SKKN The use and the efectiveness of using reading in teaching writing at Vinh Cuu high school

to 
examine the use and the effectiveness of integrating English writing skills and 
English reading skills Vietnamese classrooms, the writing is designed to answer 2 
following questions: 
1. Do English teachers in Vietnam use reading to improve students’ writing 
skills? 
2. Does the use of reading in teaching writing improve Vietnamese students’ 
English writing skills? 
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Methodology 
Participants: The surveys were carried out at the two classes the writer has 
taught: 11A2, 11A10 with eighty participants who are in the second term of the 
school and 23 other teachers were chosen randomly to take part in this research. 
The participants are graduate students who are learning the first stage of Master of 
TESOL course at Ho Chi Minh City Open University. There are 5 teachers who are 
teaching at English language centers, while there are 13 teachers from state schools 
in Ho Chi Minh city. Another 5 teachers are teaching at private schools. In 
addition, around 30% of them have over 5 years teaching experience. 
Data collection 
Teachers were given questionnaires to elicit information on the respondents. 
Two questionnaires were designed to collect teachers’ opinions in order to answer 
two research questions. The first questionnaire includes 7 questions. The first and 
second questions are used to ask teachers’ teaching experience and institution. The 
next 5 questions are used to find out teachers’ acknowledgment of this technique 
and the use of it in their classes. Meanwhile, the second questionnaire has 6 
questions, which is used to elicit the effectiveness of this technique by asking 
teachers who applied it. 
Findings and discussion 
Research question 1: Do English teachers in Vietnam use reading to improve 
students’ writing skills? 
The data of chart 1 was collected from the questionnaire 1. According to the 
chart, there were 5 teachers who confirmed that they did not know this technique, 
because of their old universities, TESOL training courses or the current Master of 
TESOL did not teach them. Hence, they could not apply this technique in their 
classes. 
5 
On the other hand, regarding the chart 2, the rest of 23 teachers (18 teachers) 
know this technique. Most of them (11 teachers) confirmed that their old 
universities, TESOL training courses and Master of TESOL taught them this 
technique. Meanwhile, 5 of them know this technique through reading books or 
journal articles of teaching writing. This means that they have interest in teaching 
writing. The rest of them (2 teachers) know this technique because their colleagues 
introduced it to them. However, there were 5 teachers did not use this technique to 
teach writing, even though they know it. The reasons for this are shown in the chart 
3. 
To conclude, there were 23 teachers, who were asked about integrating 
reading skills with writing skills. However, just 18 teachers know this technique. 
Although there were 18 teachers who know this technique, just 13 teachers (around 
57%) applied the use of reading in teaching writing in order to improve their 
students’ writing skills. Therefore, it can be stated that there were a positive 
number of teachers paid attention to the use of reading in teaching writing and 
applied this technique in their classes. 
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Research question 2: Does the use of reading in teaching writing improve 
Vietnamese students’ English writing skills? 
In order to answer this question, 13 teachers, who used this technique, were 
asked to answer questionnaire 2 in order to elicit their evaluation of this technique. 
Considering answers collected, 5 teachers stated that their students’ writing skills 
were improved after using reading to support and enhance students’ writing 
abilities. The chart 4 below displays these 5 teachers’ evaluation of advantages that 
this technique brought to their students. 
Regarding the chart 4, after applying this technique in their classes, all 5 
teachers believed that their students’ accuracy of using grammar and punctuation 
was developed as well as their ability of arranging logically their writing’s ideas. 
In addition, 4 of them confirmed the development in their students’ writing content 
as well as the improvement in writing’s coherence and cohesion of their students. 
Meanwhile, they realized that their students could not use complex grammar 
structures fluently even after using this technique. Considering these figures, it can 
be claimed that the use of reading did have a positive impact on students’ writing 
skills, especially improving the use of grammar and punctuation and the 
organization of writing’s ideas. This is a basis of the development in writing’s 
content and writing’s coherence and cohesion. However, considering the fact that 
students were not able to use complex grammatical structures, teachers need to pay 
more attention to students’ grammar. 
The rest of them (8 teachers) claimed that this technique is ineffective, 
because they had to cope with some obstacles. 
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According to the chart 5, 6 teachers claimed that their students lacked reading 
comprehension skill, while there are 5 teachers stated that the difficulty is students 
did not know how to use information/knowledge obtained from assigned reading 
materials in their writing. In addition, a half of them (4 teachers) pointed out that 
the fact that students did not read assigned reading materials was also an obstacle. 
Considering these figures, it can be stated that the lack of reading comprehension 
skill was the main problem, which meant students might have limited 
understanding of assigned reading materials; therefore, they could not obtain any 
information or knowledge to support their writing. Moreover, the lack of reading 
assigned reading materials could be the result of the lack of reading comprehension 
skills as well as the difficulty level of assigned reading materials and students’ 
attitudes and low-motivation. Therefore, teachers need to improve their students 
reading comprehension skill as well as choose reading materials that can interest 
students and are not beyond their English level. 
2. Advantages and disadvantages 
a) Advantages 
The use of reading is supporting writing (AlOmrani, 2014). Meanwhile, non-
directional hypothesis means that information/knowledge learned from writing can 
be used in reading and vice versa, which means reading is used to assist writing 
and vice versa (AlOmrani, 2014). Bidirectional hypothesis stated that “reading and 
writing are both interactive and interdependent” (AlOmrani, 2014, p. 103). This 
also means that the change in students’ language proficiency may lead the change 
in their writing abilities or reading abilities, which can be understood that if their 
writing abilities develop, their reading abilities will develop and vice versa 
(AlOmrani, 2014). 
It can be stated that the use of reading does have the positive effect on 
teaching writing. Most of students’ writing skills were improved. Their students 
were able to express their thoughts in English fluently, differentiate between the 
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topic sentence and the thesis sentence or had the improvement in organizing 
writing’s ideas. 
b) Disadvantages 
The first limitation of this writing is that the limited number of teachers who 
took part in the survey. The second limitation is that the lack of students’ opinions 
of the effectiveness of the use of reading in teaching writing. The use of reading 
had some obstacles, which led to the ineffectiveness of this technique. They were 
the lack of reading comprehension skill, students did not read assigned reading 
materials, and students did not know how to use information/knowledge obtained 
from assigned reading materials in their writing. If the teacher pays more attention 
to improve students reading comprehension skill, these obstacles can be overcome. 
This will lead to the effectiveness of this technique. 
3. Evaluation 
a) New points 
The rearcher has also found out some considerations for teachers when using 
reading to improve EFL students’ writing skills. AlOmrani (2014) stated that 
because the reading materials are used “as a source for improving writing abilities” 
(p. 102); therefore, the reading materials must relate with the writing assignments. 
In addition, it is claimed that EFL teachers also need to focus on improving 
students’ reading skills (AlOmrani, 2014), because “if a learner has low level of 
proficiency in reading skills this will lead to low level of competence, performance 
and proficiency in writing skills as well” (Bhatt & Lilian, 2016, p. 635). However, 
enhancing students’ writing skills is necessary, teachers should not pay more 
attention to developing students’ reading skills than students’ writing skills 
(Morrow, 1997, as cited in AlOmrani, 2014, p. 106), because the aim of integrating 
reading into writing instruction is using reading materials as resources to improve 
and assist students with their writing skills (AlOmrani, 2014). 
b) Effects 
As mentioned above, the use of reading is suggested as an effective technique 
to improve EFL students’ writing skills (AlOmrani, 2014; Grabe & Zhang, 2013 & 
Habibi et al., 2015). Hence, in order to be aware of the feasibility and effectiveness 
of the use of reading in teaching writing, the researcher began to do more research 
on applying this technique in teaching writing as well as apply it in her classes. 
The result shows that almost all students make great progress in writing skill and 
they feel more confident in writing period, which is obviously shown in chart 6 
Chart 6: Students’ view about the benefits of using reading in learning writing 
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As shown chart 6 - students’ views about the advantages they have 
experienced during the writing lessons in the classroom. The surveys were carried 
out at the two classes the writer has taught: 11A2, 11A10 at Vinhcuu high school 
with eighty participants taking part in the survey. In response to the first benefit 
whether group work motivates students to write or not, 65 students agreed that 
writing in groups motivates them to write, 9 students were not sure and 6 students 
disagreed. Regarding to the second benefit, 58 students agree that using reading in 
learning writing helps them use more complex sentences instead of simple 
sentences, while 15 students were not sure and 7 students disagreed. In students 
response to the third point whether this technique makes a contribution to 
improving students’ organizing ideas, 49 students agreed, 22 students were not 
sure and 9 students disagreed. For the final view point, which looked at whether 
taking advantage of reading in teaching writing results in good pieces of writing, 
66 students agreed, only 8 students were not sure about this statement and 6 
students express their disagreement. 
The result of the study obviously reveals that more and more students will be 
highly motivated and have chances to participate in writing activities if teachers 
.After analysis and discussion of the findings, the researcher can conclude that 
students considered writing as one of the most difficult skills and the large number 
of them supports the use of reading skill in learning and teaching writing periods. 
Dahan (2010) worried about the lack of essential skills for writing of her 
students, who were EFL learners at the American University of Sharjah in the 
United Arab Emirates, owned TOEFL 530 even higher. Therefore, she designed an 
activity, which was the Reading Project, to help her students have more interests in 
reading so as to improve their writing skills. According to her, students were 
enabled to freely choose any books that they wanted. Every week, students were 
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
Being confident
to write
Being able to
use complex
grammatical
structures
Organizing ideas
for writing
logically
Result in good
pieces of writing
agree
Not sure
disagree
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required to post something about their books on Discussion Board or iLearn, then 
they were asked to share their opinions and feelings about what they posted. It was 
expected that students could receive feedback and responses from their peers. 
During the last two weeks of classes, students were requested to give informal 
presentation of their books. After the presentation, they are required to a write 
summary of the books chosen. After using this project, she admired the 
improvement in her students’ writing abilities as well as their ability of expressing 
fluently their opinions through writing. She also confirmed that her students raised 
the awareness of the importance of improving background knowledge. 
Meanwhile, Rass designed for first year Arab EFL students at Beit Nerl 
College a course which integrated reading skills with writing skills in order to 
improve her students’ writing skills. In this course, learners were required to read 
anthological literature of English. Then, students were asked to write their 
reflection on these assigned reading materials within 5 minutes at the beginning of 
each class. After that, these writings would be shared with their classmates in order 
to have discussions about the contents and students’ opinions of the assigned 
reading materials. Their discussion could be considered as the basis of answering 
reading logs and worksheets which were used to asked about reading’ difficulties 
of students, the contents and students’ opinions of the reading materials. Moreover, 
they were requested to do weekly assignments that were writing may types of 
paragraphs, which was a basis of developing and writing essays. Meanwhile, their 
monthly assignments were informal journals about their own experiences. Students 
were allowed to write multiple drafts to surmount their writing’s difficulties. Each 
draft would receive feedback from teachers. The first and second drafts would be 
given comments about the content and organizing ideas, whereas comments about 
grammar and punctuation would be given on the final draft. Students were also 
required to analyse errors that were made in their peers’ writings. Comparing 
between students’ first writing assigment and final writign assignments, Rass 
indicated that her students’ proficiency in writing skills was improved. They were 
able to compose good essays as well as differentiate between the topic sentence, 
the supporting sentence and the thesis sentence. 
Luu (2012) conducted a study of benefits brought to EFL learners by 
integrating reading skills and writing skills at Ho Chi Minh City University of 
Finance-Marketing. The participants are 58 students who were selected randomly, 
then divided into 2 groups, that are control group and experimental group. 
Moreover, 8 experienced teachers also were chosen to take part in this study. Two 
groups of students would receive the same knowledge of all types of academic 
essays. During the first 2 weeks, they were taught by the same teaching 
instructions. However, from the third weeks, students of the experimental group 
would be taught by read-like-a-writer approach of Steve Peha, while teachers of 
the control group maintained the old teaching instructions. In the second week of 
the course, students had to do the pretest, and after 9 weeks of learning, they had to 
do the posttest. These tests would be evaluated by teachers based on 5 criteria: 
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organization, ideas, word choice, sentence fluency and convention by using 
computers. The results from these tests would be kept and used as data for this 
study. 
Moreover, students actively learn English writing style, choosing proper 
words and basing on the reading materials the teacher provides them. Learners 
remember and broaden their knowledge naturally, not mechanically as teachers 
teach them. For teachers, they do not need to teach students in details, but just 
guide students to take advatage of reading materials effectively in writing and 
celebrate writing activities for all students to join in. 
c) Application and results 
After applying the method, the results were completely different. Before 
asking students to write, the teacher provided students with reading materials about 
the topic and gave some questions involved in that reading passages. At the same 
time, the teacher based on those reading passages to teach vocabulary and 
structures. Students had certain knowledge of the topic. They, therefore, wrote 
much better. 
The surveys also were also carried out at Open University where the writer 
has taken part in M.A course. The instruments are used to do the research are 
questionnaire and interview. The writer then gathers information about classroom 
activities. The findings are more reliable with different methods. A questionnaire 
was designed to collect data from 23 teachers teaching different classes such as 
public and private schools, which is obviously presented in chart 4 and 5. The 
result shows that some teachers know the effective of using reading to teach 
writing while others do not. 
The findings have also revealed that the experimental group’s students have 
improved their writing’ essays as well as word choice. The results also pointed out 
that most students of the experimental group improved their sentence fluency; 
therefore, their writing performances were better than writing performances of the 
control group’ students. Considering the class of Dahan (2010), the class of Rass 
and the study of Luu (2012), it can be stated that the use of reading does have the 
positive effect on teaching writing. Most of their students’ writing skills were 
improved. Their students were able to express their thoughts in English fluently, 
differentiate between the topic sentence and the thesis sentence or had the 
improvement in organizing writing’s ideas. 
APPENDICES 
APPENDIX 1: 
Questionnaire 1: 
Questionnaire 2: 
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