous two versions amongall the students’ production, and the result confirms that the instruction is effective to some extent

for the word choices were modified gradually across the three versions. After all, with regard to the

purposes of publishing an informative and promotional text for H&T, how to convey correct and

charming information to the potential guests and then raise their motivation is the most crucial. In

their written comments, the evaluators showed their strong interests to read the brochures and high

motivation to visit the tourist attractions, and these responses are exactly what an H&T brochure

aims for and is expected.

Conclusion, Implications and Recommendations

Nowadays, as an international language English has become the main communicative medium for

both native English speakers and non-native English speakers, and it is inevitable that EFL learners

would produce locally-flavoured writings due to the influences of contextual differences. However,

it is still believed that appropriate choices and constraints of technical lexis and structures in a

genre can effectively facilitate communication and thus meet both the writer and readers’expectations in a professional community. Hence, it would be helpful for ESP learners if word



155 frequencies and key word lists can be generated in order to identify the essential words, grammar

and patterns used in a special genre.

In this study, 78 English tourist attraction brochures together with 24 students’ self-

designed texts were used as the samples to be analysed with Word Smith. In total, there are 728 key

words (KW) identified in the authentic texts with reference to BNC and these words can play a

significant role in English education for specific purpose in hospitality and tourism because they

are supposed to be the essential words to compose an effective informative and promotional text. In

addition, this study also analysed the ESP learners’ work and achievements in a GBI writing

course. It was found that ESP learners in Taiwan might have different choices of lexis when writing

a specific genre from the ones used in the authentic texts. The likely reasons for this phenomenon

may come from three aspects i.e. contextual differences, fossilisation of English learning, and

unilateral lexical knowledge. Though the results also indicate that the apparent GBI in class

seemingly did not make significant changes on the students’ word choices within a short period of

time, the outsiders’ evaluations all confirm that the last version is the best among all in terms of

authenticity of reading and motivation to visit the place, which achieves the purpose of preparing

an informative and promotional brochure.

Choosing right words and knowing their constraints help construct the authenticity in a

specific genre. The results of this research firstly imply that in each genre there are essential key

words which are frequently used and ESP learners are required to employ these words if they need

to write a specific genre and their readers can only rely on English as a medium. Acquiring these

words can avoid inaccuracy and inauthenticity. Thus, it is hoped that ESP teachers and learners can

pay close attention to the high frequency words and key word lists for these words pinpoint the

authenticity and appropriateness of a particular genre language, which could make them reach the

communicative purposes in their professional community. As Paltridge (2001) argues, genre

analysis provides ESP learners with not only knowledge and skills but an access to socially

powerful forms of language. Furthermore, analysing these lists with the sources learners will read

and write empowers ESP educators to design curriculum, materials and activities, which gives them

a more central role (Hyland, 2004a; 2008).

Indeed, what a GBI classroom aims for is to equip ESP learners with abilities i.e. generic

competence (Bhatia, 2000) to “participate in and respond to new and recurring genres” (Paltridge,2001, 7). In a word, compared to EGP ( English for General Purposes) teaching, it may take



156 teachers’ more time and patience to design and teach an ESP course but if teachers simply rely on

the methods of teaching EGP to instruct an ESP course, this would truly make the instruction

prescriptive and less effective.

This research is a very preliminary trial of examining a less attended discipline in ESP in

Taiwan but it can serve as a starting point for further researching. For the future studies, it is,

firstly, advised to closely investigate how the key words are used in the texts i.e. concordance. By

looking at its concordance with rhetorical considerations, we may have a clearer idea of what

constitutes a holistic structure of this particular language and why the language is chosen

purposefully and how it is used by expert writers (Johns, 2002). In other words, we will study its

lexis, grammar, sentences and patterns at a broader level. Second, the focus can be placed on

recognising the moves and strategies applied in designing authentic tourist attraction brochures.

This investigation broadens the study from sentence to paragraph level and to the whole

organisation of writing, i.e. from semantics to pragmatics. Not until this stage is achieved can a

thorough ESP writing curriculum be well planned and then be implemented.

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161 Appendix

Part of the assorted key words in authentic tourist attraction brochures with reference to BNCVERBS ADJECTIVES ADVERBS NOUNS SPECIAL NOUNS FUNCTIONAL WORDS

VISIT OUR ANYTIME # ORG ANDENJOY FREE AROUND GARDEN WWW INCLUDING

DISCOVER YOUR APPROXIMATELY GARDENS SHAKESPEARE FOR

EXPLORE FASCINATING TOO CASTLE COM FROM

PLEASE STUNNING AGAIN WEBSITE UK THROUGH

SAFARI OPEN THERE GIFT WOBURM PLUS

JOIN FUN EVEN ADMISSION HOLKER THROUGHOUT

WALK ONLINE STILL SHOP CADBURY EXCEPT

FOLLOW BEAUTIFUL NOW EVENT BEATRIX AT

RELAX THEMED NO PALACE KEW TO

CALL AVAILABLE NOT THINK TANK BIRMINGHAM UP

RIDE OUTDOOR TICKET BIDULPH DOWN

OFFER INDOOR EMAIL CONSALL THE

LEARN DAILY HALL TEL AGAINST

WELCOME BOTANIC CAFÉ TUDOR HOWEVER

TAKE SPECTACULAR POTTER NATIONAL TRUST THEN

PICNIC HISTORIC RIDES BLENHEIM AS

FIND UNIQUE FAMILY CO OF

CLIMBING SPECIAL DAY WINTERBOURNE SO

STEAM DELICIOUS PARK SIZERGH IN

UNWIND SUITABLE BOOKING CARTMEL IF

CHASE VICTORIAN WORLD CAF WHAN

TRAVEL ROYAL FARM HAWKSHAD BUT

CLOSES AMAZING TRAIL ARDEN

WANDER LOCATED GALLERY SHUGBOROUGH

DON'T GUIDED JUNCTION WWT

DIG RANGE TOUR CANNOCK

TREAT MAGNIFICENT VISITORS LONDONINCLUDES EXCITING EXPERIENCE AVON

CLIMB TRANQUIL INFO STRATFORD

MEET HOMEMADE ADVENTURE BRANTWOOD

OFFER FANTASTIC PARKING TRAVELINE

HIRE WILD LAKE PUZZLEWOOD

Biodata

Wen-hsien Yang is assistant professor in the Department of Applied English at National Kaohsiung University of

Hospitality & Tourism, Taiwan. He received his doctorate in ELT from the University of Exeter, UK. His mainresearch interests lie in the ESP aspects about second language writing, genre analysis and word analysis in specifictexts. He has also published a number of papers on ESP and corpus.



162

Effectiveness of Student Responses to Teacher Written Feedback: A Study of Thai Graduate

Students

Supong Tangkiengsirisin

This study investigates how graduate students respond to various types of teacher written feedback including surface-level, clarification-level, and content-levelfeedback. Data were obtained from 180 students’ expository compositions, whichwere analyzed in terms of categories of feedback delivered to them and the ways theywere revised in response to the teacher’s comments provided. The results revealedthat most of the students completely responded to the teacher commentary andrevised their initial drafts effectively. However, some of the student revisions were partially complete, or in a few cases there were no revisions in response to thecomments, suggesting that the students did not understand the feedback the teacher provided or that the teacher’s comments were not clear and effective enough.

Keywords: Teacher written feedback, process-oriented writing, second language writing

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IntroductionFeedback plays a crucial role in developing students’ writing skills in the process-oriented approach. In

an EFL writing course, feedback can help students improve their content, organization, and grammar.

Students, regardless of age or educational level, tend to rely on feedback to improve their writing

during a revision process. There are a large number of studies conducted with regard to whether and

how feedback helps improve second language writing (e.g. Allwright & Bailey, 1991; Carroll, Swain,



163 & Roberge, 1992; Ellis, 1994; Gass, 1997; Lightbown & Spada,1990; Long, 1996). In addition, the

effects of feedback on the improvement of writing skills, both at the sentence level and at the discourse

level, have been studied even though the results of these studies are still inconclusive and sometimes

contradictory (e.g. Ferris, 1997; Frantzen, 1995; Semke, 1984; Sheppard, 1992).

Among the various types of feedback on writing, EFL students have shown their preference for

teacher written feedback over the other types of feedback including peer feedback and oral feedback in

conferences (Leki, 1991; Zhang, 1995). Although its contribution to students’ writing development is

still doubtful (Hyland & Hyland, 2006), writing teachers often feel that it is necessary to respond to

student errors, especially grammatical ones. This type of feedback is usually welcome by many ESL

students, particularly those from cultures where highly directive teachers are valued. Concerning its

benefit for students’ writing skill development, Ferris (2002) suggests that teacher feedback

customized to students’ knowledge and experience is a helpful technique for students so that they may

avoid future problems and errors in writing. Reid (1993) suggests that feedback needs to be provided

in enough detail so that students can act and commit to change in their writing. Sommers (1982)

advocates feedback delivery stressing that comments create the motive for revising; without them,

student writers will revise in a “consistently narrow and predictable way” and assume that their writing

communicates successfully (149). Leki (1991) maintains that teacher feedback is very important as

students usually want errors in their writing to be corrected, and they will feel frustrated if no teacher feedback is provided for their writing. Teacher feedback apparently plays a significant role in

developing student writing although it may not be responsible for long-term language improvement.

In addition, no matter how important or useful teacher feedback is on student writing, it is still

not clear how effectively students can respond to the feedback. There are sometimes mismatches

between the teacher’s expectations about how students should rewrite their compositions and the actual

revision students perform in response to teacher feedback.

Review of the literature

Providing teacher written feedback to student writing

Because writing is considered as a complex developmental task and a recursive process, the process

approach focuses more on how a text is crafted through the discovery of meaning than on the





165

Explicitness of teacher written feedback

Feedback may be direct with explicit corrections or indirect with advice or suggestions (Ferris, 2002).

These two types of feedback differ mainly in the degree of explicitness of error correction. While the

effects of explicit error correction may be doubtful, implicit feedback (e.g., giving codes, giving

symbols, providing marginal feedback or locating errors) can be employed as an alternative (Semke,

1984). Indirect feedback seems to be more useful as it involves students’ responsibility for their own

learning and more effective in improving their own proficiency than explicit or direct feedback (Ferris

& Hedgcock, 1998).

Research on teacher feedback

Teacher feedback may take one of the two major forms: teacher-student conferences and teacher

written feedback. While the former is less popular due to the time constraints and the large number of students in writing classes, the latter is far more common as a means of responding to student writing.

Only teacher written feedback will be reviewed and discussed in this section as this type of feedback is

the main focus of this study.

Early studies have revealed some negative effects of L2 teacher written feedback. For instance,

Zamel (1985), in her analysis of L2 teachers’ written comments on students’ essays, found that the

teachers misinterpreted the students’ texts and gave comments in such a way that their subsequentrevised versions became less coherent. In addition, many of the teachers’ comments were vague and

confusing. Cohen (1987), in his investigation of the students’ perceptions of teacher feedback in

relation to their subsequent actions, found that some of the students ignored the teachers’ comments

and that the students had a limited repertoire of strategies to respond to the teachers’ comments.

Another factor that possibly leads to the failure of the teachers’ feedback is the mismatch

between students’ and teachers’ preferences for comments. Cohen (1987) and Cohen and Cavalcanti

(1990) reported that the students wished for more feedback on content than on grammar. Leki (1991)

found that the students strongly wished all their grammatical errors to be marked and corrected by their

teachers even though they showed a growing interest in content and organization. This revealed that

these EFL students had a mistaken notion of equating revisions with correcting surface errors and the

unrealistic expectation for perfect grammar might lead to a lack of improvement in students’ revisions.



166

Nevertheless, some studies showed that teacher feedback had a positive effect on students’

writing proficiency and resulted in improvement in student writing. EFL students valued teacher

feedback and expected to receive feedback from their teachers (Leki, 1990; Zhang, 1995). Students

also found teacher feedback useful for their revision, and they tended to carefully read their essays and

respond to teacher comments on the initial drafts rather than on the final drafts (Ferris, 1995). Teacher

feedback based on four major criteria: length, type, use of hedges, and text-specificity was also found

to have positive effects on student writing (Ferris, 1997). These teacher comments included limited

grammar feedback, marginal comments which functioned as requests for information or for revision,

and focused text-specific comments that provided clear directions for the revision tasks. In addition,

other feedback techniques that were claimed to be effective include an approach in which teachers had

to provide feedback only on certain aspects of content and form without giving comments on all

written errors or problems (Leki, 1992) and a study in which students were asked to produce written

dialogues in response to the teachers’ comments (Jenkins, 1987).

A comparative study between peer and teacher feedback in English writing classes revealed

that learners passively accepted and used more teacher feedback than peer feedback but did not

necessarily understand its value or significance (Lee, 2008; Zhao, 2010). With regard to students with

learning challenges, a study revealed that teacher written feedback positively affected student

performance and did not harm students' self-esteem (Siewert, 2011).

Revision in the process-oriented writing approach

In the process-oriented approach, writing is seen as a recursive process which consists of prewriting,

writing, and revision. Of all these stages, revision can be regarded as the major and most important

stage of process writing as it is usually through the revising process that student writing can be

improved with the help of various types of feedback. Revision may take place at any point during the

composing process (Flower & Hayes, 1981), where writers generate, reformulate, and refine ideas in

an attempt to discover and approximate intended meanings (Zamel, 1982, 1983). During the revising

stage, writers make both local and global alterations to their texts. These alterations involve both

meaning and content modifications, and grammatical and lexical corrections. Revision can also be

used as an assessment of the writing skills, and the ability to provide written feedback to assess

students’ proficiency contributes to the development of student writing. Revision was utilized as a type



167

of formative writing assessment to promote pedagogical practices and maximize student learning (Lee,

2011).

Teaching EFL writing in Thailand

Even though the process-oriented approach to writing is theoretically popular, its applications in the L2

context are not common and widespread. In Thailand, for instance, many writing classes at the

undergraduate and the graduate levels still rely on the traditional approach to teaching writing, which is

product-oriented and is mainly concerned with form. Only one draft is usually required for grading

without any rewriting. Students’ first drafts are essentially equivalent to their final drafts, and teachers

mainly provide comments on surface features rather than on the content or meaning.

This study contributes to existing research on teacher feedback by investigating how EFL

students revise their writing in response to the teacher’s written comments on both the content leveland the surface level. In particular, it presents the actual revisions the students performed in response

to teacher written feedback on their initial drafts of expository compositions. The feedback was

delivered in the form of comments to improve content, and the organization and coherence of the

students’ compositions, as well as correct the surface-level errors in their writing. Analysis of student

revisions in this study revealed the manners in which the students revised their drafts. The results of

this study mainly respond to the research question: How effectively do the students respond to teacher

written feedback and revise their initial drafts?

Methodology

Participants

The study was conducted with 60 first-year graduate students pursuing a Master’s Degree in English

for Careers at a university in Thailand. All of them were Thai students enrolled in a required writing

course, and their age range was from twenty-three to fifty. They earned previous degrees in various

fields of study, and none of the participants had an overseas education as undergraduates even though

some of them had been working for international organizations.

Procedures and data collection

In this study, the teacher/researcher provided comments on the students’ 180 expository essays

regarding content, organization, word choice, and grammar. The modes of the expository essays were



168

cause-and-effect , comparison/contrast and classification. The students were required to send their first

drafts to the teacher through e-mail. Subsequently, the teacher gave comments on the drafts and

returned them through e-mail to the owners of the essays for revision. The students sent their rewritten

drafts, which were revised in response to the teacher feedback. In this study, the students were asked to

make only one revision of their initial drafts.

Data analysis

Analysis of teacher written feedback

The data consisted primarily of the students’ initial drafts that had received teacher written feedback.

The teacher written comments in each composition were analyzed in terms of feedback types including

surface-level feedback , clarification-level feedback and content-level feedback (Paltridge et al., 2009).

The students’ revised drafts were subsequently analyzed in terms of the students’ response to the

teacher written feedback provided in their initial drafts.

The three categories of teacher written feedback used in this study and their applications are presented in table 1.

Table 1 Categories of teacher written feedback and their applications

Categories ApplicationsSurface-level feedback Corrective feedback on word choice and grammar

Clarification-level

feedback

Comments requesting corrections or alterations to

unclear issues

Content-level feedback Comments focusing on the organization of information

as well as the information itself

Analysis of students’ responses to teacher written feedback

This analysis, which involves the examination of the students’ revisions in response to the teacher written feedback, was adapted from the analysis of successful and unsuccessful revisions in students’

essays developed by Conrad & Goldstein (1999). Student moves related to the teacher comments were

classified into three types:



169

Complete response to teacher written commentary (CR) refers to student revision moves thatmatched the teacher’s purpose for providing a particular comment. Student moves with thistype of response took several forms, e.g. adding, deleting, substituting, moving words or phrases, copying a teacher-provided correction and rewriting a sentence or a paragraph.

Partial response to teacher written commentary (PR) refers to student revision moves made

when the student attempted to revise an area commented on, but the revision did not matchthe teacher’s purpose in providing the comment.

No response to teacher written commentary (NR) refers to student revision moves that weremade when the student did not revise an area commented on by the teacher. In other words,the student made no change in his or her revised draft in response to the teacher comment provided in the initial draft; the student merely copied from the initial draft to the reviseddraft.

In this study, the analysis of teacher written comments and student moves in response to the teacher

comments was performed by two coders. One of the coders was the researcher himself and the other

coder was a Thai instructor who earned a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from a university in the U.S.and has taught English at the tertiary level in Thailand for over 20 years. The inter-coder agreement for

the teacher written comments was 91%, and that for the moves in response to the teacher written

comments was 93%

Results

In the present study, different numbers of teacher written comments were provided on students’ initial

drafts. Table 2 shows the number of written comments of each type.

Table 2 Number of written comments in each category

Types of Comments Frequencies (%)

Surface-level feedback 566 (40.1)Clarification-level feedback 308 (21.9)Content-level feedback 534 (38)

Total 1,408

The study has also revealed the students’ responses to the teacher written feedback. Table 3 indicates

the number of student moves with complete, partial or no response to the comments.



170

Surface-level feedback Clarification-level feedback

98.981.2

1.114.3

04.5

Content-level feedback 90.6 7.1 2.3

Responses to Surface-level Feedback (SL)

This type of feedback was the most frequently used in this study with 566 SL comments (40.1%) being

provided. The comments of this type took the form of addition, substitution or deletion of items in

students’ drafts.

Regarding the students’ responses to SL feedback, the data analysis reveals that the complete

response was the most common (98.9%). In most cases of SL feedback, the students copied the

teacher’s corrections, whether they involved addition, substitution or deletion of words or phrases.

There were only a few tokens of partial response and to the teacher’s SL comments in the students’

revised drafts. There was no token of no response for this type of feedback.

SL feedback was offered on the basis of the teacher’s assessment of individual students’

language proficiency and writing abilities. The teacher made a correction or added a word where he

assumed that an individual student was unfamiliar with a certain use of an English word or would be

incapable of correction of a certain error. For instance, in a student’s draft

…some of Thais’ ways of lives are changing and some of good beliefs will be changed basedon cultures.

The teacher added the word “other,” between the words “on” and “cultures,” assuming that the student

was unfamiliar with the use of “other” in her writing to make a contrast between entities. The teacher

did not provide any explanation regarding the addition of “other.”

In addition, the teacher provided correction for the surface errors that were considered minor

and not worth distracting the students while revising their initial drafts with the task of self-correction.

Again, the teacher provided the correction as a target-like model. An example of teacher correction of

a minor error is the teacher correcting a personal pronoun. In the sentence

Since Thai people are adaptable to globalization, we enjoy living among the changes caused.

Table 3 Responses to teacher written feedback

CR

(%)PR

(%)

NR

(%)

“ ” “ ” “ ”



171

The teacher changed the personal pronoun “we” to “they” to refer to “Thai people” anaphorically. This

substitution prevented distraction during revision and in this case the teacher believed that the student

would understand why the correction was made.

Responses to Clarification-level feedback (CLL)

A total of 308 CLL comments (21.9%) were provided in this study. The CLL comments consisted of

(1) questions, (2) short phrases, (3) general statements, (4) symbols (such as arrows, circles or question

marks).

Based on the data analysis, the students generally made complete revisions in accordance with

the CLL comments (81.2%). However, some of them made partial revisions (14.3%) or no revisions at

all (4.5%). An example of CLL feedback involves the expansion of a student’s ideas to clarify an

argument. The following extract has been taken from a cause-and-effect essay composed by a student.

…..AEON, a financial investor from Japan, is a good example to reflect the globalization.AEON is well known among the working class workers who work for low wages. Why ?? [Comment: No explanatory comments were offered to this sentence. Instead, the teacher putthe question “why” and double question marks after the sentence.]

In the student’s revised draft, she added a reason to expand and clarify the sentence, explaining why

“AEON is well known among the working class workers who work for low wages”. The revised draft

is

…..AEON, a financial investor from Japan, is a good example to reflect the globalization.AEON is well known among the working class workers who work for low wages since this is

the only way for poor people to obtain the cash with fast approval, no guarantor, no

difficulty, and simple documentations.

The teacher used CLL comments to encourage the student to “expand” by giving a reason (See

Halliday, 1994: 324). This type of feedback led to the complete revision of the student’s initial draft,

enhancing paragraph development.

A relatively small number of the student moves had partial response to the CLL comments.

Forty-four comments (14.3%) resulted in revisions that were not completely accurate. In these cases,

the students’ revised drafts suggested that while the students noticed the comments on their initial



172

drafts and despite their attempt to revise their first drafts in accordance with the comments, their

revision was not successful and did not match the teacher’s purpose in making the comments.

In the following example, the student seemed to understand what she was supposed to do in her

revision, in response to the CLL comment provided at the problematic area. However, in her revised

draft she still had inappropriate use of cohesion. The following extract was taken from a body

paragraph of a cause-and-effect essay.

Another reason of Thai poor economy is corruption. Our country loses a tremendous amountof money while the national wealth is illegal transformed into individual benefits. It is anegative image of Thailand. [Comment: What does “it” refer to?]

The teacher circled the personal pronoun “it” and put a question (as shown in the comment) under the

pronoun. However, in the student’s revised version, she changed the pronoun “it” to the demonstrative

reference tie “this”. Hence, her revised draft is

Another reason of Thai poor economy is corruption. Our country loses a tremendous amountof money while the national wealth is illegal transformed into individual benefits. This is anegative image of Thailand.

The teacher used the CLL feedback to suggest that the pronoun “it” needed revising, or changing. In

this instance, it is apparent that the student realized that she would need to change the word “it” to

another word. However, her revision was not complete or was partially complete because she usedonly the demonstrative pronoun “this,” instead of a complete noun phrase containing a summarizing

noun, to cataphorically refer to the preceding situation. An improved version should be

Another reason of Thai poor economy is corruption. Our country loses a tremendous amountof money while the national wealth is illegal transformed into individual benefits. This

problem has led to the negative image of Thailand.

This instance suggests that the CLL feedback delivered to the student’s initial draft so that she could

improve her draft might not have been clear enough to help her find the most appropriate cohesivedevice to link the revised sentence to the preceding one. Hence, the partial response to the comment.

When student moves had no correspondence to the CLL comments, the students made no

revision in response to the teacher feedback. For example, the teacher gave a CLL comment so that the



173

student would explain more clearly. The following extract has been taken from a body paragraph of a

classification essay.

Who are these people?

Problem-solving skills are in the second category. I realize that these people can get their jobs done successfully. I was confronted with the significant problem in my previous firm.My team was preoccupied with a long term project that could not be completed in onemonth. We would be fired if we couldn’t submit our customer’s project by the due date…..

In this case, the student did not make any change to the noun phrase “these people” as she revised her

initial draft. She left it as it was, instead of expanding the phrase by adding more specific information

so that the sentence would read:

I realize that people with these skills can get their jobs done successfully.To find out why the student made no revision in response to this comment, the teacher asked the

student, and she said she did not know how to revise her writing.

The CLL feedback provided an opportunity for the students to self-correct, and a majority of

cases, the students were able to respond completely to the comments or suggestions. The teacher used

the less specific indications of symbols, questions and brief phrases and statements to direct the

students’ attention towards areas that needed revision. He expected that the students, when receiving

this type of feedback, would know how to correct the errors or enhance cohesion in their writing once

their attention was drawn to them.

Responses to Content-level feedback (COL)

In the present study, the COL comments were used the second most frequently after the SL feedback.

A total of 534 COL comments (38%) were provided on the students’ initial drafts. This type of

feedback was specifically used to provide an opportunity for the students to resolve problems related to

the organization or content in their writing.

In response to this type of feedback, most of the revisions were complete (90.6%), while only a

few were partially complete (7.1%) and in a few other cases, no response was provided for revision at

all (2.3%).



174

Some of the COL comments were brief and concise, while others were much longer, usually

explaining a corresponding rule or providing a direction for revision. Some of the COL comments even

combined more than one purpose; for instance, they provided an explanation or a reason for revision

along with a specific direction for revising a particular section of a draft. For example, the teacher

provided the following comment for a student to revise her draft for cohesion between the thesis

statement and the body paragraphs.

The main problem with your organization is that your thesis statement at the end of your introductory paragraph does not reveal what your body paragraphs will be about[Identification of a problem]. You need to relate those two areas in your essay. So, when yourewrite, include the key words from the topic sentences of your body paragraphs in your thesis statement [Direction for revision]. Your thesis statement will be stronger and clearer if you use an essay map [Explanation for the need for revision].

The teacher used the COL feedback to help the students to reflect on the comment carefully and

identify how the problematic areas should be resolved during their revision. This would also involve

deleting a sentence or adding another sentence to make the text more coherent.

The COL feedback was utilized to provide opportunities for the students to self-correct. Instead

of providing correction directly, the teacher used this type of feedback, which identified areas for

revisions of material within students’ developmental range.

Most of the student moves (90.6%) had complete response to the COL comments. This

suggests that the teacher’s purpose in using this type of feedback to provide opportunities for self-

correction was fulfilled. The following example illustrates the students’ complete response to the

teacher’s comments.

One effect of globalization is the advancement of communication technology. Thetechnological revolution has provided a faster way to communicate. Thai people are now ableto keep in touch with the outside world affordably.

[Comments: This paragraph is too short. If you can give some examples to show how Thaiscan communicate with the outside world, your paragraph will be better developed. Also,think about how you can introduce an example.]

In the student’s revised draft, she added three examples introducing the first using the conjunctive

expression “for example” and introducing the last using “moreover”.



175

One effect of globalization is the advancement of communication technology. Thetechnological revolution has provided a faster way to communicate. Thai people are now ableto keep in touch with the outside world affordably. For example, real-time online meetingsacross the countries are possible via the wireless Internet web camera. Parents can make alive chat with their children studying in the United States. Moreover , many young peopleaccess the Internet regularly and know what books are now being published in the England or what top hit songs are in the Billboard chart.

The teacher used COL comments to encourage the student to “elaborate” through apposition (See

Halliday, 1994: 324) using a conjunctive expression (“for example,” in this case) to exemplify her

argument that Thai people are now able to contact the outside world conveniently. In this instance, the

student also used “extension” for positive addition; specifically, she introduced a final example using

the conjunctive expression “moreover”. This COL feedback led to complete revision of the student’s

initial draft and enhanced the use of cohesion, as well as paragraph development.

However, some student moves were found to have partial response to the COL comments. In

these cases, the students’ revised drafts indicated that the students failed to match the teacher’s purpose

in making the comments.

In the following example, an extract from a classification essay, a COL comment was provided

so that the student could revise the topic sentences in her expository essay. In the following extract, the

introductory paragraph is first presented with the last sentence serving as a thesis statement, whichreveals the major topics to be discussed in the subsequent body paragraphs. Then the COL comments

are provided below the introductory paragraph. (The teacher’s purpose in writing the comments here is

to draw the student’s attention to the relationship between the thesis statement and the body

paragraphs.) Following the comments are the first sentences of the body paragraphs of the essay,

presented in the chronological order. However, the topic sentence of each body paragraph does not

reveal the main topic of the paragraph as introduced earlier in the thesis statement, resulting in a lack

of global cohesion in the essay, even though the student used the sequence signals, i.e. first , second and

finally. In the student’s revised draft, the student’s correspondence to the comment was apparently

incomplete; therefore, her revision was still not very effective.

School is the place to educate students and also the place for new technologies. I have beenteaching for more than fifteen years and notice that there are three categories of teachers



176

when using technologies as criteria. There are teachers who are ready to adapt themselves to

new technologies, teachers who are somewhat ready to do, and teachers who are not ready

for the new technologies. (The last sentence serves as the thesis statement of this essay.)

[Comments: You can make your essay more cohesive by rewriting the topic sentence of each paragraph. The topic sentences should reiterate the major points presented in the thesis

statement.]

First, these teachers are usually in their twenties or in the early thirties. Most of them haveknowledge in computer and can operate it effectively…..

Second, these teachers are usually in their late thirties to mid forties. These teachers havelimited knowledge in technologies and computer…..

Finally, these teachers are usually in their late forties to fifties and get used to usingtraditional method of teaching such as merely talking and writing on the blackboard or thewhiteboard…..”

In the student’s revised draft, the topic sentence of each paragraph was revised. However, it seemed

that the student did not fully understand how to revise her topic sentences according to the COL

comments provided. Even though she changed the cohesive device used at the beginning of each body

paragraph, she did not add to the topic sentences the major points she included in the thesis statement.

Instead, she simply changed the sequence signals “first,” “second” and “finally” to “for the first

category,” “for the second category” and “for the third category” respectively. Consequently, her

response to the feedback could be considered to be partial and her revision was regarded as being

incomplete and not sufficiently coherent. In fact, the student only changed each sequence signal to a

nominal group signifying sequence using the head noun “category”.

All the above examples show how the teacher delivered feedback on student’s first drafts and

how the students responded to the feedback. In most cases, student revision was successful; in some

instances, unsuccessful revision was performed, or no response was provided.

Discussion

All of the students in the study used the comments to revise their writing as they moved along from the beginning to the end of their initial drafts. Regarding the student moves to teacher written feedback, it

appeared in this study that the majority of the teacher comments were responded to with complete

response in three ways:

1. the students copied the teacher’s corrections.



177 2. the students appropriately added a word, a phrase or a clause.

3. the students appropriately made changes to text.

With regard to the student moves with partial or no response to the commentary, there are several

possible reasons for the mismatch:

1. the students did not understand the teacher comments.

2. the students were not able to change the language or writing using the teacher

comments.

3. the students chose not to make a revision.

The teacher written feedback served two main purposes in the present study. First, surface-level

feedback or direct correction was used to provide feedback on the form of the students’ writing with a

specific focus on word choice and grammar. Second, clarification-level feedback and content-level

feedback were used in the form of directions, questions and statements about language usage and

writing conventions to provide both form-focused and content-focused feedback. Feedback delivery

and revision are a type of social interaction that occurs when a teacher provides written feedback on

students’ initial drafts and the students modify their drafts in response to the teacher feedback.

Feedback can provide useful language information to the learner while making connections

between his or her current interlanguage and the second language (Ferris, 2003). Feedback can also provide metalinguistic information that may raise learners’ consciousness regarding the second

language (Gass, 1997). In addition, when students have opportunities to receive feedback on their

writing, they can analyze language while producing modified output (Swain, 1995). It is evident that

opportunities to modify output are available to any student who makes revisions in response to the

feedback provided through teacher written comments on the content and language usage in student

writing. It can be claimed that students and teachers can negotiate meaning through modifications of

input and output in writing. In other words, when a teacher writes comments on student writing, a

negotiation for meaning is induced, and meaningful input is made comprehensible through

modifications (in the form of expansions, examples, etc.).

Even though the students expected their teacher to give feedback mainly on their grammatical

errors in their first drafts, in general feedback on content, rhetoric, and organization should take

priorities so that the students can develop ideas that they plan to include in their writing more clearly



178

and accurately and can avoid writing clear, well-organized, but inaccurate ideas (Campbell, 1998).

After providing comments on content, rhetoric, and organization, the teacher can then move on to the

sentence-level problems of grammar, spelling, and mechanics.

Positive results were found in the students’ writing when the students were required to revise

their initial drafts in response to teacher written feedback. These results mirror the results yielded from

some previous studies on teacher feedback, especially error correction, followed by students’ revisions,

concluding that writing accuracy could improve during the revision process subsequent to the students’

receiving feedback (Ferris, 1995, 2002, 2004, 2006; Zamel, 1985). A fair amount of empirical

evidence also advocates the positive effects of revision subsequent to feedback delivery on students’

accuracy in their writing “either in a short term or long term” (Fathman & Whalley, 1990; Ferris, 1997;

Chandler, 2003; Ferris & Roberts, 2001).

The findings also reveal that in the students’ revised drafts, errors were reduced most when in

response to corrective feedback. It can be stated that student writing improved most as a result of this

most explicit feedback, which naturally accommodated the students’ revision as they made changes in

accordance with the corrections provided; in many cases they simply copied the teacher’s corrections

on their revised drafts. The results in this study corresponded to Chandler’s (2003) results, concluding

that direct feedback or correction by the teacher was the most effective of the four types of feedback (correction, underlining and description, description, and underlining in this respective order) provided

to student writing. The superiority of direct feedback over the other feedback types was probably

because it is “the fastest and the easiest way for them (students) to revise” (291).

In response to the teacher written comments, the student moves reflected three types of

response to the purpose of the comments: complete, partial and no response. These responses refer to

the degree to which a student move resulted in a revision that matched the teacher’s purpose in

providing a comment. In this study, the great majority of the student moves responded to the comments

completely. The fact that there were some moves that had partial response to the commentary suggests

that the students consistently put their great efforts in responding to the teacher comments though not

successfully. This, in turn, reflects the students’ perception of the teacher feedback as important and

valuable as in the Thai culture, teachers’ advice or suggestions are mostly expected to be followed.



179

In this study, the student moves in response to the teacher written comments were similar in

that the students all copied the corrections provided by the teacher into their revised drafts. Moreover,

most of the students seemed to have noticed the comments and made revisions related to the

comments. The appropriately revised output indicated that the student successfully demonstrated

linguistic or rhetorical ability to fulfill the objective of the comment, even though s/he might have

sought assistance from any of the potentially helpful resources. In the few cases where the student

moves had no response to the teacher comments, several reasons can be offered on the basis of the

students’ responses in the questionnaires. First, the student did not understand the comment; second,

the student did not have the related language or writing skill to revise their writing; third, due to time

constraints, the student did not have enough time to revise properly; fourth, they disagreed with the

teacher comments provided; and finally, the teacher comments were unclear or ineffective.

Clearly, the students were able to manipulate the second language in response to the teacher

comments. The findings indicate that the students received a great deal of feedback both on form and

on content, feedback with metalinguistic information, input with requests for clarification and modified

input with expansions. The students’ revised drafts revealed that the students were able to use the input

to modify their writing by making additions, deletions and substitutions with respect to information in

their initial drafts, thereby increasing readability their writing. To accommodate students’ successful

revision, teachers need to pay careful attention to the ways they provide feedback on student writing.Effective feedback on students’ initial drafts can significantly contribute to their effective revision.

Conclusion

Based on the findings of this study, in most cases, the graduate students were able to make complete or

successful revisions at all levels of feedback provided. They mainly relied on the teacher’s comments

to rewrite or improve their writing in the initial drafts. Even though some of the revisions were not

successful, they showed their attempt to modify their writing in response to the feedback. There were

relatively low incidences where no response was provided due to the students’ inability to make

revisions or to understand feedback.



180

The research findings of this study suggest several important pedagogical implications. First of

all, the overall research results suggest that feedback and revision can contribute to the improvement of

student writing. Teacher written feedback can provide students with an additional layer of scaffolding

to develop their writing skills, promote accuracy and clear ideas, and develop an understanding of

written genres (Hyland, 2003). In the context of this study, teacher written feedback should be

customized to facilitate students’ revision. In addition, a combination of all types of written comments

should be provided on the basis of the student’s proficiency level and the level of difficulty regarding

the writing problem being addressed. However, there is concern over the amount of feedback provided

on each piece of student writing. That is, an excessive amount of feedback might be overwhelming and

cause confusion to students. Content-level and clarification-level feedback might be delivered for

students’ first revision and surface-level feedback might be provided to accommodate their second

revision, although two or more revisions would consume more of the teacher’s time.

Additionally, revision is an important activity that can help improve student writing and, in

turn, contribute to the development of a better attitude toward L2 writing. Students should be

encouraged to revise and rewrite their essays throughout a writing course so that they will be motivated

enough to become independent EFL writers who can perform self-editing and self-revision later in

their life (e.g. Ferris, 1995). Then, writing would not be only a tedious assignment that EFL/ESL

students are required to complete on a weekly or fortnightly basis or just a piece of material to bemarked and used as part of course evaluation.

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Biodata

Supong Tangkiengsirisin is an Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at the Language Institute of ThammasatUniversity, Bangkok, Thailand, where he currently serves as Director. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English fromChulalongkorn University and earned his Ph.D. in English Studies from the University of Nottingham. With over 20 yearsof teaching experience at the tertiary level, he has covered a wide range of areas in his teaching including academic writing,written business communication, English for Specific Purposes, and career-related English skills, both in the undergraduateand graduate levels. He also specializes in teacher training in Thai contexts with a focus on English teachers’ languageskills and professional development for primary and secondary education. His research interests involve second languagewriting, genre analysis, and interlanguage pragmatics. He has compiled course books on English for Health Sciences andEnglish for Sociology and Anthropology.



185

Writing Anxiety: EFL Postgraduate Students Writing Research Papers in English

Montarat Rungruangthum

This paper aims to examine the factors that lead to writing anxiety as perceived by EFL

learners and the strategies they use to cope with their anxiety while writing research papers in

English. Four postgraduate students (three Thai and one Chinese) studying in the first-year international PhD program in Applied Linguistics were asked to submit their research papers

at the end of the course. The Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (SLWAI)

questionnaire was administered in Weeks 10 and 14 to assess their anxiety levels while they

were writing their papers. A semi-structured interview was used to elicit the causes of writing

anxiety and coping strategies. The results show that the factors causing anxiety about their

writing were: teachers and grading . Leki’s (1995) framework of coping strategies reveal that

these participants frequently used Focusing strategies and Stopping writing when they wrote

research papers in English.

Key words: Writing anxiety, writing research paper, and English as a ForeignLanguage

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Anxiety Inventory ®¦º° SLWAI) ÅoÎµ¤µÄoÄ-´µ®r É 10 Â¨³-µ®r É 14 Á¡º É°¦³Á¤·¦³´ªµ¤ª·´ª¨³ É´«¹¬µÁ¥ªµ¤ª·´¥ ¼ oª·´¥Äoµ¦-´¤£µ¬rÂ¹ ÉÃ¦-¦oµÁ¡º É°«¹¬µ-µÁ®»ªµ¤ª·ª¨Äµ¦ Á¥Â¨³¨ª·µ¦Á·{®µ É¼ oÁoµ¦nª¤µ¦¨°ÅoÄo ¨µ¦¨°Â-Ä®oÁ®Èªnµ{´¥ Én°Ä®oÁ·ªµ¤ª·´ª¨Äµ¦Á¥°¼ o ÉÄo£µ¬µ°´§¬Á}£µ¬µnµ¦³Á«º° ¼ o-°Â¨³µ¦¦³Á¤·¨ -Îµ®¦´¨ª·µ¦Á·{®µµÂª·°

Leki (1995) ¡ªnµ¼ oÁoµ¦nª¤µ¦¨°Äo¨¥»rµ¦Áo»-Ä (Focusing strategies) Â¨³¨¥»rµ¦®¥»Á¥ (Stopping writing) Á¤º É°Á·ªµ¤ª·´ª¨Äµ¦Á¥ªµ¤ª·´¥Á}£µ¬µ°§¬

Îµ-Îµ´ : ªµ¤ª·´ª¨Äµ¦Á¸¥ µ¦Á¸¥ªµ¤ª·¥Á}£µ¬µ°§¬ £µ¬µ°´§¬Äµ³£µ¬µnµ¦³Á« µ³£µ¬µnµ¦³Á«



186

Introduction

As English is becoming more dominant as a world language, many higher education institutions use it

as a medium of instruction in their educational programs (Parker, 2010). In Thailand, the number of

government universities which provide international PhD programs has been increasing (Wiriyachitra,

2002). Postgraduate students studying in international programs in Thai universities are required to

write assignments, research papers, and dissertations and to make presentations in English. For

example, at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT), postgraduate students of

Applied Linguistics must have at least one publication in an international peer reviewed journal as one

of the graduation requirements (School of Liberal Arts, King Mongkut’s University of Technology

Thonburi, 2008). The challenge of writing in English may cause anxiety which is hypothesized to

result in poor-quality written tasks. Therefore, it is very important to study the causes of anxiety as

perceived by EFL learners and investigate how to help them cope with anxiety.

Writing anxiety

Writing anxiety can be defined as “a fear of the writing process that outweighs the projected gain from

the ability to write” (Thompson, 1980, p. 121). The productive skills, such as speaking and writing,

generate anxiety higher than the other language skills (Aydin, 2008; Tsui, 1996). Prior studies on

writing anxiety over the last two decades have been centered on ESL learners, whereas there has been

little information available on how EFL learners perceive anxiety about writing in academic contexts

(Aydin, 2008; Atay & Kurt, 2006; Mat Daud, Mat Daud, & Abu Kassim, 2005). In Thailand, English

writing skills are very important for postgraduate students because they are required to be published in

scholarly publications. Research into problems encountered by non-native students of English writing

research papers has highlighted four broad areas of concern: 1) little awareness of the audience/reader;

2) the amount of time needed for writing; 3) lack of ability in making claims and writing arguments;

and 4) being concerned with vocabulary, structure, and writing style (Cheung, 2010; Flowerdew, 1999:

Gebhard, 1996).



187

Writing anxiety, as shown in Table 1, can be assessed by using two types of questionnaires:

Writing Apprehension Test (WAT) and Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (SLWAI). The

former was proposed by Daly and Miller (1975) to measure writing anxiety of ESL learners. However,

this test was originally developed with reference to first language learners (Atay & Kurt, 2006; Cheng

2004; Erkan & Saban, 2011). The latter was developed by Cheng (2004) and has been widely used to

estimate the degree of writing anxiety perceived by ESL and EFL learners. Many research studies on

writing anxiety report that SLWAI has good internal consistency (Atay & Kurt, 2006; Cheng, 2004;

Erkan & Saban, 2011; Oztürk & ÇeÇen, 2007). The SLWAI was therefore chosen for the present study

to examine the degree of anxiety of EFL postgraduate students when they were writing a research

paper in English.

Table 1: Studies on writing anxietyAuthor(s) Research Focus Data Collection Results

Harris & Grangenett(1992)

Graduate studentsin U.S.

WAT and a record of network use

Writing apprehension wassignificantly correlated to loginfrequency

Cheng (2004) EFL students SLWAI The development of SLWAIMat Daud, MatDaud, & AbuKassim (2005)

ESL universitystudents

WAT The low proficiency group wasanxious about vocabulary andlanguage use. By contrast, thehigh proficiency group wasworried about content.

Atay & Kurt (2006) ESL prospectiveteachers SLWAI and open-ended questions Causes of writing anxiety were:Teachers, past experiences, duedate, inability to organize ideas,and exams

Öztürk & ÇeÇen(2007)

EFL students SLWAI and portfolio Using portfolios to overcomewriting anxiety perceived by EFLstudents

Notes: While “SLWAI” stands for Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory, “WAT” refers to Writing Apprehension

Test .

Coping strategies for writing in English

Coping strategies originally referred to “the methods these participants used to approach and complete

the writing tasks assigned them over the course of the semester” (Leki, 1995, p. 240). The present

study attempts to investigate whether the original categorization by Leki could be used to identify how

EFL participants deal with writing anxiety. For non-native speakers of English, writing anxiety may

have a negative effect on their writing performance. It is essential to analyze their coping strategies to



188

help them become less anxious when writing a research paper in English. It seems an important study

on coping strategies was conducted by Leki (1995), investigating how ESL university students

achieved their written assignments when they were studying in the United States. The data includes

interviews with ESL students over a semester, interviews with their professors, classroom

observations, and examinations were further analyzed using a qualitative approach. According to

Leki’s findings, these ESL students reported ten categories of coping strategies when they needed to

submit their written assignments in English:

1. Clarifying strategies- The participants use these strategies to make sure that they

understand what is required in the written assignment, such as talking to other students

about the assignment.

2. Focusing strategies-The participants use these strategies to concentrate on a written task,

such as rereading the assignment several times, reading books or relevant research articles

to develop their written tasks.

3. Relying on past writing experiences-The participants refer to past writing experiences in

their efforts to accomplish their current writing tasks.

4. Taking advantages of first language/culture-The participants take advantage of being

international students and attempt to incorporate something about their background

knowledge in their written tasks.

5. Using current experience or feedback to adjust strategies-The participants receive current

feedback on their assignments from teachers or friends to guide their work.

6. Looking for models-The participants find examples for their written assignments.

7. Using current or past ESL writing training -The participants may use current or past writing

techniques that they have learned before, such as brainstorming before writing.

8. Accommodating the teacher’s demands-The participants gauge their teacher’s opinions,

purposely suppressing their ideas about their written tasks.

9. Resisting the teacher’s demands- The participants may ignore the guidelines given by theteacher or fail to do the written assignments.

10. Managing competing demands-The participants are aware of their responsibility in the time

allotted, including managing course loads, managing work load for a specific course,

regulating the amount of investment made in a specific assignment, and managing the

demands of life.



189

Since some postgraduate students in Thailand have to publish in a scholarly publication in an

international refereed journal, the challenge of writing in English may cause anxiety and may affect

their written tasks. The coping strategies used by EFL learners were included in the present study to

help them deal with the anxiety of writing their research papers in English. This paper, therefore,

investigates the factors leading to writing anxiety and the strategies that EFL learners in Thailand

frequently used when writing a research paper in English. The research questions addressed were as

follows:

(1) What factors contributed to writing anxiety of EFL postgraduate students while writing their

research papers?

(2) What strategies did the EFL postgraduate students use to cope with their anxiety while

writing their research papers?

Research methodology

Participants

Participants in the present study were four EFL postgraduate students who were studying in the first-

year international PhD program of Applied Linguistics at King Mongkut’s University of Technology

Thonburi (KMUTT), Thailand. All participants, as shown in Table 2, enrolled in the course Theories in

Language Learning (TLL) and were assigned to submit a research paper in English based on their

interests at the end of the course. Since these EFL participants had never written a research article in

English before, this task was completely new to them. It was predicted that the participants might

encounter a certain degree of anxiety while writing a research paper although they had high English

language proficiency and passed the university language test (or had at least a 6.5 IELTS score). In this

paper, the participants’ names are replaced by pseudonyms and permission was obtained from each

participant for collection and publication of the research data.



190

Table 2: Participants’ profile

BackgroundParticipants

Ping Suda Ying Chai

Nationality Chinese Thai Thai Thai

Gender Female Female Female MaleAge 34 30 28 24

Writing research paper in English Never Never Never Never

Passed language test /6.5 IELTS score Yes Yes Yes Yes

Research instruments

Two research instruments were utilized to investigate the writing anxiety and the coping strategies

used by the EFL participants while they were writing their research papers: the Second Language

Writing Anxiety Inventory (SLWAI) and semi-structured interviews.

The Second Language Writing Anxiety Inventory (SLWAI), the latest version, was proposed by

Cheng (2004) initially to assess the degree of writing anxiety individuals feel when writing in a second

language. The SLWAI consists of 22 items, all of which are answered on a five-point Likert scale from

“strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. Many studies have reported the effectiveness of this

questionnaire in terms of reliability and validity (Atay & Kurt, 2006; Cheng, 2004; Öztürk & ÇeÇen,

2007; Guo & Fan, 2009) and can be used to determine writing anxiety levels perceived by either ESLor EFL learners (Cheng, 2004; Guo& Fan, 2009). Consequently, the SLWAI was employed in the

current study to establish the level of writing anxiety at three levels: low anxiety, moderate anxiety and

high anxiety.

A semi-structured interview was used to gather information on the nature of the anxiety caused

by writing a research paper in English and the coping strategies used by EFL participants. The

participants’ responses in these interviews enabled the current researcher to understand the

participants’ experiences of being anxious and the contexts of English writing. These EFL participants

were then asked to: 1) report the progress of writing their research paper; 2) specify their writing

difficulties and reasons for feeling anxious; and 3) identify the coping strategies they used when they

were writing a research paper in English.



191

Data collection

The data collection on writing anxiety was conducted in the second semester of 2008 when four EFL

participants were in the first-year of the international PhD program at King Mongkut’s University of

Technology Thonburi, Thailand. The SLWAI was administered to investigate changes in writing

anxiety. For the semi-structured interviews, each participant was informed about the research purposes,

procedures and confidentiality. They then signed a consent form before the data collection. Each

participant was individually interviewed in English in the final week to elicit his/her experiences of

being anxious and to avoid any influences from the other participants (Rubin & Rubin, 1995). The

semi-structured interview lasted for 10-20 minutes. They were also asked to report their causes of

anxiety and coping strategies that they used while they were writing a research paper.

Results Analysis of second language writing anxiety inventory (SLWAI)

The data obtained from the SLWAI revealed the anxiety levels when these participants were writing

research papers. The writing anxiety level can be divided into three levels based on the total score of

the questionnaire (the total score = 110): low anxiety (equal to or lower than 58), average anxiety

(ranging from 59 to 82), and high anxiety (equal to or higher than 83) (Atay & Kurt, 2006, p. 5). Table

3 indicates that there was a slight change in writing anxiety from week 10 to week 14. Only Chai, the

male participant, was able to decrease his anxiety significantly when writing a research paper in

English.

Table 3: Writing anxiety level

ParticipantsSLWAI

Week 10Anxiety level

SLWAI

Week 14Anxiety Level

Ping 55 Low anxiety 57 Low anxiety

Suda 50 Low anxiety 48 Low anxiety

Ying 52 Low anxiety 58 Low anxiety

Chai 57 Low anxiety 53 Low anxiety

The results of the SLWAI, as summarized in Table 4, show that these EFL participants did not

display avoidance behavior in using English while writing a research paper (Items 5, 6, and 21). Some

items (3, 9, 14 and 20) point to the fact that these participants had no strong feelings about having their

writing task evaluated or graded by teachers. In addition, these participants did not report any physical





193

Analysis of factors leading to writing anxiety

The responses obtained from the semi-structured interview were analyzed based on the investigation

by Atay & Kurt (2006) to describe how each EFL participant felt about a writing task that they had

never done before. The first and second interview questions aimed at finding the difficulties perceived

by these participants while they were writing a research paper. The results, as shown in Table 5, reveal

that frequent problems with writing a research paper in English were presenting ideas and text

organization. Suda also added that she was very anxious because she had no background in language

learning theories. Only Ping, the Chinese participant, reported that selecting technical terms used for

writing research paper was very difficult since previous researchers and practitioners might interpret

key terms differently.

Table 5: Writing difficulties of EFL learnersDifficulties Ping Suda Ying Chai

Inability to present ideas -- 9 9 9

Inability to organize written texts 9 -- 9 9 Lack of background knowledge -- 9 -- --

Choosing technical terms 9 -- -- --

Table 6 also shows that writing anxiety was generated by grading and teachers. Ying and Chai

were anxious about time limits because they held part-time jobs as university teachers. Two

participants, Ping and Suda, mentioned that they wanted to achieve their self-expectations, namely,

trying to write a good research paper for scholarly publication.

Table 6: Causes of writing anxietyFactors Ping Suda Ying Chai

Teachers -- 9 9 9

Time limits -- -- 9 9

Grade/Evaluation 9 9 -- 9

Self expectation 9 9 -- --



194

Analysis of coping strategies

The participants were asked to report what they did when they were anxious about writing this

research paper in English. The interview data were then transcribed and analyzed based on Leki’s

framework of ESL coping strategies for writing (1995). Table 7 provides a summary of coping

strategies used by EFL postgraduate students in this study. The results show that the strategies these

EFL participants frequently used were focusing strategies and stopping writing . Both Suda and Ying

reported using talking with friends to get moral support and to find out what the others were doing.

Table 7: Coping strategies used by the four EFL participantsCoping Strategies Participants Transcription

1.Clarifiying Strategies

2. Focusing Strategies Suda:

Ping:

Ying:

“When I have any difficulties, I will read and read more. I read and tryabsorb try to understand it”

“I will stop and go to read more about it”

“Maybe reread anything that related to my study but when I’m anxious. Icannot do my work”

3. Relying on past writingexperiences

4. Taking advantage of firstlanguage/culture

5. Using current experience or feedback

Ping: “… I stop and keep thinking and get feedback from my teacher on the firstdraft”.

6. Looking for models

7. Using current or past ESLwriting training

8. Accommodating teacher’s

demands

9. Resisting teacher’sdemands

10. Managing competingdemands

11. Other(s)x Stopping writing research paper

x Talking with friends

Suda:

Ping:

Ying:

Chai:

“If it is too much for me, I ignore it. I cannot pay attention to it. So I have toleave it for a while”.

“So I like to ask the other what they are doing but it does not mean I want tocompare but I don’t like getting behind. If I know my friends have done a lotof things, I will have anxiety because it helps me to catch up”

“I stop. If I cannot write, sometimes we need to stop because your ideas arenot available”.

“…go to consult also talk to my friends. We cannot finish early”.

“The first thing I do when I’m anxious. I will stop doing this project anddoing something else if I have time.”

“Stop doing it for a while is good but I can’t because it’s already close to thedue date. Sometimes I share feeling with the others.”

“Rest. Take a rest, stop doing it for a while but actually you cannot forget it because it will haunt you”



195 Analysis of overall results

In the present study, the overall picture shows that there was a mismatch between the SLWAI results

and the interview data. These EFL participants were not concerned with English writing and their

written tasks being evaluated by teachers. The participants’ responses, conversely, describe the causes

of writing anxiety (e.g. teachers and grading) and the writing difficulties (e.g. inability to present ideas

and text organization) that they had encountered when writing a research paper in English. The

mismatched data obtained from the SLWAI and semi-structured interviews will be discussed in the

following section.

Discussion and Conclusion

This preliminary study attempted to find out the level of writing anxiety perceived by EFL

postgraduate students and coping strategies that they used when writing research papers in English.

The results show that all the participants had low anxiety when they were writing their research papers,

and there was a slight change in writing anxiety level between weeks 10 and 14. On some items in the

SLWAI, these participants had no strong feelings when their written tasks were evaluated or compared

with others. The data obtained from the semi-structured interviews, however, reveal that the factors

leading to writing anxiety were teachers and grading. One possible explanation is that all the first-year

postgraduate students were required to earn a GPA of 3.25 or higher to avoid academic probation. For

the writing difficulties, these EFL participants reported that they worried about how to organize writtentexts and how to present their ideas in the research papers. Previous studies on English writing (e.g.

Atay & Kurt, 2006; Cheung, 2010; Flowerdew, 1999) also point out that non-native speakers of

English have problems with word choice, grammatical structures, and less facility of expression when

writing a research paper in English.

The results of coping strategies used by EFL postgraduate students reveal that they used

focusing strategies and using current experience or feedback strategy to guide them in writing a

research paper in English. Other strategies used by EFL learners were to stop writing and to talk with

their friends. These two new categories of coping strategies may be added to Leki’s original

framework (1995). However, the limitation is that the original categorization was based on how non-

native speakers of English achieved their written tasks, whereas the present study focused on ways to

help them manage their anxiety when writing research papers in English.



196

The overall results of the current study show the mismatched findings between the SLWAI and

the semi-structured interview. The questionnaire used in this study did not provide adequate

information on their worries and writing experiences. For example, the participants reported that they

had no strong feeling of being evaluated by teachers. In contrast, the data from the semi-structured

interview enabled the researcher to verify the results obtained from the questionnaires and to illustrate

a comprehensive understanding of the analyzed data and the contexts of what factors contributed to

writing anxiety as perceived by the EFL learners and how they dealt with anxiety when writing a

research paper in English.

As a final note, I may say that the study was limited by the small number of participants;

therefore, the results may not be representative of all EFL learners. The coping strategies should befollowed up in a real-time situation when participants are doing written tasks. Further studies on

coping strategies for English writing should take research methodology and the analysis framework

into account because they may influence the whole procedure of data collection and data analysis.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on this research study.

My thanks also go to the postgraduate students studying in the PhD. program of Applied Linguistics at

King Monkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT) for participating in this study.

References

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Cheung, Y. L. (2010). First publications in refereed English journals: Difficulties, copingstrategies, and recommendations for student training. System, 38(1), 134-141.

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telecomputing: A pilot study. Technology, Pedagogy and Education, 1(1), 101–111.

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Öztürk, H., & Çeçen, S. (2007). The effects of portfolio keeping on writing anxiety of EFLstudents. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 3(2), 218–236.

Parker, P. (2010). When English becomes the medium of instruction: Communicative effectiveness ismore important than accuracy. Retrieved April 5th, 2010 fromhttp://www.su.se/english/about/press/press-releases/when-english-becomes-the-medium-of-instruction-communicative-effectiveness-is-more-important-1.2392

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School of Liberal Arts, King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi. (2008). Graduationrequirements Retrieved May 29th, 2008 from http://sola.kmutt.ac.th/sola/index.php/courses-offered/doctoral-degree/graduation-requirements/?lang=th

Thompson, M. O. (1980). Classroom techniques for reducing writing anxiety: A study of

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Biodata

Montarat Rungruangthum is a PhD. candidate in Applied Linguistics at King Mongkut’s University of Technology

Thonburi, under the program Strategic Scholarships for Frontier Research Network. Her research interests are linguistics

and social psychology. Currently, she is conducting research on cyber deception by Thai internet users. She can be reached

at [email protected]





200

Introduction

In 1999, the Ministry of Education in China released an Action Plan for Rejuvenating Education in the

21st Century. This is an overall guiding and operational plan for national educational development in

China. Its implementation required a new round of reforms in the English curriculum for primary and

secondary schools, and the implementation of these reforms commenced in 2001.

One of the goals in the renewed English curriculum for secondary education is to develop

students’ cultural/intercultural awareness and communicative competence. The new emphasis on a

cultural dimension in language teaching is a demanding challenge for school teachers because this was

the first time that cultural awareness was introduced as one of the language teaching and learning

objects into the English curriculum. Within this new change, I will begin my discussion with previous

research on this issue and then have a look at teachers’ perceptions on this new dimension in languageteaching.

Previous research

The introduction of a cultural dimension into foreign language teaching has a long tradition in Europe

but became an explicit focus in curriculum documents of the reforming processes in many countries in

the 1990s. Because of this new emphasis, Byram & Risager (1999) explored teachers’ views about

cultural dimensions and their effect, as reported by teachers, on secondary school students’ perceptions

of other cultures. As one dimension of their investigation, these researchers used a questionnaire to

elicit definitions of culture from teachers and analyzed their definitions using a grid with two

dimensions: thematic (such as a way of life/objective structure/norms and values/art and literature) and

societal level (such as international, national, group, individual) (Byram & Risager 1999: 105). Their

findings showed that teachers’ understandings of the concept ‘culture’ concentrated on national culture

with little attention being paid to aspects of culture beyond those already found in textbooks. The

definitions provided by teachers appeared to be lacking in the depth and complexity necessary for

language teaching. When teachers were then interviewed the researchers were interested in

interpretations of cultural dimensions in language teaching, and they concluded that teachers were

often frustrated in their attempts to treat the cultural dimension seriously because of pressures to

produce measurable results and to focus on linguistic competence.



201

In Mexico, Ryan (1994) also explored the relationship between foreign language teachers’

perceptions of culture and their instructional behavior. Ryan categorized their culture definitions into

six basic beliefs in accordance with Keesing‘s categories of meaning: (1) culture is knowledge gained

through reading; (2) culture is institutions which should be analyzed; (3) culture is the daily way of

life; (4) culture is transmitted from one generation to another; (5) culture means having a critical

attitude toward the world; (6) culture is lived and experienced. During her observations, Ryan analyzed

how teachers handled information about English-speaking cultures. Linguistic analysis and practice

dominated instruction and culture aspects and linguistic practice were carefully distinguished (Ryan,

1994). She reported that insertion of information about the target culture was done in several ways. In

addition to the three ways reported in Byram & Risager (1999) (culture anecdotes, facts and artifacts)

Ryan identified another two forms: cross-cultural comparisons between native culture and foreign

culture; and “brief, encapsulated cultural statements often seen as talking off the subject” (p. 231). On

the basis of these findings Ryan drew the conclusion that there is “some degree of relation between

teachers’ filters [definitions] and corresponding teacher behavior” (p. 231). For example, if a teacher’s

filter was “culture is the daily way of life”, he/she may instruct students with cultural anecdotes based

on her/his own personal experiences. Ryan thus found that in general teachers are teaching culture as

facts, rather than for cultural understanding and intercultural competence, a finding which is important

in shedding light on how teachers are teaching about culture.

Another international survey of teachers’ perceptions of cultural teaching in language teaching

was conducted in 2001 by researchers of CULTNET (Sercu, et al, 2005), a network of researchers on

intercultural competence in foreign language education, involving foreign language teachers in seven

countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Poland, Mexico, Greece, Spain and Sweden. The aim was to define the

mainstream of attitudes to the cultural dimension of language teaching among ordinary teachers. Their

findings show that teachers think that ‘teaching culture is as important as teaching foreign language’

and they express their willingness to teach culture and intercultural dimensions. Most teachers agreed

that the more students know about foreign cultures, the more students are tolerant, an idea which is

closely linked to their interest in teaching culture but teachers from Bulgaria, German, and Mexico

hesitated to take a clear stand on whether they thought language and culture could be taught in an

integrated way.



202

In what seems to be the only study in China, Lessard-Clouston (1996a) conducted a case study

of 16 Chinese EFL teachers' views of culture in both their EFL learning (during a summer intensive

EFL teacher training programme) and teaching (at the lower secondary school level). The participating

teachers/learners were interviewed towards the end of their programme. The study showed that

teachers, when asked about culture and language, gave very broad definitions that included all aspects

of daily life, and said they taught culture both explicitly and implicitly in their classes (ibid). The

findings also revealed teachers’ major support for the role of culture in their EFL learning and the need

for a greater understanding of how to incorporate culture into their own EFL classes. Teachers think

that more efforts should be made to have culture incorporated more explicitly into EFL curriculum.

This body of literature was based on investigations conducted in different countries where

teachers’ concepts about culture teaching varied. The amount of research is overall still small and

except for the small scale study by Lessard-Clouston, there is no empirical research done on Chinese

teachers’ perceptions of culture teaching in ELT in China especially at the secondary education level.

This present study serves as an empirical first step to investigate school teachers’ beliefs concerning

culture teaching in ELT in China in more detail with a different research methodology and

complements Lessard-Clouston’s study in terms of not only investigating teachers’ perceptions of

culture teaching but also their understanding of culture teaching objectives.

Cultural teaching: Concepts in the language curriculum in China

The new English curriculum issued in 2001 has five parts concerning English educational goals

structured in a circle to indicate the relationship of each to the others, to illustrate how they

interconnect and suggest the richness embodied in human language. The five parts are: (1)Language

knowledge which includes phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, functions and topics; (2) language skills:

listening, speaking, reading and writing; (3) cultural awareness which includes cultural knowledge,

cultural understanding and awareness/ability in intercultural communication; (4) learning strategies

which includes the following types: Cognitive, monitory, communicative, and ‘resourceful andemotional strategies’; (5) emotion and attitude, which includes motivation/interest, self-confidence ,

willpower, cooperation, concept of motherland and world vision. (See diagram indicating English

language teaching objectives in China below).







205

English classroom so as to provide a general picture of the current situation in language teaching in

Xinjiang, Northwest part of China.

Methodology

The study was conducted in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, the most culturally diverse province

in China. The participants in the study were full-time lower secondary school English teachers and

teacher trainers who worked in Normal Universities and Teacher Training Colleges to train those who

would become teachers in secondary schools. Most of them with at least 10 years of teaching

experience on average. They were teaching 11-20 hours per week at the time they participated in the

study. In terms of their education background, ninety percent of them had received a teaching

certificate after teacher training from a college. Ten percent of the participants had BA degree and a

teaching certificate.

Six hundred copies of the survey with consent form and official approval were distributed to

school teachers and some teacher trainers in different parts of Xinjiang at the end of the 2007 academic

year. Subjects were randomly chosen from 126 schools in five large prefectures in addition to the

capital city of Xinjiang. 463 out of 600 possible participants completed the questionnaire with a return

rate of 77%. The 463 participants included 400 school teachers from schools in Xinjiang and 63

teacher trainers from universities in the capital city, Urumuqi. The purpose of the survey of teacher

trainers was to see if there would be any difference between trainers and teachers.

The survey which consisted of 27 questions was used with the intention of eliciting a wide

range of information, and this article reports only a small part of the results, including comparisons of

teachers’ views with those of teacher trainers. Three types of information have been extracted: 1) How

ELT teachers define culture, 2) teachers’ attitudes towards the necessity of cultural teaching in ELT,

and 3) teachers’ perceptions of culture teaching objectives in ELT. As for the third question on culture

teaching objectives, some items were borrowed from the CULTNET survey as will be indicated later

in the discussion section.



206

Findings and discussion

ELT Teachers’ definitions of culture

The teachers were given an open-ended question asking “Which part of the culture(s), do you think, is

most interesting in teaching about English language countries, in other words, how do you perceive the

concept of culture?” The answers provided by teachers cover a wide range of cultural aspects to

include almost all aspect of the life of a people, and therefore the first stage was to group similar

phrases or words of their answers together into certain categories expecting to get a general impression

of teachers’ understanding of culture; to see if there is any common ground in their views; to use this

classification as a means of quantifying the responses for easy analytic reference later. Such a

categorization does not suggest that the concept of culture can be divided into a number of categories

on a theoretical level. The classification is simply an operational instrument to get an overview of

some important dimensions which are being dealt with. Thus, each definition can be placed in anumber of categories in order to present the richness of the data; rather than a reduction into one

category, which would destroy the value of this kind of qualitative data as pointed out by Byram &

Risager (1999). Based on respondents’ answers, a total of nine categories were created:

1. Culture understood as a way of life or habits—daily life, life style, living conditions,

routines, hobbies, etc.

2. Culture understood as tradition, folklore and customs—local conditions & customs andmoral standards, communicative rites, social protocols, social conventions, popular

practices, etc.

3. Culture understood as history, geography, —all cultural activities in human society,

historical events, famous people, etc. and some references to the historical development of

words, proverbs, idiomatic usages, slang

4. Culture understood as products of all kinds—literature, art, music, architecture, films, etc.

5. Culture understood as values, beliefs and behavior—behavior patterns, ways of

talking/expressing oneself, interpersonal relationship, religious beliefs, etc.

6. Culture understood as education—British /American education

7. Culture understood as political and economic systems

8. Culture understood as science, technology, and environment

9. Others—irrelevant and uncertain responses.





208

There are limited numbers of respondents from school teachers (7.1%) and even smaller

numbers of teacher trainers (2.6%) who understand culture as the education system (in Category 6).

As for understanding culture as a political system and economy in category 7, both groups of school

teachers and teacher trainers comprise a quite low percentage 6.5% and 8%, which could be due to

the possibility that both groups think ‘culture’ is more related to the traditions and history evolved or

passed down from generation to generation and therefore more permanent, while politics and

economy are more contemporary focused issues and more temporary.

Category 8 is about science, technology and environment to which both groups give hardly

any attention as part of their understanding of culture: (1.6% and 0.9%). This is not surprising

because this part of culture is not within traditional concepts of understanding culture among

Chinese people. Furthermore this kind of cultural information doesn’t appear in the textbooks. It is

not likely to make any connection for teachers with ‘culture’.

In summary, from the wide-ranging perceptions of ‘culture’ from teachers and teacher

trainers it could be seen that the concepts of culture which popped into teacher’ minds are first

traditions and customs, second history and geography, third the way of people’s daily life, which

thus can be considered as leading concepts of their understanding of culture .

In addition, we should note that some teachers said they thought Anglo-American culture should betaught together with Chinese traditional culture, while others focused on cultural differences

between our own and other cultures by a comparative approach in order to reach better

understanding of our own culture through the viewpoint of others, as is indeed recommended in the

curriculum document analysed above.

It is important to point out that some teachers failed to answer the question or misunderstood

the question; some expressed their uncertainty and dilemma, and some felt very confused about

what to say when they were asked to do so (these responses were placed in category 9). It must be

admitted that to formulate a definition of culture is very difficult for teachers in a short time in a

coherent way especially when they lack training on this aspect of language teaching, but in this way,

like Byram and Risgaer (1999), it was hoped to analyse the unreflective perceptions on which

teachers based their daily activities in the classroom.



209

Teachers’ attitudes towards importance of cultural teaching in ELT

Teachers and teacher trainers were asked “Are your students interested in learning culture(s) of

English speaking countries?” and “Are you interested in teaching culture(s) of English speaking

countries?”. The first question, focusing again on teachers’ perspectives, gives us an indirect account

of students’ curiosity towards cultural learning. The second question tells us about teachers

themselves and their own attitudes towards cultural teaching. Responses were on a five-point scale:

“very interested, interested, uncertain, less interested and not interested”. In the analysis “very

interested” and “interested” were combined to show positive attitudes towards the culture teaching

and “less interested” and “not interested” were combined to indicate the negative attitudes towards

this issue, leaving “undecided” unchanged. The results obtained from these two questions are

presented in Table 2 below:

Table 2: Students’ and teachers’ and teacher trainers’ interest in culture learning and teaching

Interest in Teachers Teacher trainers

F P F PQ1learning

1 276 71.5 58 92.12 73 18.7 5 7.93 40 10.3

Total 389 100 63 100Q2teaching

1 326 83.8 59 93.72 45 11.6 3 4.83 18 4.6 1 1.5

Total 389 100 63 100 Notes: 1=Very interested; 2=Undecided, 3=Not interested; F= Frequency; P=percentage

It can be seen that both from teachers’ and teacher trainers’ experience of teaching in the

classroom, a large majority of teachers (276/71.5%) and trainers (58/92.1%) say that their students

are interested in learning cultures of English speaking countries. Teachers (326/83.8%) and trainers

(59/93.7%) themselves are also interested in teaching cultures in language teaching. For teachersthemselves this may be due to the fact that teachers have received the new curriculum training, as

indicated in another question from the survey. The concept of ‘cultural awareness’ was introduced

as we said above for the first time into the English curriculum in 2001. As a result teachers are sure

to have got some understanding of the integration of language teaching with cultural teaching and

Table 2: Students’ and teachers’ and teacher trainers’ interest in culture learning and teaching



210

gradually realized the importance of raising students’ cultural awareness in language teaching. As

for why students are curious about the foreign cultures and what is their motivation in learning

language in terms of culture, it is very hard to speculate, but would be an interesting topic for further

research.

The data also show that there are some teachers (73/18.7%) and trainers (5/7.9%) who are

not sure whether their students have any interest in cultural learning or not, and about one in ten

teachers–but not trainers–are not clear whether they themselves (40/10.3%) are interested in

teaching foreign cultures. The uncertain and even negative opinion towards this new dimension of

language teaching among a small minority of teachers could be regarded as normal and acceptable.

Teachers can’t be expected to digest the new concept just with a few training courses to reach a

common ground of understanding towards this rather complicated issue of culture teaching.

In order to get further understanding of teachers’/trainers’ general opinions about cultural

teaching, another question was introduced (Q3) ‘Do you think culture teaching is important in

English teaching’, again using a five-point scale: ‘Very important, important, undecided, less

important and not important.’ ‘Very important’ and ‘important’ were combined to indicate teachers’

positive attitude towards culture teaching and ‘less important and not important’ to indicate

teachers’ negative attitudes towards this issue. The neutral one ‘undecided’ was kept as it is. Theresults are shown in the Table 3 below.

Table 3: Teachers’ trainers’ opinion on the importance of culture teachingQ3 Teachers Teacher trainers

F P F P

1 323 83 58 92

2 28 7.2 4 6.4

3 38 9.8 1 1.6

Total 389 100 63 100

Notes: 1= important; 2=Undecided; 3= Not important F=frequency; P=percentage

The results show that a high percentage of both teachers (323/83%) and trainers (58/92%)

have positive opinions about the cultural dimension of language teaching and only less than one out



211 of ten feel uncertain about it and/or they think that it is not important. Therefore it is evident that

teachers/trainers on the whole show great interest in teaching culture in language teaching as seen

above, and as seen here they believe in the significance of the cultural dimension of language

teaching. The concept of ‘cultural awareness’ which appeared in the curriculum seems to have

exerted some influence on teachers’ thinking.

In the fourth question, the teachers/trainers were asked if it is necessary to integrate culture

teaching into ELT, again using a five-point scale: ‘Very necessary, necessary, undecided, less

necessary and not necessary.’ The same way is used combining ‘Very necessary and necessary’

together to indicate teachers’ positive attitudes towards the cultural teaching and ‘less necessary and

not necessary’ to indicate teachers’ negative attitudes towards this issue. The result is presented as

follows:

Table 4: Necessity of integrating culture teaching into ELTQ4 Teachers Teacher trainers

F P F P1 195 50.1 50 82.52 122 31.4 9 14.33 72 18.5 4 3.2Total 389 100.0 63 100.

Notes: 1= necessary, 2=undecided, 3= not necessary, F=frequency, P=percentage

The results reveal that half of the teachers (195/50.1%) said that it is necessary to integrate

culture into ELT while there is still another half who felt uncertain or disagreed if we combine the

uncertainty and negative attitude together (194/49.9%). This implies that the idea of “integration” of

culture teaching with language teaching seems difficult. Although the importance of teaching culture

is clearly recognized as we saw in the previous section, the notion of integration is not. It can be

speculated that they did not give the same strength to the notion of integration because they do not

know how this is to be done, or because they believe this will have some detrimental effect on their language teaching. In fact, teachers still emphasise language knowledge and grammar and allocate

only 10 percent of the time to culture teaching (data from elsewhere in the questionnaire). One

reason for this has been that language teachers in general– and also in China– are more interested in

the practical aspects of communication. Language teachers often treat culture as supplementary or

incidental to “the real task” (Fantini, 1997). Another reason is that the cultural dimension is not



212

included much in the National University Entrance Examination and this is probably why teachers

do not take the trouble to integrate what is not tested. Teachers’ performance is evaluated mainly

through the passing rate of National Entrance Examination.

As for teacher trainers, a substantial majority (50/82.5%) showed a positive attitude towards

integration of culture and language teaching. The reason for this is probably that college teachers do

not have the pressure of struggling for a pass rate of Entrance Examination compared with school

teachers.

In short, from the results obtained from Q 3 and 4, it can be seen that most teachers/trainers

are interested in teaching culture and their students are also interested in learning culture. The

importance of teaching culture in language classroom is acknowledged by the majority of teachers.Referring to the integration of culture/language teaching, however, teachers and trainers held a

variety of opinions.

Teachers’ perception of the objectives of culture teaching

Another aspect of the questionnaire investigated teachers and trainers’ thoughts about their teaching

objectives. Since the majority of teachers/trainers think that it is important and necessary to teach

culture in ELT, what objectives of culture teaching teachers perceive, needs to be investigated. A list

of 11 items was suggested within the cultural dimension and teachers were invited to indicate ones

which best represent their opinion. The first four items are borrowed from the CULTNET project

(Sercu et al, 2005), and the last seven are taken from the new English Chinese curriculum (See

appendix 1). The scale ranges from ‘very important, important, undecided, and less important to not

important.’ The means for each statement were calculated with ‘Very important’ being scored as 1

and ‘Not important’ scored as 5. The lower the mean therefore the more importance was attached to

the objective. Since all scores were below 3, it is clear that all the objectives were considered

important to some degree. Our analysis therefore focuses on the degree of importance and not thefact that any objective was considered unimportant or even ‘undecided’.

The list of 11 cultural teaching objectives appeared in the questionnaire in random order. The

table below has been rearranged according to four aspects: General objectives, skills dimension, the

knowledge dimension and attitudinal dimension. The analysis will follow the four dimensions:



213 Table 5: Culture teaching objectives in four dimensions

General objectives of cultural teaching

Q5h Make language teaching more interesting and motivating.

Q5i Widen students’ horizons on the world.

Q5f Promote increased understanding of students’ own culture

Skills dimension

Q5g Promote the ability to handle intercultural contact situations.

Q5j Promote students’ ability to evaluate and their sensitivity to different cultures.

Q5k Promote students’ awareness of similarities and differences between English

speaking countries.

Knowledge dimension

Q5a Provide information about the history, geography and political system of theforeign culture(s).

Q5b Provide information about daily life and routines

Q5c Provide information about shared values and beliefs.

Q5d Provide experiences with a rich variety of cultural expressions (literature,

music, theatre, film, etc.).

Attitudinal dimension

Q5e Develop attitudes of acceptance and tolerance towards other peoples andcultures.



214

Table 6: Result of Culture teaching objectives in four dimensions in rank order School teachers (p = 389) Teacher trainers (p = 63)

N M SD N M SD

Q5-h

Q5-i

Q5-f

Q5-g

Q5-b

Q5-k

Q5-j

Q5e

Q5-dQ5-a

Q5-c

384

386

383

383

388

384

382

383

386387

384

1.63

1.65

1.75

1.82

1.88

2.07

2.13

2.16

2.172.36

2.38

.744

.648

.802

.870

.805

.913

.945

.941

.935

.9541.04

Q5-h

Q5-i

Q5-g

Q5-f

Q5-d

Q5-k

Q5-e

Q5-b

Q5-jQ5-a

Q5-c

61

61

60

60

61

61

59

60

6159

61

1.59

1.72

1.72

1.73

1.85

1.89

1.90

1.92

1.971.97

2.03

.588

.609

.640

.733

.792

.733

.759

.829

.795

.694

.802

Notes: N = Number including this objective in their response–some respondents did not categorise all objectives); M =

Mean ranging between 0.00 and 5.00.; SD = Standard deviation

It is interesting to discover that both school teachers and teacher trainers shared very similar

understanding about culture teaching objectives. They both ranked items h, i, f, the general

objectives of culture teaching, at the top of the list. The belief that culture teaching can make

language teaching more interesting and motivating and culture teaching can widen students’ horizon

on the world was supported by school teachers (M. 1.63 ; M.1.65,) and by teacher trainers (M.1.59;

M.1.72). They also agree that learning about students’ own culture is important (M.1.75; M.1.73).

These three items (Q5-h, i, f) are taken from China’s English Curriculum Standards (CECS). This

shows that teachers/trainers give their preference to general culture teaching objectives.

As for the skill dimension of culture teaching, there are three regrouped skills related to

culture teaching seen in Table 5. It can be seen that both school teachers and teacher trainers

believed that a very important objective of culture teaching is to promote students’ ability to handle

intercultural contact situations: Q5-g borrowed from CULTNET was ranked nearly at the same

place by both groups. The result is surprising because this idea ‘intercultural’ is fairly new in



215

secondary language education and also because students do not have much chance of intercultural

contacts. Therefore, it may be that they think culture teaching could contribute to communication,

could help students learn to communicate with people from different cultural background if they

have opportunities for well-equipped preparation in their language education.

Another interesting finding is that school teachers and teacher trainers place the objective of

promoting students’ awareness of similarities and differences of English speaking countries (Q5-k)

in the middle (M.2.07; M 1.89), then there is a gap to the next score on (Q5–j) for the teachers but

not for the trainers. They thus seem to hold different views about promoting students’ ability to be

sensitive to different cultures (M.2.13, M.1.97). School teachers gave this a higher score, meaning

that it was less important for them. The possible reason might be that school teachers may think their

students have fewer chances of contact or first-hand experiences with foreign cultures. Students

need their teachers’s help to tell or to compare different cultures with their own in order to develop

their sensitivity to other different cultures while trainers may think the ability to be sensitive to other

cultures is more important. These two objectives (Q5-k, j) are already designated in the new

curriculum.

Regarding the knowledge dimension, school teachers put a priority on ‘provide information

of daily life and routines’ higher (Q5-b, M 1.88) while teacher trainers believed that ‘to provide

experiences with a rich variety of cultural expressions (literature, music, theatre and film etc.) (Q5-d,

M1.85) is more important. The former is focusing on ‘small c culture’ while the latter is on ‘big C

culture’ (Stern, 1992). The implications of this result could be threefold. First, teachers may be

familiar with this part of culture and they may feel confident to teach it. Second, teachers would

possibly link cultural information of daily life with something ‘close to students’ life,’ ‘something

students may be interested in,’ ‘something which may be within student’s cognitive domain’

expressed by them when asked to define what culture is. Third, the contents concerning small c

culture appear more often than big C culture in the textbook, which suggests the knowledge of small

c culture could be possibly used more in daily communication with people of different cultures,

especially in secondary language education. However, teacher trainers still think literature, music

and art, etc. are the channels to learn culture in language teaching. This also implies that there is a

disconnection between teacher training courses and teachers’ practice in the classroom. It also

suggests that teacher trainers may themselves lack the training on the new curriculum and there are

many changes of teaching concepts they are not very clear about.



216

It is surprising to discover that both school teachers and teacher trainers put Q5-a and Q5-c at

the bottom of the list concerning information about the history, geography, political system and

values and beliefs. This suggests that teachers are not very interested in teaching the big C culture

about foreign history and geography. This ranking is very interesting when looking at the definitions

of culture above where teachers put history and geography quite high next to daily life and customs.

Here, when they are asked to define the objectives of culture teaching, they seem to give less

support to it. This shows clearly that the knowledge they favour in practice–despite their theoretical

concepts of culture–is ‘providing information about daily life and routines’ rather more than big C

culture, implying the objectives should be linked to the development of students’ ability in

communication.

The knowledge of ‘providing shared values and beliefs’ (Q5-c) is placed last among the

eleven culture teaching objectives, which corresponds to what respondents said when asked to

define their understanding of the culture. It is difficult to speculate about the reason why

teachers/trainers do not support this objective and this will be a topic to be investigated in future.

As far as the attitudinal dimension (Q5-e) is concerned, teachers and trainers agree on

ranking and put it in the eighth and seventh places, respectively, which shows that they are

becoming aware that developing students’ attitudes to accept and tolerate other peoples and cultures

are highly important in language teaching. This attitude is considered the foundation of intercultural

competence in language teaching aims, to develop learners as intercultural speakers or mediators

(Byram, 2002), which is regretfully not designated in the new English curriculum. Therefore, it is

reasonable for teachers/trainers not to strongly support this objective, which may be a bit far from

their understanding of cultural teaching.

In summary, in this part, the teachers’ perceptions of cultural teaching objectives have been

examined and we noticed that the teachers are, broadly speaking, inclined to emphasise the overall

objectives of cultural teaching. Major interests are centered on students, and the purpose of teaching

culture understood by teachers/trainers is to raise and maintain learners’ lasting interest and

motivation in language education and to widen their world view through the language the students

are learning. It is encouraging that the skills dimension is better supported than the knowledge

dimension by teachers, which gives a hint of conceptualization changing from the traditionally

knowledge-based, cultural information-input to skills-orientation at least theoretically.



217

However there are some divergences between teachers and teacher trainers which raises

questions about cultural teaching objectives set in the curriculum for secondary education and the

development of teacher training programmes in this aspect, i.e., that there seems to be some

disparity between the two.

Conclusion

Regarding teachers’ understanding of culture, the study shows that teachers give a very extensive

definition of culture but mainly focus on small c culture like ‘traditions and customs,’ and ‘the way of

people’s life,’ which may be close to students’ lives and interest them. However, teacher trainers think

that literature is a major channel to get to know foreign cultures because literature courses are offered

at the university level. It also reveals that, in practice, both teachers and trainers are not much

interested in teaching the big C culture about foreign history, geography and political systems although

conceptually they regard this as a composition of culture. There clearly exists a gap between practice

and theory in terms of culture teaching and culture understanding. Nevertheless, their attitudes towards

cultural teaching are positive. They perceive the cultural teaching objectives more in terms of general

teaching objectives: Promoting students’ motivation and sustain their interest in learning English,

widen students’ horizon by means of cultural teaching.

This study was an effort to investigate teachers’ and trainers perceptions of culture teaching in

ELT in a Chinese context. However, although we have established a basic knowledge about teachers

and trainers, it is in the nature of the research that it has triggered more questions. Considering the

limitations of sample size and instrumentation of the current study, the researcher would like to suggest

that a future study is needed to cover a large representation of the population including follow-up

interviews which were not possible in this project. Future research can also be designed to explore how

classroom teachers translate their objectives for cultural learning into practice and the nature of the

relationship between teachers’ instruction of culture in the foreign language classroom and students’

development of intercultural competence. Given the limited number of cultural studies in China, thereis an urgent need for future research in the Chinese context.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for Professor Michael Byram’s comments on this article.



218

References

ACTFL. (1999). The national standards in foreign education. New York: NYPublishing.

Alptekin, C. (2002). Towards intercultural communicative competence. ELT Journal ,56 (1), 57- 64.

Bennett, M. J. (1993). How not to be a fluent fool: Understanding the culturaldimension of language. The Language Teacher , 27 (9), 123-138.

Byram, M. (1988). Foreign language education and cultural studies. Language, Culture,

and Curriculum, 1(1), 15-31.

Byram, M. (1991). Teaching culture and language: Towards an integrated model.In D. Buttjes, & M. Byram, (Eds.), Mediating languages and cultures (pp. 59-90). Clevedon,

England: Multilingual Matters.

Byram, M, & Fleming, M. (1998). Language learning in intercultural perspective.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Byram, M., & Risager, K. (1999). Language teachers, politics and cultures,

Multilingual Matters.

China’s English Curriculum Standards (2001). Beijing, People’s Educational Press.

Chinese Communist Party Central Committee & State Council (1999). Zhonggong

zhongyang guowuyuan guanyu shenhua jiaoyu gaige quanmian tuijin suzhi jiaoyu de jueding [Decision on deepening educational reform and promoting quality education].Beijing, People’s Educational Press.

Crystal, D. (1997). English as a global language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fantini, A. E. (1997). New ways in teaching culture. New York: TESOL.

Gannon, M. J. (2001). Understanding global cultures: Metaphorical journeys through

23 nations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and culture in language teaching . New York: OxfordUniversity Press.

Lessard-Clouston, M. (1996). Chinese teachers’ view of culture in their EFL learningand teaching: A case study. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 9(3), 220-225.

Ministry of Education (1999). Zhongxiaoxue jiaoshi jixu jiaoyu guiding[Regulations on continuing education for primary and secondary teachers]. Beijing .





220 Appendix

Q3 What do you understand by ‘culture teaching’ in English

teaching context?

V e r y

i m p or t a

n t

i m p or t a

n t

un d e c i d e

d

l e s s

N o t

(1) Promote the ability to handle intercultural contact situations.

ឭ㜞⮓ℂ〙ᢥൻᓔ⊛⢻ജޕ

(2) Provide experiences with a rich variety of cultural expressions (literature,music, theatre, film, etc.).

洛ਞን⊛⧷幼ᢥൻㄠᣇᴺ㧔ᢥቇޔ㖸⃟ޔ㒞⓶ᓇ展╬㧕ޕ (3) Provide information about shared values and beliefs.

⸃⊛ચ⋋屑ାઔޕ

(4) Develop attitudes of acceptance and tolerance towards other peoples andcultures.

ၭ␊ቇ↢⺈᳃ᣖޔᢥൻ⊛ធᡴ⹌ኈ㊐ᐲޕ (5) Provide information about daily life and routines

⸃ᣣᏱ↢ᵴᎿޕ

(6) Provide information about the history, geography and political system of the foreign culture(s).

⸃⧷幼࿖ኅ⊛☕ผޔℂᴦᐲޕ (7) Promote increased understanding of students’ own culture.

ଦ扪ቇ↢⺈⥄Ꮖᢥൻ⊛⸃ (8) Make language teaching more interesting and motivating.

幼⸒ᢎቇᦝ⿰㧘ᦝแ♠ᕈޕ

(9) Widen students’ horizons on the world.ᜏዷቇ↢⊛展㊁ޕ

(10) Promote students’ ability to evaluate and their sensitivity to differentcultures.

ឭ㜞ቇ↢⺈ਇหᢥൻ⊛攃Ⓔ⢻ജᗵᐲޕ

(11) Promote students’ awareness of similarities and differences of Englishspeaking countries.

ଦቇ↢ᵈᗧ⧷幼࿖ኅ梃ᢥൻ⊛ᑰหޕ

Biodata

Han Hui is a professor in the School of Foreign Languages of Zhejiang Agricultural and Forestry University, DonghuCampus. She has taught English at college level for 25 years. She obtained her PhD from Durham University, UK. Her research interests are in teacher education; English education and intercultural studies. She has published over 20 papers inacademic journals. She can be reached at [email protected].



221 Corpora and Emerging Technology for ELT

Wirote Aroonmanakun

The use of corpora can contribute to language learning in both implicit and explicit

ways. Corpora have been introduced in language teaching as another approach toteaching language. Data-driven learning views language learning as a kind of research process in which students are expected to discover the knowledgethemselves. In Thailand, though corpora are not widely used in ELT, in manyuniversities corpus-based research, such as move analysis on academic writing,experiments on the use of concordance and corpora in ELT, the creation of Thailearner English corpora, errors and performance analysis of Thai learners on prepositions and collocations is now active.

The use of concordance and corpora is an example of how current technology can beapplied to ELT. Other innovations, such as Blogs, Youtube, Facebook, Skype, and

smart phones, have also been studied to explore their use in ELT. With the rapidgrowth of technology, language learning is no longer restricted to the same oldlearning environment. It is our duty as teachers to help strengthen students' linguisticability by seeking and adapting new innovations for language learning.

Keywords: Corpora, ELT, emerging technology

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222

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1. Introduction

Teaching English is an important job in this time of globalization. But despite many efforts and many

years in English language learning, a lot of Thai students still do not feel that they are competent

enough in English. This is the basic problem of ELT that has been talked about publicly in Thailand.

There is as yet no best solution to this problem. This paper is an attempt to understand the problem and

explore what could be an option for improving the teaching of English in Thailand.

Teaching English or any language is different from teaching other subjects like linguistics,

physics, or mathematics. For other subjects, teaching is about conveying the information in that

subject. Teachers can go on with their lectures or discussions without worrying whether students pay

much attention in class, as long as those students have sufficient knowledge to pass the final exam or

can conduct their own research. Teaching English cannot be done in the same way as teaching physics

or linguistics because learning a language is not solely about acquiring knowledge. Language is about

communication. Whether someone is good in English can be determined from his or her performance,

or language proficiency.

That may be the reason why we can see a lot of teaching techniques being used to encourage

students to participate in class. That is why we can see a lot of research focusing on the different

effects of techniques or methods for teaching English and a lot of research focusing on task-based

language teaching to improve students' language skills by creating tasks that facilitate collaborative

interaction. That is what many English language teachers are doing here in Thailand. But with different

cultural backgrounds, teachers have to be aware that some techniques or methods may not suit Thailearners. So, it is not as easy as adopting any techniques or methods that work well in the West and

expecting the same result here. Getting Thai learners to participate in communicative tasks might be

difficult because Thai learners are not as articulate as Western learners. Moreover, Thai learners at the

present time may behave differently from students in the past. That is why each teacher has to find a

way of teaching effectively.



223

Nevertheless, we cannot deny that learning a language is also learning linguistic knowledge

of the language. Some researchers have been talking about the correlation between language

proficiency and metalinguistic knowledge, which is described in Roehr (2008, p. 174) as “learners’

ability to correct, describe, and explain L2 errors.” So, teaching English is not entirely about getting

students involved in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. We have to be certain that they can use

the language properly and that they have metalinguistic knowledge and are able to correct and explain

errors.

The question is how we are going to provide them with the metalinguistic knowledge. We

can tell them explicitly what the knowledge is. But it does not guarantee that we can teach them all the

linguistic knowledge and that they would be able to learn it all. What we should do is to teach them

how to acquire or understand language on their own. One way to do that is to use corpora andcomputer technology in language teaching.

2. Corpora in ELT

Corpora have been extensively used in language teaching. In fact, corpora are widely used in other

fields of study. In natural language processing, they are primarily used in training a computer to

understand certain phenomena of a language via a statistical model and process the language based on

that statistical information. In lexicography, corpora are certainly the source of knowledge for extracting words and meanings. In linguistics, corpora are like evidence of language uses that linguists

examine to answer linguistic research questions. In translation studies, parallel corpora are used for

studying characteristics of translated languages, which are regarded as translational norms (Baker,

1993, p.246). In language teaching, both native corpora and learner corpora are very useful resources

for language teaching.

The corpus is defined as “a collection of pieces of language text in electronic form, selected

according to external criteria to represent, as far as possible, a language or language variety as a source

of data for linguistic research” (Sinclair, 2005, p. 23). Since a corpus is a large collection of language

data, we need some tools in exploring the data. Basic information that we can get from any corpus is

the frequency of usages, samples of authentic uses, and the tendency that certain words will co-occur



224

with certain words, or what we call collocation. There are a number of tools that we can use to explore

a corpus. The basic tool is concordance software such as AntConc, MonoConc, WordSmith. Some

tools, such as ConcGram (Greaves, 2009), Word Sketch (Kilgarriff et al., 2004), are more delicate and

designed for more advanced users.

Figure 1 is an example of a screen from the concordance software AntConc. We can see the

list of files in the corpus we are using, the total tokens of words and word types, the list of words and

their frequency, which can be sorted by frequency or by word form. Figure 2 displays concordance in

the form of keyword in context, where we can sort the list of occurrences by the right or left context.

Usually, concordance software also has a function to display collocates of the keyword, which are

determined by some statistical methods.

Figure 1: AntConc displaying word frequency list





226

For this approach to work, students have to be trained and have some experience in

interpreting concordance output. Whether this is possible for students in general is still a question. But

some people, such as Bernardini (2004), believe that it works well at least from her experience in

teaching English for advanced learners at the undergraduate level. She found the results to be positive.

Her students were shown how to use the British National Corpus and other corpora. Then they were

asked to carry out a project initiated by themselves. At the end, the results and strategies used in their

search were brought into discussion in class. The students were also able to come up with suggestions

for further studies as a result from exploring the corpora. Besides Bernardini (2004), others such as

Cobb (1997) and Gavioli (2005) also support this corpus-driven method.

However, others do not believe that this new approach is going to happen any time soon

because it requires dramatic changes for both teachers and students. Teachers will no longer be the

source of knowledge. They will become like a coach while students will have to do more work on their

own. Some students may prefer spoon-feeding in the same old way. Some teachers may not feel

comfortable because they do not know all the answers in advance. They will have to accept the fact

that by exploring real data, students may encounter some usages that the teacher may not be able to

explain immediately in class.

Therefore, another group of people think that corpora should not be employed directly in ELT, but they should be used as a resource for language teaching. A corpus can provide us with useful

information about the language that we can use in teaching as a source of knowledge. We can use the

corpus to help answer specific questions about certain words, phrases, or structures. We can use the

corpus to spot the problems of learners by doing error analysis on a learner corpus. We can know

better what should be the priority in teaching when we compare the learners’ performances and the

natives’ performances.

Corpora have been used for producing better references in ELT. English dictionaries

nowadays are mainly based on corpora larger than hundreds of millions of words. Many grammar and

course books are also constructed on a corpus basis.



227

When we explore both native and learner corpora, we can come up with ideas of what the

syllabus should be. One idea is to emphasize top frequency words, which is known as lexical syllabus.

The idea was introduced in 1950 and the General Service List (West, 1953) is produced on the basis of

this idea. In addition, corpora can be used for preparing materials that suit a task or assignment.

Examples of exercises created from concordance outputs are shown in Figures 3-4.

Figure 3: A gap-filling exercise (Mallikamas, 1999, p.8)

Figure 4: An exercise on polysemy (Mallikamas, 1999, p.9)



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Whether the use of corpora in ELT is corpus-driven or corpus-based, it has led language

teachers to realize the importance of lexical and phraseological units in language teaching (See

Meunier & Granger, 2008). Corpora are now widely used in ELT worldwide and it is now easier to

work with corpora. There are many corpora that can be accessed online. For example, at the website

http://corpus.byu.edu, we can search many English corpora, e.g. the British National Corpus and the

Corpus of American English. Besides using corpora created from collecting texts that meet the criteria,

some have started using the web as a corpus. WebCorp (http://www.webcorp.org.uk/) is a site where

we can search for a keyword using search engines like Google or Alta Vista, with results being

displayed in concordance format.

3. Research on Corpora in Thailand

In Thailand, although the use of corpora in ELT is not widely employed, there are a number of

significant movements going on in many universities. There is research on ESP using specialized

corpora like the work of Kanoksilapatham (2007) at Silapakorn University on move analysis of

scientific texts, and the work of Getkham (2010) at the National Institute of Development

Administration on multidimensional analysis of applied linguistics articles. Some research has

explored the effects of corpora and concordance in the classroom, such as Sripicharn (2003, 2004) at

Thammasart University, Sarawit (2008) at Naresuan University, and Supatranont (2005) at

Rajamangala Lanna. While not all of them find the effects to be statistically significant, the use of concordance in the classroom received positive responses from their students.

At Chulalongkorn University, corpora related to ELT were created and placed online. The

first one is the Thai learner English corpus, a collection of essays written by undergraduate students

from two universities, Chulalongkorn and Thammasart universities. It can be accessed at the site

http://ling.arts.chula.ac.th/TLE/. Another corpus that might be useful for ELT is the English-Thai

parallel corpus, which is a collection of translations of novels from English to Thai. This can be

accessed at http://ling.arts.chula.ac.th/ParaConc/. With the use of these corpora, research focusing on

Thai learners’ performances can be more easily analyzed and compared with those of native speakers.

For example, Mallikamas et al. (2010) use a learner corpus to study collocation errors. Aroonmanakun





230

be useful when we want to introduce students to cultural differences. With all these facilities, Chinnery

suggests that Google can be used like CALL, naming it Google-Assisted Language Learning. In fact, if

we explore Google in detail, we can see that it can be used in many ways for ELT. With the advanced

search option, we can limit the search to a specific region, or a specific domain. Then, we can see the

number of different hits from different search settings. This is another way to look at cultural

differences through language uses. Moreover, with the introduction of Google translation, although the

results of translation into Thai may not be good, it is interesting to bring the results into class and learn

English through this activity.

Facebook is, of course, one of the most popular social media now. With 500 million users in

20112, it is one of the biggest social networks. Facebook is used to share information among friends in

the social network. Friends in the network will be notified of profile changes, new wall postings, new

photos, new videos, etc. A group can be created for people who share the same interest. It can be an

open or restricted group. This kind of utility would be useful for sharing class information. Thus, it is

not surprising to find that many teachers are now using Facebook for their classes. Blattner and Fiori

(2009) have pointed out the potential of Facebook, especially the ability to create groups, as a useful

means for pedagogical practice. They suggest that we use this group feature for creating a community

of learners. The teacher can create a group for a particular class. Or their students can join groups

devoted to language learning. This would help them realize the possibilities of e-learning that arealready there, and foster the habit of learning on their own. Using Facebook is not new for students

since they are already using it to communicate and play games with their friends. What we could do is

merely to direct them to academic possibilities. Blattner & Fiori (2009) also emphasize the use of

Facebook to raise students’ socio-pragmatic competence and promote cross-cultural communication

because students can communicate with students of other languages worldwide. Thus, activities on

Facebook can help raise their pragmatic awareness as well as practice genuine communication. An

interesting introduction to Facebook for ELT can be found on Youtube at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azQbYH2_uaM.

2 http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics



231

From this video introduction, we can see that besides using Facebook for sharing

information, there are some applications that might be useful for education. For example, the

application CiteMe could be used to search and display the bibliography of a book in different style

formats. Word Challenge is a game for creating possible words from given letters. This is an example

of the concept of educational games through the use of Facebook. The concept of edutainment or using

games in learning is discussed in Donmus (2010). He talks about another learning environment called

game-based learning environment. This refers to games designed for educational purposes. He argues

that learning through a game-based environment would certainly attract students’ attention and

increase their motivation and their retention. Game-based education nowadays is no longer a matter of

a single user playing against a computer, but it can be a collaboration of many users through the

internet. Finally, he encourages more research studies to be done on the effects of educational games

on foreign language learning through social networks like Facebook.

There are many possibilities of using Facebook. Besides creating a group for the class and

communicating within the group, we can also introduce students to other groups related to learning

English, or we can ask them to find a Facebook group that is useful for learning English. Therefore, we

let them join a group and at the end they report to us their activities and what they have learnt from the

group.

5. Conclusion

It can be concluded that corpora and these emerging technologies are being used more widely in ELT.

Whether it is really a new approach or a new way of teaching foreign languages effectively is

something English language teachers have to find out if they decide to adopt these technologies.

Actually, many teachers worldwide already enjoy using these technologies in their classes. Indeed,

there are some groups and websites devoted to this use of technology (See useful resources).

However, some teachers may not want to be involved because they do not feel comfortablewith the use of technology. The idea of technology affecting education is not something new. Every

time new technology is invented, people always expect that there will be some dramatic changes in

education. Take the radio and television as examples. When they were first introduced, people thought

that they would bring education directly inside our living rooms. But it did not turn out that way.



232

Mostly radio and television have been used for entertainment and their content is controlled and

created for commercial purposes. However, with the use of the internet right now, things are quite

different. It is more difficult to control the internet than radio or television. And the most important

thing that we have to be aware of is that technology is changing very rapidly. As we all know, recently

cutting edge technology can quickly become old and obsolete. Like it or not, new technology is going

to be in our life in our education. If we are going to retire in a few years, we may not have to worry

much. But if we still have ten more years in teaching, we are going to teach young students who are

more familiar with technology than us. They are what Prensky (2001) called “digital natives.” They

start using technology like smart phones or iPad when they are in primary school.

Some schools have started using iPad in their education. Whether its use will help children in

learning, we do not yet know. But we know for sure that these kids are growing up equipped with

technological abilities. Their way of life is different from ours. They will not enjoy going to classes in

the same old environment we used to. A lot of teachers have been complaining that students nowadays

are not like them. They do not pay attention to the class. Their attention span is quite short. They talk a

lot in class. We used to silence them by keeping them busy writing down notes from slides. That no

longer works. They can get all the content on a slide by taking a picture with their smart phones.

Maybe we have to admit that we are going to see increasingly more students with different lifestyles.

We have to understand how they grow up.

According to Prensky (2001), “Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast.

They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the

opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive

on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to ‘serious’ work” (p.1).

Therefore, the problem of education may not be because those kids are less intelligent than

older generations, but maybe the education system itself cannot adjust to the changing environment.

So, perhaps it is not about how to make them behave like students in the past. Maybe it is about how to

adjust the learning environment to fit their habits. We have to follow technology not because we are

crazy about it or because it attracts students, but because the world is changing very fast and we should

use what the students are familiar with when teaching them. If we browse through the web, we can see



233 lot of information out there that we can use in teaching language. Corpora and concordance tools are

one thing. But with the advances in Artificial Intelligence technology, we can easily use speech

synthesis, speech recognition, or even machine translation, as well. Language teaching is no longer

constrained in the small classroom. We can extend it and bring the world into our class. Teaching

language should not be boring. It should be fun and enjoyable for both students and teachers. If we are

not trying to understand and adapt to the changing world, maybe the problem is not that students at this

time are worse than students in our time. The problem may lie in us who cannot deal with the changing

world. And we may be the real problem of education.

Acknowledgements

This work is supported by The National Research University Project of CHE (HS1153A) and by

Chulalongkorn University Centenary Academic Development Project.

References

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Greaves, C. (2009). ConcGram 1.0: A phraseological search engine. Amsterdam: JohnBenjamins.

Johns, T. (1991). Should you be persuaded: Two samples of data-driven learning materials , ELR

Journal , 4, 1-16.

Johns, T. (2002). Data-driven learning: The perpetual challenge. In B. Kettemann, & G. Marko(Eds.), Language and computers: Teaching and learning by doing corpus analysis. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora,Graz 19-24 July, 2000 (pp. 107-117). Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Kanoksilapatham, B. (2007). Rhetorical moves in biochemistry research articles. In D. Biber, U.Connor, & T. Upton (Eds.), Discourse on the move (pp.73-120). Amsterdam: JohnBenjamins.

Kilgarriff, A., P. Rychly, P. Smrz, D. Tugwell. (2004). The Sketch Engine. Proc EURALEX

2004 (pp. 105-116). Lorient, France.

Mallikamas, P. (1999). Applications of corpora in language teaching. Thai TESOL Bulletin.

12(1), 1-17.

Mallikamas, P., Jirananthiporn, S., & Wijitsopon, R. (2010). The roles of collocations in Englishlanguage learning and teaching. In P. Attanatho, & D. Pradittatsanee (Eds.),Chulalongkorn-Thammasat Conference Proceedings 2009 (pp. 47-78). Bangkok:Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University,

Meunier, F., & Granger, S. (2008). Phraseology in foreign language learning and teaching. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon (MCB University

Press), 9(5), 1-5. Retrieved from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-%20digital%20natives,%20digital%20immigrants%20-%20part1.pdf

Reagin, J. (2004). The theory and practical applications of emerging technologies in ELTclasses: How the blog can change the teaching of English. In The Fourth International

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Sarawit, M. (2008). The effect of corpus analysis on improving student control of ‘protect’ and‘prevent’. Journal of Humanities (Naresuan University), 5(1), 1-13.

Sripicharn, P. (2003). Evaluating classroom concordancing: The use of concordance-basedmaterials by a group of Thai students. Thammasat Review, 8(1), 203-232.

Sripicharn, P. (2004). Examining native speakers’ and learners’ investigation of the sameconcordance data and its implications for classroom concordancing with ELF learners.In G. Aston, S. Bernardini, & D. Stewart (Eds.), Corpora and Language Learners (pp. 233– 245). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Useful resources

AntConc http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/antconc_index.html

Drive belonging and http://www.edumorphology.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/fb_classroom1.pdf

Facebook Strategies for the Classroom Discussions.http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=28579140444&v=wall

Facebook for ELThttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azQbYH2_uaM.

Teaching English through technology.http://www.wmich.edu/teachenglish/

Technology in English language teaching.http://www.facebook.com/pages/Technology-in-English-language-teaching/148739365144043



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Using YouTube for vocabulary development.http://eltnotebook.blogspot.com/2007/07/using-youtube-for-vocabulary.html

YouTube in the Classroom!http://esl.about.com/od/listeninglessonplans/a/youtube.htm

BiodataAssociate Professor Dr. Wirote Aroonmanakun chairs the department of Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, ChulalongkornUniversity. His research interest is on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics. He is now taking a major part in theThai National Corpus development project. It is aimed to creating a large general Thai corpus which is comparable to theBritish national Corpus. He is also creating other corpora, such as English-Thai parallel corpus, Thai Learner Englishcorpus. As for research on computational linguistics, he had developed basic tools for Thai language processing, such asThai syllable segmentation, Thai word segmentation, Thai romanization, Thai grapheme-to-phoneme. He is now workingon Thai named entity recognition and Thai compound noun extraction, which will be implemented as a part of tagger for Thai National Corpus project.



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Contributed by

AN APRIL EVENING

He loved to run - the best little runner in the neighbourhood. He could outdo his two older

brothers; they were fast, but he always took the lead. And he could skate as fast as he could run - even

faster. His first skates were second-hand bob skates, tied tightly with thin leather straps across the

toes and behind the ankles of his brown boots. He had just turned eight and was lucky enough at his

own birthday party to get the one piece of cake with the nickel wrapped in waxed paper. That was

enough money to buy 12 marshmallow strawberry candies and some Juicy Fruit gum.

April: the awakening of spring when robins return, streams fill with trout, and pussy willows

announce the lengthening of days and the sun’s increasing warmth. The lad donned his rubber boots

and skipped up the train tracks to gather these lovely sprigs for a neighbour. He heard the train

whistle and carefully placed his only penny on the track. When it was flattened he admired the

transformation made by the tons of steel as he felt the warmth of the reformed object in his small

hand. Soon, he too, would be transformed. The pussy willows were across the ditch, and he gathered

a small bundle and took them to his friend.

He had one more task to do: deliver a grocery order for his employer who paid him 10 cents

each week. It was a big job and a lot of money for the young lad. He loved his job. His employers

loved him too. They would send him a dozen red roses a few days later.

When his work for the day was finished, he went next door to a school chum’s house. As they

sat on the front steps the lad proudly showed his friend the flattened piece of copper. They looked

toward the street and saw a horse drawn wagon - small wheels in the front, big wheels at the back.

The horse was doing the work for the six-year-old driver. It was Thursday after five o’clock. The lad

decided to enjoy his first horse-and-buggy adventure. Climbing onto the back of the wagon and fac-

ing in the opposite direction was a common thrill for neighbourhood boys.

He hurried to the moving wagon, put his right foot on the axle, and grabbed the small handle

on the side. His rubber boots were slippery and the axle was greasy. The fierce wooden spokes

reached out and grabbed his leg, pulling it to the centre of the wheel. His school chum ran quickly

and released the lad’s left foot he had automatically raised to free himself. But it was too late for the

lad’s right leg. He grasped the small brass handle with supernatural strength and screamed, “Help!

Help!” His leg, held firmly by the steel-like spokes, had no choice but to follow the motion of the

wheel - around and around and around. The young driver whipped the horse to stop it, but in its

confusion the animal pulled while the lad continued to scream for help. When he could hold on no

longer, he fell onto the unpaved street. The wagon was still moving. The leg had been completely

severed at the knee, and the red gravel was now embedded in his back and attached to his mangled

limb. All strength was lost and the air continued to echo his cries for help. A passerby grabbed the

horse’s bridle and brought it to a halt.

A training centre for military soldiers was located near the accident scene and a sergeant heard



238

the horrifying screams, jumped the fence and placed the lad, with help from another trainee, onto the

fresh blades of spring grass. A neighbour offered a clean sheet, and the green, red and white colours

became the background where the injured lad lay.

A crowd gathered. The lad felt no pain now for he was in shock. His body’s defence mecha-

nism caused total numbness where the limb had been severed. His Dad ran to the awful scene whensummoned by the lad’s school chum. As the lad repeatedly cried, “Daddy, am I going to die?” he saw

the big tears roll down his father’s cheeks as his dad assured him he would not let him die. The ambu-

lance was called but it never came. One man, having seen the gory sight, refused to take the lad in his

car for fear of blood stains which would be dif ficult or impossible to remove. He quickly drove away.

The lad lay there for what seemed to be an eternity – waiting – waiting, and waiting. And the

crowd grew bigger – waiting, and waiting. A chauffeur-driven lady was shocked when she realized

the reason for the crowd that had formed a semicircle around the exhausted bleeding lad. “To hell

with the blood” she said. “Get the kid into the back seat and to the hospital before he bleeds to death”.

Carefully his dad and the soldiers lay him onto the covered seat. Holding his head with tender and trembling hands, his dad tried to comfort him, reassuring him that all would be well. An orderly

was waiting when they reached the hospital, and the lad was carefully transferred from the car onto a

gurney and wheeled into a small ante room. The lad begged for water but was unable to drink when

it was offered. He was conscious the hour he had to wait to be admitted – waiting until his father’s

landlord came to the hospital to guarantee the administrator that he would cover all costs if the boy’s

dad could not. The landlord did not hesitate.

A mask was placed over the lad’s face, he saw stars, and his head pounded until darkness

came. He was asleep. It was well after eight o’clock. His dad’s blood type was a perfect match and

the transfusion was direct as father and son lay side by side during the operation, one giving life, the

other, receiving. The doctor finished the amputation. The lad was deeply asleep. He slept as thoughhe would never awaken.

The attending nurse that Thursday had also been the nurse when the lad was born in the house

adjacent to the accident scene. Eight years later it was her face he saw when he awakened. “Hi,” he

whispered, “where is my leg?”

“Go back to sleep, dear,” she said calmly. “Go back to sleep”.

The pain was excruciating in the following days. The lad could feel his toes, but they were not

there. Only a heavily wrapped stump-like object was under the raised sheet.

When he was ready to go home, his dad carried him ever so gently over his shoulder. He wore

the new blue housecoat and smiled at the nurse who carried his roses. The journey home was the

same route he had travelled 10 days before, only in the opposite direction. His mother wept when

she kissed him. His oldest brother gave him a brand new wrist watch purchased from his paper route

earnings. The other brother was afraid to see what his sibling would look like so he did not appear

for the homecoming. And his five-year-old sister gently kissed him before he was carried upstairs to

his bedroom. He was home.

The lad often dreams of running and jumping and skating and soaring through the air on a

pillow of soft white pussy willows and red roses – a flattened penny in one hand, and a silver nickel

in the other. The dream is always the same. It is a beautiful dream.



239

“April’s a lovely lady

She wears a golden crown.

She rides in a golden carriage

When she comes up to town.”

-Thomas Dunhill-

has degrees in Biology, English and Education from the University of

New Brunswick in Fredericton and Acadia University in Nova Scotia. He also has earned educational diplo-

mas from Harvard University in the USA and Manchester University in the UK.

Jerry has experience as a marine biologist, educator at the Elementary and Senior Secondary levels, School

Supervisor of Student Services and University lecturer. He is an accomplished pianist and has a certificate in

piano from the Royal Conservatory of Music, University of Toronto. He is also a well-known artist in water-

colours.

Now retired, Jerry enjoys playing music, painting, journal writing and travelling. He is presently planning

his fourth visit to Southeast Asian countries. He lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, with his wife.

They have four adult children.

Biodata



240

Thomas Hoy

Stephen Conlon, Chaos in the Classroom, Bangkok, Assumption University Press, 2009, 459 pages.ISBN 978-974-615-300-3

Stephen Conlon begins this collection of loosely related essays in an unusual way. Instead of the

conventional device of setting the tone of a book with one or two epigrams, Conlon goes over the

top with 20 pages of them. There are comments on the nature of language and chaos from a range of

luminaries as varied as Karl Marx, Izaak Walton, Yukio Mishima, Agatha Christie and Aristophanes,

to name just a few. It’s an interesting way to start the collection but I would suggest one addition that

might more precisely capture the problems that social science and applied linguistics has in dealing

with the messiness of language. The quote is from Alfred Jarry, the proto-surrealist famous for two

things: firstly, his iconoclastic play Pere Ubu , which caused a riot at its first performance and whose

eponymous anti-hero was inspired by the chaos in Jarry’s high school classroom, and secondly,

for his invention of pataphysics, “the science of imaginary solutions”. “Imagine the perplexity,”

says Jarry in his Doctor Faustroll , “of a man outside time and space, who has lost his watch, and his

measuring rod, and his tuning fork.” In his own way, Conlon is offering “imaginary solutions” to the

teaching of language and he questions the value of the measuring devices that determine the ques-tions and hence the solutions that much applied linguistics offers. Instead, he proposes that we draw

on unmeasurables such as art, beauty, literature, soul, quality, experience, and intuition and challenge

students with the best language that we can muster.

With a title like Chaos in the Classroom, one might expect a diatribe against the current

mess which language education is in and some handy hints on how to restore order, purpose and

predictability. But it’s not that at all. According to Conlon, we need more chaos in the classroom not

less. Chaos is proposed as not only the negative absence of order but also as a source of creativity

and ideas and as a counterweight against “scientism” and the sterility and triviality of the social sci-

ence paradigm which increasingly dominates language teaching. Under this paradigm, teachers and

their experience, intuition, creativity, humours, knowledge and appreciation of their students and





242

Denmark. The program, described in the essay “Voices out of nowhere”, asked not particularly ad-

vanced students to write novels in groups about the things that really interested them, their own lives

and communities rather than the more traditional ESL literature class that gives students a simpli-

fied (for simplified, read gutted) classic text that has no particular relevance or interest to them. The

students have published these works and presented them at conferences and they have been used in

other classes for discussions. Most importantly, as English is being increasingly thought of as Eng-lishes, “The English they would learn was their own” (p.261), their responsibility and their creation.

Other essays deal with a chaotic range of subjects: chaos theory and its educational and linguistic im-

plications, academia as a theme park, Jane Austen and D.H. Lawrence, and the sources of creativity.

It’s a big and messy book, sometimes verging perhaps on a woolly sentimentality, sometimes wan-

dering off in random directions. But nevertheless, it does some systematic thinking about the uses of

art and the personal voice in the language classroom and it is written with a very informed, strongly

opinionated and deeply engaging voice. I am sure I’ll return to it from time to time for entertainment

and inspiration.

At my previous university there was a course assessment form that asked the students to as-sess courses as to whether the information presented by the “instructor” was “clear”, “practical”,

and “useful”. The form irked me. I always thought that these terms defined education and language

itself in very narrow and prejudicial terms. First, we have the instructor not the teacher. An instructor

by definition knows how to tell someone how to successfully perform a more or less simple mechani-

cal task. Attach Part A to Part B. Fold Part C as shown in Fig. 3. The correct answer to the question

is D. And so on. A teacher on the other hand might leave the students with questions and ask them to

devise their own solutions. A good teacher is an artist and performer and thinker not just a technical

adviser. As well as asking about clarity, practicality and utility, we could legitimately ask the students

if the teacher had given them ideas and information which was “challenging”, “dif ficult” and even

“puzzling” or “unclear” and still give the teacher a good assessment if they rated highly on theseresponses. In these essays, Conlon is all of these things at times but teachers and other readers who

are not just interested in what the business manuals call “ef ficient and effective” communication, the

sort of sterile, narrow, supposedly practical stuff that seems to be made for robots not humans, might

turn to this volume for these qualities.

holds a doctorate in comparative literature from La Trobe University in Australia and is currently a lecturer

Biodata



íăðíŞæĄ ē : čòÖíăðíŞðúāöăæñāôĀñçòòð÷āùäòŞ, 2554

÷ĈèñŞòĀÖùăä êæćðçāèĄ 12121

čæò÷ĀíæŞ 0-2564-3105-11

čæòùāò 0-2564-3119

http://www.tu.ac.th/org/tuprint





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