It's been a while...

I know it has been awhile since the last time I put up an entry in this blog. Frankly speaking, I have (almost) forgotten about this blog. And this blog was created for the purpose of my M.Ed subject, i.e. Introduction to Educational Research (or something like that). Hence, right after the end of that semester, this blog has been forgotten.

So I came across this blog when I was bored at my mum's place over the Hari Raya break. So I googled myself (yeah, like I don't have anything better) and I found this long-forgotten blog. I am still in the break but I was thinking, I should do this blog because I can see my thoughts flow from all the readings.

Since the last entry, there were so much had happened. I am no more in Pekan, but now back to my hometown, Bentong. It's been a year now since I am back. About my master degree, I am technically done, if and only if, this thesis is not part of the degree. And I have been assigned to a supervisor, based on my second proposal.

Now, talking about the proposal, or proposals to be exact, I have changed the study like millions of times so to speak. But what have came up, or rather written down, are three. As you may have read, my initial proposed study was on MBMMBI. I scrapped that out at the end of 2010 because frankly speaking, who'd want me to come into their classroom and observe? So I decidedly to change to "Implementing Project-based Instruction in ESL Classroom". God, I think I spent like two years on this alone. I wrote the proposal in between marking the SPM papers and my Bali trip back in 2010 (the trip was a disaster- went with a drama queen), and continued with it until last year. I even pilot studied it- and as expected, it is just almost impossible to be done in school.

So after thinking about it over and again, I went through all my assignments and decided to just replicate a study. So I took a study done by Prof. Icy Lee of HK University. Actually, I have been dwelling with this like a year now, but come to nothingness. Until recently when I started to really think about it really, really hard. It was because my supervisor seems doesn't like the idea much. She asked lotsa questions that I just wanna give up.

So what have I thought? I wanna replicate the study "Error Correction in the L2 Writing Classroom: What Do Students Think?", but with different respondent. Yes, many say that by switching to Malaysian context, I'd get a whole new different set of result, but it seems very much difficult to state that in the Statement of Problem section. Hence, I have decided to change the study to "Gifted Students Reaction Towards Teachers' Feedback on ESL Writing."

Since I have the access to these so-called gifted students, I think I will be able to get more authentic result, that hopefully, will add to the knowledge of TESL. At the moment now I am still reading (yes, it seems endless) on the topic and since I have decided on gifted students as my respondents, I now need to read on them. So far, I think I am on the right direction.

For the purpose of this blog, my next entry will give the definitions of key terms as well as discussion on the original paper by Prof Icy Lee. From there I hope to give a more structured entries which covers the main topic (students reactions on teacher feedback) and the respondents (gifted students).

I hope, I really, really hope that I can get this done and over by November. For the initial study of the same topic, I have actually done the survey on two schools, namely SBP Integrasi Tun Abdul Razak (my previous school) and MRSM Tun Abdul Razak, Pekan. I have also done the same survey on my students here in SMA Persekutuan Bentong (SUPERB - I gave the acronym :-) ). So now I have more than 300 respondents. Hope that will be sufficient.

Next entry- detailed proposal of the current study.