High school teachers’ pedagogical beliefs in English as a foreign language writing instruction

 Truong M. Hoa & Pham V. P. Ho. Journal of Science Ho Chi Minh City Open University, 7(4), 21-33 21 
HIGH SCHOOL TEACHERS’ PEDAGOGICAL BELIEFS IN 
ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE WRITING INSTRUCTION 
TRUONG MINH HOA 
Ho Chi Minh City Open University, Vietnam – ngut_minh_hoa@yahoo.com.vn 
PHAM VU PHI HO 
Van Hien University, Vietnam - phamvuphiho@gmail.com 
(Received: June 30, 2017; Revised: July 22, 2017; Accepted: November 29, 2017) 
ABSTRACT 
Writing in a foreign language is deemed to be the most difficult language skill to learners, especially at high 
school level. Consequently, its teaching has become a challenging task for high school teachers in the Vietnamese 
context. Teacher beliefs related literature indicates that what teachers do in the classroom is directly governed by 
what they think and believe. Thereby, the current study adopted features of a survey research design to examine the 
English as a Foreign Language (EFL) high school teachers’ beliefs about writing and its teaching. 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 of EFL writing instruction of these teachers were elicited through two instruments of 
eighteen–item questionnaires and semi–structured interviews. Then the questionnaires were quantitatively analyzed 
and the interviews were qualitatively analyzed. Results of the study showed that most of the participants held 
different orientations about writing skill, teacher roles and its teaching. The study was closed by a brief conclusion 
of key findings. 
Keywords: EFL Writing Instruction; High School; Teacher Beliefs. 
1. Introduction 
In learning a foreign language, learners 
are subjected to four skills in a natural order 
of acquisition namely listening, speaking, 
reading, and writing. And the last, writing, is 
deemed to be the most difficult language skill 
to be acquired (Mekki, 2012) requiring “the 
mastery of a variety of linguistic, cognitive, 
and sociocultural competencies” (Barkaoui, 
2007). According to Mekki (2012), one of the 
main reasons for difficult acquisition of 
writing skill is that students and teachers still 
believe that students’ good writing ability 
mainly results from their attainments of the 
language and its text forms but ignore specific 
steps and collaborative strategies. It can be 
inferred that in order to master writing skill, 
not only do language learners need linguistic 
knowledge since “with linguistic knowledge 
students often struggle to produce a cohesive 
piece of writing” (Uddin, 2014), but they 
should also grasp social awareness of the 
writing contexts (Khanalizadeh and Allami, 
2012) and cognitive awareness of a specific 
writing process (Hyland, 2003). 
Since the academic year of 2013–2014, 
writing a free paragraph to answer a given 
topic has been called for in the English paper 
of the National GCSE examination in the 
Vietnamese context. Ironically, the results of 
these papers were mainly around between 2.0 
and 3.5 points. Essentially, these unexpected 
scores originate from the fact that a large 
number of high school candidates either did 
not know how to construct the text or skipped 
their writing section, which holds twenty 
percent of the whole English paper 
(TuoitreOnline, 2015). Surprisingly, this 
problem also recurred in the academic year of 
2015–2016. Some students said they found 
writing section really difficult. In addition, 
others admitted that the habit of rote learning 
sample texts given by the teachers makes 
them unable to write well when there are 
22 Truong M. Hoa & Pham V. P. Ho. Journal of Science Ho Chi Minh City Open University, 7(4), 21-33 
some small changes in the topic. In fact, most 
high school students do not have any 
strategies for composing texts independently 
but normally practice writing in a controlled 
way. This tallies with what Khanalizadeh and 
Allami (2012) described about writing 
teaching and learning in Iran, “writing skill is 
often limited to making sentences, and the 
grammatical points of those sentences are the 
most important parts of learning how to 
write”. Moreover, Tran Thi Ly (2007) raised 
her voice that writing skill has been conducted 
in the Vietnamese classrooms as “an 
individual activity with the teacher as the sole 
audience and the students are quite quiet”. 
Such low results of writing section in National 
GCSE examination in recent years have 
proved that writing is a “difficult, 
sophisticated, social activity and an important 
skill for language learners” (Mekki, 2012). 
To help learners develop such a 
sophisticated skill like writing, it is obvious 
that “teachers are one of the key factors in 
delivering instruction that leads to the 
development of competent literacy learners, 
[...] to be pivotal in influencing students’ 
literacy achievement” (Kraayenoord, Miller, 
Moni and Jobling, 2009). In other words, 
teachers’ tutorial may have explicit effects on 
writing performance of their students (Nguyen 
Ho Hoang Thuy, 2009). As teachers play a 
critical role in developing learners’ writing 
performance, their pedagogical beliefs have 
also become a key issue in education since 
“what they believe as well as what they do not 
believe have powerful influence on their 
classroom behaviors” (Le Van Canh, 2011). 
This may originate from the view that 
“teachers are active, thinking decision–makers 
who make instructional choices by drawing on 
complex practically–oriented, personalized, 
and context–sensitive networks of knowledge, 
thoughts, and beliefs” (Borg, 2003). 
Therefore, Richards, Gallo and Renandya 
(2001) posit that “in order to understand how 
teachers approach their work, it is necessary 
to understand the beliefs and principles they 
operate from”. 
In the field of writing instruction, 
researcher ... 14 
The teacher should provide corrective feedback on students’ 
language use (e.g. vocabulary, grammar, mechanics). 
76 4.03 .84 
15 
The teacher should provide corrective feedback on students’ 
idea development (e.g. coherent and cohesion). 
76 3.45 .86 
16 
The teacher should provide corrective feedback on students’ 
both language use and idea development. 
76 4.34 .76 
Valid N 
(Listwise) 
 76 
As a post-writing step, teachers’ 
correction of students’ written work is an 
indispensable component of teaching process, 
contributing to students’ writing development. 
Two methods of providing corrective 
feedback (Fathman and Walley, 1990, in 
Zaman and Azad, 2012) include (1) one 
method focusing on the form or language 
accuracy; (2) and the other emphasizing on 
the content, which is primarily developed 
through cognitive meaning–making process. 
The above table clearly shows that most of the 
participants strongly believed that providing 
corrective feedback on both language use and 
idea development is the best way (Item 16; 
M= 4.34; SD= .76) to help enhance students’ 
writing ability. Qualitatively, all the five 
interviewees totally agreed that corrective 
feedback has a good effect on students’ 
writing overall quality. For instance, teacher C 
and teacher E precisely expressed that 
According to my personal view, by 
any degree, teachers should correct 
their students’ writing in term of 
overall quality I mean form and 
content. Thus, students are able to 
develop their writing better. 
Although I have no much time, when 
giving corrective feedback to my 
students’ writing, I usually 
concentrate on vocabulary, 
grammar, punctuation, and even 
idea development. 
(Teacher C) 
I consider that in order to help 
our students improve their writing 
better, we should give comments on 
overall quality of their writing such 
as correct grammar, correct 
spelling, suitable punctuation, 
clarity and coherence as well. 
 (Teacher E) 
The table above also reveals that the 
participating teachers preferred providing 
corrective feedback on students’ language use 
(M= 4.03; SD= .84) to their idea development 
(M= 3.45; SD= .86). It seems that the 
teachers, to some extent, still favored form–
based orientation rather than meaning–making 
process–based one in providing written 
feedback. Nevertheless, the results also show 
teachers’ positive belief in a combination of 
both form–based and meaning–making 
process–based orientations in providing 
corrective feedback. This shows how 
important teachers’ corrective feedback is to 
the overall quality of students’ writing 
because writing ability not only refers to 
accurate language use but also fluent idea 
development. In other words, teachers should 
focus on both sentential and textual levels 
whencorrecting students’ writing. 
 Truong M. Hoa & Pham V. P. Ho. Journal of Science Ho Chi Minh City Open University, 7(4), 21-33 31 
Table 7 
Beliefs about the encouragement of students’ writing practice 
Item Students’ extensive writing N M SD 
17 
The teacher only need to have students to complete writing 
tasks exposed in the textbooks. 
76 3.82 .69 
18 
The teacher should create a favorable environment for students 
to write a lot. 
76 4.49 .77 
Valid N 
(Listwise) 
 76 
“Practice makes perfect” is a theme that 
teachers should observe to give their high 
school students more chances to practice 
writing. According to Herder and King (2012, 
cited in Pham, Vu Phi Ho, 2013), just inside-
the-classroom activities are not enough for 
students to practice and improve their writing. 
Thus, Uddin (2014) requests students should 
be asked to join out–of–class writing activities 
more as all the steps of writing process could 
not be fully accomplished within classrooms. 
Positively, Table 7 reveals that the 
participants widely agreed that teachers 
should create more favorable environments 
for students to practice writing (Item 18; M= 
4.49; SD= .77) rather than letting them do 
controlled practices in the textbooks (Item 17; 
M= 3.82; SD= .69). By this way, students 
could manipulate various stages of the writing 
process such as idea brainstorming, idea 
organizing, and appropriate linguistic 
selecting by themselves. Parallel with this 
quantitative finding, all the five interviewees 
also agreed that it is necessary to offer 
students more writing practice; typically, 
“the more my students practice, the more 
their writing skill is improved” (Teacher B). 
In other words, it is even better to assign 
homework on similar topic and text types for 
students because “practice makes perfect”. 
Through homework writing assignments, the 
cognitive processes can be done in a more 
comfortable way because the stages of the 
writing process could not be fully completed 
in an environment with temporal limit and 
rigid curriculum as in the classroom. 
I find it crucial for language 
teachers to assign their students 
some topics to write at home. You 
know, if writing at home, students 
will become more comfortable 
without time pressure. Secondly, 
when writing at home, these 
students will have much time to 
accomplish steps of writing process 
such as collecting ideas, outlining 
them, editing spelling, grammatical 
mistakes, except for cases that they 
copy the sample texts down from 
online resources. 
(Teacher A) 
4. Conclusion 
4.1. Teachers’ beliefs about the nature 
of writing in the high school context 
Unsurprisingly, the teachers of the eight 
selected high schools strongly believed that 
language accuracy and text structure are the 
main concerns of writing. However, it seems 
most surprising that many of them also 
positively admitted the functional social–
based aspect of writing, which deals with the 
target audience, communicative purposes and 
situational context of writing. In addition, 
some teachers somehow believed that writing 
is best acquired through meaning–making 
process as well as through interactions among 
students. In short, these high school teachers’ 
beliefs about nature of writing were quite 
multiple. Accordingly, they perceived writing 
skill at high school level is not only restricted 
32 Truong M. Hoa & Pham V. P. Ho. Journal of Science Ho Chi Minh City Open University, 7(4), 21-33 
by separate language and text forms but also 
summons students much cognitive process 
and functional awareness and collaboration. 
This tallies with previous studies on the nature 
of writing by Schmitt (2010), Mekki (2012), 
Khanalizadeh and Allami (2012), and Uddin 
(2014). 
4.2. Teachers’ beliefs about teacher 
roles in writing classrooms 
Most of the participants agreed that 
language teachers must be a direct knowledge 
transmitter to give learners some input before 
asking them to write instead of letting them 
totally relying on the teacher as the main 
facilitator in the writing classrooms. This is a 
good way to help students write better. A 
combination and flexibility of the above 
teacher roles were highly appreciated by a 
large number of the participating teachers. 
4.3. Teachers’ beliefs about teaching act 
With respect to instructional materials, the 
teachers highly appreciated that employing 
authentic supplementary materials along with 
the prescribed textbooks is necessary because 
they considerably contribute to developing 
students’ awareness of social contexts and 
functions of different writing text types. 
Regarding instructional activities, the 
selected participants strongly believed that 
form–based orientation to teaching writing 
should be used by studying model texts on the 
basis of linguistic features and genre 
schematic structures before having students 
write. Noticeably, functional social–based 
orientation to teaching writing was also highly 
favored by the teachers as a necessity to raise 
students’ awareness of social functions and 
purposes of writing. Besides, the teachers 
agreed, to some extent, that collaborative 
activities such as pairs/groups (interactive 
social–based orientation) or instruction on 
composing a text independently (cognitive 
process–based orientation) should be often 
held in writing classes. 
As for corrective feedback, many strongly 
believed that providing feedback on the 
overall quality of students’ writing is the best 
way to help improve their writing skill. In 
terms of each separate aspect, the study found 
that language accuracy surpasses idea fluency. 
For extensive writing practice of students, 
most participants strongly applauded that 
practicing writing on the same topics and text 
types outside the classroom is an ideal way for 
teaching writing based on the motto “practice 
makes perfect”. Thus, writing steps can be 
practiced in a more comfortable way with no 
time pressure 
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