Nowadays English has become an international language because it is widely used in many parts of the world. In the tendency of integration of the global economy, English is one of the effective communicative tools for everybody. The role of English is considered to be very important in the fields of economics, politics, science, culture and education. Especially, Vietnam’s official membership of WTO on 7th November 2006 opened a new door for integrating into the world economy, and more and more people want to learn English for communicating with foreign partners, tourism, and study tours, etc.
Thanks to the innovation of ways in teaching English, English lessons are taught with four skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) in one unit. Moreover, there exist three stages: pre - while - and post-teaching in one lesson. This really helps students improve their skills beside the grammar exercises to pass the exams.
When teaching writing skill to grade 11th students at Hoai Duc A High School I found out that pre-writing stages are very important in teaching writing and it also has significant effects on the students’ writing performance. If students do not prepare well enough they can not write well, they can not even write anything in their notebooks.
I decided to carry out the action research to find out how pre-writing stages affect the students’ writing performance and whether the pre-lesson activities are important to teachers of English at Hoai Duc A High School. Based on the results of this action research, some changes and improvements could be applied in my lessons, and some appropriate strategies needed to be designed with the hope that students will work more effectively in a writing lesson. Hopefully that the results of this study would be shared with any colleagues who had the same problems or anyone who is interested in this study.