Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION

I. Rationale for the study

Vietnam has recently joined the World Trade Organization and has a lot of good chances to develop its own economy by working and commencing with international companies and organizations. English, as a result, becomes an indispensable tool in establishing and improving foreign interactions and relationships. A number of programs have been introduced by the Ministry of Education and Training to address this situation. At the moment new English textbook, say, has been applied widespread for the 10^th students. Such program places emphasis on the integrated teaching method, which states that the languages consist of four language skills as listening, speaking, reading, and writing and two language elements: vocabulary and grammar. Out of these four language skills, writing is considered as an essential skill in order for students to achieve linguistic competences. However, this raises issues over how to encourage students to generate ideas due to teachers paying more attention students to write correctly and grammatical rules, leading to teachers ignoring the value of talk and collaboration in the classrooms. Research shows that rather than creating and writing their own points of view, high school students are sticking to the fixed ideas given in either the textbook or by the teachers themselves. This leads to students adopting passive habits towards writing and underdeveloped skills such as not knowing how and where to find relevant information and evidence in preparation before a writing task.

Among a number of genres introduced for the 10th form students, narrative writing is chosen as a part of the study for some of the following reasons:

First of all, narrative writing is closely related to life. Narration is, simply put, the art of "telling back" what has been learned. The art of narration begins early, before a child has learned to read. Even a preschool child can "tell back" the favorite stories read over and over by parents. As a result, students are willing to deal with what is considered as more familiar to them than other genres.

For such the close-to-life nature, narrative writing, therefore, is not only important to the real life but also to the academic achievement. Students need to know how to retell and write about what they have experienced as well as known before as a means of giving and exchanging information in the simple way of writing.

Last but not least, such the genres as discursive essays and narrative, may lend themselves to process-driven approaches, which focus on students' ideas. Narrative activities are suited to brainstorming and discussing ideas in groups, and the collaborative writing and exchanging of texts help the students to direct their writing to their reader, therefore making a more successful text.

For the above-mentioned reasons, the aim behind this thesis is to focus on developing a variety of in-class pre-writing activities, in order to encourage students to generate ideas, specifically in narrative writing. Particular reference will be made to the 10^th form students and the teachers in Le Quy Don high school who have taken part in the research.

II. Background of the study

In researching this study a variety of sources pointed to a wide range of theories and techniques towards pre-writing. Furthermore the literature indicates how essential it is for students to generate their own ideas for writing activities. In saying this it seems high school teachers actually limit their students to completing the somewhat unimaginative activities set out in their textbooks. Moreover, up till now very little research has been conducted on the issue. One notable piece of research was done by Nguyen Thi Thanh Nga from Hanoi National University of Foreign Languages who did a research thesis on designing in-class prewriting activities for the piloted English 11 in order to motivate 11^th form pupils to write. Due to this apparent lack of research, the purpose of this study is to discover what the pre-writing activities for narratives were used in the new English textbook towards 10^th form student’s learning, form then on the researcher would like to suggest some more of pre-writing activities aiming at varying the pre-writing activities, lessening students from the textbook designed.

III. Aims of the study

The primary aim of the research is

- To study what kinds of pre-writing activities used by the teachers in Le Quy Don high school.

- To investigate the real students’ problems with the writing narratives.

- To discover what kind of pre-writing activities that the students and teachers would like to apply to exploit the writing narrative tasks.

- To suggest some more of pre-writing activities to free students of the natural science major from the activities designed by the textbook, which are used in in-class prewriting activities against the new English textbook which could subsequently help students generate ideas and improve their narrative writing.

IV. Scope of the study

Pre-writing is considered to be apart from the writing task and therefore is still researched separately. Consequently, this thesis concentrates mainly on designing more pre-writing activities in the narrative writing for the 10^th form students in Le Quy Don high school.

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