UNDERSTANDING TEACHER TRAINEES’ ATTITUDES TOWARDS WRITING ACTION RESEARCH REPORTS IN ENGLISH: A CASE STUDY IN LAOS

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the attitudes of Lao teacher trainees towards and their needs in academic writing in English. For many years, the English language curriculum in teacher training colleges in Laos has focused on general English skills such as grammar, speaking, listening and reading. With respect to writing, it focuses mainly on sentence level, or at most paragraph level, writing. A recent change in curriculum in one of the eight teacher training colleges requires its teacher trainees to write longer academic texts, including the writing of an action research report based on their teaching practicum. But how well these teacher trainees have been equipped to write such long texts and what their attitudes are

towards this new task are unknown. In order to understand their attitudes towards, their knowledge about, and their difficulty in academic writing in general and the writing of the action research report in particular, a survey questionnaire was administered to 110 teacher trainees. Results found that while these teacher trainees understood the importance of academic writing, they felt that their training and supervision were inadequate to help them write their action research reports. Additionally, results revealed their lack of confidence in their competence in English writing. The findings of the study should be useful for helping teacher trainers design better training programmes for academic writing. The study should have implications for curriculum design for academic writing in the teacher training colleges in Laos and in similar institutions in other parts of the region.