PROJECT-BASED HOMEWORK HELPS TO IMPROVE PARAGRAPH WRITING SKILLS OF ENGLISH-MAJOR STUDENTS AT NHA TRANG UNIVERSITY

Abstract

A majority of freshmen of English-major students of the 60th course of Nha Trang University were afraid of writing skills because they were lack of vocabulary, ideas, social knowledge and made a lot of grammar mistakes. The purpose of this paper is to find out if doing a project of a small newspaper could improve paragraph writing skills compared with individual writing homework. The objects were 32 students of the experiment class (class 60NNA-5) and 32 students of the traditional class (class 60NNA-6) who studied Writing 2, writing academic paragraphs. Both qualitative methods (interviews) and quantitative methods (pre-test, online survey and posttest) were utilized in this paper. Research results showed that doing a project helped to improve 20% writing skills of English-major students, group work skills, vocabulary and grammar. Besides, students developed skills of time management and designing small paper.