Vu Tran-Thanh, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Language Education Reform in Vietnam and Teachers’ Professional Development

Language education in Vietnam has become an important focus of public debate since 2008 when approximately 450 million USD was poured into an initiative called the 2020 National Foreign Language Project (referred to as Project 2020 onwards). The objective was clear: by 2020 Vietnamese students would have been able to communicate effectively in at least one foreign language (preferably English).

Teachers have been positioned at the center of the Project with more than 80% of the investment spared for their professional development (PD). Numerous training programs at different scales have been organized, textbooks have been published and a whole new standardized language test has been developed. The government obviously expected a lot from the teachers, but the results turned out to be disappointing. Most public school ESOL teachers are still considered pedagogically under-qualified and linguistically incompetent; and the situation which they were expected to reform (grammatical exam-oriented teaching with no skills) remains unchanged.

Researchers and teachers seem to share their viewpoint on this one fact: most state-run PD initiatives are top-down, insufficient, and unsystematic. Teachers, therefore, consider attending a PD program a burden rather than an opportunity (Le, 2019).

Teachers’ Beliefs and Their Role in Professional Development

While most teachers blame the policies for these outcomes, I believe the dilemma needs to be addressed from both sides: administrators and teachers. From my research, mostly qualitative, with both preservice and in-service teachers, I have found that many of them hold rather worrying misbeliefs about language teaching and learning, and those misconceptions serve well as an obstacle for PD.

Researchers such as Borg (2011) or Ashton (2014) have found that teachers’ beliefs act as a filter to expert knowledge. In other words, teachers only take in what correlates with their own existing beliefs. Efforts to educate teachers without taking their beliefs into consideration will, therefore, potentially fail.

In the case of Vietnamese ESOL teachers, their faulty beliefs form systematically and thus have become very challenging to address. They form perceptions about language education as learners, bring those with them to teacher education programs, which are conducted by trainers who share a similar background. As they progress, additional relevant (mis)beliefs are constructed. What seems to be a never-ending process here is that the teachers may be imposing false beliefs on some future-teachers, who are currently students in their classrooms. In the following sections I will present three of such (mis)beliefs emerging from my research.

Vietnamese ESOL Teachers’ Pedagogical (Mis)Beliefs

Available PD is no Good for Examinations

When asked why they don’t teach skills but all grammar and vocabulary, most teachers would respond, “That’s what is tested in every exam.” Poor results indicate one important thing: the teachers are incompetent. They, therefore, turn the whole language learning into exam preparation.

Holding this belief firmly means that teachers readily turn away from any PD program that aims at “teaching for skills” – the only type that is available to them. Their selection criterion is quite simple: anything that sounds “communicative” would not be working.

The belief is faulty in two aspects: (1) students do need what was rejected by their teachers – even for examinations, and (2) teachers refuse their own opportunity to learn. Additionally, it also signals a critical issue: teachers don’t believe in Project 2020 and what it has to offer.

The Textbook is Everything

From some pre-workshop discussions with some teachers, there emerged a major concern: they would not be able to teach without textbook-based training. While the Ministry of Education and Training has pointed out that textbooks are now only a source of reference and that teachers solely need the national syllabus, most teachers believe otherwise. Many teachers revealed that they were not confident to teach and worried that their students would not perform satisfactorily if no handy guidelines on using a certain textbook were provided. In other words, Vietnamese teachers still hold a belief from the time when the “one textbook for all” policy was employed: only teach what is in the textbook – no more, no less.

Similar to the previous misbelief, this perception can potentially filter out PD programs that are not textbook-related and teachers can eventually stop learning. Teachers obviously need more than just lesson planning skills and refusing to enrich their knowledge base with more diverse content is more than just dangerous.

Communicative Language Teaching Must be Fun

I once worked in the judging committee for a teaching competition and heard this complaint, “This year’s lessons are not fun at all”, which implied that a CLT lesson should be fun. My later interactions with teachers and teachers-to-be revealed that this belief is extremely common.

Many university programs devote considerable training to using games and songs. Activities that trigger laughter and joyful moments are encouraged (and implicitly required). Many student-teachers have come to me with the question of how to make their lessons fun. While adding some uplifting emotions to a lesson is totally fine, placing “enjoyable” above “learnable” is something to worry about.

Besides creating unnecessary burden in lesson planning and causing teachers to go astray from lesson objectives, this misbelief is harmful to their PD in the long run. It can gradually alter their methodological knowledge base, especially when similar perceptions are subsequently accepted.

What are the Ways Forward?

An unprecedented change is happening at a national scale: Project 2020 has extended its deadline to 2030 and a national education reform is being carried out. These events have, consequently, made ways for numerous PD initiatives. The issue of misbeliefs is not simple to address, especially when it is rather deep-seated. Many experts have warned that history will repeat itself if no perceptual shift is initiated. The whole system seems to be facing an equal number of challenges and opportunities when those beliefs are not held only by teachers. Changes should first begin not just in policies but in the mind of those in power.

References

Ashton, P. T. (2014). Historical Overview and Theoretical Perspectives of Research on Teachers’ Beliefs. In H. Fives & M. G. Gill (Eds.), International Handbook of Research on Teachers’ Beliefs. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203108437.ch3

Borg, S. (2011). The impact of in-service teacher education on language teachers’ beliefs. System, 39(3), 370-380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2011.07.009

Le, V. C. (2019). Exploring teacher learning in mandatory in-service training courses: Challenges ahead. In C. V. Le, H. T. M. Nguyen, M. T. T. Nguyen, & R. Barnard (Eds.), Building Teacher Capacity in English Language Teaching in Vietnam (pp. 62-79). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429457371