Teachers’ Perceptions of Developing Writing Skills in the EFL Classroom

Abstract

Despite the fact that English is taught as a foreign language in schools from an early age, students often face difficulties when it comes to the development of their writing skills. This paper aims at exploring teachers’ perceptions regarding the development of the writing skills of elementary and secondary school EFL learners. Altogether, 85 Kosovar teachers were included in the survey. Even though the teachers believe that writing is important, they do not give the same emphasis to developing it as to other skills. According to their responses, some common difficulties learners experience while writing are a lack of vocabulary, writing anxiety, lack of ideas, mother tongue interference, grammar difficulties, weak structure organization and poor spelling. The teachers suggest that these difficulties might stem from a lack of reading and writing practice, ineffective teaching methods and low motivation for writing. We recommend various actions, such as teacher development courses to help them acquire more effective strategies of teaching writing, increased writing practice in the classroom, and the use of different learning strategies to meet all students’ needs.

Exploring EFL Teachers’ Perspectives on Sources of Challenges in Writing Classroom

“…Generally, these results have been supported by Alshammari (2020) and Nasser (2016), who argued that Saudi learners' proficiency in writing tends to be insufficient. Similar results were reported by several studies (Alzamil, 2020;Fareed et al, 2016;Hussain, 2019;Ibnian, 2017;Jashari & Fojkar, 2019;Javid & Umer, 2014;Mohammad & Hazarika, 2016;Moses & Mohamad, 2019;Nuruzzaman, Shafiqul Islam, et al, 2018;Rass, 2015) who found that despite substantial attempts to improve EFL students' writing skills, it remains below expectation. EFL learners face challenges due to linguistic deficiencies, specifically, lack of ideas and incorrect writing mechanics such as vocabulary diversity, grammatical difficulties and flaws, and poor spelling.…”

“…It wastes so much time; thus, I focus more on other language skills." This finding corresponds with that of Jashari and Fojkar (2019), who concluded that teachers tend not to award the same attention to writing skills in terms of development, while Ezza (2010) stated that teachers tend to focus primarily on grammatical accuracy rather than written performance due to the outdated teaching materials.…”

“…The majority of published studies support the presence of these challenges (Alzamil, 2020;Fareed et al, 2016;Hidayati, 2018;Hussain, 2019;Ibnian, 2017;Jashari & Fojkar, 2019;Javid & Umer, 2014;Mohammad & Hazarika, 2016;Moses & Mohamad, 2019;. This indicates that EFL teachers recognize the importance of vocabulary for building sentences and that students with limited grammatical understanding may experience fear and lack confidence.…”

“…The data collected from the 15-item questionnaire data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for vocabulary; mechanics). This categorization was derived from the results of previous studies (Alshammari, 2020;Alzamil, 2020;Fareed et al, 2016;Jashari & Fojkar, 2019;Kenta & Bosha, 2019;Moses & Mohamad, 2019;. The researchers classified the raw data into these conceptual categories to represent the challenges related to teachers, learners, and textbooks.…”

“…those of Fareed et al (2016); Ibnian (2017); Jashari and Fojkar (2019); Kenta and Bosha (2019); Moses and Mohamad (2019) and Rass (2015), who found that EFL students have insufficient levels of competence due to a lack of language ability, which they cited as a barrier to improving their written…”