Đổi mới phương pháp giảng dạy cho học viên TESOL: Quan điểm của người làm công tác đào tạo

Tiu 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. Chi
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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. Tiu 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 Chi
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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): Tiu 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,