Problems Of Teaching English In Vietnam English Language Essay

This chapter is concerned with the current situation and issues of the teaching of English in Vietnam. As a way of start, the researcher will first provide a brief history of English language teaching in Vietnam. Then will examine in some depth the current situation of English language teaching in Vietnam, looking specifically at English language teaching both inside and outside the formal educational system. The final section is devoted to a discussion of some of the problems we have been experiencing in the teaching of English in Vietnam in the context of integration and globalization. This chapter also derived the previous research conducted by William F. Hanes, Trang Q. Nguyen, and Hoang V. Van.

6.1 History and Problems of Teaching English in Vietnam

The history of English language teaching in Vietnam can be roughly divided into two periods: (i) English in Vietnam before 1986 and (ii) English in Vietnam from 1986 up to the present. The reason for this way of division is that 1986 was the year when the Vietnamese Communist Party initiated its overall economic reform, exercising the open-door policy, and thus marking the emergence of English as the number 1 foreign language in Vietnam.

6.1.1 English in Vietnam before 1986

English in Vietnam before 1986 had a chequered history. Chronologically, the teaching of English in Vietnam can be subdivided into three periods: the first period extends from the beginning of the French invasion of Vietnam up to 1954; the second period, from 1954 to 1975; and the third period, from 1975 to 1986. Each of the periods will be examined in some depth in the sections that follow.

6.1.1.1. English in Vietnam before 1954

It is difficult to point to a specific date when English was introduced into Vietnam. But what is certain is that the language was taught in Vietnam from the French times and that although English made its presence in Vietnam during this period, it did not become a foreign language to be learned as widely as French.

It is not quite clear either how English was taught in this period for a number of reasons. First, there are no extant writings on the teaching of English in Vietnam. Secondly, there are no extant English textbooks written by Vietnamese authors; what are left today are some English textbooks in use by that time which were written by French textbook writers such as Lʼanglais Vivant: Classe de sixième, Lʼanglais Vivant Classes de troisieme (1942) and some bilingual English-Vietnamese dictionaries compiled by two Vietnamese scholars known as Le Ba Kong and Le Ba Khanh. It can be infer red from the contents of those textbooks that although some attention was paid to pronunciation drills and reading skills, the prevailing method of teaching English in Vietnam before 1954 was the grammar-translation method.

6.1.1.2. English in Vietnam from 1954 to 1975

1954 – 1975 was the period when Vietnam was divided into two parts – North and South. In this period, each part of the country was politically allied with a world superpower: North Vietnam was allied with the former Soviet Union and South Vietnam, with the USA. The status of English, thus, was different in each part of the country. In South Vietnam, English was the dominant foreign language; it was studied for direct interactions with the USA. In North Vietnam, in contrast, although four foreign languages (Russian, Chinese, French, and English) were recognized nationally, Russian topped the list in the formal educational system; and like English in the South, Russian in the North was studied for direct interactions with the former Soviet Union. As Russian dominated the foreign language scene in North Vietnam, English was relegated to an inferior status. In upper secondary schools, it was taught only in some classes in towns and in big cities as a pilot subject (Nguyen Nhat Quang, 1993: 1). At tertiary level, there were two foreign language institutions that offered English as a discipline, namely, The Hanoi Foreign Languages Teachersʼ Training College (currently The University of Languages and International studies, Vietnam National University Hanoi) and The College of Foreign Languages (currently The University of Hanoi). Apart from those institutions, some universities offered English as a subject. However, due to the limited use of English in North Vietnam in this period, the goals of learning the language seemed to be confined only to understanding the USA and to fighting against the US invasion on the diplomatic front.

6.1.2 English in Vietnam from 1975 to 1986

The period of 1975 – 1986 was characterized by the dominance of Russian and the decline of English and French, particularly of Chinese in foreign language education in Vietnam. In this period, Chinese was cast away from the formal educational system, and the targets set for Russian, English and French were roughly as follows: 70% of the school pupils would study Russian; 20%, English and 10%, French. At tertiary level, Russian continued to predominate in the North. This can be seen in the fact that the number of students majoring in Russian in this period always far exceeded the combined enrolments of all other foreign languages. In the South, Russian study started to grow very fast: Russian departments with the whole academic staffs coming from the North were established in many universities and the number of students enrolling in Russian both as a discipline and as a subject started to increase. The spread of Russian was further strengthened by Russian aids in education: hundreds of Vietnamese teachers and students were sent annually to the former Soviet Union for both undergraduate and graduate studies. When Russian dominated the scene, English suffered a setback; it was taught in a limited number of classes in upper secondary schools, particularly in towns and big cities. At tertiary level, the number of students enrolling for English both as a discipline and as a subject also decreased.

It was noted, however, that in this period a small number of Vietnamese teachers and interpreters of English were chosen and sent to Britain, Australia, New Zealand and India for graduate studies in English language teaching. The training programmes of Britain, Australia and New Zealand were terminated in 1979 when Vietnam involved in Cambodia. In 1985, Australia resumed its English training for Vietnam under a UNDP Programme until 1992 and from 1992 it was done under a bilateral aid programme between Australia and Vietnam, first known as AIDAB (Australian International Development Assistance Bureau) and then as AusAID (Australian Agency for International Development), 40 Vietnamese teachers and interpreters of English were sent to Australia annually to undertake graduate studies in English language teaching (cf. Do Huy Thinh 2006). This programme was terminated in early 2000s.

The content of English teaching in Vietnam in this period followed both the “adopt” and the “adapt” approach to material development. The prevailing method of teaching English was the structural method with a focus on lexico grammar, reading and translation skills. Students were first introduced to a sentence pattern; then they were taught to use substitution and transformation techniques to drill in this sentence pattern; then they were asked to make up new sentences based on this sentence pattern; and finally, as a form of consolidation, they were asked to translate their made-up sentences into Vietnamese and vice versa. Some attention was paid to the teaching of oral skills, particularly to improving language accuracy, but because the new sentences were created without context, the fluency aspect of language teaching was sacrificed.

6.1.3 English in Vietnam from 1986 up to the present

The period from 1986 up to the present is characterized by the rapid growth and expansion of English in Vietnam. This English boom began in December 1986, when at its Six National Congress the Vietnamese Communist Party initiated an overall economic reform known as Đổi má»›i (Renovation), opening the door of Vietnam to the whole world. In the context of economic renovation and of the open door policy, English becomes the first (and nearly the only) foreign language to be taught in Vietnam. It is one of the six national examinations that students have to pass if they want to get the Secondary School Education Certificate and is a compulsory subject for both undergraduates and graduates at tertiary level. In a new market economy of Vietnam with the growth of international businesses and trades, and the increasing number of foreign tourists, the ability to communicate in English has become a passport to a better job not only in the tourism and hospitality industries but in many other enterprises as well. English is taught in schools, in universities and in evening foreign language centres across the country. There are now more teachers and students of English than of any other subjects. Further, the Đổi má»›i newspaper has created mounting pressures for more and more places to teach English at every stage of the far-expanding educational system. At the same time the fast process of globalization – the strongest external force for English language teaching and learning in Vietnam – has made it difficult to maintain the existing and admittedly low standards in its teaching and use. Increasingly, it was being realized in decision-making bodies that without major changes and sizeable inputs in its curricula and courses, methodology and materials, English teaching in Vietnam would soon ceased to effectively serve the demands being made on it. This has resulted in the current situation of English language teaching in Vietnam which I will be concerned with in the sections that follow.

6.1.4 Problems Experienced in Teaching English in Vietnam

The booming of English in Vietnam has caused the country a number of problems which can be presented below.

First, there is a disproportionate demand-supply. With a population of over 85 million, of whom a sizeable proportion have a strong desire to learn English, the demand for English language teaching far outstrips the supply of native speaker and competent non-native speaker teachers.

Secondly, textbook writing and teacher retraining are the two important aspects to implement its curriculum. As motioned, textbook writing has been completed, but to do massive and long term retraining of teachers in English competence would demand manpower and logistic resources beyond the capacity of the system at present. This problem will be compounded when Vietnam starts to carry out the new 10-year National Plan to introduce English nationally.

Thirdly, despite the importance of English in the new context of integration and globalization, English language teaching in Vietnam, due to its low quality, has not met the demand for competent English-speaking people. The main reasons are that (i) most of the English teachers, particularly those who are teaching at primary and lower secondary levels are disqualified, (ii) most teachers, except some who are teaching at tertiary level, have not had a chance to study in an English-speaking country, and that (iii) many of them do not normally communicate in English and cannot sustain teaching that mainly depends on communicative interactions.

Fourthly, there are classroom constraints: schools are often located in noisy places, with poor ventilation, overloaded beyond their capacity to classes of fifty or even sixty, with poor libraries and poorly paid staff. Better teachers often go to the cities to seek employment in non-teaching fields or leave the profession for other jobs in the country. There are the material constraints too: tape recorders, electronic equipment, and language lab do not exist in average schools except in the cities and in affluent private institutions. The only sure aids available are the blackboard and sometimes a cassette player, and the frequent voice heard is the teacher based on what she makes of the dayʼs textbook lesson. To make matters worse, class contact hours are few (only 2 or 3 hours a week).

Fifthly, although the rhetoric of the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training stresses the development of practical communication skills, this is rarely reflected at the classroom level, where the emphasis is on the development of reading comprehension, vocabulary and structural patterns for the purposes of passing the end-of-school and university entrance examinations into colleges or universities. New teacher training programmes pre-service and in-service alike have been designed and delivered with a focus on training communicative teachers in a bid to address the faults of teaching methodology. Unfortunately, not much improvement in terms of teaching methods has been noticed in English classes. During the training courses, Vietnamese teachers show great interest in new methodologies, but after they return from those courses, they continue teaching in the old methods.

Sixthly, there is a mismatch between testing and teaching in English language teaching in Vietnam. While teaching follows the communicative approach, testing seems to focus on measuring studentsʼ lexico grammatical knowledge. To make matters more complex, at tertiary level, what the Vietnamese tertiary institutions do is to adopt either TOEFL or TOEIC or IELTS as the main yardstick to measure the studentʼs knowledge and skills in English. These instruments, as is known, are suitable for measuring the knowledge and skills of English of those students who are going to study either in Britain or in the USA or in an English-speaking country.

And finally, the fact that English is introduced into primary schools in Vietnam makes some people express their concern about the negative effects that early introduction of English is having on national identity (cf. Crystal 2000, Nunan 2003).

According to Trang (2010) in teaching IELTS at Vietnam National University, Hanoi, this problem can be tackled through answering the following questions:

1. From lecturers’ perspective, what are their biggest difficulties when teaching IELTS speaking to Vietnamese students at university level?

2. From students’ perspective, what are lecturers’ difficulties when teaching IELTS speaking?

3. What teaching techniques do lecturers suggest to overcome those difficulties?

In short, to answer research question number 1 and 2, the following Table 20 sums up the most common difficulties of lecturers when teaching IELTS in different parts of the speaking test:

Table 21. The most common difficults of lecturers when teaching IELTS

To answer research question number 3, various solutions suggested by the interviewed lecturers include:

– To reduce the size of the IELTS class to the smallest if it is possible.

– To make the IELTS classroom environment less formal and more friendly, one where students can make mistakes without looking or sounding inept.

– To choose the topic that relates to the students and that is easy for the students to talk about.

– To encourage students not to be afraid of making mistakes.

– To emphasize the use of graphic organizers to help the students to plan a clearer and more structural.

– To giving helpful feedback on students’ work and assignments through out various methods such as whole-group feedback; assignment return sheets; model answers; posting comments of common errors.

– To try to correct students only when the meaning is unclear and results in communication breakdown.

– To tell the students to use as much of English as they can, avoid speaking Vietnamese in class.

– The students’ talking time should be more than the teacher’s talking time .

– To make the students aware that they can use the cue card as the structure of the talk.

– To ask the students to use some IT application at home to help them to improve their pronunciation, they can record their own speech, listen to the native speaker and imitate them.

6.2 The impact of adapting the process-oriented approach on EFL learners’ writing performance

Writing in English is a skill that is often neglected in Vietnamese secondary school writing classes, partly because the current textbooks do not have any writing activities and also because teachers find writing quite a daunting prospect in their classes. However, learning to write in English has officially been brought into the curriculum as one of the required skills for Vietnamese students, who are in lower-secondary schools (grades 8 and 9) since the school year 2004-2005 and in upper-secondary schools since the school year 2006-2007.

In the upper-secondary school context, where exposure to English is typically limited to three periods each week, students receive little practice in writing in English, only one period (45 minutes) per unit. When they do write, they find themselves confused with word choice, grammatical use, organization and generation of ideas. They tend to translate ideas from mother tongue into English, express ideas in long sentences, and are not aware of different kinds of writing, thus making them unable to write in real life. Because of limited background knowledge, they often feel bored when doing written work, especially when lacking support and motivation from teachers.

Moreover, students show little knowledge about how to write a contextually appropriate paper and how to develop their process of writing. Unfortunately, the pressures of the formative tests and summative examinations force English teachers to focus their attention on grammatical rules, linguistic accuracy and students’ final “piece of work” instead of functional language skills. Due to students’ low level proficiency, time constraints and low motivation, writing still remains neglected. Teaching English writing in Vietnamese upper-secondary schools is a challenging job for many Vietnamese English teachers because it requires not only high language competence among the teachers themselves, but also the application of appropriate writing instruction. The reality of teaching English writing at Ly Tu Trong specialized upper-secondary school has revealed that most students have problems in writing. Their problems as well as reasons are as follows:

6.2.1 The overview of the development of writing ability

Although writing plays an indispensable role in the four basic language skills, it has long been ignored in Vietnamese secondary schools. According to the national examination format (see Appendix II), reading ability is still regarded as the most important skill. As for formative and summative tests, writing is not included, thus making it difficult to motivate students to write in class. Compared with the other three skills, writing is considered too complicated to teach. Some teachers do not feel confident about their own English and shy away from designing writing tasks or getting students to write more than just grammatical exercises. Sometimes teachers do not have enough ideas to help students.

In reality, most teachers follow what the tasks in the textbook require, and do nothing more about it. They may even let students copy the models from the so-called “How to” book. It could be obvious that writing is not important enough to teach in the class and that it occupies a lower position in Vietnamese upper-secondary English classrooms. It is not surprising, as a result, that this reading-dominated principle and the test-oriented approach bring about negative effects to upper-secondary graduates, who will later receive many complaints about their lack of competence of listening, speaking and writing skills.

6.2.2 Emphasis on language accuracy

Writing instruction in Vietnam is carried out under the authority of a nationally unified syllabus and the national examination system. Although the Vietnamese upper-secondary English Syllabus involves developing four functional language skills, the test and examination formats highly value correct linguistic forms instead of students’ development of creative thought. The desire for high graduation pass rates among upper-secondary schools places English teachers in a dilemma. Under immense pressure, English teachers must focus on teaching correct language forms and test-oriented skills rather than helping students develop their creative thinking and language skills for communicative purposes.

Moreover, most writing activities in the Vietnamese upper-secondary syllabus, especially Tieng Anh 10, are designed on the basis of the product-oriented approach, in which students are encouraged to mimic a model text, which is usually presented and analyzed at an early stage. This discourages students’ creativity because they cannot use their own experiences to express themselves. All they have to do is to answer comprehension questions, to fill in the blanks with the provided information, or to build complete sentences using the given cues in order to make a meaningful letter, and so on. This controlled writing format hinders teachers in trying new approaches to writing instruction. Teacher feedback focuses more on grammatical and lexical errors instead of meaning-oriented exploration. In brief, under such a syllabus, students are mainly evaluated by their test scores.

6.2.3 Lack of variety of assessment

In Vietnamese upper-secondary school context, it has long been the tradition that teachers are responsible for correcting their students’ writing. Thus, students write for the teacher, not for themselves, and as a result, teachers are the only audience for whom students gain experience writing. One result of this is that writing teachers are often overloaded with the task of giving feedback to and correcting students’ writing. This has led to the situation in which teacher-controlled feedback still remains dominant in Vietnamese English writing classrooms.

It is widely held that upper-secondary school English teachers mainly concentrate on the correction of grammar and spelling mistakes. They assume that such errors need to be eradicated immediately, and that the best way to help students is correcting all the errors in their writing in order to help students make progress. However, this traditional treatment is said to have no significant influence on students. From my observations, some good students do not like such a way. They feel discouraged and humiliated when having their writing papers marked with a lot of suggested correction. In some cases, some students just take a glance at what the teacher has corrected, while many others may not even look at the corrections.

It is also found that upper-secondary school students are never asked to revise their work for improvements based on the teacher’s feedback. The first drafts are always the final ones. It is simply because there are too many students in a class, and most classes are mixed ability; revision may become a burden to the teachers as marking and correcting is time-consuming. They could not manage it when they have only 45 minutes allocated for each writing lesson. They sometimes feel guilty because they are unable to correct all errors for students or to work through all their written work. This results in a mentality in which students fail to think carefully and deeply about their errors.

Due to the fact that students are passive in the classroom, they naturally feel uncomfortable with cooperative interaction that requires them to take an active role. Most students are likely to think that writing in English, just like writing in Vietnamese, is individual work, not a collaborative effort. They are not accustomed to pair work or group work when they do the writing. They never share their written texts with their peers in order to get feedback as well as to learn from their friends’ written products. Consequently, the teacher-led assessment makes writing meaningless and unproductive; student creativity and activeness are hindered, and thus motivation and proficiency in writing remain low. 

On realizing students’ problems of English writing, I assume that the product-oriented approaches and the teacher’s traditional treatment of writing, to some extent, have now been disproved, discouraging students from writing in English in writing classrooms. Therefore, what English writing teachers in upper-secondary schools need to do is to improve the quality of students’ pieces of writing, to give them a more cooperative learning environment, and to encourage them to share their written products with their peers’.

The researcher has been making an effort to seek pedagogical methods which could help deal with the mentioned problems. And assume that adapting the process-oriented approach could be a more effective strategy. Many studies on the effectiveness of this approach have proved that it can be applied in EFL writing classes to solve the above problems. Theoretically, this process approach calls for providing and maintaining a positive, encouraging and collaborative workshop environment (Silva & Matsuda, 2002, pp. 261). Related to my students’ problems, so the researcher would like to conduct an experimental study in order to test whether adapting the process-oriented approach could have a positive impact on upper-secondary school students’ quality of writing.

6.3 Case study and program for teaching EFL scientific writing to Vietnamese researchers

The market for English in Vietnam is immense for a variety of reasons. Culturally speaking, the extensive importation of English-language films, music, games and TV series, not to mention international social networking, has created a generalized source of palpable social pressure.

Academically speaking, English has become a turnkey to opportunity. Entrance to many Vietnamese postgraduate programs, even in areas where such a link would seem improbable, such as nursing, is highly dependent on performance in tests of English reading comprehension. Moreover, being the language in which the overwhelming majority of technical journals with higher impact factors publish, English follows the Vietnamese researcher throughout his career, adding the requirement of competent written production to breadth of reading.

Science and social science authors who want to publish internationally but have not acquired the necessary level to write directly in English must shop around for a translation service. Investment in such a service, which is often pricey, may be rewarded with surprise when journal peer-reviewers comment on the lack of scientific or even English language competency in their articles. Such authors have little recourse but to keep hunting for a better service in an expensive trial-and-error process while their articles collect virtual dust as they fall behind in research quotas and funding competition. Those authors able to represent their research clearly in English frequently seek out help in the form of a text editing or revision service to conform language and style to appropriate levels. Such help, however, is not a guarantee of success, which ultimately lies in the strength of the original text that is being corrected.

Although Vietnamese scientific output and its impact are clearly multifactorial issues, for good or for ill, English language education has become a functional prerequisite for Vietnamese scientists. Nevertheless, the type of education currently available in the Vietnamese EFL market does not lend itself to academic production although test preparation courses, generally in the form of VIP private tutoring, may be found at a limited number of schools. Thus, despite assertions that “the second-language learner who actually achieves native-speaker competence cannot possibly have been taught this competence” (Selinker, 1972, p. 212-213), the development of an academic writing course who goals include written expression on a level acceptable for publication in the international scientific literature should be seen both as a necessity and an opportunity. In this context, such a course, although involving an exportable concept, must be firmly rooted in the structures of Vietnamese Portuguese and English to such a degree as to shun the involvement of international publishers and any ambition of “monoglot materials…without regard to students’ L1” (Cook, 1998, p.118).

The program involved three modules that are outlined in more detail below: a basic or background module on consistently troublesome grammar elements, an editing module consisting of various group exercises involving the correction of previously submitted articles from their research group, and a translation module in which the students translated segments of articles they or colleagues had written and presented them to the group for analysis.

6.3.1 The Background module

As previously stated, the Background module was not a ground-up approach because of the students’ more advanced reading level. Another important factor weighed into the approach was that because there is enough similarity to warrant scholarly debate whether English is actually a romance language (Gachelin, 1990), the language pair lends itself to a complimentary teaching structure, i.e., one that emphasizes differences (non-similarities) between the languages instead of treating them as rigidly discrete and foreign systems. Thus, this module focused on areas in which the two language systems clashed, where, observed from my experience as a text reviser, Vietnamese researchers assume and impose fossilized L1 structures on English that can violate anything from good style to basic comprehensibility. Such topics, which follow with a minimum of explanation, are outlined in Table 21 below:

Table 22. Content of Background module of EFL science writing course

6.3.2 The Editing module

The Editing module represented the beginning of the practical component of the course. It consisted of group exercises involving manuscripts that had been previously corrected for the study group. An uncorrected text was projected on a screen with a video projector and a progression of group exercises was carried out. Exercises began with sentences singled out to highlight specific problems covered in the Background module, such as preposition use or word order. A sentence was given and students were asked if there was anything wrong with the sentence. If no one perceived the mistake, the problem word or words were pointed out: “What about this?” The weaker the response by the group, the more detailed the explanation and the stronger the reinforcement would be.

Beyond the black-and-white cases, more subtle miscollocations were dealt with by having the students take turns revising sentences. A student would rework a complete sentence without having been prompted about any possible errors and his version would be entered on the screen below the original. The group would be asked to compare the sentences, describing the changes made and the possible reasoning behind them. The student would be given a chance to explain his choices and then the version I had prepared was compared to the other two, if necessary. Valid alternative phrasing suggested by the students was encouraged; they were reminded that the goal was to stimulate their own more authentic English production, and not to simply imitate another writer’s style. The idea was to use sentences that could be resolved and explained by logic rather than by concluding “it just sounds right/better”. Even if aesthetics was appealed to, the mechanics behind it were stressed as much as possible to demonstrate that they could achieve naturalness by reasoning in places where native-speakers relied on “instinct”. This type of exercise was expanded to the paragraph level, with the goal of working on a full text together.

Bear in mind that the application of the Background module was not strictly chronological in the general order of the course; some mistakes in the Editing module called for a review of previous material and others called for completely new lessons unforeseen in the original planning. Drills, warm-ups, review and/or new background topics were presented each class since an overlong group text editing exercise could become tiresome.

6.3.3 The Translation module

The Translation module was to follow a fairly similar pattern as the Editing module, but was not thoroughly explored by the time the course was concluded after about ten weeks. The primary difference was that, due to the need for careful individual thought and the longer time involved in translation, an entire abstract was assigned for translation at home and student work was compared on a sentence-by-sentence basis in class, with the students commenting on each other’s work and arriving at the best version. Although I stepped in where I felt it was necessary, I tried to hang back and let the comparison process itself raise student awareness. Dialog in this module would necessarily include Retsker’s (1974, p. 9) concepts of equivalence, analogy and adequacy whereby students would acquire strategies for dealing with various levels of correspondence between the grammatical relationship and semantic features of the two languages.

6.3.4 Results and discussion

Student reception of the course, which was only informally measured by attendance and chat, and thus will be mentioned only in passing, seemed quite positive. Nevertheless, the course could be more fully developed, especially the Translation module. The final objective of peer (i.e., colleague) reviewed self-translation must be reached for authors to arrive at a greater state of responsibility for their own production. An excellent conclusion for such a course would be to follow a study group through the entire process of manuscript creation and submission to a scientific journal for publishing, including letters to the editor and dealing with the corrections required by the journal’s reviewers, hopefully ending in successful publication.

It should be commented that the special circumstances of this group of students both facilitated and hindered the process. Group cohesion was very high due to their shared university coursework, research projects and in some cases internship, which led to a friendly, non-competitive atmosphere when critiquing each other’s work. Gaffes were not punitively censured by the group, and this openness made them very easy to teach. The only hindrance in the group dynamic was exhaustion from their multitude of activities. Classes were held on a weeknight from 8:00pm until approximately 10:00 after most had studied and put in a full day at their internships, so even though motivation was not lacking there was a limited supply of energy left. Nevertheless, this is hardly idiosyncratic and should really be taken as a basic social reality for any such group taught in Vietnam.

Any direct, systematic approach to good writing itself, apart from the SVO lesson and passing examples in the Editing module was left out of the course design although it merits discussion. Whether there exists such a thing as universal sound writing principles that can be taught outside the bounds of a particular language in the same sense as Chomskian emphasis “on universal rather than language-specific aspects of language and language acquisition” (Cook, 1998, p.118) is an interesting question. In this case, it could be narrowed down to “what are the hallmarks of a well-written scientific article?” To address this, a survey of the most influential articles in a given discipline could be made and the resulting list of articles gathered for analysis.

Self-translation as opposed to direct writing in the target language (in this case English) is another area that warrants exploration since it is important for a number of reasons in a course such as this. First and foremost, an original in the mother tongue (L1) leaves a process trail that can be used to evaluate the success of the product in the target language. In my experience revising manuscripts, I have found that it would often be easier to do a new translation from the original than to decipher the intent of a badly handled translation alone. However, in the Translation module of such a course the authors of a text used in class would also be students and, naturally, present to clarify intent. Thus, having a base text in L1 would eliminate most doubt in an objective way for the rest of the students and would also help the rest of the students more clearly visualize the author’s thoughts. Moreover, prewriting in L1 and then translating produces a completed prototext as an extra step for author reflection, which could be helpful for the final product, at least while at the student level. Finally, according to Balboni (2011, p.1),

“translation can be a motivational activity if the text is actually motivating”. It could be easily argued that under such circumstances, self-translation would be the most motivating of any possible exercise.

Self-translation also differs from translating third-party work in that the author, according to Menakhem Perry (cited by Grutman), “can allow himself bold shifts from the source text which, had it been done by another translator, probably would not have passed as an adequate translation” (Grutman, 1998, p.18). The manuscript would still be ‘live’ at this point since not only the author would be present, but (in the case of the experimental course) colleagues from the same academic setting and research group who were pursuing the same ends and involved in the research being written about. The translation work and its peer review in such a classroom setting thus becomes a natural outgrowth of the research itself, contributing to and furthering the larger scientific process. In this case, therefore, we have an interesting melding of purposes: the ongoing (physical therapy) education process under the guidance of the responsible professor/s, which gains cohesion through the research project, which is then reviewed and clarified in writing the article in L1, to which is appended the EFL educational goal whereby, in a course such as that presently described, the article undergoes a second round of revision and rethinking by the original authors, under the guidance of the EFL professor, before going on to the final steps of the publishing process and finding a place in the scientific literature. The question arises whether a course such as this could be given on an individual basis, since cohesive groups may be hard to come by. First of all, much is gained by the group dynamic, such as the peer review factor mentioned above and below. The group dynamic also lends itself to a more open, descriptive approach that can contribute ideas, whereas an individual working with a tutor may be more apt to fall into a prescriptive pattern and end up simply cloning the style of the tutor, which is great for pronunciation, but could create dependency for writing. The perennial drawback of the group approach is lack of individual attention, so the size of any group should be controlled. Participation in an overly large group could actually be worse than studying individually. A good (although more time-consuming) plan would be to provide a group class and supplementary tutoring sessions for students having trouble.

Grammatically speaking, a study of the verb tenses by article section could be included in the course. For example, as mentioned above, the difficult present perfect tense often appears in the introduction section when rehearsing the history of research in a certain area so far. Calls for further study and description of study limitations in the discussion sections will frequently employ modals. Consistent use of the past tense is called for in the methods, etc.

There a number of levels on which Vietnamese could gain from such an approach to EFL writing. First, as the linguist Paolo Torresan maintains (2011), “a mistake is a gift to the class.” I mean to say by this that there is benefit to be derived from an examination of the interlanguage miscollocations propagated in a great many articles, both those published and those denied publication, by Vietnamese authors. From such mistakes, a territory of Portuguese and English system clash can be mapped out by means of which Vietnamese researchers can be sensitized to areas where Portuguese language parameters do not transfer. Second, the peer review component of such a course will help sensitize authors to the need for clarity in their writing, not only because their own colleagues will need to read their production in class (and not merely some faceless reviewers from some faraway journal), but to express their thoughts in such a way as to lend them to exportation, which can lead to the exposure they desire for their research. The final benefit of such education applied on a large and consistent enough scale would be that the general linguistic quality of Vietnamese scientific writing would improve, removing costly intermediaries from the publication process and leading to more numerous and citable publications. Hence, see the Appendix III for more information about the TESOL English course syllabus that design to Vietnamese learner to help them gain the skills above.

6.4 About English Teacher Training by the IFTS programme and its adaptability to current needs of English teacher training in Vietnam

The section reports on an evaluative review of the English Education Program by the IFTS and its adaptability to current needs of English teacher training in Vietnam by focusing on both strengths and weaknesses identified through the analysis of the program based on the related theories, models and previous empirical research and comparison of the present program with the preceding English language teacher education program. The research shows that the program has more strengths than the weaknesses it does. It was seen that pedagogical and theory components are quite well covered. Consequently, a number of suggestions are offered to the stakeholders in the implications of the critical evaluation. In closing, the study stresses the importance of systematic evaluation for educating and training highly qualified English language teachers and successful foreign language education.

6.4.1 What does the IFTS teacher training programme include and how is it delivered?

According to (Martyn & Ha, 1999), the training program content is derived from the pre-course and during-course needs analyses, and from the previous experiences of others who have trained non-native speaking teachers in developmental contexts (for example, Clarke, 1991; Doff, 1988; Richards, 1998; Spratt, 1994; Willis, 1986; Harmer, 1991; Ur, 1996). The program content is selected being mindful of the social context within which English language teachers (ELTs) work in Vietnam, and the program is responsive to the constraints of such contexts (see Holliday, 1994; Tollefson, 1995). The needs analyses and the previous experiences of others have resulted in a program content that is delivered flexibly and that may include the following broad, general topics:

Language Proficiency and Communication Skills

Theories of Teaching (General Teaching and Language Teaching Methodologies)

Practice of Teaching (General Skills and Specific Language Teaching Skills)

Subject Matter Knowledge (for example, the System of the Language; Second Language Acquisition Research)

Classroom Based and Learner-Centered Observation and Decision Making Skills and Pedagogical Reasoning Skills

Contextual Knowledge (The Understanding of and Adapting to Specific Contexts)

In the previous Program for ELTs from specialized non-language universities these substantial, general topic areas were expanded to the following areas:

Language Development for Language Teachers

Introduction to Action Research for Language Teachers

Self-Access and Independent Learning Skills for Language Teachers

Empirical Approaches to Language Teaching

Classroom Management Skills for Language Teachers

Introduction to Classroom Observation and Research for Language Teachers

Language Learner Styles

Language Learning Strategies

Language Learning Tasks

Learner-Centered Approaches to Language Teaching

Teaching the Four Language Macro-Skills

Teaching Large Classes

Teaching Mixed-Ability Classes

Teaching ‘Weak’ Classes

It is stressed that each of the above course components is developed to different degrees of depth depending on the needs of the participants. It would be impossible to cover all the above areas to the depth required in the limited time available. The ‘depth’ that is developed may vary from a simple introduction of the concept, to an extensive and intensive 3- or 4-week course component. The teacher trainers in consultation with their participants are free to decide which aspects of the program content are focused on.

The delivery of this program content has other ‘peculiarities’ in the Vietnamese context. Besides the fact that no aspect of the content is prescribed, teacher trainers and the participants have access to an extensive and accessible resource centre. This centre contains a wide range of reference texts, course books, cassette tapes, videos, journals, and newspapers. The centre also provides teacher trainers and participants with access to the Internet. The programs have administrative support including access to photocopying facilities and services. These aspects of program delivery are unusual in a developmental context, but add to the value of the program outcomes.

The evaluation and assessment of both the success of the application of the methodologies used in the programs to achieve the program aims, and of the learning of the participants is done using as variety of formative and summative evaluation and assessment techniques.

6.4.2 Any innovative parts of IFTS English teacher training programme for English teacher training in Vietnam? If so, what is the innovative thing?

According to (Coskun & Daloglu, 2010), there are some recommended innovative things:

1. Courses should be restructured to meet the practical, teaching-related needs of the student teachers. It would be fair to suggest that teachers should incorporate more micro-teaching and classroom observation chances in pedagogic courses.

2. The theory and the practice components of the program should be balanced as there seems to be a feeling among many students that the program puts more emphasis on the theory rather than the practice. A teacher education program should only be neither theoretical (received knowledge) nor practical (experiential knowledge) and the parts of a teacher education program reflect the harmony of both knowledge and application (Ur, 1992).

3. The school experience course should start earlier in the program and should be allocated more time and importance for experiential learning. As Enginarlar (1996) stated, one school experience course with very limited hours of observation and actual teaching would not suffice to prepare student teachers for teaching profession. Also, preparation to teach in more than one level, such as the elementary and secondary levels is a necessity because most student teachers do not know where they will be teaching. Instructors at the universities, and mentor teachers and administrators at schools where the school experience courses are carried out play vital roles in practice-based courses. Therefore, these people should be trained enough to understand the importance of these courses for teacher candidates and be aware of their responsibilities within these courses. The quality of the mentoring is important as a means of teacher development. Also the school-university cooperation should be strengthened for more effective practice-based courses.

4. There is a need to have a course in the program to help student teachers to share ideas and get feedback about their school experience course and reflect on their teaching practices so that they can establish the link between theory and the practice.

5. Teachers should use more modern teaching techniques. Lecturing should be abandoned and the level of memorization involved in the program should be reduced.

6. Using presentation as a teaching and learning technique should be approached more critically by the instructors because almost all student teachers complained about the fact that presentations are overused in some courses.

7. Courses relevant to student teachers’ linguistic competence should be increased in number.

8. English preparatory education for program student teachers is necessary to better enable them to deal with the courses offered in the program more effectively. Those who fail to demonstrate sufficient English language proficiency should have an additional one year of basic English language education.

9. There is a need for more elective courses offered in the program. Analyzing the variety of elective courses offered in different English teacher training departments, Sanlı (2009) found that the variety of these courses is very limited and more options about these courses should be given to student teachers.

10. As there seems to be only one course, Classroom Management, directly related to students’ managerial competence, there is a need for new courses to improve students’ managerial competence so that student teachers can deal with possible problems they may experience in their future working environments.

11. Literature courses should be approached as a tool for teaching English.

12. To avoid overlaps among different courses, teachers should work in cooperation, collaboration and integration to consider overlaps and resolve disagreements in course contents.

13. There is a need for a clear program philosophy reflected into the program. Wallace (1991) attracts attention to the need for a clearly stated philosophy in teacher education programs.

14. A course called “Orientation” should be offered to help students decide about their future careers.

15. Teachers should be regularly evaluated by students so that teachers can both improve themselves and thus the program. For a constructive, manageable and regular use of student evaluation, Daloglu’s (1998) model including three main components (content of the course, teaching techniques employed in the lessons, and assignments and assessment procedures) can be used as many students seem to complain mostly about these there aspects of the current program.

In addition to the above list of program components in need of improvement from both teachers and students’ point of views, there are certain aspects of the program that needs to be maintained. First of all, the relationship between teachers and student teachers is favorable. Also, the theory part of the program is quite strong. Student teachers’ involvement in the decisions made about the content of some courses is another good point to note down. Courses related to materials development also seem to be favored by both student teachers and instructors. The addition of some courses in the new program (e.g. teaching four skills, literature and language teaching) and the separation of the listening course from the speaking course in the new program are regarded as positive changes by the instructors. Finally, courses involving practice chances for student teachers are the ones that should be maintained in the program.

6.4.3 General evaluation of the IFTS English teacher training programme

Strengths of the program

According to KarakaÅŸ (2012), the new program includes newly added compulsory courses which were not available in the former one such as “listening and pronunciation”, “second foreign language” and “community service”. Also, contents and names of the several courses have been changed. To illustrate, ‘English grammar’ was named as ‘contextual grammar’, and ‘English literature’ as ‘literature and language teaching’. Some integrated courses like listening and speaking were separated from one another and were added into the curriculum as ‘listening and pronunciation’ and ‘oral communication skills’. To literature course was added a pedagogic dimension and took the name ‘Literature and Language Teaching’. These amendments were positively approved by lecturers applying the program (e.g. CoÅŸkun & DaloÄŸlu, 2010) thanks to the heavy emphasis on the pedagogic and linguistic dimensions.

Another improvement in the present program is the increased cooperation between student-trainees and teachers in schools, which did not take enough precedence before (Grossman et al., 2007). In a study on the new program, it was found that the curriculum was responsive to teacher-students’ expectations in teaching profession, social objectives and profits. They also acknowledged that the courses provided opportunities of application as well as pure theory, unlike the previous curriculum (CoÅŸgun-Ogeyik, 2009).

Weaknesses of the program

The initial weakness of the program lies in the fact that it is out-of-date, having been in practice for almost five years. During this stretch of time, many changes of direct pertinence to the role and teaching of English along with technological resources and challenges have come into existence. Any program together with its curriculum is supposed to be constantly kept up-to-date and regularly revised (Farris, 1996) and the task of updating should be done at regular intervals to be able to maintain the same rate of the current advances happening around the world in the field of language teacher education (CoÅŸkun, 2008). However, the new status of English as global language is not conveyed to the teacher-trainees. It is their right to be alerted about the varieties of English, the global role of English, as a language they will be teaching soon. This hole in the program has been pointed by some heedful researchers, with the following suggestions by (Snow et al. ,2006; cited in CoÅŸkun, n.d.)

1. Teacher trainees should experience the varieties of English.

2. Methodologies to be of value in the local context and to reflect students’ actual needs and interests should be adapted,

3. Collaboration between local and outside experts should be supported,

4. Trainees should be imbued with the value of continuous reflective practice and life-long learning efforts.

As largely voiced by teacher-trainees in the previous studies, another missing point in the program is the scarcity of culture-based lessons (CoÅŸgun-Ogeyik, 2009). Peacock (2009) quotes his participants’ suggestion that “the programme needs to ‘promote the culture of teaching and what it means to be a teacher” (p. 270). In parallel, Cross (2004) promotes the idea that the target cultures should be placed in the program. I, in this context, refer to the target cultures as the cultures of those speaking English all around the world, not only the cultures of native speakers of English.