INTRODUCTION 1. RATIONALE Nowadays English has become an international language because it is widely used in many parts of the world. In the tendency of integration of the global economy English is one of the effective communicative tools for everybody. The role of English is considered to be very important in the fields of economics, politics, science, culture and education. Especially, Vietnam’s official membership of WTO on 7th November 2006 opened a new door for integrating into the world economy, and more and more people want to learn English for communicating with foreign partners, tourism, study tours, etc. Since the Communicative Language Teaching was applied widely, groupwork has had its actual and important roles in helping students to practice their four language skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing) in integration. When teaching writing essays to the third-year Major English College students at Hong Duc University I found out that in practice writing lessons very few students took part in groupwork actively. I saw that students sat in groups saying nothing or very little mainly in their mother tongue or having private talks. When they were encouraged to work in groups they reluctantly spoke. I decided to carry out the action research to find out the causes of students' inactive participation in groupwork. Based on the results of this action research, some changes and improvements could be applied in my lessons, and some appropriate strategies needed to be designed to enable all group members to discuss actively in groups. I hoped the results of my study would be shared with any colleagues who had the same problem or anyone who was interested in this study. Luận văn chia làm 3 chương, dài 47 trang
