AbstrackDoing research in colleges and universities is an essential activity since it may provide students a good basis to become professional researcher and teacher in the future. However, few students in Vietnam can recognize the importance of research activities or possess an adequate background of knowledge to participate in these activities, and additionally, the obligatory course of Research Methodology offered in many universities cannot bring enough understanding in doing research to students. This study, thus, aims at investigating the effects of Research Methodology courses (in both of their good and bad sides) on students at a pedagogical university. The study also attempts to survey the attitude of those students toward the activity of doing research and the impact of the attitude on their process of learning to be researchers.

In English learning, writing skill is considered, by many people, the most difficult skill to be mastered. In fact, errors and mistakes in writing are unavoidable and a large amount of them has been detected with a variety of types. Previous researchers have also proved the significance of error analysis and correction in enhancing the writing skills of English learners, but the beliefs and applications of teachers in error correction methods still differ. Thus, the aim of this paper is to investigate these two factors in the teaching and learning environment of a university in Vietnam. The study is conducted in two phases: teacher interview and class observation in practice, with the participation of two English teachers who are in charge of teaching writing skill to two classes of 21 and 28 students. The recorded results give emphasis to the need of error correction in writing classes, some commonly effective activities utilized; furthermore, there is a remarkable outcome that teachers seldom have academic basis on error correction but mainly depend on their own experience in teaching practice, and their approaching methods to correcting mistakes on students' paper can be both direct and indirect. In addition, some ideal activities for error correction, namely peer feedback, on-going writing quizzes, and error codes, are presented.