Pre-service Teachers’ Writing Pedagogy in Multilingual Basic Schools (Published)
Writing instruction is among the most intricate dimensions of English language teaching, especially for pre-service teachers negotiating the boundary between theory and practice. This study examines the challenges faced and strategies employed by final-year pre-service teachers teaching English Language Writing in Ghanaian basic schools. Anchored in a pragmatist paradigm and a sequential explanatory design, the study surveyed 212 pre-service teachers (Cronbach’s α = .82), followed by semi-structured interviews. The descriptive analysis of the survey and the thematic analysis of the interviews converge on two principal challenges. Most respondents cited heterogeneous proficiency (84%) and insufficient materials (79%) as persistent constraints. Conversely, task sequencing, mentor feedback, and collaborative writing emerged as consistently effective pedagogical strategies. Framed by Vygotsky’s Socio-Cultural Theory (SCT), the findings show how mediation, scaffolding, and collaborative learning enable interns to translate theoretical knowledge into responsive classroom practice. The study contributes to teacher education literature by extending SCT applications to pre-service teacher preparation in multilingual and resource-variable contexts. Strengthening structured mentorship, embedding differentiated writing instruction in teaching practice expectations, and improving resource provision to consolidate a sustainable and inclusive writing pedagogy during internships are recommended.
Keywords: Feedback, Scaffolding, Writing pedagogy; pre-service teachers, mentorship, multilingual classrooms
Direct Teacher Corrective Feedback in EFL Writing Class at Tran Quoc Tuan University in Vietnam: To What Extent Students’ Writing Performance Affected (Published)
The study is aimed at investigating the influence of using teacher’s direct corrective feedback on second-year cadets’ writing performance in a foreign language writing class. It is an action research, employing interviews, writing analysis and survey as research instruments, which was conducted with 3 English teachers and 16 second-year non-English major students of Tran Quoc Tuan University of 2018/2019 academic year. The findings revealed through writing analysis that, firstly, the overall accuracy score tended to increase in the subsequent texts, which partially supports the conclusion that the use of direct corrective feedback (hereafter, DCF) may help the students enhance their writing accuracy over a period of treatment. Secondly, it could be said that DCF could be advantageous for tense, S-V agreement and spelling, but it brought few benefits to the use of articles in the cadets’ writings. Finally, through the survey and interview, most students responded that they got significant progress in their writing after the teacher’s DCF intervention. In addition, the students believed that teacher’s DCF improved their English competence as well as their writing performance.
Citation: Ky D.V. (2023) Direct Teacher Corrective Feedback in EFL Writing Class at Tran Quoc Tuan University in Vietnam: To What Extent Students’ Writing Performance Affected, International Journal of English Language Teaching, Vol.11, No.1, pp.,41-56
Keywords: Feedback, Writing Performance, direct corrective feedback
Anxiety in Writing Skills: The Voices of EFL University Learners (Published)
This descriptive study explores writing anxiety attributed to the following factors: structuring paragraphs, sentence accuracy, feedback, corrections, grading, and classroom learning environment. The research sample was 327 Saudi female EFL university learners in Madinah, Saudi Arabia, who responded to a 28-closed item questionnaire. The results revealed that the participants were usually anxious about paragraph structuring but sometimes experienced anxiety about constructing proper sentences with correct grammar, vocabulary, and spelling. An unexpected finding was that Saudi female EFL university learners were sometimes anxious about receiving feedback, corrections, and grading in writing tasks. The results also indicate that the classroom learning environment was sometimes a source of anxiety.
Keywords: Classroom Environment, Feedback, sentence accuracy, structuring paragraphs, writing anxiety
Different Comprehension Strategies to Improve Student’s Reading Comprehension (Published)
Comprehension is the ultimate goal of all reading; that is, the ability to understand a text underlies all reading tasks. Thus, main-idea comprehension should be at the core of all reading instruction. In most classes, comprehension is tested as the class reviews post-reading comprehension questions. Instead of testing comprehension, we can help our students by teaching comprehension. Simply put, reading comprehension is the act of understanding what you are reading. While the definition can be simply stated the act is not simple to teach, learn or practice. Reading comprehension is an intentional, active, interactive process that occurs before, during and after a person reads a particular piece of writing. Reading comprehension is one of the pillars of the act of reading. The use of effective comprehension strategies that provide specific instructions for developing and retaining comprehension skills, with intermittent feedback, has been found to improve reading comprehension across all ages.
Keywords: Comprehension, Feedback, Instructions, Interactive, Reading, Teaching