VietTESOL International Convention 2026

As schools worldwide experiment with artificial intelligence and Vietnam accelerates its own digital shift in English classrooms, writing remains one of the hardest skills for high school students to master. Grounded in Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of scaffolding and employing the Teaching and Learning Cycle as the instructional framework, this study explored whether Deepseek, an AI-powered writing assistant, could genuinely help tenth graders handle the demands of genre-based writing. Working with 64 students in a public Vietnamese high school in Mekong Delta, an experimental group that received Deepseek-supported genre instruction with a control group taught through conventional methods were conducted over seven (7) weeks. The teaching zeroed in on three persistent trouble spots of building strong thesis statements in (1) arranging cohesive devices to create logical flow, and (2) choosing lexico-grammatical features that suit discussion genres. Writing quality was measured through pre- and post-tests using analytic rubrics, and ten students sat for interviews to share their experiences. The numbers told a clear story, the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group, and students themselves reported feeling less anxious and more capable of generating ideas, although some worried about becoming too dependent on the tool, which provides teachers’ explicited genre pedagogy. Extended UTAUT2 analysis showed that seeing real benefits and having supportive conditions mattered most for adoption. However, the small sample size from a single school restricts research generalizability, and the 7-week duration may not capture long-term retention. Future research should examine larger samples across multiple provinces and investigate whether writing gains persist over extended periods.