THE STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS ON THE USE OF GENRE-BASED APPROACHES FOR TEACHING WRITING AT UNETI

The Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training has reformed English textbooks concentrating on the four skills: speaking, listening, reading and writing for university students. With writing skill, students are asked to write different kinds of text. However, since the school year 2005 – 2006, students have been asked to do multiple choice tests on their final exams. The final tests and all the exams in most of high schools and universities in Vietnam have the same formula: grammar and vocabulary section, reading comprehension section and writing section. In writing section, students are asked to “rewrite” some sentences in another way but keep exactly the same meaning as the given ones. They are also asked to do the word order in jumbled-word sentences or fill in the blanks with verbs or verb phrases. The purposes of the final exams and the new textbooks are different. Therefore, most of the time in class, a large number of teachers have to focus on intensive writing skills to help their students pass the exams and also to secure their own positions.