VietTESOL International Convention 2026

Vietnam’s national plan to reposition English as a second language by 2035 raises an urgent question for school-based ELT: do current instructional models prepare learners for meaningful communication, or do they reinforce the very EFL grammar-orientation the policy seeks to overcome? Drawing on English as a Lingua Franca scholarship and washback theory, this quantitative case study examines the attitudes of 319 Vietnamese high school students within a distinctive instructional arrangement that combines three weekly graded periods of textbook-based instruction with Vietnamese teachers and one ungraded supplementary period with foreign teachers of diverse nationalities, a setting that constitutes an authentic lingua franca environment. Using a cognitive-affective-behavioral attitude framework, the study analyzes Likert-scale data through reliability testing, exploratory factor analysis, Welch’s t-tests, and Pearson correlation on validated nine-item scales. Results reveal a striking knowing-doing gap. Students show strong cognitive endorsement of lingua franca principles, with high acceptance of accent diversity and of English as a tool for cross-cultural exchange, while behavioral willingness to interact with foreign teachers remains substantially lower. Affective and behavioral dimensions correlate strongly, suggesting that confidence and willingness may function as a connected psychological-behavioral cluster requiring confirmatory testing, whereas cognitive endorsement does not translate into action. Notably, private grammar-focused tutoring shows no significant association with any attitudinal dimension. The complete absence of spoken assessment in formal evaluation appears central to this gap. The study argues that Vietnam’s ESL transition is constrained less by ideology than by the structural absence of speaking accountability.