PROJECT-BASED LEARNING AND COLOURING SENTENCES HELP TO IMPROVE WRITING PARAGRAPH SKILLS OF ENGLISH-MAJOR STUDENTS OF NHA TRANG UNIVERSITY

Abstract

Freshmen of English-major students are usually afraid of writing skills compared with other skills because of limited vocabulary, limited social knowledge and unconscious grammar mistakes. The purpose of this paper is to find out if doing a project of writing paragraphs and colouring sentences could improve writing paragraphs skills of the students. The subjects were 37 students of experiment class (class 63NNA-7) and 37 students of traditional class (class 63NNA-6) who studied writing paragraphs and did their homework in two different ways. An online survey was designed and sent to 34 students of experiment class, and then randomly, 10 students were interviewed to know what benefits and difficulties they had while doing writing project of a small newspaper. A comparison between results of the final exam of Writing 2 (Writing paragraphs) of the two classes was carried out to test whether doing writing project could help the students to improve their writing skills. Research results shows that the project-based learning improved students’ writing skills and their awareness of writing paragraphs. This research also puts forward to some suggestions to apply projects in teaching writing skills.