Speakers
Description
Textbooks play a central role in English Language Teaching (ELT) by providing structured content and guiding instructional practices. In Vietnam, the Global Success textbook series has been officially adopted for nationwide use from the 2026-2027 academic year and is claimed to be developed according to the communicative approach in alignment with the 2018 General Education English Curriculum. However, limited research has systematically examined the extent to which these materials operationalise communicative principles, particularly in reading tasks, which constitute a major source of language input and are crucial for students’ performance in high-stakes examinations at the end of Grade 9. This study investigates reading tasks in the Global Success textbooks for lower secondary students (Grades 6-9). It aims to critically evaluate the extent to which these tasks align with CLT principles. For this purpose, a set of CLT-based criteria was synthesised from the literature, and a modified version of Littlejohn’s (2011) task analysis framework was employed to analyse selected units across the four textbooks. The analysis generates frequency counts and percentage indices, with a scoring scheme to compare the degree of communicativeness. The findings are expected to provide evidence-based insights into the communicative value of the textbooks and inform pedagogically principled adaptation in classroom practice.
Biography
Ms. Ngoc Nhu Tran, is a freelance English teacher based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and an MA TESOL graduate. Her academic and professional interests centre on communicative language teaching, and materials evaluation. She is particularly interested in critically examining how English textbooks can be designed and adapted to support meaningful interaction in classroom contexts. In her teaching practice, she aims to apply research-informed approaches to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Her current work focuses on analysing reading tasks in Vietnamese lower secondary textbooks from a communicative perspective, contributing to ongoing discussions on the role of materials in English language education.
Ms. Anh Van Vo, MA is a freelance English teacher based in Danang City, Vietnam. Her research focuses on the teaching and learning of vocabulary in a second or foreign language. More specifically, she is particularly interested in inclusive education and second vocabulary acquisition, with the aim to advocate for equality in education. Her recent research has explored incidental vocabulary in multimodal inputs such as reading a graphic novel, which she is developing further to reading-while-listening and reading in Braille for learners with special needs.
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