DERECHOS Y OBLIGACIONES DE LOS PROPIETARIOS

None of the teachers were trained to be primary English language teachers. They all attended pre-services courses that prepared them for secondary classrooms and all the teachers comment that they found it challenging when they started working as a primary teacher. Bao’s concerns below reflect the feelings of all the teachers.

At first I feel really difficult because in one lesson you teach only 4-6 new words and very simple structures. So how can I spend 30 minutes to teach just a few language items? So I really have difficulties at first

(T.Bao.INT2/ 14.11.13)

While some teachers mention that they have gained confidence in teaching young children through attending workshops organised by international publishers and organisations and “know now how to teach children, how to teach at primary school” (T.Nhung.INT1), others continue to struggle. These feelings are expressed well by Bao and Thanh:

It is hard work because the young children they are very energetic …they talk so much in class and the class is too crowded for me to teach English, so sometimes I feel exhausted…I was not trained to be a primary teacher

(T.Bao.INT1/8/11/13) …difficult because the work with children, working with children, it’s a big problem. They are so young and so their memory is not long and it’s difficult to teach them and so for teaching them I have to design some activity according to the children, mostly it’s games, songs and chants.

(T.Thanh.INT1/29/11/13)

Like the other teachers, Thanh uses games, songs and chants in his lessons often at the start and end as Figure 5.4 highlighted. As well as games, songs and chants, the

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teachers also perceive the emphasis on speaking and listening in the new curriculum as reflecting a more child-friendly pedagogy suitable for young learners in primary schools.

…in the past many teachers they always focus on grammar and writing but for children, especially for young learners, speaking is very important

(T.Mai.TGP/18.4.14)

However it is interesting that data from the observed lessons suggests that this is the only attendance to a young learner approach the teachers seem to use. The majority of their lessons follow an adult-oriented approach to language presentation and practice, with games and chants used to practise discrete language items. This was something identified by Moon (2005) and Nguyen (2012) in their studies of primary teachers in Vietnam prior to the introduction of the new curriculum. An exception was observed in one of Chi’s classes (T.Chi.LO3/15.4.14) where the students were put into small groups of four or five students to colour, cut and paste clothes onto characters from the textbook as the photo in Figure 5.10 shows.

Figure 5.10 Chi’s Grade 3 class (T.Chi.LO3/15.04.14)

However, although this activity had the potential to create meaningful language, it was not fully exploited and a familiar whole class repetition of language from the textbook

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followed. Indeed in the post-observation interview, Chi seemed to be unsure about the usefulness of this activity and the time ‘wasted’ with cutting and pasting, suggesting that this lesson probably did not reflect what she normally does.

It is interesting that both Nhung and Mai were keen to point out that their final observation was a ‘normal’ class and that, as Mai puts it,

I didn’t prepare anything. This is usual because I want you to see the fact.. I teach as usual

(T.Mai.O3/11.4.14).

In these lessons it is noticeable that games and songs they included in their previous observations were missing, suggesting that there is probably little overt adherence to a young learner approach or aspects of ‘communicativeness’ through games and songs in normal lessons (see my comments earlier in section 5.3.3.1)

In section 5.3.2, the teachers’ talk revealed an awareness of the shift in teacher and student roles required in the new curriculum and many teachers linked this to a young learner approach, as Nhung articulates below:

Teaching primary students is more difficult than secondary students. Yeah, you have to be active, you have to be friendly, you have to encourage, you use a lot of comments, good comments to students, yeah. I think it’s difficult.

(T.Nhung. INT1/5.12.13) However, the observation data showed that in the majority of lessons, the relationship between the teacher and students is formal with almost no talk beyond the set structures of the textbook. The teachers provide little praise or feedback at the end of activities. This sense of distance between the teacher and students is also reflected in the layout of the classrooms. The class sizes are large and the students sit in rows with little space for movement around the room by either the students or teacher, as the photo in figure 5.11 on the next page exemplifies.

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Figure 5.11 Nhung’s Grade 4 class (63 students) (T.Nhung.LO3/04.04.14)

Chau in particular appeared to be adopting more of a young learner approach than the others. I noted in my Research Journal how Chau’s lessons made me feel, “there is a lovely atmosphere in her classes, a kind of warmth that I don’t feel in the others” (RJ/14.4.14). The lesson extract in Figure 5.12 below taken from Chau’s Grade 3 class, highlights what she does to help foster this feeling I got (shown in underlined italics). A copy of the corresponding textbook pages for the lesson can be found in Appendix 8.

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Setting This is a 35-minute Grade 3 class with 52 students, aged between 8 and 9. The

lesson is based on Unit 18 Lesson 1 in Tieng Anh 3 and the focus is on colours: What colour is it? /It’s …

1. Chau starts the lesson with a song about weather. The students stand up to sing. They seem to like it. She then asks: What’s the weather like today? Students answer individually ( e.g. sunny, cloudy). 1. Chau uses the students’

names to nominate them. Chau then asks the whole class to repeat today’s

date and writes it on the b/b.

2. Chau introduces colours using coloured hats cut from card. She shows a hat and drills the word with the whole class ( red, orange, yellow, green). After each word is drilled, Chau sticks the hat and corresponding word card on the b/b. She drills all the colours again chorally in groups. 2. She laughs and smiles when students repeat in a funny way.

3. Chau chorally drills all the vocab items again. She asks students to close their eyes and she removes a coloured hat. The students open their eyes and say which colour has been removed.

4. Chau asks: Do you want to play a game? Students: ‘yes!’. Chau divides the class into two teams. She sticks the hats on the b/b. Two students come to the front of the class. Chau asks a student sitting down to say a colour. Then the two students at the front slap the correct hat. 3. Chau puts a smiley face sticker on the students’ hand if they win. At the end of the game she counts the number of smiley faces on their hands and gives points to the team. 5. Chau asks students to look at their books and to listen to the dialogue and read.

She plays the CD again and students repeat each line chorally.

6. She then 4. puts puppets on the b/b to represent the characters in the dialogue and gets open pairs to repeat.

7. Chau elicits the target language in Vietnamese and writes it on the b/b: ‘What colour is it?/ It’s red’

8. Chau demonstrates the textbook exercise with two students and asks the students to do it in pairs. 5. She monitors students and talks to them 9. Chau asks pairs to repeat the dialogue and corrects some pronunciation. 10. Chau gets the students to play a game ‘remember, remember’. She divides the

class into two groups and asks one student from each group to alternately say a letter for a colour card and a word card. If they match 6. they get a smiley face on their hand. She then asks students the colour of things in the classroom. 11. Chau ends the lesson with a song from the textbook. She counts the number of

smiley faces and the class claps the winning team. She then repeats the target language on the b/b and drills the whole class.

Figure 5.12 Lesson Extract from T.Chau. (T.Chau.LO3/14.04.14)

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Particular behaviours that typify Chau’s lessons include using students’ names (1), careful monitoring of students (5), using child-friendly incentives (smiley faces and puppets) (3, 4, and 6), showing she is relaxed and enjoying her time with the students (2). Although these may be display lessons for my benefit, the fact that such behaviour seemed familiar to the students suggests that this is more or less how Chau would normally behave and respond to students in non-observed classes and was also typical of her behaviour in the other two lessons I observed. However the majority of teachers show little use of child-friendly activities, techniques or behaviours implicit in the communicative approach for young learners, sticking to familiar student-teacher relationships and teaching practices.