Writing to become: how scholarly writing shapes reflection and professional development across early-, mid-, and late-career Vietnamese tertiary EFL teachers

This study examines how scholarly journal article writing operates as a reflective mechanism for Vietnamese tertiary English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers, and how its dominant function varies by career stage. Guided by two questions, including how teachers perceive writing as part of professional development (PD) and how writing contributes to reflective teaching (RT), we conducted semi-structured interviews with nine teachers from two universities. Interviews were held in Vietnamese, transcribed verbatim, translated for analysis, and examined using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings articulate a stage-sensitive pathway: writing → reflection → PD. For early-career teachers, drafting worked as a mirror for criterion-referenced self-appraisal, making aims, procedures, and evidence explicit and prompting targeted revisions to tasks, feedback, and assessment. For mid-career teachers, writing functioned as a design prompt: drafts pre-specified contrasts and decision rules, turning lessons into bounded trials and supporting codification of recurrent moves into portable accounts. For late-career teachers, writing served stewardship aims, pairing boundary-setting (‘when not to use this’, failure modes) with intergenerational mentoring through co-authorship. Across stages, writing sharpened claim-evidence alignment, scaffolded prospective classroom experimentation, converted tacit repertoires into shareable designs with stated limits, and socialised judgement through collaborative writing networks.