Building Teacher Capacity in English Language Teaching in Vietnam

Research, Policy and Practice

Van Canh Le, Hoa Thi Mai Nguyen, Thi Thuy Minh Nguyen, Roger Barnard, Van Canh Le, Hoa Thi Mai Nguyen, Thi Thuy Minh Nguyen, Roger Barnard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429854538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

This timely volume opens a window on issues related to English language education in Vietnam. The authors consider that teacher quality is the key factor to be considered if the national English language curriculum outcomes are to be achievable. Aiming to shed light on key issues recently observed in the Vietnamese landscape of English language education, it examines the complexity of the institutionalization of the standardized English proficiency policy, which has been in force since 2008. That policy uses the Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFR) as the model to set the standards and levels of proficiency for teachers, learners and state employees.

The book presents both the theoretical and practical aspects of the standardization movement in English language education. The contents comprise a series of extended research-based chapters written by experts of language-in-education policy and planning in and about Vietnam from a range of perspectives including teachers, English language curriculum developers, teacher educators and researchers. The rich coverage of the book includes current discussion on English language education in Vietnam ranging from policy to practice, making it highly relevant to English teachers, teacher educators, and scholars, in Vietnam and worldwide, who aspire to broaden their horizons and professionalism.

1
English language teaching in Vietnam

Aspirations, realities, and challenges

Le Van Canh

Introduction

The global expansion of English, accompanied by the neoliberal discourses, has given rise to the universal association of English to economic and educational opportunities. According to Wedell (2011, p. 275):

The rapid expansion of English language teaching into state education systems worldwide over the past 20 to 30 years has been an obvious trend. For the first time in foreign language teaching history, national governments and individuals worldwide seem to see teaching a language (English) to all learners in state schools as an important means of increasing human capital on which future national economic development and political power depends.

Within the Asia-Pacific region, Nunan’s (2003) survey conducted in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Vietnam indicated that English became compulsory at a lower age despite limited resources and the lack of qualified English language teachers. Particularly, as English has been adopted as the working language of ASEAN countries, it is imperative that “citizens of the Member States [are pushed to] become proficient in the English language so that the citizens of the ASEAN region are able to communicate directly with one another and participate in the broader international communities” (ASEAN Secretariat, 2009, p. 3).

Vietnam, like many other countries from within and outside ASEAN, encounters many challenges in its endeavour to expand English language education to the national educational system, the greatest challenge being the lack of well qualified teachers (Wedell, 2008). This chapter examines a recent innovation in English language education called the National Foreign Languages 2020 Project (NFLP, 2020). Although the innovation has its supporters, it has been subject to considerable criticism in Vietnam for setting overambitious and unrealistic goals. The chapter falls into five sections. The first provides brief background information about the country in order to contextualise the subsequent analysis of the country’s current English language education landscape. The second section describes the most recent innovation in English language education policy. The third section examines language teacher education and teacher competence. Next, the chapter describes the gap between the intended goals and the reality of the implementation of the innovation. The fifth and final section discusses the challenges and recommendations for addressing those challenges.

Background

Vietnam is located in South East Asia. It has a population of more than 90 million composed of more than 50 different ethnic groups with their own languages. While Vietnamese is the official language, the country is, in reality, multilingual and multicultural. Throughout the country’s many-thousand-year-long history, education has constantly featured prominently as a critical strategy for advancing human capital development in the government’s strategies for socio-economic development. Meanwhile in the minds of the Vietnamese, education has always been greatly valued as the significant symbolic capital for social and economic upward mobility.

In Vietnam, compulsory schooling begins at the age of six and involves nine years from primary to lower secondary school. Students have 12 years of full-time schooling. The educational system in Vietnam is highly centralised. The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) takes the initiative for curriculum design, development, revision and review, and textbook writing and assessment, usually in response to policies motivated by social, economic, and political forces and changing trends in educational theory and practice. A one-size-fits-all approach is always adopted to centrally mandated curricular changes, and teachers are expected to faithfully implement those changes in their classroom teaching. This approach to educational planning leads to proactive government intervention even at the classroom level. Understandably, most of the teachers teach the coursebook, not the students (Le, 2012). As a result, a great number of Vietnamese students view the covering of the content of the coursebook as their aim of learning rather than using English for real-life communication (Ton & Pham, 2010).

Since the turn of the century when Vietnam has moved more rapidly towards a full market-driven economy for more comprehensive integration into global processes, there have been several changes in the country’s educational policies and practices. Neoliberalism, which frames education as primarily a site for human capital building and economic productivity (Block, Gray, & Holborow, 2012), has implicitly proliferated as an organising principle of social life in the country. Traditional teacher values are increasingly in conflict with the quasi-marketisation of the educational system. Teacher integrity and students and parents’ attitudes towards teachers are negatively influenced.

In addition to the influence of the market economy, the prolonged mismanagement in education has reduced public credibility in domestic education, and this in its turn has led to the unanticipated rise in the number of outbound students. More and more middle-class families and nouveau riche choose to send their children overseas for tertiary education. The most preferred destinations for these outbound students are the United States of America (22,400), Australia (19,700), Canada (14,200), and Britain (5,000), according to 2017 statistics by the New York–based Institute of International Education (Thanh Nien, May 30, 2018). As English is the gatekeeper for these students, parents invest a great amount of their financial resources in their children learning English in private English language centres or foreigner-run schools. By contrast, in the mountainous areas, school students and their parents prefer staying away from schools to work in the fields despite teachers’ advice (D. C. Nguyen, Le, Tran, & T. H. Nguyen, 2014).

Recent innovation in English language education

English did not foreground the foreign language education landscape in Vietnam until the early 2000s when the country moved away from a centrally planned socialist economy to a market-driven economy in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union bloc. The new economic policy, which was officially adopted in the late 1980s, attracted an ever stronger flow of direct foreign investment. This led to the pressing need of a labour force with a good command of English. The need became far greater following the country’s membership of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in mid-1995 and of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in early 2007. Naturally, English became synonymous with economic growth and prosperity (Holborow, 2012) in the political, educational, and public discourses, creating “English language fever” throughout the country.

Influenced by neoliberal ideology, which is “understood as an ideology within language education that views language as a commodity and promotes the idea that FL [foreign language] learning is connected to the acquisition of wealth, social status, and professionalism” (Ennser-Kananen, Escobar, & Bigelow, 2016, p. 16). Vietnamese politicians and parents reify English as inherently useful and essential for full participation in global society. In politicians’ minds, English proficiency is a critical resource for Vietnam’s competitiveness in the global economy. Put another way, a good command of English is perceived as “essential” and an “economic imperative” for the country’s “employment opportunities, economic development, modernization, internationalization, participation in the global economy and to become an economic global player” (Sayer, 2015, p. 50, original emphasis). In the mass media, English proficiency has become an expression of “pride” associated with the power of a successful citizen, with economic, material gain, and opportunities for a better future. In effect, the English language has been viewed as one of the key strands of today’s Vietnamese education, alongside mathematics and information technology.

A significant landmark that has recently been staked out in English language education in Vietnam is the NFLP 2020. The Project was approved by the government in 2008 with a budget of nearly US$500 million, targeting English proficiency as a comparative advantage in successfully facing the economic challenges of a globalised, multilingual, and multicultural world for all Vietnamese school-graduates and university graduates by 2020. To achieve this target, an “English for Everyone” approach (Wedell, 2008) was adopted. English has thereby become a compulsory subject in the school curriculum and an optional activity in kindergartens or nursery schools.

A phased approach is adopted to ensure a smooth introduction of English to the primary school curriculum starting at grade 3. Accordingly, English is to be taught to 70% of grade 3 classes by 2015 and available nationwide by 2019. English teaching hours are set to double, and maths are to be taught in a foreign language in 30% of high schools in major cities by 2015. Although it was not until 2011 that English was officially introduced as a compulsory primary school subject throughout the country in grade 3, many state primary schools and private schools based in urban areas had been at the forefront of the movement without knowledge of how young children learn a second language in the context of classroom instruction. A good number of private schools introduce English as a compulsory subject as early as first grade in response to parents’ demands. These private schools employed either untrained or inadequately trained native-English-teachers to attract fee-paying students from well-to-do parents, who tend to associate English proficiency to their children’s better future. As Nguyen (2011, p. 225) has observed:

The emergence of English as a global language has had a considerable impact on language planning policy in many non-English-speaking countries, including Vietnam, leading to more English teaching in primary schools. As English has become increasingly prominent, there has been an urgent need to keep proficiency in this foreign language high to enhance Vietnam’s competitive position in the international economic and political arena.

Within the public educational sector, alongside the increase of weekly instructional hours from 2 class hours (45 minutes each) to 4 hours, the starting age for English language learning is lowered to the age of 9 (grade 3) ranging from 2 to 4 class hours a week depending on the existing human resources. A new series of textbooks have been written by Vietnamese authors in partnership with Pearson using the leading learner-centred task-based approach. The textbooks are published both in print and electronically. Innovative pedagogies such as learner-centred, task-based learning, blended learning, English-as-medium-of-instruction (EMI), technology-assisted language learning all have been promoted. Technologies such as interactive whiteboards and video-based instructional materials are provided for schools in the belief that these will maximise learners’ exposure to English for communication within and outside the classroom.

Driven by the desire to set standards for what teachers and students at different levels of education should be able to do with their English, a six-level proficiency framework, a modification of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), has been adopted as an assessment blueprint, and the locally developed language proficiency test called Vietnamese Standardised Test of English Proficiency (VSTEP) is used as an assessment tool. It is stipulated that upper secondary school and university graduates, irrespective of their major area of study, are supposed to reach the third level (CEFR B1) in order to be eligible for graduation. Ironically, the same proficiency benchmark (CEFR B1) is applied to both secondary school graduates and university graduates. Although a great amount of money was budgeted to the development of VSTEP, many universities have opted for TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), IELTS (International English Language Testing System), or TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) because of the credibility gap in the quality of the locally produced test and test administration (Le, 2017a).

Language teacher education and teacher competence

In Vietnam, the teacher education system, like the educational system itself, is also highly centralised. The training of teachers for all subjects and all types of schools is regulated by national legislation. Teacher training is provided at universities of education. The prototypical training route for teaching any school subject including foreign languages is a four-year undergraduate programme. The basic entrance requirements into universities of education is the certified completion of 12 years of schooling and passing the national entrance examination after the upper secondary school. Due to the negative influence of the market economy, high achievers in the secondary school graduation examination are no longer attracted to teaching careers, and consequently the entry score at teacher training universities is ever lower (VN Express, August 8, 2017). The teacher education curriculum (both pre-service and in-service) is largely preoccupied with what content and pedagogy teachers need to master. Nguyen (2013) compared the second language teacher education programme in one Australian university with that in a Vietnamese university and found that the Vietnamese university’s curriculum devoted most of its input load to English proficiency and subject matter knowledge but little to contextual knowledge including knowledge of the learners. In addition, the practicum is not organised enough to make it a useful learning experience for prospective teachers because of limited resources (Le, 2014; Nguyen, 2015). The result is that most graduates from teacher training universities are not sufficiently equipped with classroom practical skills when they are placed in schools (Vietnam News, March 24, 2010).

The hasty and ideologically driven replacement of the previously dominant Russian with English in the educational system and the introduction of English into the primary school curriculum in the early 1990s led to the serious problem of teacher shortage. To solve the problem, the government decided to retrain a great majority of Russian-language teachers to teach English and simultaneously gave a green light for universities to offer tai chuc (off-campus or extension) fee-paying courses of English language teacher training for secondary school graduates who were not academically qualified for university admission. As training courses of this type brought in huge profits to both training universities and hosting institutions, they mushroomed in every corner of the country, leading to problems of quality management. The graduates from these courses became “half-skilled” teachers (i.e., those with limited En...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Foreword
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 English language teaching in Vietnam: aspirations, realities, and challenges
• 2 Problematising pre-service English language teacher education curriculum
• 3 Risk, uncertainty, and vulnerability: primary teachers’ emotional experiences of English language policy implementation
• 4 Exploring teacher learning in mandatory in-service training courses: challenges ahead
• 5 Teachers’ professional learning in the context of language education reforms
• 6 Leveraging teaching knowledge to develop teachers’ classroom English: working at scale
• 7 University lecturers’ perceived challenges in EMI: implications for teacher professional development
• 8 Teachers’ implementation of computer-assisted language learning in the context of educational change in Vietnam
• 9 An evaluation of the intercultural orientation of secondary English textbooks in Vietnam: how well are students prepared to communicate in global contexts?
• 10 English as a lingua franca for Vietnam: current issues and future directions
• 11 Building teacher capacity for ELT in Vietnam: ways forward
• Index