Vấn đề phù hợp đến đâu khi triển khai giáo
học pháp giảng dạy tiếng Anh cho người phi bản ngữ
của phương Tây hay giáo học pháp tiên tiến trong bối
cảnh dạy và học ở Việt Nam từ lâu vẫn luôn là đề tài
tranh cãi sôi nổi. Những quan điểm từ giáo dục phản
biện sẽ giới thiệu cho học viên trong chương trình đào
tạo Tesol ở Việt Nam về cách áp dụng và đổi mới
phương pháp giảng dạy để phù hợp với từng hoàn cảnh
và môi trường của họ. Đối tượng nghiên cứu của bài viết
này bao gồm 40 giáo viên hiện đang là theo học chương
trình đào tạo Thạc sĩ (TESOL) tại Hà Nội và thành phố
Hồ Chí Minh thông qua quan hệ hợp tác song phương
giữa Trường Đại học Hà Nội và Trường Đại học Victoria
(Melbourne) trong suốt 15 năm qua. Nghiên cứu này
dựa trên việc đánh giá học viên trong môn học “Đổi mới
trong phương pháp giảng dạy tiếng Anh”, nhằm khuyến
khích học viên của mình rằng tất cả đều là những nhà
giáo dục chuyên nghiệp từ tiểu học, trung học hay đại
học. Ngoài ra, nghiên cứu cũng xác định một vấn đề
trong quá trình giảng dạy tiếng Anh để làm sao phù hợp
với môi trường dạy và học, thiết kế câu hỏi nghiên cứu
để họ có thể áp dụng và đánh giá đúng với hoàn cảnh
của mình. Hoạt động này được áp dụng trong cả
chương trình giảng dạy và đánh giá, nhằm thúc đẩy học
viên ứng dụng một phần của chu trình nghiên cứu vào
công tác dạy học. Thông qua một khuôn mẫu về đổi mới,
học viên sẽ tìm ra cho mình một ý tưởng sáng tạo trong
giảng dạy vừa có tính ứng dụng cao vừa mang tính
nhân văn để giới thiệu và đánh giá trong trường đại học.
Bằng việc phân tích mô tả định tính, nghiên cứu này
trình bày kết quả nghiên cứu chuyên đề về những vấn
đề mà giáo viên gặp phải trong quá trình giảng dạy, các
dạng câu hỏi thường gặp, và hiệu quả của việc đưa
những phương pháp đổi mới vào chương trình giảng dạy
của họ. Phương pháp tiếp cận được đưa ra trong
chương trình đào tạo Thạc sĩ Tesol cho thấy rằng chính
giáo viên là những người hiểu rõ nhất cần phải đổi mới
những gì trong giảng dạy tiếng Anh để phù hợp với bối
cảnh giáo dục Việt Nam hiện nay.
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Tiu ban 1: Đào to chuyên ng
164
ĐỔI MỚI PHƯƠNG PHÁP GIẢNG DẠY CHO HỌC VIÊN TESOL:
QUAN ĐIỂM CỦA NGƯỜI LÀM CÔNG TÁC ĐÀO TẠO
Martin Andrew
Trường Đại học Victoria, Melbourne, Úc
Tóm t
t: Vấn đề phù hợp đến đâu khi triển khai giáo
học pháp giảng dạy tiếng Anh cho người phi bản ngữ
của phương Tây hay giáo học pháp tiên tiến trong bối
cảnh dạy và học ở Việt Nam từ lâu vẫn luôn là đề tài
tranh cãi sôi nổi. Những quan điểm từ giáo dục phản
biện sẽ giới thiệu cho học viên trong chương trình đào
tạo Tesol ở Việt Nam về cách áp dụng và đổi mới
phương pháp giảng dạy để phù hợp với từng hoàn cảnh
và môi trường của họ. Đối tượng nghiên cứu của bài viết
này bao gồm 40 giáo viên hiện đang là theo học chương
trình đào tạo Thạc sĩ (TESOL) tại Hà Nội và thành phố
Hồ Chí Minh thông qua quan hệ hợp tác song phương
giữa Trường Đại học Hà Nội và Trường Đại học Victoria
(Melbourne) trong suốt 15 năm qua. Nghiên cứu này
dựa trên việc đánh giá học viên trong môn học “Đổi mới
trong phương pháp giảng dạy tiếng Anh”, nhằm khuyến
khích học viên của mình rằng tất cả đều là những nhà
giáo dục chuyên nghiệp từ tiểu học, trung học hay đại
học. Ngoài ra, nghiên cứu cũng xác định một vấn đề
trong quá trình giảng dạy tiếng Anh để làm sao phù hợp
với môi trường dạy và học, thiết kế câu hỏi nghiên cứu
để họ có thể áp dụng và đánh giá đúng với hoàn cảnh
của mình. Hoạt động này được áp dụng trong cả
chương trình giảng dạy và đánh giá, nhằm thúc đẩy học
viên ứng dụng một phần của chu trình nghiên cứu vào
công tác dạy học. Thông qua một khuôn mẫu về đổi mới,
học viên sẽ tìm ra cho mình một ý tưởng sáng tạo trong
giảng dạy vừa có tính ứng dụng cao vừa mang tính
nhân văn để giới thiệu và đánh giá trong trường đại học.
Bằng việc phân tích mô tả định tính, nghiên cứu này
trình bày kết quả nghiên cứu chuyên đề về những vấn
đề mà giáo viên gặp phải trong quá trình giảng dạy, các
dạng câu hỏi thường gặp, và hiệu quả của việc đưa
những phương pháp đổi mới vào chương trình giảng dạy
của họ. Phương pháp tiếp cận được đưa ra trong
chương trình đào tạo Thạc sĩ Tesol cho thấy rằng chính
giáo viên là những người hiểu rõ nhất cần phải đổi mới
những gì trong giảng dạy tiếng Anh để phù hợp với bối
cảnh giáo dục Việt Nam hiện nay.
Abstract: The degree to which western or
alternative TESOL pedagogies are appropriate for
implementing in Vietnamese teaching and learning
contexts has long been a bone of contention. Insights
from critical pedagogy would inform TESOL educators
in Vietnam that pedagogical interventions or
innovations need to be particular to their context and
environment. This paper presents a case study of 40
teachers who are students in a Master of Education
(TESOL) program delivered in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh
City for the past 15 years by Victoria University
(Melbourne) via a partnership with Hanoi University.
The study draws on the assessed work of students in
the unit ‘Innovation’ which aims to encourage its
students, all of whom are professional educators from
primary, secondary or tertiary contexts, to identify a
TESOL research problem that is specific to their
teaching and learning environment and design a
research question and a pedagogical or curricular
intervention or innovation that they can implement and
evaluate within their individual contexts. This activity,
which serves as both curriculum and assessment,
empowers the students to apply a segment of an action
research cycle to their workplaces. Students use an
innovation framework to identify an innovative teaching
idea that can be practically and ethically introduced and
evaluated in their school or university. Using qualitative
descriptive analysis, this study presents thematic
findings about the kinds of problems that teachers
identify in their contexts, the types of questions they
believe need to be asked, and the types of innovations
they introduce into their curricula. This pedagogical
approach employed by the MTESOL program
articulates the idea that the best people to know what
innovations are required in Vietnamese educational
contexts are the teachers themselves.
Chin lc ngoi ng trong xu th hi nhp Tháng 11/2014
165
EMPOWERING VIETNAMESE TESOL TEACHERS
TO INNOVATE: INSIGHTS FROM A TEACHER EDUCATOR
The scope of the MTESOL program
In 2014 Victoria University (VU, Melbourne)
celebrated 15 years of collaboration with Hanoi
University (HanU) in the delivery of its Masters of
Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages
(MTESOL) program in both Hanoi and Ho Chi
Minh City. Over the years, in response to
changing student, societal and national needs, the
program has developed into one focusing on
teaching Vietnamese educators to become novice
action researchers. This means that not only do the
students, who are teachers from tertiary,
secondary and primary state and private
institutions, learn to draw on their own
experiences and journeys as practitioners in the
creation of new knowledge relevant to their
contexts; they also acquire the research skills and
reflective techniques to be able to implement
further projects in their teaching environments.
Some students may even become research leaders,
establishing practitioner-based action learning
cycles for colleagues. For the purpose of the
program, action research is considered to be “a
small-scale intervention in the functioning of the
real world and a close examination of the effects
of such intervention” (Cohen & Manion, 1985,
p.174). Such cycles lead, ideally, to the testing of
new pedagogical and curricular innovations, such
as those used internationally in TESOL, and
evaluate their value and appropriateness to the
institutional and national environments where our
students teach.
The MTESOL program covers three 24-credit
units that, together with a cross-credited Diploma
of TESOL delivered by Hanoi University. On a
case by case basis, graduates from similar
diplomas nationally and indeed internationally
may also qualify for the cross credit and therefore
entrance. Naturally, all entrants require and
International English Language Testing System
(IELTS) score of 6.5 (or equivalent) overall. This
is commonly agreed to be a national standard in
Australian universities for speakers from other
languages entering programs taught in English.
Arguably more important than either the content
knowledge or linguistic attainment is the students’
investment in the experience of a transnational
Masters in TESOL. There is a danger of
regression. Huang (2010) warned: “During the
training courses, Vietnamese teachers show great
interest in new methodologies, but after they
return from those courses, they continue teaching
in old methods” (p. 22). This is the gap Roger
Barnard and Gia Viet Nguyen (2010) see as the
disjuncture between “intended” innovations in
TESOL teaching “and the realized version” (p. 77).
The action research-focused curriculum of the
MTESOL encourages students to consider what
might potentially constrain them from their
aspired classroom innovations, and to evaluate the
success of their interventions.
The capital of such a program, according to
student assessments, lies in: (i) the English
speaking lecturers and their quality; (ii) access to
innovative pedagogical and curricular ideas from
international literature and from lecturers’ own
practice, and (iii) the chance to explore one’s own
teaching and learning environment and the
practices and culture of one’s institution as a
starting point for selecting, implementing and
evaluating a teaching intervention in a local
context. The students with a more integrative
motivation to become empowered, to become
leaders in their contexts, and to be the best teacher
they can be are consistently more successful than
those with purely instrumental motivation: to be
able to keep their jobs and to get the pay increase
that comes with the Masters. For transnational
partners, education is about the empowerment of
individuals, often described as capacity building
(Sen, 1999); about change for the better; about
learning how to make a difference.
Tiu ban 1: Đào to chuyên ng
166
The MTESOL program is delivered three times
a year, with students progressing through the three
units over the space of 12 months. In their first
unit, Educational Research Design and Methods,
the students are introduced to the range of
epistemological concepts reflected by the gamut
of mostly qualitative research methodologies
available in the discipline, encompassing case
study research, grounded theory, narrative enquiry
and action research. Methods of data collection
and analysis are demonstrated and exemplified
following analysis of where research problems
and questions come from, and how the
identification of questions leads logically to the
description of a line of enquiry with appropriate
methodological underpinning. The program is
informed by practitioner research throughout, and
as such there is a strong emphasis on reflection:
reflection on, in and for action. Students learn how
to write literature review and how to scope out a
potential project in the form of a micro-proposal.
An emphasis on research ethics, of researcher
honesty, a compulsory dimension for transnational
partners, remains strong throughout the units. This
is taught practically in such activities as learning
to paraphrase and summarise from literature, and
in considering the impact of the planned
innovation on each stakeholder. The dimension of
power, manifest in the fact that teachers have
ultimate power over their students’ grades, is
crucial in students’ descriptions of ethical concerns.
The second unit of the degree, Innovation, uses
innovation theory and a range of contemporary
thinking associated with culture and identity, to
ask the student to define what is innovative about
their intervention and to justify its necessity in
their contexts. Innovation is seen simply as “The
successful exploitation of new ideas” (Innovation
Unit, 2013, online) and ‘new ideas’ can be entirely
new or a reworking of an old idea or an
embedding of an old idea into a new context
(Markee, 1997). More specifically, we tell our
students innovation is:
“An idea, object or practice perceived as new by
an individual or individuals, which is intended
to bring about improvement in relation to desired
objectives, which is fundamental in nature and
which is planned and deliberate” (Nicholls,
1983, p. 4, cited in White, 1988, p. 114).
In some contexts, particularly rural ones, using
vocabulary games or dictogloss to enhance lexical
acquisition may indeed be new; and in others,
perhaps private universities with transnational
programs, the role of peer intervention in
assessing writing or the use of blogging to
enhance written fluency may be appropriate.
In this unit, students design the procedures of
data collection and analysis and assess its viability,
practicality, suitability and its ethical integrity.
They expand their range of literature to
encompass recent work not merely seminal work,
and consider the applicability of studies to their
own context. They learn to position themselves
within the body of learning and to partake in the
academic conversation, developing an integrated
proposal and research instruments and delivering
them in oral and written forms. By this stage, they
need to be ready to implement their innovation-
based research and to gather the data and envisage
how they are going to analyse and present it in a
way that articulates with their research question
and line of enquiry. Thinh Do Huy (2006) wrote
of a strong need for institutions to “help learners
identify their learning objectives and needs and
employ various tasks to stimulate learner
motivation” (p. 8).
The final unit, Evaluation, takes the student
from the status of collector of raw data to potential
author of a research report or article. Learning
how to evaluate a range of interventions in
TESOL over time and place and how to analyse
data using a range of qualitative tools such as
open coding and thematic analysis, students
acquire the skills needed to work with and present
data. The emphasis in the unit is on evaluation and
reflection; in particular on identifying aspects of
the research process that were or were not entirely
successful. Valuable learning emerges from such
retrospection and introspection; learning not just
Chin lc ngoi ng trong xu th hi nhp Tháng 11/2014
167
about research in general but about the
individual’s capacity for research and the
practitioner’s drive for continual improvement.
The final report, potentially in the form of an
academic article formatted for a journal in the
discipline, not only captures the academic
literacies demanded of professional writing in
TESOL, but also represents a learner’s personal
trajectory as an action researcher.
This program is motivated by the ideas that
empowering teachers in ELT contexts by enabling
them to become action researchers and reflective
practitioners is a key strategy in critical pedagogy
(Wyatt, 2011) and English Language Teaching
(ELT) education (Burns, 2010). Action research
contributes “to the increased well being –
economic, political, psychological, spiritual – of
human persons and communities” (Reason &
Bradbury, 2001, p. 2). Crucially, our choice of
curricular delivery does not merely follow
precepts from western educational practice. With
Le Van Canh (2011) I concur that “Without
adequate understanding of what shapes their
teaching practices, any coercive intervention to
change teachers, including formal training, would
be of limited impact” (p. 238).
The work of Vietnamese researchers, both
within Vietnam and overseas, informs our
prescript: “Research, especially classroom
researchplays an important role as it can help
generate classroom practices which are
appropriate to the social, cultural and physical
contexts in which they work” (Pham, 2006, p. 2).
Further, participatory action research allows
teachers “to learn about their teaching at the same
time as they improve their teaching” (Tran, 2009,
p.105). Tran justifies this valorising of practitioner
research in Vietnam with reference to culturally
specific traits: commitment, collaboration,
concern, consideration, change (Tran, 2009). She
writes: “It allows teachers to learn about their
teaching at the same time that they improve their
teaching.” (p.105). Lillian Utsumi and Doan Thi
Nam-Hau (2010) argue that teachers want to
change to meet learners’ needs by enhancing
autonomy, using collaboration and project work
and creating discussions stimulating “high order
thinking” (p.14).
Contexts for educational innovation in
TESOL in Vietnam
During the 15 years of the delivery of the
MTESOL, the program has resisted remaining a
static product and has evolved to match national
initiatives such as the 2020 program, institutional
drives like Hanoi university’s desire to maximize
its TNE opportunities and to compete favourable
with others in the field, and of course pedagogical
ideas like the absorption of ideas from
communicative language teaching (CLT) into a
broader church informed by critical, post-
structural, social constructivist, sociocultural and
sociolinguistic thinking which focus on learners as
individuals with changing investments in learning
related to their desires for future imagined
communities of belonging (Anderson, 1983;
Andrew & Romova, 2012; Kanno & Norton,
2003); and more fluid identities as socially mobile
national and global community members (Norton,
2000). As in Bonny Norton’s work, there is a
stronger focus on learning as capital, as power,
and on English as a locus of power: the more
privileged access to English you have, the more
valuable as an individual you are to yourself, your
school, your family, your country. I must add that
we are also likely to ask our students to use
postcolonial theory to deconstruct the sentiment of
the previous sentence (Canagarajah, 1999, 2005).
Nevertheless, access to ‘English’ is a crucial
motivator in terms of students’ desires for future
recognition, promotion, leadership opportunities
and other forms of social and cultural capital. This
trend is evident in recent writings on education in
Vietnam, such as Johnathan D. London’s
compilation of studies (2011, pp. 2-3):
Tiu ban 1: Đào to chuyên ng
168
Over the last two decades, Vietnam has
registered significant “improvements” across
many indicators of educational development.
Education in Vietnam – as in other countries –
has long been viewed as a pathway to a better
life; an avenue to social mobility.
The pressure on education to serve as a vehicle
of individual and collective advancement is
more acute than ever as society becomes more
complex and globally integrated.
Vietnam’s education system may be thought of
as a vast social field in which aspirations and
constraints collide.
These fragments of texts also indicate the key
problem that students in the MTESOL face: the
pressure of constraints. Pham (2006) noted that
there is difficulty in resisting top-down, power-
coercive structures inherent in institutions, and
Nguyen (2011) signaled: “The issues of research
as well as the values of research are not
determined by the researcher but instead by the
sponsor” (p. 242). Many teachers are fearful of
changing their methods (Tomlinson & Bao, 2004)
and to emphasise the spoken and aural skills
demanded for communication in a globalised
world – but untested by national examinations
(Canh & Bernard, 2009). London (2011),
summarising this thinking, writes: “quite often,
entrenched interests, bureaucratic rigidities, and
ideological functionalism seem only to promote
continued organisational inertia” (p. 3). The
innovation we encourage the students to
implement can clash with this ‘inertia’.
These top-down constraints, students report,
come fin primary and secondary contexts from
“didactic” textbooks (Canh & Barnard, 2009, p.
23), layered with pedagogical methods that are
communicative in principle but may not be in
practice (Barnard & Nguyen, 2010). Barnard and
Nguyen suggest this could be due to teachers’
inability to implement the intended curriculum,
but the student teachers in the MTESOL
consistently argue it is due to London’s (2011)
‘bureaucratic rigidities’. In 2001, Pennycook
famously observed:
The language we teach, the materials we use,
the way we run our classrooms, the things
students do and say, all these can be seen in
social and cultural terms, and thus, from a
critical perspective as social, political and
cultural political questions (p.129).
Although educators throughout many parts of
the world have interrogated their teaching
materials critically and taught students to unpack
them as ideologically-frought and therefore
problematic documents, students report there is
still much ‘inertia’ in Vietnam. For MTESOL
students, the challenge is, to cite Alastair
Pennycook (2001) once again, “finding
possibilities of articulation” (p.130). These
possibilities have limitations, as Iranian scholars
Reza Pishghadam and Elham Naja Meidani (2012)
discovered in their introduction of tenets from
critical pedagogy into a local curriculum on
postmodern philosophy: “Getting students
acquainted with critical issues is like opening a
Pandora’s box,