the effects of e comments on the academic writing activities for graduate students at hcmc open university

BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO
TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC MỞ TP. HỒ CHÍ MINH

BÁO CÁO TỔNG KẾT
ĐỀ TÀI KHOA HỌC VÀ CÔNG NGHỆ CẤP TRƯỜNG

The Effects of E-comments on the Academic Writing Activities for
Graduate Students at HCMC Open University

Mã số: T2015.15.194

Chủ nhiệm đề tài: TS. PHẠM VŨ PHI HỔ

TP. HCM, 4/2016


ABSTRACT
E-peer comments were widely investigated by researchers around the world. However,
comparing lecturer’s e-comments to e-peer comments with the purpose to help improve e-peer
comments were vacant in research. In addition, the effects of lecturer’s e-comments on the student
writing revision and e-peer commenting skills were not widely researched. The purpose of the
current study was to see if the instructional model of showing the lecturer’s sample e-comments
to the big size classes was effective in terms of training students how to become better e-peer
commenters. Comparison between lecturer’s e-comments and e-peer comments were also
investigated, including whether those e-comments affect on the writer revision. Finally, students’
attitudes towards the training and its effects were explored. Quantitative data collection from 26
written papers from those who received lecturer’s e-comments, including the e-peer comments
from group members were analyzed. Questionnaires responded from 86 graduate students from
two graduate classes (Dip 17A & TESOL 10) were also analyzes. In terms of qualitative analysis,
data recorded from the semi-structure interviews from 20 graduate students were analyzed as
supplementary data to obtain in-depth information.

The findings of the current study show that there was no a statistical significant difference
between the lecturer’s and e-peer comments in terms of the total number of words written in the
e-comments. In terms of the total number of e-comments deliveries on both global and local areas,
the graduate students provided more total of e-comments on both global and local areas on their
peers’ papers than those provided by the lecturer. In addition, there was no statistical significant
difference between the lecturer’s and e-peer comments on global areas although the e-peer
comments on local issues were more than those from the lecturer. However, in terms of qualified
comment deliveries or revision-oriented comments which trigger revision, there was a statistical
significant difference between lecturer’s e-comments and e-peer comments on both global and
local issues. The lecturer tended to provide more qualified comments on global areas whereas the
peers provided more on local issues. The findings of the study also reveal that the lecturer’s sample
e-comments illustrated in the classroom during the treatment had great effects on the quality of the
e-peer comments. The graduate students were able to provide more qualified e-comments
(revision-oriented comments) on global issues throughout the training to help each other improve
writing revision while local areas seemed to be less provided. In terms of comparing the effects of
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lecturer’s e-comments with the e-peer comments on writing revision, the study found that there
was no statistical significant difference between the effects of these two. However, there was a
statistical significant difference between the total number of qualified comments and the number
of total revisions. The graduate students were able to make far more revisions than expected.
Finally, the graduate students highly evaluated both the lecturer’s e-comment and e-peer comment
activities employed in the treatments. They confirmed that the e-comment activities helped them
learn how to write academic writing papers and contributed to the writing quality because those ecomments helped identify the writing problems for revisions. The current study highlights the
effects of the e-peer comment training for graduate students to enhance not only the writing quality
but also the skills for e-peer comments.
Keywords: Lecturer’s e-comments, e-peer comments, areas of comments, global comments,
local comments, revision-oriented comments, non revision-oriented comments, qualified
comments, unqualified comments, sample e-comments.

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CONTENTS
Abstract ......................................................................................................................................................... 1
1

Rationale for the study .......................................................................................................................... 4

2

Literature review ................................................................................................................................... 5

3

4

5

2.1

Trained Peer Comments ................................................................................................................ 7

2.2

Research questions ...................................................................................................................... 10

2.3

Definitions of terms used in the present study ............................................................................ 10

Research Methodology ....................................................................................................................... 11
3.1

Research setting .......................................................................................................................... 11

3.2

Participants.................................................................................................................................. 12

3.3

Research design .......................................................................................................................... 12

3.4

Training procedures .................................................................................................................... 13

3.5

Writing Assignments .................................................................................................................. 15

3.6

E-comment activities .................................................................................................................. 17

3.7

Areas of e-comments .................................................................................................................. 21

3.8

Coding schemes .......................................................................................................................... 22

3.9

Data collection for analysis ......................................................................................................... 25

3.10

analysing the writing revision ..................................................................................................... 25

3.11

Interviews .................................................................................................................................... 26

3.12

Questionnaire .............................................................................................................................. 27

Findings and discussion ...................................................................................................................... 28
4.1

Research question 1: ................................................................................................................... 29

4.2

Research question 2: ................................................................................................................... 37

4.3

Research question 3: ................................................................................................................... 42

4.4

Research question 4: ................................................................................................................... 48

4.4.1

Quantitative analysis ........................................................................................................... 48

4.4.2

Qualitative analysis ............................................................................................................. 55

Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 57

references .................................................................................................................................................... 60
Appendix A: Lecturer's e-comments ........................................................................................................... 64
Appendix B: syllabus for academic writing for graduate students .................................................................
Appendix C: interview .....................................................................................................................................

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1

RATIONALE FOR THE STUDY
The course of Academic Writing for Graduate Students at the Graduate School of HCMC

Open University (HCMC OU) was introduced to the graduate students since 2012. Prior TESOL
classes (from 1 to 5) and Diploma courses (Dips. 1- 10) were not included for the training of this
Module. The occurrence of this course came from the fact that many MA students could not write
up their theses very well in terms of Academic written styles. Actually this was not something new
or weird because this phenomenon is found similarly in other contexts where the Master programs
in TESOL were offered. The MA students are often have writing problems when they composed
their thesis. That is the reason why the graduate program in TESOL at HCMC Open University
offers this course to train the students to do better in their writing.
In the graduate program in TESOL, the graduate students at HCMC OU are required to write
research projects for most of the courses. End of each course, the graduate students are normally
required to write a 2000-word paper to submit to the lecturers for gaining scores. This requires
students to use their critical thinking to compose their papers, which includes conducting broad
reading, provide critiques or argument for each session of the paper. This is not an easy job at all.
In the same situation from other context, Harris (2006) claims that he/she found frustrated with the
quality of students’ writing skills whenever he/she read the graduate projects or research proposals.
This suggests better teaching methods or other teaching activities in the academic writing
classrooms in order to help graduate students improve their writing skills.
Research on writing instruction has changed from controlled writing to process writing.
Writing is no longer viewed as a means of reinforcing structural patterns (Andrade & Evans, 2012).
Writing is now seen as a written means of communication, and has become an integral and
important part of language learning and is necessary for academic and professional purposes. The
instruction has gradually shifted from a product-centered approach to a more process-oriented
approach (Andrade & Evans). In the view of product approach, learning writing in L2 (Foreign
language) means learning how to produce sentences, grammatical structures without any errors.
Forms are the center of focus rather than the content or idea development. On the other hand,
process approach views writing as a developmental process in which multiple drafts were revising
based on lecturer/peer comment activities.
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In the context of the graduate training program at the Graduate School of HCMC OU in
TESOL, each class size is about 40 – 50 graduate students. This number is large in terms of training
students how to compose Academic writing papers. Particularly, using lecturer’s comments to all
students each week is impossible. In this training, the lecturer often provided e-comments for 5
fastest students (early birds) who submitted the papers during each week to provide comments and
used those e-comments as samples in the classroom to train the students how to revise their written
papers and how to provide e-peer comments efficiently. Make use of the models or framework of
trained-peer comments in the classrooms from Berg’s (1999), Min’s (2005), Pham Vu Phi Ho &
Usaha’s (2015), Stanley’s (1992), and Tuzi (2004) to help students enhance their comment
deliveries to improve peers’ writing revision is essential in the training process. Accordingly, the
lecturer applies the student-centered approach in the classrooms to help get involved all the
students in the learning process. The activities of training e-peer comments in current study were
not investigated in literature in the learning process of the graduate students about e-peer
comments (Using Microsoft Word) to enhance the quality of comments and writing revision.

2

LITERATURE REVIEW
There are a number of research studies on comparison between lecturer and peer comments

in literature. Hyland (1998) conducted a study on the impact of lecturer written comments on
individual Writers’; Nelson and Carson (1998) investigated the ESL students’ perceptions of
effectiveness in peer comments; Tsui and Ng (2000) studied the roles of lecturer and peer
comments in revisions in writing among learners; Hyland (2000) investigated written lecturer
comments and how they interacted with other aspects of the context; Nguyen Thi Kieu Thu (2002)
conducted a survey in Vietnam to investigate the lecturer’s practices in giving errors comments to
second year and third year students’ writing; Yang et al. (2006) investigated two types of
comments from peer and lecturer to EFL students in China; and Jones et al. (2006) studied the
interactional dynamics in online and face-to-face peer-tutoring sessions for second language

writers. Recently, Pham Vu Phi Ho and Usaha (2015) conducted a study on training e-peer
comments to help student writer improve their writing quality and writing revision.
The findings of these studies remain questionable in terms of preferences of the lecturer’
comments to peer comments. Nelson and Carson (1998) found that students preferred the lecturer’s
comments to peer comments and considered comments on local areas as relatively ineffective.
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Tsui and Ng (2000) and Yang et al. (2006) found that lecturer comments were more favored by
most students than peer comments and led to more revisions which yield good results on the
lecturer’s comments. Tsui and Ng (2000) found that students have more confidence in lecturer
comments because the lecturer is seen as more experienced and more authoritative. Moreover,
lecturer comments were considered to be of better quality. They were more specific, were able to
explain what the problems were, and were able to make concrete suggestions for revision. Yang
et al. (2006) also found that students considered lecturer as more “professional,” “experienced,”
and “trustworthy” than their peers. In addition, Hyland (2000) found that cultural factors made
students feel uncomfortable with the peer comments and discouraged them from being critical of
each other’s work. In addition, Treglia (2006) indicated that the students appreciated receiving
comments of encouragement and found their lecturers’ written commentary helpful in improving
their writing. The most common reason for the rejection of peer comments was that the writers did
not accept the comments for the reason that it seemed “incorrect” to them. In another story, Hyland
(1998) conducted a case study to describe two students who received lecturer’s comments during
the course and found that the two students both started the course with positive feelings towards
writing but ended with demotivation and lacking in confidence in terms of receiving lecturer’s
comments. This indicates that the lecturer comments were sometimes inefficient in the training
writing process. Supported to this view, Nguyen T. K. Thu (2002) found a positive shift in
students’ priorities from traditional lecturers’ comments to more involving methods like peer
comments and self-comments. Jones et al (2006) argued that force students to make a choice
between peer comments and lecturer comments were not appropriate because peer and lecturer
comments should be mutual supported. Also, Jones et al. added, when students were not forced to

make a choice, they welcomed both peer and lecturer comments. Tsui and Ng (2000) asserted that
peer comments could not be replaced by lecturer comments. Hyland (2000) indicated that the
relationships between lecturers and students are both complex and unequal in terms of power.
Hyland (2000) argued that students were expected to take full responsibility for their own writing
process and to revise it on their own, using their own strategies. Lecturers should consider
measures to help student writers to do help themselves instead of controlling the commenting
process. Pham Vu Phi Ho and Usaha (2015) found that e-peer comments were effective to help
student writers revise their papers to enhance the writing quality and students highly evaluated epeer comments. Therefore, training students to provide qualified comments is a means to get
6


students involved in the learning process and makes them become more responsible for their own
writing products.
Although lecturer comments were highly preferred by the students, Hyland (2000) found
that the lecturers tended to treat the students’ papers as in the product approach rather than process
writing approach. They had a tendency to focus on ‘fixing up’ the texts rather than to help them
develop their writing when giving comments. Also, Nguyen T. K. Thu (2002) found that error
fixing and grammar correct were more employed in the lecturer’s comments. In addition,
Montgomery and Baker (2007) found that the lecturers generally gave little comments on global
issues, such as organization, and a large amount of comments on local issues, such as grammar
and mechanics, throughout the writing process. Regarding the impacts on the student revisions,
Hyland (1998) asserted that the students’ revisions did not incorporate with the lecturer comments,
or if so, it occurred on the surface level. On the other hand, Yang et al., (2006) found that peer
comments appear to bring about a higher percentage of meaning-change revision (global areas)
while most lecturer’s comments influenced revisions on local areas surface level. In other words,
the majority of lecturer comments to students’ writing was prior to the local rather than the global
areas. The next session will present the employment of training peer comments to help students
help themselves in the writing process.

2.1 TRAINED PEER COMMENTS

As mentioned earlier, the activities of peer comments are seen as fruitful to the training
classrooms. According to Lui and Hansen (2005), peer comment activities help students take
responsibilities for their own learning, build critical thinking skills, and consolidate their
knowledge of writing. In addition, peer comment activities can enhance students’ communication,
build their social skills, and provide them with a supportive social network. Also, peer comments
activities are seen as good chances for students to build their own linguistic knowledge, enhance
participation, and improve both oral and written styles. The literature reviews above indicate that
most of students preferred teacher’ feedback. However, quite a few research studies still found
beneficial from peer feedback in terms of more active involvement and encouragement of
autonomy (Yang et al., 2006), and students taking more responsibility in their own learning process
(Hyland, 2000). Therefore, the trends of research in this field take an action to train students in the
peer comments activities.
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As a key research in peer comment activities, Berg (1999) conducted a research study on
effects of trained peer comments on ESL students’ revision types and writing quality. The
researcher conducted the research through a comparison of 46 ESL students, divided into two
groups, in an intensive English program at a university in a large city on the U.S. One group was
trained in how to participate in peer comments to writing and the other was not trained. Each
student’s first and second drafts were compared sentence-by-sentence. The study found that peer
comments can teach students academic writing because, in discussing their own and other essays,
students have to actively apply their knowledge of such aspects as a thesis statement, the
development of ideas, and the different types of organization. In addition, the research also found
that watching a peer’s approach to reading one’s text might serve as a model for how to read text
through the eyes of someone else. It may then help students to develop a better sense of how to
read their own texts from a perspective of an audience, what questions to ask, and how to
systematically examine their text with the purpose of improving it. The study did not investigate
the nature of comments (areas of comments).
In order to train students to become successful peer comments to provide qualified

comments on global and local areas, Min (2005) made use of four steps to train students to do peer
comments. 18 EFL sophomore students participated in the researcher’s composition class at a large
university in southern Taiwan. The results indicate that the numbers of comments and number of
words produced post-training were significantly higher than those prior to training. In addition,
the students were able to provide a greater amount of comments on the global issues after training.
This indicates that students tended to allocate more attention to macro issues such as idea
development and organization post-training. Besides, the students pointed out that the four-step
procedure helped them become better reviewers, although following the four steps was both timeand energy-consuming. They also learned from their peers how to focus their ideas and view things
from different perspectives. The study did not investigate the direct training peer comments via
the lecturer’s own commentary practices.
In terms of investigating the effects of per comments on writing revisions, Min (2006)
examined the impact of trained responders’ comments on EFL college students’ revisions, both in
terms of revision types and quality. The study took place at an urban university in Southern
Taiwan. Participants were 18 sophomores in the researcher's writing class. The results show that
trained peer review did enhance the quality of students’ revisions. Most of the revisions after peer
8


review training were on global areas such as idea development, unity, and organization. The result
of this study also demonstrated that 77% of the trained peer review feedback was incorporated into
students’ revisions, which constituted 90% of the total revisions. The training in the study did not
take place during the course, but just at the short beginning of the course.
Recently, Pham Vu Phi Ho and Usaha (2015) conducted a study training students to
provide blog-based peer comments on students’ writing papers. The study also aimed at
investigating the extent to which the students incorporated peer comments into their writing
revision. 32 second year students from a University in Ho Chi Minh City participated in the study.
The students learned how to write academic writing, worked in groups to brainstorm ideas, made
outline, and wrote essays, and posted on the blogs seeking for e-peer comments. The results
indicated that though the comments on global areas were greater than those on local areas, the
qualified comments (revision-oriented comments) were not. The total revisions made during epeer comments were greater than the total revision-oriented comments delivered by peers. In

addition, revisions at lower levels such as “word” or “phrase” needed less help from peers, whereas
those at higher levels such as “sentence” or “paragraph” needed more help from peers. The study
failed to compare the effects of lecturer’s e-comments vs. e-peer comments.
Earlier research studies succeeded in training students to provide peer comments to help
student writers improve their writing revision; however, they failed to compare the differences
between lecturer’s and peer comments. Though some research studies investigated the students’
attitudes and preferences towards lecturer and peer comments, they failed to compare the numbers
of comments between lecturer and peers’, the length of the comments, and the effects of lecturer’s
comments on peer comments. In addition, in terms of e-peer comments training, most of the
previous research studies provided short-term training such as face-to-face conference or
classroom demonstration before the actual peer comment activities were conducted. In terms of
long-life learning or long-term memory, length of training was supposed to be more effective.
Therefore, the purpose of the current study was an attempt to search for responses to the following
research questions.

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2.2

RESEARCH QUESTIONS
1.
2.

3.

4.

Are there any differences between lecturer’s and e-peer comments in terms of global
and local areas?

Do the lecturer's illustrated comments affect quality of students' comments? If yes, to
what extent are there differences between lecturer's e-comments and e-peer comments
in term of revision-oriented comments?
Are there any differences of effects between the lecturer's and peer comments on
students' writing revision?
what are the graduate students’ evaluation on the e-comment training and the ecomment activities in the academic writing for graduate students?

2.3 DEFINITIONS OF TERMS USED IN THE PRESENT STUDY
E-peer comments: According to Ware and Warschauer (In press), e-peer comments refer to
the means by which human comments, particularly peer comments can be provided through
technology. In the current study, e-peer comments refer to the comments provided by group
members on the student written papers, using the feature of “New Comment” in the menu of
Microsoft Office.
Lecturer’s e-comments: lecturer’s e-comments refer to the comments provided by the
lecturer using the feature of “New Comment” in the menu of Microsoft Office.
Lecturer’s sample e-comments refer to the lecturer’s e-comments as mentioned above
which were used to illustrate on the projector in the classroom with a purpose to train the
graduate students how to provide qualified comments and how to revise their own writing
papers.
Areas of comments: Liu and Sadler (2003) define areas of comments as the comments
addressing to the writing problems on both Global and local areas.
Global comments: Pham Vu Phi Ho and Usaha (2015) define global comments as the
comments addressing to the content, idea development, rhetoric, and organization of the writing
papers which are the decisive factors to make the writing paper become qualified.
Local comments: Pham Vu Phi Ho and Usaha (2015) define local comments as the
comments relating to the writing errors such as spellings, word choice, grammatical structures…
which do not make changes in meanings.

10

Revision-oriented comments: According to PhamVu Phi Ho (2015), revision-oriented
comments, also known as qualified comments refer to comments that address directly to the
writing problems to trigger revisions.
Non revision-oriented comments refer to the comments that do not trigger and changes.
Those comments like praises or statements that do not request for revision are considered as non
revision-oriented comments.

3
3.1

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
RESEARCH SETTING
The Graduate School of Ho Chi Minh City Open University (HCMC OU) has run the

Master program in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) under the
MOET’s license/approval since 2006. The students who have been taking courses at HCMC OU
have come from different parts of the country. There are two separate training programs for MA
degrees. One is of the National Master Program (MOET’s approval) and the other is a twinning
program between HCMC OU vs. University of Southern Queensland (USQ), Australia. Every
year, the Graduate School recruited about 230 graduate students, about 45 students for Domestic
program and 180 students for the Joint-training program (the first phase of training).
Both MA training programs requires graduate students to hold at least a Bachelor Degree
in TESOL or in relevant English major. They have to take an entrance examination before
admission. The National Master Program requires grad students to complete 50 credit
coursework and a thesis while the twinning program is not thesis-based. The twinning program is
divided into two phases, one (phase 1) is learning from the lecturers at HCMC OU for about six
months, and the other (phase 2) is learning from the teaching staff coming to Vietnam from the
USQ. The students spent most of the weekends to take part in course-works for approximately
one year. Each module required students to participate at least 80% of class meetings, took part

in classroom discussions, activities, and composed assignments or reflective papers for around
2000 words. After they completed their course-works and other requirements, they could come
back to their working place to work and conduct their thesis.

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3.2

PARTICIPANTS
Two intact classes from both programs (National and Twinning program) assigned to the

researcher/lecturer for training were selected for the study. 95 grad students, 45 from the class
Diploma 17A (Dip 17A), and 50 from the TESOL2015 (or TESOL 10) participated in the study.
However, only 36 out of 45 students from the Dip 17A responded to the questionnaire. They
both took the course of Academic Writing for Graduate Students. The Dip 17A class started from
24/5/2015 to 02/8/2015 with 3 credits and the TESOL10 started from 18/10/2015 to 20/12/2015
with 2 credits based on the curriculum of the Graduate School. Most of the instructional models
and training activities were similar (Fig. 1). The class of Dip 17A (with 3 credits) had more time
to review their paragraph and essay writing.
3.3

RESEARCH DESIGN
The current study employed both quantitative and qualitative research. Though two intact

classes from courses of Academic Writing for Graduate Students were selected for quasiexperimental research, no comparison between control and experimental groups was used because
the purpose of this study was to see if the instructional model of trained e-comments was effective.
The most important characteristic of a quasi-experiment study is that it deals with the phenomenon
of cause and effect (Walliman, 2001; Thomas, 2003; Hult, 2006; Charles & Mertler, 2004). In a
quasi-experimental study, research is conducted under the conditions in which it is difficult to

control many of variables and in which subjects cannot be assigned to special groups for the
purposes of the research (Seliger & Shohamy, 2001). Nunan (2001) and Hult (2006) claim that it
is not always feasible to carry out a true experiment for humanities due to the impossibility of
randomly assigning subjects to experimental and control groups and controlling the research
environment. In addition, Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias (1996) and Charles and Mertler
(2004) point out a common problem in social science research that in many cases the researcher
cannot randomly assign individual or other units of analysis to comparison groups, especially in
school settings. Leedy and Ormrod (2005) have also said that in the experimental designs,
researchers emphasized the important of randomness; however, randomness is sometimes not
possible or practical. In most quasi-experimental studies, researchers do not control for all
confounding variables, and so cannot completely rule out some alternative explanations for the
results they obtain (Walliman, 2001; Leedy & Ormrod, 2005). In this case, the current study used
12


kind of content analysis to analyze the data, specifically the lecturer’s and students’ e-comments.
The analysis was based on e-comments collected from the lecturers and peers instead of evaluating
the writing quality. Hence it was rather easier to control variables. Fig. 1 presents the research
design.

• Students' writing
drafts
• E-Peer comments

Pre-treatment

Treatment
• Lecturer's ecomment
• Exposure &
explanation

• Revision
• enhancing ecomment skills

Post-treatment

Fig. 1 Design of the Research
3.4

TRAINING PROCEDURES
The purpose of the course was to enhance graduate students’ writing quality in terms of Academic

writing styles. The students were reviewed several writing genres in both paragraph and essays writings.
Paraphrase and summary writing techniques were introduced. In addition, how to avoid plagiarism was
carefully trained in order to help graduate students keep away from unexpected mistakes in Academic
writing contexts. Different from the research methodology module, the students were trained to understand
how to write each part of a research study. The ultimate purpose was to help students improve their writing
skills when they conducted their writing assignments for some course-work or to write up their research
studies. After learning this course, the grad students gained a broad knowledge of writing skills

such as the organizations of paragraphs and essays, some essential linguistic features for academic
writing, and especially, they learned how to write up a paper for publication for national or
international journals.

13


The students were required to write a paragraph or an essay each week or every other week
based on the content of the lecture deliveries. All writing had to be in academic writing styles. The
writing papers should include citations and references. APA styles were highly recommended.

Students’ papers are highly evaluated based of the informative references that they searched for.
This required students to conduct a lot of reading to obtain much knowledge in this field. In
addition, writing at graduate studies always required students to obtain critical thinking; hence,
most of their writing needed their heuristic skills based on broad reading. A writing paper without
this feature was not highly evaluated. Students’ writing submission was always at the first hour of
the class meeting. Hand-writing was rejected; no late submission was accepted.
Presentations are conducted with group of four or five students. Although the presentations
are kind of group work, the scores will be given to each individual in terms of informative
presentation, good preparation, and delivery techniques. Instead of presenting the topics on the
course-outline, in this course, the lecturer required that each group select a research article for their
presentation. The purpose is to help them get accustomed to the template of international research
papers and to provide you good literature review for their research thesis.
At the end of the course, students were required to conduct a research project or discussion
of literature review relating to experience in their own teaching profession. The students were
expected to write a small-scale research paper for publication on a national or international journal.
In case some students were not lecturers to conduct their experimental research, writing literature
review with in-depth arguments and discussion was also accepted. They had to make sure that they
were able to point out the objectives and argue for their own stance.
Academic writing style was required. Their written papers needed to include the purpose of
the paper, and every paragraph should have a topic sentence and supporting sentences to stay
focused. In each paragraph of the paper, they needed to make sure that they were arguing an issue
(Argumentativeness), or classifying some points of the matter (Classification), or comparing two
points of theories (comparison-contrast), or they wanted to present some causes of a problem
(Cause-effect). Low academic writing styles would lead to low assessments. Grammar errors and
poor sentence structures were also evaluated. They were advised to make use of the Microsoft
Office to help them with those weak points. Broad reading was highly recommended to include
citations and references in their papers. Books or empirical studies relating to their topic area
14

should be advised to review for clarifying the arguments. They were also advised that writing
styles should be simple, apparent, and consistent from the beginning to the end. References and
in-text citations should be in APA styles. They were trained to make use of Microsoft Word 20102013 or later to help with APA fifth edition (sixth edition with Word 2013). This was one training
session of the course. The syllabus for training the two classes was provided in the Appendices.
3.5

WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
During the course, the graduate students were requested to writing 9 different assignments

based on the training syllabus. Most of the assignments were composed outside the classroom as
homework. This aimed to provide lecturer and students spaces to conduct e-comments to help
enhance writing quality. The assignments were presented as follows:
Assignment 1: Select one of the topics below to brainstorm and compose a good paragraph of
120 words:
1. Education system in Vietnam
2. Writing problems
3. Steps to improve writing quality
4. The effects of collaborative writing
Assignment 2: Select one of the following topics to write a paragraph about between 120 - 150
words:
1. A number of students have been truanting regularly. In your opinion, what are the
causes?
2. What are the benefits of applying task-based activities for second language
training?
3. Why do people keep seeking for happiness?
4. Note: You have to use references to support your reasons or ideas; make use of
citations and references in APA styles.
Assignment 3: Write an argument essay from 500 to 600 words using the data you have collected
from the interview. What are the pros and cons of the issue? Make sure that your evidence is strong
15

enough to convince readers. Data used from the interviews can be cited as (personal
communication, year). Other references to support your argument would be included.
Assignment 4: Use one of the journal articles I provided (for presentations) to write a summary
for 120 words. Be sure to include these features in the summary:
 Author and (year of publication)
 Purpose of the study
 Setting and sampling
 Methods/ data collection
 Findings
Assignment 5: Write your own critique paper on the article that you summarized for your last
assignment (200 words for the critiques).
Assignment 6: Administer the questionnaire you have constructed (from 5 to 7 question items) to
about 20 people; then write a data commentary of about 120 to 150 words.
•

Alternative topics can be:

•

Social network affected learning (Facebook, YouTube, etc.)

•

Mobile learning

•

Frequency of using L2 in teaching/learning a foreign language

Assignment 7: Write your research title and compose an introduction to your research between
600 – 900 words. Read as many materials relating to your topic as possible to use citations to
support your ideas/argument for the topic. Don’t for get to include the reasons why you need to
conduct this research and the purpose of your study.
Assignment 8: Compose the review of literature for your final project research. Use materials and
previous research studies to support and provide the rationale for your study. Citations and
references are written in APA styles.
Assignment 9: You plan to present your paper in a conference (the topic might be the one you
interviewed your peers). They ask you to submit the abstract for their consideration.

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•

Work in group of four or five.

•

Write a topic (your intended topic for the final assignment)

•

Brainstorm and write the general background of the topic area.

•

Write a sentence for the research gap.

•

Write the intended sample and setting.

•

Write the method or data collection.

•

Describe the hypothesis.

•

Write the significance/highlight for the study.
Among these 9 assignments provided during the course of Academic writing for graduate

students, only 6 first assignments were collected for analysis. The graduate students were requested
to compose all the first 6 assignments because these could be written for a week. The last three
assignments (7-9) required broad reading and its purpose was to help students compose their final
research project. Therefore, the current study did not intend to take those for data analysis.
3.6

E-COMMENT ACTIVITIES
When discussing the methods of teaching Academic Writing in English, lecturer/peer

comments were not excluded. Previous researchers such as Berg (1999), Min (2005, 2006), Stanley
(2003), Tuzi (2004), and Pham Vu Phi Ho & Usaha (2011 & 2015) have found its benefits when
applying to the writing classrooms. Lecturer/peer comment activities help make students become
more active and responsible for their own learning process in order to help one another improve

their writing products, help lecturers reduce the amount of work when dealing with big-size classes
(Pham Vu Phi Ho, 2015). Therefore, these activities were used in the training courses of this study.
According to Hyland, K. and Hyland, F. (2006), employing peer comments provides student
writers with opportunities to discuss their texts and discover others’ interpretations of them.
Hyland (2002), Liu and Hansen (2005), Nunan (1993), and Storch (2005) agree that lecturer/peer
comments help enhance collaborative learning, help students experience the sense of audience
(Berg, 1999; Tsui & Ng, 2000; Nguyen, 2002), encourage interactions and comments among
learners (Warschauer, 1996; Sullivan and Pratt, 1996; Braine, 1997; Braine, 2001; Abrams, 2001;
Liu and Sadler, 2003; and Yang et al., 2006), affect the writing revisions (Berg, 1999; Liu &
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Sadler, 2003; Rodriguez, 2003; Tuzi, 2004; and Min, 2006); and finally, help students improve not
only draft quality, but also the overall language skills (Sullivan & Pratt, 1996; Berg, 1999; Liu &
Hansen, 2005; Min, 2006; and Yang et al., 2006).
Liu and Hansen (2005) reason that the roles of the peer in the group are important to get the
ball rolling, to maintain the time flow, and to reconcile disputes. If there is no facilitator, there
might be delay in commenting activities. Muncie (2000) argues that peer comments can only be
truly effective in that development when the learners are encouraged and be able to analyze and
evaluate it by themselves. The lecturer has the responsibility to provide a supportive atmosphere
and to provide concrete useful guidelines in the process of peer comments (Lui & Hansen, 2005).
Being aware of this, the lecturer/researcher attempted to find ways to trigger the “ball rolling” by
making students force each other to provide comments faster as mentioned later in this session.
Students were required to work in a group of four or five (randomly selected) during the
writing process. After completing their writing assignment, they needed to share their papers with
their peers to seek for help. Meanwhile, they had to read their peers’ papers and provide comments
to help them correct mistakes and word usages, reorganize the ideas, make it in logical order,
improve their writing quality in terms of unity, coherence, and organization, etc. These activities
aimed at not only helping their peers to enhance their writing, but also helping student-writers
themselves look back their writing for better revision. Each of them needed to read and provide

comments to other three of their group members. Although these were time-consuming activities,
they helped students learn from one another and perfect their writing faster. Peer comments were
much appreciated if they focused more on the content and organization of the essays.
After collecting all the peer comments and revising their papers based on peer comments,
they handed to the lecturer/researcher via email or the website (phamho.com/classes), including
the peer comments and revised version. Then the lecturer selected the first five or six papers to
provide e-comments using the function of Microsoft Word Processor (Menu => Review => New
Comment). Figure 2 presents a sample of e-comments used during the training process, and figure
3 shows one of the peer comments on a group member’s writing 3. More samples of lecturer’s
e-comments are attached in appendices.

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Fig. 2 Lecturer’s e-comments on student’s writing paper.

Fig. 3 Peer comments on an assignment
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At the beginning of each training session, the lecturer showed the e-comments to the
whole class via the projector and explained every comment that he made. The purpose was to use
those comments on 5 or 6 writing papers as samples to train the students’ writing skills as well as
to train them how to provide comments on their peer writing papers. The lecturer also observed
peer comments on each paper to see if peers provided qualified comments or not. In case some
comments provided by peers but led to no revision by the student writers, the lecturer also
mentioned in his e-comments to get the student writer valued their peer’s comments. After each
training session, the lecturer sent back those comments to the whole class so that they could read
to learn from the comments provided by the lecturer. The purpose was that the students has
chances to reflect their own writing from the sample e-comments or learned how to provide

qualified comments on their peers’ papers.
Showing and explaining lecturer’s e-comments was one of the main instructional
activities in the current study when the lecturer had to deal with big-size classes and writing
assignments were provided every week. That was also a purpose of this study when the
researcher/lecturer attempted to investigate if this training model was effective in terms of
training students how to revise their papers and how to provide comments on their peers’ writing
papers.
The purpose of selecting the first five or six earliest papers to provide e-comments was
that each group members need to encourage each other to read and provide comments on their
own papers as soon as possible so that they could have chances to receive e-comments from the
lecturers. That is to say “getting the ball rolling” among group members. Submitted papers
without/not enough e-peer comments were not accepted. Figure 4 presents the instructional
model and activities.

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Activities

•Writing weekly assignments
•Providing peer comments
•Group presentation
•Collaborative writing
•Individual writing

Mode of
Instruction

•Lecturer's e-comments
•Presenting e-comments as sample

•Lectures
•Group discussion
•Modelling

Research Project

•Self-selected topic
•Broad reading
•Academic writing style
•Use Citations & References of APA
styles

Fig. 4 Instructional model and activities
3.7

AREAS OF E-COMMENTS
During the e-comment training, the graduate students were advised to focus more on global

issues (idea, content, and organization) than on local areas (grammar, spellings, vocabulary, and
mechanics). As a matter of fact, many research studies debated about the effectiveness these issues
during lecturer/peer comment activities. Nguyen Thi Kieu Thu (2002) states that getting students
involved in the error correction is an essential part of writing process, and Chandler (2003) reasons
that having the lecturer correct all the grammatical and lexical errors resulted in a significant
improvement in both accuracy and fluency. Padgate (1999) states that if not focusing on forms
during peer comment activities, it might not be powerful enough to result in grammatical
improvement. However, Truscott (1996) reviewed quite a few previous research studies and argues
that grammar correction in L2 writing classes should not be the center of focus because it is
ineffective unhelpful; sometimes it has harmful effects. In addition, Bitchener et al. (2005) found
that L2 writing learners, in the process of learning new linguistic forms, may perform them with
accuracy on one occasion but fail to do so on another. Furthermore, Liu and Hansen (2005) claim

that the most helpful comments for student revision are those that address global issues rather than
local issues. As an expert in this field of training students how to improve their writing based on
comments for revision, the lecturer/researcher strongly advised the students to focus more on the
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global issues when providing comments because this would help the writing paper enhance unity,
logic, and coherence. These factors are very important to help enhance the quality of the writing
paper. However, local issues were not exclusive and considered as secondary concerns during the
e-comment activities.
3.8

CODING SCHEMES
In order to assist the categorizing process, the researcher tried to make definitions and

regulations for each category so that it was easier to code each peer comment and distinguish one
type of comment from the other types. Table 1 presents the coding scheme adopted from Pham
Vu Phi Ho and Nguyen Thi Thuy Duong (2014).
Table 1. Coding scheme
Global Areas
Revisionoriented

Types of

Evaluation

Local Areas

Non revision- Revisionoriented
oriented

Non revisionoriented

Generally
Specifically

Specific
ideas
Particular
word
Clarification
choices,
phrases, or
sentences
Cohesion
Alteration
Suggestion/

Generally

Advice

Specifically

Explanation
Statement
Plagiarism

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Evaluation: If students make their own judgment about other peers’ writing in general or
on a specific point in the writing, that comment will be sorted as general or specific evaluation.
For example, the comment like “Your writing is very well-organized and easy to follow” was
regarded as “general evaluation”. Some comments such as “You have a very clear description of
the class in the picture. Moreover, I like the way that you describe objects with their functions”
were classified as “specific evaluation”. In this study, many of these types of comments were
students’ compliments and therefore did not give any suggestions for writing revision. A few
comments such as: “I think this sentence is not suitable to the picture” or “This point is not
convincing” which pointed out some problems and evaluate a particular weak point in writing may
lead to changes to the student writers’ writing.
Clarification: When the students were unsure about any particular ideas, use of word
choices, phrases, sentences or grammar in their peers’ writing, they gave comments to clarify that
point, which were classified as “clarification type”. In this type of comments, students could raise
some questions related to meaning or coherence of a specific idea or sentence to the topic. Some
common phrases can be found in this type of comment include “what does that mean?”, “How
does it relate to…?”, I don’t quite understand…,
Alteration: When students discovered that their peers made mistakes/errors about
grammar, vocabulary, punctuation, spelling, format…, they could suggest correct replacement.
This means that alteration was used for comments on local areas. For example, instead of using
past tense “collapsed”, a student carelessly wrote “collapses”. In this case, the suggestion for the
correct word was considered belonging to alteration type.
Suggestion/ Advice: When students consider their peers’ ways of writing, using structure
or vocabulary, they may come up with better ideas to make the writing better; they can make
suggestions for another ways of expression. The suggestion can be general or specific. For
example, an original sentence was “Next to the man is a lovely white dog looking at its master”.
Some students suggested that the dog should be personified as a human and “the personal pronoun
“he” should be used in the sentence. Another example is “It is not very interesting. You can write:
There are 3 soldiers in uniform with guns in their hands.” These comments were typical of specific

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suggestion. One example of general suggestion can be “Try to lengthen it. It will be more logical
and smooth”
Sometimes, the alteration type could be confused and overlapped with suggestion type.
However, the researcher decided to distinguish the two types as follow: the alteration type was for
correcting surface mistakes/errors and the peer reviewer did propose the correct substitute.
Suggestion type was to raise awareness of some unconvincing writing points and advised the
writers toward better writing though the current writing was grammatically correct.
Explanation: With this type of comments, the students not only pointed out problems in
writing but also provided reasons or language knowledge about why the writing should be
changed. For example, “we use too for negative thing” can be classified as an explanation.
Explanation is highly valued when giving comments as it may provide students with knowledge
that they haven’t known or at least they can be satisfied about why their writing should be
rewritten.
Plagiarism: It is important to avoid plagiarism in academic writing. “Plagiarism is using
someone else’s works or ideas as if they were you’re your own, and it is a serious offense” (Oshima
& Hogue, 2006, p. 41). Hence, comments related to plagiarism touches one sensitive issue in the
research: copy other’s ideas or work without giving citation or references. Some comments like
“Should give a citation & reference” was arranged to lie into the category of plagiarism.
Statement: Any statements which do not contain the meaning of the six types of comments
above were coded as statement. For example, after commenting on an essay, a peer wrote, “This
is just my opinion, I hope it will help you a lot” or another said, “These are some points I give you.
I hope they help you much.” They were regarded as “statement.” (Pham Vu Phi Ho, 2015)
Global and local areas: Depending on the aspect that a comment mentioned, it can be
arranged into global or local areas.
Global areas refer to feedback about the content idea development, purpose, and
organization of writing. Local areas refer to feedback about mechanics and surface grammatical
mistakes/errors e.g. spelling, capitalization, punctuation, tenses... (Lam, 2010). For examples,

comments like “You should rank the effects in terms of importance. It may make your writing wellorganized.” or “There is no balance between the idea 1 and 2. I mean that you discussed the idea

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