Effects of Self-Assessment on Writing of Thai EFL Students in Different Groups of Learning Styles
Year: 2017
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Effective self-assessment will help language learners to objectively assess and evaluate their writing skills efficiently [1,2].It is also realized that the effectiveness of self-assessment of learners is affected by their learning styles [3].As a result, the purposes of this research were: (1) to explore the preferred learning styles of Thai EFL students, (2) to examine the effects of self-assessment on writing skills of Thai EFL students in different groups of learning styles, and (3) to examine the attitudes of Thai EFL students in different groups of learning styles towards the use of self-assessment in writing.The participants of this study were 68 second year English major students who enrolled in 411232 English Essay Writing course in the second semester of the academic year 2016 at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Khon Kaen University.The research instruments consisted of 1) Felder and Soloman's (1991) Index of Learning Styles questionnaire, 2) the essay writing pretest and posttest, 3) the self-assessment checklist, 4) the attitude questionnaire, and 5) the interview.SPSS program was used to figure out the percentage, mean, standard deviation, and t-test.Content analysis was also employed to analyze the interview.The findings from Index of Learning Styles questionnaire revealed that most of students were Visual learners, followed by Global, Sensing, Active, Reflective, Intuitive, Sequential, and Verbal learners respectively.After participating in self-assessment training, all groups of students with different learning styles could get the posttest score higher than pretest.A group of students who can learn best with Reflective learning styles could get the highest different mean scores between the essay writing posttest, followed by the group of students with Global, Visual, Intuitive, Sensing, Verbal, Active, and Sequential learning styles respectively.Most of students found the self-assessment checklist useful for revising their written work which helps them to point out the strengths and the weaknesses of their own writing.They pointed out that the most useful group of items of the self-assessment checklist is organization (introduction, body, conclusion) while the most difficult group of items to self-assess is grammar and mechanics.However, comparing with self-assessment, most of students were more comfortable about getting feedback from the teacher.As a result, they suggested that self-assessment should be combined with teacher feedback.
Authors: Jakkrapong Thongpai, Poranee Deerajviset
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2905690296