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A Study of Senior High School English Teachers¡¦ Practices and Beliefs about Writing Instruction

According to Li¡¦s (1992) study, the majority of high school students in Taiwan consider English writing their most taxing subject. After ten years, it seems still a difficult task for most of them, which is shown by the results from CEEC in 2001¡Xthe percentage of examinees who have scored higher than 12 points in writing is below 8%. This undesirable fact causes trouble and frustration not only to students but also to teachers. After a literature review of three dimensions¡Xresearch on English composition, empirical studies in Taiwan, and English teachers¡¦ beliefs and their pedagogical practices, the researcher adopted a qualitative methodology to do the research. The methodology is composed of an interview and a questionnaire.
In this study, it is concluded that writing teachers¡¦ prior learning experiences had an influence on their current teaching practices. What¡¦s more, as for the explanation of why writing instructors have adopted these different methods, there are many possible reasons to give, such as time limit, students¡¦ numbers or a test-oriented trend in education. Teachers¡¦ beliefs and practices may also differ significantly due to their students¡¦ different backgrounds and needs. Moreover, the difficulties that teachers face are indeed serious problems the authorities concerned have to fix and some relevant suggestions should be proposed. Last but not least, the results of this study have shown some of teachers¡¦ beliefs about their writing instruction, including the opinions on principles of compiling writing materials and the teaching points they stress. Therefore, the relevant authorities and other researchers can refer to these results in this study when they implement language education reforms or conduct related studies. It is hoped that such a study would help people have a thorough comprehension of senior high school writing instructors¡¦ beliefs and draw much more attention to the importance of their needs, and difficulties.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0711105-092754
Date11 July 2005
CreatorsHsu, Jia-yu
ContributorsTai-hsiung Yang, Da-fu Huang, Hwi-hwa Lee
PublisherNSYSU
Source SetsNSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0711105-092754
Rightswithheld, Copyright information available at source archive

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