Abstract

This study explored Vietnamese EFL teachers’ paragraph writing instruction and the challenges students encountered in learning to write English paragraphs. The data were collected at five high schools in central Vietnam via questionnaires, interviews and classroom observations. In particular, 40 EFL high school teachers completed a questionnaire and five classroom observations were additionally made to five out of these questionnaire respondents to understand their actual classroom practices. The teachers were further interviewed at the post-teaching stage. In addition, 150 students from the participating high schools were surveyed for the difficulties they had with paragraph writing and five of them were interviewed for follow-up insights. The results uncovered that teachers reported a central focus on both global and local dimensions of a paragraph. In their teaching practices, they tended to employ a product-based rather than process-based approach by guiding students through the final end product of the written paragraph, followed by whole-class feedback. Time constraint and students’ low motivation to write and revise were reported as main barriers to the classroom adoption of a process approach. In students’ perceptions, starting a paragraph, generating and organizing ideas, and using appropriate sentence structures and lexical items were among the common challenges. The study suggests important implications for paragraph writing instruction and for future research.

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