Nowadays, English is considered to be one of the key factors that help our country make faster progress on the way of industrialization and modernization. Therefore, the demand to use English fluently as well as to master the four basic skills is becoming essential among all students in general and students at Hanoi University of Industry in particular. Of the four skills, writing seems to be the most difficult but really important because it is especially necessary for them to acquire ESP lessons in their last term. Therefore, helping students enhance their writing skills is one of the teachers’ responsibilities. This can be done in a number of ways as Skroll (2003, p115) notes, “Second language writers often benefit most and make most progress when teachers contribute to this goal through a variety of intervention strategies available in classroom settings”. One of these intervention strategies is students’ peer written feedback in writing.
It is obvious that one of the most meaningful and important methods of teaching writing is the use of students’ peer written feedback. In this way, students write the first draft and exchange it with their peers. Then, they read each other’s paper and provide feedback, usually based on the checklist given by the teacher. The checklist focuses on three main areas of the writing: organization, grammar and vocabulary.
The use of peer feedback especially peer written feedback in writing classrooms has been generally supported in the literature as a potentially valuable aid for its social cognitive, affective and methodological benefits (see, Mendonca and Johnson (1994), Villamil and De Guerreco (1996), Jacobs (1998), Brinton (1983). They all believe that peer feedback is very important and has great influence on the success of teaching and learning writing. Keh (1990) states that Peer feedback is essential to the teaching and learning writing as peer readers can provide useful feedback so that peer writers can and do revise effectively on the basis of comments from peer readers. Besides, it is found that when students become critical readers of others’ writings, they will be more critical readers and revisers of their own writings (Rollinson, 2005). These are the main reasons why a lot of teachers have chosen to use peer written feedback in the writing classroom. However, using peer written feedback in writing is not easy as it takes the teachers a lot of time and effort to teach writing skills.
Recently, every school and university in Vietnam has tried to apply the latest methodology in teaching language skills in general and in teaching writing skills in particular in order to make language teaching and learning as effective as possible. Hanoi University of Industry is certainly not an exception. Founded in 2006, HaUI has different training programmes. Since its establishment, the university has paid great attention to English as one of the main subjects so that students after graduating should be able to use English confidently in their jobs and read documents written in English in their majors. Therefore, all students at HaUI study English for five terms. During these terms, they learn and practice the four basic skills and some ESP lessons. The textbooks such as International express – Elementary (Keith Harding and Liz Taylor, 2005), International express – Pre-intermediate (Keith Harding and Liz Taylor, 2005) and International Express – Intermediate (Keith Harding and Liz Taylor, 2005) are chosen as the materials at HaUI. The students share the same English course for the first four terms (each term includes 120 periods, 45minutes/period) and some ESP for the last term. In the first four terms, students learn different skills, which are integrated in a lesson as organized in the textbooks. However, writing skills are especially necessary for them.