EFL Writing at Thai Secondary Schools: Teachers and Students’ Views, Difficulties and Expectations

Thai students’ writing in English is a chronic problem documented in the literature of English Language Teaching (ELT) in Thailand. However, little research has been conducted on how Thai teachers and students perceive the importance of Englishwriting and what difficulties and expectations/suggestions they have in teaching and learning this skill at uppersecondary schools (USS). This study, therefore, plans to fill this gap by employing two sets of surveys and semistructured interviews with 114 teachers and 170 students from 30 different USS in the Northeastern part of Thailand and two provincial supervisors of ForeignLanguageEducation Divisions (ProSup). Besides their various stated personal and contextual problems in terms of time constraint, insufficient resources and poorlymotivated and mixedability students, national test structures and the presence of untrained English teachers, the participants acknowledged the importance of Englishwriting and expected to have this skill taught at all school levels. These findings suggest that to improve the teaching and learning practices of this skill at USS in Thailand and other countries with similar contexts, relevant support and necessary reforms from teachers, school leaders and nationaltest and policymakers are needed.