Teaching and Assessing Writing Strategies for Secondary School Students and Investigating Teachers’ and Students’ Attitudes towards Writing Practice Mohammad Dayij Suleiman Al.gomoul Tafila Technical University, Faculty of Education, Tafila, Jordan KEYWORDS Assessment. Investigation. Teaching-learning Strategies. English as a Foreign Language. Foreign Language. Language 1. Language 2. Ministry of Education. ABSTRACT This study aimed at investigating teaching and learning strategies followed by teachers of English and secondary school students in Tafila Directorate of Education concerning writing practice inside the classroom. It also aimed at identifying English language teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards teaching and learning writing and finding out the problems which face the secondary students when they start writing composition. From my own observation as a supervisor of English language for almost ten years in the Ministry of Education, I noticed that students in general, and secondary school students in particular find it difficult to write in English. They say they do not find reasonable ideas in English, and even if they find ideas, they fail to elaborate them into correct English. So, the impact is that they hate to write in English and, maybe, they start to form a kind of negative attitudes towards writing in English. The subject of the study consisted of all EFL teachers who teach secondary school students (first and secondary stages) in Tafila Directorate of Education with a total number of 45 teachers, and all secondary school students with a total number of 350 students. The sample of the study consisted of 10 teachers (5 males and 5 females) and 30 students (15 males and 15 females) chosen randomly to fit the purpose of the study. The instruments of the study were two questionnaires developed by the knowledge of the researcher to collect the data regarding strategies and techniques used by the teachers and students when presenting writing: one for the teachers and the other for the students. Teachers were asked to evaluate the students written tasks. The collected data was analyzed and discussed and findings were figured out as shown in the tables enclosed with this study. Recommendations were also drawn out at the end of the study. INTRODUCTION Background of the Study Writing is one of the four main skills that teachers often neglected. Most of the them feel that Jordanian students are wreakers in writing than in other skills, and that more practice is cr- ucially needed than is found by simply follow- ing the required course book (Al-qomoul 2007). They have to begin to think about some of the reasons why students find it difficult to write in English. However, a picture or a plan can be a useful stimulus for writing tasks. It provides a common experience for the whole class, and is a basis from which a variety of language acti- vities of different levels can be generated (Al- qomoul 2007). Almost all English language teachers whom I supervised expressed their deep concern with the low level of achievement of their students at the writing skill. When asking them a ques- tion like: What is the percentage of your students who can write legibly? Some teachers put it at 5%, others at 10%. Those who teach the scien- tific streams put it at 25% at the very best. Even very clever students when asked about their ab- ility to write in English complained that they di- dn’t do very well. Mukattash (1982) stated that the overwhelming majority of Jordanian studen- ts cannot construct a simple sentence without making basic errors. Karala (1986) complained that the written performance of Jordanian stu- dents showed a high percentage of errors. Writing is an integrative skill and an impor- tant, constructive, and a complex process. It is an essential skill in foreign language learning in order to give the learners the opportunity to de- velop the proficiency they need to write personal letters, essays, research papers and journals. In addition, writing skills enhance cognitive and lin- guistic awareness (Abu-Jalil 2001). Writers often use the writing process in dif- ferent ways. The writing process is influenced by the purpose of writing, the intended audience and the selected format (e.g. letter, report, jour- nal entry). The five activities that comprise the writing process are prewriting, drafting, revis- ing, editing and publishing. These steps are more complex. Rather than being linear, the writing process is extremely recursive as writers go back and forth among the different steps of the pro- cess. In other words, any activity can turn up at any moment in the writing process and that any © Kamla-Raj 2011 Int J Edu Sci, 3(1): 25-36 (2011)