The development of a form-focused web-based instruction to enhance the English grammatical and writing competence of Thai undergraduate sports science students

Abstract

The study objectives were (1) to investigate the needs of Thai undergraduate sports science students and their stakeholders to enhance the students’ English grammatical competence and writing ability, (2) to develop the form-focused web-based instruction, (3) to find out the effects of the form-focused web-based instruction on the sports science students’ English grammatical competence and writing ability, and (4) to investigate the attitudes of sports science students toward the instruction. The study was descriptive and experimental research including three phases: needs analysis, course design, and evaluation of the effectiveness of the form-focused web-based instruction. The study was conducted with 83 undergraduate sports science students at Mahidol University in the 2011 academic year. During the experiment, students were assigned to do grammatical exercises on the web-based course, practice writing on the weblog, and discuss on Facebook regarding their problems in grammar and writing. Based on the gain scores of the pre-test and post-test, grammatical exercises, and writing assignments, the students had improvement in grammatical competence and writing ability. There were statistically significant differences of the mean scores of the pre-test and post-test (t = 6.07, p =.000), weblog writing assignments (F = 10.355, p = .000), and grammatical exercises: cloze tests (F = 33.142, p = .000) and the error recognition tests (F = 52.66, p = .000). The students also had positive attitudes toward the instruction. Therefore, such instruction was worth developing for and implementing with sports science students.