Written corrective feedback (WCF) is widely used to point students to the grammatical errors in their written work and help reduce them. This paper reports a quasi-experimental study that compared the effectiveness of direct and indirect teacher WCF in a Thai context. One hundred and twenty Thai students at two public universities in southern Thailand were assigned to write argumentative essays within a treatment period; each treatment had 60 students. The feedback was given by four ESL/EFL lecturers at the two universities. Grammatical aspects focused on were tenses, subject-verb agreement, articles, singular/plural nouns, prepositions and adjectives/adverbs. Means for the number of errors were obtained at three points, namely, pretest, immediate posttest and delayed posttest. The findings revealed that time and WCF type as main effects showed differentiated results on all six grammatical aspects. Interaction effects between time and WCF were found for tenses and subject-verb agreement. For between-subjects effects, indirect WCF was more effective than direct WCF. For within-subjects effects, generally the differences in the mean values were significant between pretest and delayed posttest, but not between pretest and immediate posttest. These findings have implications for writing instruction and research in an ESL/EFL tertiary context.

The research study aims to explore writing strategies used by Thai first to fourth-year university students. Thirty-six (36) students from the Business English program at a government university in Southern Thailand who had experience in English writing, served as the subject of the research. They responded to a questionnaire. The online questionnaire was created by using SurveyCan. The questionnaire focused on students’ English writing experiences through the use of writing strategies. The results revealed that most of the students used both cognitive strategies and metacognitive strategies for the prewriting or planning stage. During the drafting stage, it was found that most of the students used metacognitive strategies in developing their ideas when writing a text. Besides, they used cognitive strategies and socio-affective strategies in engaging their writing tasks, searching for more information from other resources, and asking their peers. In the post-writing stage, most of the students sometimes used cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies, and socio-affective strategies, respectively. The findings of this study suggest that most of the students may not get familiar with learning new things from each other in developing their ideas, using critical thinking, and solving problems in their writing. Overall, they use various strategies in each stage of their writing and they may not be aware of the effectiveness of writing strategies in developing their English writing skills at higher levels.

Language is a very important tool for human communication. To be successful in speaking, people may use both verbal and non-verbal communication. Using effective communication may not be easy for many people. This study examined 40 Thai employees and 17 foreign customers from three hotels and three tour agencies in Trang, Thailand. The data for this study were collected through a questionnaire from 40 Thai employees. 17 foreign customers answered two open-ended questions, and then the interview was asked. The participants answered about problems and solutions in speaking English. The finding of this study showed that most employees and foreign customers had more verbal communication than non-verbal communication. However, they used several solutions to solve those problems based on their perspectives and experiences.