VietNamNet Bridge – The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) proposal on foreign language requirements has been criticised as “utopian” and impractical.

Under the program, by 2020, the majority of Vietnamese who finish intermediate school (2-year training), junior college (3-year training) and university (4-5 year training) must have foreign language skills good enough to communicate, study and work in a multi-lingual integrated environment. The foreign language proficiency will be an advantage of Vietnamese worker.

However, educators and analysts all have doubts that the VND10 trillion program will succeed.

Vietnam runs marathon to “European standards” finish

In order to produce good students, Vietnam needs to have good teachers. Therefore, MOET plans to test teachers’ qualification in accordance with the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) and send them to suitable training courses both in Vietnam and overseas.

The qualification tests caused a shock to society: only 3 percent of high school teachers and 7 percent of primary & secondary school teachers meet the CEFR standards. Meanwhile, 17 percent of primary school teachers were found meeting the A1 level for beginners.

“With such a situation, it will take a long time to upgrade the teachers’ qualification. Therefore, I believe that the goals set for 2020 will be unattainable,” an expert said.

He went on to say that MOET should rethink whether all English teachers need CEFR standards. Currently, the qualifications of the teachers in different localities vary, while teachers’ qualifications in different localities also diverge.

“I believe that in some areas, such as mountainous and rural areas, CEFR-standard teachers should not be required,” he said. “Since the students in the localities cannot meet the requirements to study foreign languages in accordance with standards, it’ll be no use to train CEFR-standard teachers”.

Phan Van Hoa, President of the Da Nang Foreign Language University, noted that the teachers’ qualifications are uneven.

“Some teachers, who have good pedagogical methods, remain far from the standard capability. Meanwhile, many teachers with good professional knowledge still do not have teaching experience,” he said.

Commenting about the qualifications of general school English teachers, Nguyen Ngoc Hung, a former member of the Steering Committee of the National Foreign Language Teaching Program, said: “All the teachers have university degrees, but many of them do not have adequate qualifications”.

How to “upgrade” English teachers?

The answer is that teachers need retraining to improve their qualification. However, it is not easy to implement the job.

Instead of focusing on retraining teachers to improve teachers’ qualifications, provincial authorities and schools have rushed to buy equipment to serve the English teaching.

Many schools bought Robot Teacher after MOET introduced it as a smart device which allows to mark students’ school works properly. However, as many teachers do not know how to use it, the device does not have much significance to English teaching.

The Nghe An provincial authorities spent several billions of dong to build eight foreign language labs equipped with modern facilities.

However, as the local teachers have not been trained how to deal with the equipment, the labs have been left idle.

Tin Tuc