Abstract
The current study adopted features of a survey research design to examine the EFL high school teachers’ beliefs about writing and its teaching, their actual classroom practices, and the interplays between their beliefs and practices in the realm of EFL writing instruction. A sample of seventy-six EFL teachers from the eight selected high schools situated in Ho Chi Minh City was recruited for the current survey. The beliefs and practices of EFL writing instruction of these studied teachers were elicited through a thirty-nine-item questionnaire, which was qualitatively analyzed by SPSS 20.0. The study results showed that most of the participants held different views/orientations about writing skills and teaching writing, consisting of form-based, cognitive process-based, functional social-based, and interactive social-based views; nevertheless, the form-based orientation was still most dominant in their beliefs. On the contrary, in practice, most high school teachers followed the product approach, which underlies form-based orientation in lieu of different approaches, explicitly interpreting the writing section’s low results in the Vietnamese National GCSE examination in recent years.
Highlights
Since the academic year of 2013–2014, writing a paragraph to respond to a given topic has been required in the English paper of the Vietnamese National GCSE (GeneralCertificate for Secondary Education) Examination in the Vietnamese context
Nguyen [53] claims that the textbook series and ELT curricula for three-grade high school level mandated by Vietnamese MOET equalize the focus and time allocation of all four language skills, which look more communicative than the old series focusing almost on reading and grammar
Many of the high school teachers in this study revealed that they usually responded to their students’ writing in terms of overall quality (Item 36, M = 3.79, standard deviation (SD) = 0.943); language accuracy was still prioritized above idea fluency so far (Mlanguage accuracy = 3.92; Midea fluency = 3.25) in practice
Summary
Since the academic year of 2013–2014, writing a paragraph to respond to a given topic has been required in the English paper of the Vietnamese National GCSE Tran [2], Duong [3], and Nguyen [4] described that writing skills had been conducted in the solid Vietnamese classrooms where students are automatically attributed to passive receivers of language knowledge rather than language construction while the teachers tend to be powerful centers Such unsatisfactory outputs of the writing section in the National GCSE examination in consecutive recent years evinced that writing is a difficult, sophisticated, social activity and an important skill for language learners [5,6,7], necessitating “the mastery of a variety of linguistic, cognitive, and sociocultural competencies” [8], This necessity derives from the fact that “teachers are one of the key factors in delivering instruction that leads to the development of competent literacy learners” [13], (p. 23)
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