Speaker
Description
As publication pressure becomes increasingly prevalent across Vietnamese higher education, it is essential to understand how lecturers perceive and respond to these demands, which can support sustainable academic work and research engagement. This qualitative case study explores Vietnamese EFL lecturers’ experiences of research agency under publication pressure, focusing on how they negotiate institutional expectations and engage in research and publication practices. The study involved six EFL lecturers from a university in Hanoi across different career stages. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, research profiles and annual evaluation forms, and then analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings reveal that participants exercise research agency in different forms to meet publication demands. While some actively pursued publication for career development, others engaged in research mainly to fulfil institutional evaluation criteria. They also adopted different strategies to navigate these tensions including collaborative publishing, selecting low-risk research topics, conducting classroom-based research to support both teaching and publication goals and participating in funded research projects. The findings further suggest that the enactment of research agency varied across career stages and personal circumstances. By examining lecturers’ perspectives within a specific sociocultural and institutional context, this study contributes to ongoing discussions on teacher and academic agency in non-Western higher education settings and offers implications for institutional policy and academic professional development.
Keywords: research agency; publication pressure; Vietnamese EFL lecturers; higher education
Biography
Le-Tuyet Thi Pham is a lecturer of English at VNU - ULIS with research interests in learner autonomy, teacher agency, and research engagement within contemporary educational contexts. Her work particularly focuses on Vietnamese EFL students’ and lecturers’ experiences in language teaching and learning, and academic research practices. She is also interested in the integration of digital technologies and artificial intelligence in language education, as well as issues related to teacher development and academic work in non-Western contexts. In addition to her research interests, she has experience teaching academic English, writing, and language-related courses at the tertiary level.
| Affiliate type | University |
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