Análisis Micro ambiental

The undergraduate English language teacher training offered at each university is a four-year program with requirements to complete 210 academic units (1.5 academic unit is equal to 1 credit point in the current credit-based education system) with seven major groups of subjects based on MOET’s drafted framework for constructing a pre-service English language teacher curriculum (MOET, 2010) (see Table 4.1).

Table 4.1. Overview of four-year English language teacher education program (MOET, 2010)

Subject groups Example of subjects Academic

units

Main language of

instruction

General education

Basic Principles of Marxist Leninism, Ho Chi Minh’s Ideology, Information Technology, Psychology, Educational Theories, Vietnamese Language, Second Foreign Language

80 Vietnamese

English language skills

Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing, Grammar

110 English

Linguistics Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics

Literature-Culture English Literature, American Literature, Cross-cultural Communication

Teaching methodology

English Language Teaching Methodology, Microteaching

School placement Practicum 10 English/

Vietnamese Thesis writing /

Graduation test

Completion of research writing or graduation

tests 10 English

On successful completion of the course, students are awarded the degree entitled “Bachelor of Arts in Teaching English” and are qualified to teach at various types of schools within Vietnam. Typically,

they teach at high schools but some go and teach English at lower levels of the education system such as in kindergarten, primary or junior secondary schools. The English department and its umbrella institution may support them to find jobs related to English language education after the completion of the program by posting recruitment news, providing letters of reference or communicating directly with the schools when necessary. The prerequisite and number of credits for completing each subject vary slightly among institutions.

As can be inferred from the data obtained, the curriculum of undergraduate EFL teacher programs stipulated by MOET’s framework is comprised of two main components: general education taught in Vietnamese and specialized English language teaching knowledge taught in English. The general education makes up more than one third of the four-year program. In terms of English language teacher knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and contextual knowledge (English language teaching methodology) are much outweighed by the domains of English language proficiency and subject matter knowledge (language skills, linguistics, literature and culture) but little by contextual knowledge, pedagogical reasoning and decision making and school placement. In other words, the EFL teacher education is heavily reliant on linguistics and literature and deals very little with teaching practice (Pham, 2001), which supports Pham’s (1998) claim that teacher training in Vietnam emphasizes subject-matter content knowledge and the philosophy of Ho Chi Minh, with little attention given to “teaching methods”.

The imbalance between theory and practice is also evident in the fact that the teaching practicum components account for only 10 of the total 210 academic units of the training program. Although there is still no clear consensus about how much time trainee teachers should spend on their placement, or how the time between practical teaching at school and the theoretical learning at university should be distributed, the literature suggests that the length of time spent by pre-service teachers in the practicum affects their confidence and capacity to apply theory to practice (Darling- Hammond & Bransford, 2005). Therefore, according to the studies, to improve teacher candidates’ capacity to apply learning to practice, more attention needs to be paid to developing trainee teachers’ pedagogical and contextual knowledge, such as classroom management, school culture and expectations, the English curriculum in schools, testing factors, and students’ backgrounds and learning needs through university courses, and more time on authentic teaching practice at school because this knowledge enables the teacher to function effectively in the real teaching context (Johnson, 1996; Kwo, 1996; Richards, 1998; Yuan and Lee, 2014).

All the teacher educators consulted during the course of this research highlighted several weaknesses inherent in the current English language teacher education in Vietnam. While it is beyond the scope of this study to investigate this issue further, to discuss it at length, or to suggest remedies, it is essential

to note that many of the issues that face English language teacher education stem from a lack of connection between government policies and grassroots practice.

Firstly, the lack of communication between universities, schools and employers was mentioned. Most respondents agreed that representatives of schools, employers and universities had limited opportunities to communicate. This was leading to low levels of collaboration between the three parties, resulting in a potential mismatch between training objectives, graduate outcomes and recruitment. In some instances, said one Dean, organizational structures were based on rigid personnel and financial arrangements that undermined collaboration,

We need to wait for approval from this university if we would like to contact the school or employer regarding our training programs. We are dependent on the university’s financial and human support. We generally do not want to attempt something beyond our role because the more we are involved, the less we get. (Interview, D3)

Time constraints were the main contributor to this lack of collaboration. Both university educators and school teachers said that heavy workloads left little time for them to think about collaborative initiatives outside teaching. Each school teacher typically needed to teach about 20 periods (45 minute each) a week and to be engaged in other duties such as tutoring, attending staff meetings and joining professional development workshops while each university mentor was required to spend 40 hours per week lecturing, researching and engaging in other professional responsibilities. As such, the collaboration that does occur comes more from concern on the part of some individuals than from structural co-operative arrangements. In fact, the issue of heavy workloads of English teachers at both higher institutions and high schools in the Vietnamese EFL contexts, which hindered the mentoring practice of the university mentors and school mentors to a considerable extent, has been highlighted in research by Pham (2001) and Utsumi and Doan (2010).

Secondly, university participants were sceptical whether the courses in the training program were up- to-date and reflected current research into language learning and teaching as well as curriculum and teaching practice in schools. Time constraints and staffing restrictions were cited as the main factors impeding the university lecturers to conduct research, or to take practical measures, such as redesigning courses and trying out new teaching techniques, to ensure that programs reflected the best of what is currently known about language pedagogy.

You could look at the curriculum and see the list of the courses, which are very similar to what has been taught twenty years ago. Communicative language teaching was more appropriate in the early 1990s than it is now but courses continue to rely on theories of communicative language learning. We know they are old but we are not sure what to do. (Interview, UM5) The participants considered some areas in the courses to be lagging behind current best practice including integration of ICT, recognition and integration of national curriculum and understanding the broader educational goals.

Thirdly, there is a problem concerning interfacing with the national curriculum and syllabus documents. Over the past ten years, MOET has published complex curriculum and syllabus documents, and extensive support materials in all teaching and learning English programs in Vietnam’s educational system (MOET, 2007a; Government of Vietnam, 2008; MOET, 2010; MOET, 2012). However, many respondents, particularly the university mentors, commented that insufficient time was provided in teacher education courses for the study of these new curricula. This shortcoming is serious as these documents present not only a description of content, but also a conceptual approach to the teaching of English, which the graduate teachers will need to understand when they start teaching. This explains why the tertiary level is very slow to react to the changes the government is implementing at the school level regarding the teaching of English. Therefore,

the methodology courses at university do not cover the situation the trainee teachers find themselves in regarding the national English curriculum at high school because we have not been informed and trained about the new English curricula. (Interview, UM1)

While the internationalization of English teaching has already been reflected in MOET’s policies (MOET, 2010; MOET, 2012), efforts to teach English as a lingua franca have not been greatly emphasized in pre-service teacher training. Opinions from the university mentors showed that undergraduate courses did not incorporate an understanding of English as a lingua franca in examples, discussions, activities and assignments when appropriate. In other words, trainee teachers are still predominantly exposed to the teaching materials and teaching methodology from native English- speaking contexts. One university mentor listed some textbooks used in subjects such as Discourse Analysis, English Literature, Sociolinguistics and English Language Teaching Methodology that were not modified to suit the linguistic and cultural milieu of Vietnam. She explained that there were several aspects of the teaching content that might be adapted to accommodate the needs of EFL teacher candidates such as socio-pragmalinguistics in English speaking cultures and Vietnamese norms of interaction, the selections of English literature from non-native writers or the appropriateness of CLT in Vietnamese contexts.

Furthermore, the teacher educators showed their dissatisfaction with the extent to which existing courses prepared students for their teaching profession. The main criticism of the teacher preparation courses made by teacher educators was that they saw weak links between some courses such as English Literature, Sociolinguistics, Semantics or Syntax and the preparation for the realities of the classroom and school life. It was only in the methodology courses and the practicum that the trainee teachers had the opportunity to integrate theory and practice, but the amount of time spent in the methodology courses and the practicum was insufficient. As a result, some graduate teachers were

underprepared to teach the requisite national curricula. They may have a very proficient knowledge about linguistics and a profound understanding of English culture but they do not

Another university mentor shared this sentiment by adding that trainee teachers were unnecessarily taught many theories in communication, speech acts and teaching techniques but were not sufficiently told how to connect these things to their classroom teaching in response to students’ needs. For instance, the subject Intercultural Communication was added to EFL teacher training to supplement the traditional teaching of only British and American cultures. Unfortunately, little guidance was given to trainee teachers on how to integrate this knowledge with their own teaching at high schools. This is understandable because the principal mode of instruction was still the transmission of information about different cultures instead of treating intercultural awareness as a means to develop students’ language ability.

The findings echo the observation made by Truong and Tran (2014) about textbooks and teaching for English majors at tertiary level in Vietnam. They blame the lack of cultural information and the decontextualized language use as the main culprit for hindering learners’ intercultural competence. Skill textbooks (books to develop learners’ skills in reading, writing, listening and speaking) were seen to present mostly grammar and vocabulary with little sociolinguistic information about the language backgrounds while content textbooks (books to teach Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Literature and Culture) covered much factual information about the inner circle cultures (predominantly Anglo-cultural norms) with scant opportunity to link that cultural knowledge with language use. In other words, textbooks for English teacher education programs have not yet satisfied the demands of multiculturalism and the internationalization of the English language.