PERCEPTIONS AND PRACTICES OF SECONDARY ENGLISH TEACHERS ON TEACHING WRITING SKILLS: A NARRATIVE INQUIRY

Abstract

Writing is one of the productive skills of language teaching and learning. It is essential in every aspect of one’s life including students and teachers. We, teachers, believe that writing is one of the wearisome tasks and thus know the significance of teaching writing skills effectively to our students. However, despite all the efforts that we teachers are making every day, students in public schools are not satisfactorily developing their writing skills. Thus, this study was intended to explore perceptions and practices of secondary English teachers on teaching writing skills in public schools. At first, it aimed at exploring how English language teachers understand teaching writing skills. In the second place, it attempted to observe the teachers’ practices of teaching writing skills in the classroom context. The study was qualitative. So, I purposively selected four in-service English language teachers of four different public schools for the study. Hence, depending on the nature and demand of my research, I conducted unstructured or in-depth interview sessions and classroom observations for collecting information. The information then was interpreted, analyzed, and discussed narratively. The key insights this study drew, are that the teachers have a positive understanding of the strategies of teaching writing skills such as parallel writing, guided writing, free writing, process approach to writing, and genre approach to writing in their classroom teaching. However, teachers’ writing classes are not satisfactory in practice. They seem to be aware of the significance of teaching writing skills in the ELT classroom and their roles to make it effective and receptive to students. Practically, teachers lack performance. The study also identified factors affecting teaching and learning writing skills such as teachers as non-writers, students’ low motivation and varied linguistic backgrounds, classroom space, students’ size, and time constraints. In conclusion, teachers perceive that they teach writing skills to their students effectively using various strategies of writing in their classrooms. In addition, they believe that their classes are evidence-based featuring: presentation, interaction, collaboration, feedback, and outcome-based. However, I found their writing classes partially evidence-based. However, the observation show that teachers ineffectively make use of writing strategies in their classroom teaching. In this regard, the Socio cultural perspective suggests that learners learn from more knowledgeable others through interaction and collaboration in the classroom. Teachers should be encouraged, motivated, and supported to practice what they perceive of teaching writing to develop students’ writing competency at the secondary level in public schools