Finding the Nexus between Students’ Profiles and Attitude towards ESP: The Case of Vietnamese Medical Students Purposes (Published)
The aim of this research is to determine the relationship between students’ profile and their attitude in learning English as a foreign language. The respondents were 82 second year undergraduate students studying medicine at Thaibinh University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Vietnam. The research instrument is a Likert questionnaire including two parts: Bio Data and Attitude towards ESP. The study was basically a quantitative research utilizing the descriptive-correlational method and SPSS software to describe and investigate the relationship between students’ select profile variables and their attitude towards English for Specific Purposes (ESP). The findings from this study illustrated that there is a significant relationship between Thaibinh medical students’ attitude towards ESP and their mothers’ education, number of years of studying English, grades in EGP (English for General Purposes) and ESP and native language. Findings also revealed that the profile variables not related to the students’ attitude towards ESP are fathers’ educational attainment and sex.
Keywords: ESP, Medical Student, Relationship, attitude, profile
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DIFFERENT METHODS OF TEACHER CORRECTION FEEDBACK MECHANISMS AND STUDENTS’ WRITING FLUENCY IN BOTSWANA (Published)
This paper uses a predominantly quantitative approach to establish the relationship between error correction feedback mechanisms and students’ ESL writing Fluency (narrative and descriptive) amongst high school students in Botswana. A longitudinal, quasi-experimental design is used, with a control group that received no correction feedback while the experimental groups received direct, coded and uncoded feedback. The study is defined by a hypothesis that there is a relationship between feedback mechanism used and the development of fluency in students’ writing. Students were drawn from two Form 4 classes from one private co-educational secondary school. The Form 4 class was chosen because it was a pre-candidate class and the students were expected to sit for their BGCSE examination the following year in Form 5. There were 28 males and 40 females and their ages ranged between 16 years and 21 years. From the findings, no significant increases in fluency were found between the pretests and posttests. Correction success achieved by the three treatment groups when rewriting texts reflected the explicitness of the feedback, with the direct group highest, followed by the coded and uncoded groups.
Keywords: Coded feedback, Direct feedback, Fluency, Relationship, Students’ Writing, Teacher Error Correction Feedback Mechanisms, Un-coded feedback