2 MINUTES PRESENTATION OF PH.

D HO
FINDINGS
The findings would be discussed according to three research questions for this study.
Research Question One: What types of comments (evaluation, clarification, alteration,
suggestion/advice,
explanation, and conformation, and statement) are most frequently produced by the students during the
peer response activities?

Research Question Two: Do the comments affect the students writing quality?
As described in the rating procedures, two trained inter-raters independently rated students essays

blindly. The inter-rater correlation was significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed) making the inter-rater
reliability of the first drafts 0.73. Also, the correlation of drafts 3 was significant at the 0.01 level (2tailed) with a reliability of inter-raters at 0.86. Discrepancies were discussed between the two inter-raters
for the first draft because there were no discrepancies higher than 1 point, the researcher did not serve as
the third rater.
The mean score of the 12 first drafts (pretest) was 5.91 and the third drafts (posttest) was 7.21 (table 7).
No essay scored was less than 5 on the 10-point scale. Matched Paired test showed that the improvement
in mean scores of the pretest and posttest was statistical significant (P < 0.01). The findings indicated that
the peer response via the blogs helped student writers enhance their writing quality through their revisions
after receiving comments.

Research Question Three: What attitudes did students express on the use of blog-based peer response?
The attitudes of students on blog-based peer response were described qualitatively based on the semistructured interviews (see Appendix D) after the training and the writing journals after the revisions. The
researcher transcribed the interviews from tape recorders and then translated the interview transcripts and
the writing journals into English. Additionally, the researcher asked two other Vietnamese, one has
attended the PhD and the other attended the MA program, to do the back translation after the texts were
categorized for verification of the translation.
Most students expressed positive attitudes toward applying blogs to the peer response activities though
some of them had some initial difficulties with the technology. Time saving and conveniences of blogbased peer response were also reported.