This paper presents the innovations in teaching writing skills to students of English in Vietnamese upper-secondary schools. The paper starts by presenting a number of approaches to teaching writing: the controlled-to-free practice approach, the free-writing approach, the paragraph-pattern approach, the communicative approach, and the process approach. Then it turns to outline the approach to teaching writing in Vietnamese upper-secondary schools. It is suggested that the approach to teaching writing in upper-secondary schools is a combination of a number of approaches in which the communicative and the process approaches play a dominant role. Having outlined the approach to teaching writing in Vietnamese upper-secondary schools, the paper suggests a two-stage teaching procedure which is thought to be appropriate in Vietnamese upper-secondary school context - the pre-writing stage and the while-writing one, each of which consists of a number of steps. In the last section, the paper attempts to suggest a rating scale for marking a writing product which consists of parameters such as content, organization, discourse, syntax, lexis, and mechanical elements.
