Task-based language teaching and its impact on Vietnamese students’ use of self-regulated learning strategies in a writing classroom

Abstract

Over the past two decades, there has been an increasing emphasis on independent learning and students have been encouraged to take personality for their studies. In that context, self-regulation is seen as a vital ingredient to performance in educational setting ( Zimmerman, 1990, 2000; Wolters and Rosenthal, 2000). How to promote students’ self-regulated learning is a crucial question among educators since SRL does not take place automatically (Winne, 2005) and is not easily induced (Struyven et al., 2006). Therefore, research about the conditions that facilitate SRL attracts greater attention (Richardson, 2001). As such an attempt, the current empirical study investigates the extent to which task-based language teaching (TBLT) can help Vietnamese students increase the use of self-regulated learning strategies in a writing classroom. Sixty-nine students were instructed to write descriptive and argumentative paragraphs under task-based learning condition during a period of ten weeks. Results show that students significantly improved their overall scores of self-regulatory writing strategies, especially their scores of personal self-regulation.