Speaker
Description
Vietnam’s 2025 policy move to position English as a second language in schooling recasts the task of English teacher education. The issue is no longer only whether pre-service programmes prepare future teachers to teach English effectively as a school subject, but whether they prepare them to support broader, more regular, and educationally meaningful uses of English across teaching, communication, and school life. This article addresses that question through a qualitative case study of an undergraduate English teacher education programme at a public teacher education university in Vietnam. Drawing on qualitative document analysis of the programme curriculum and relevant policy texts, followed by semi-structured interviews with five academic staff members involved in programme design and delivery, the study examines how readiness for this emerging policy shift is currently structured, interpreted, and constrained. The findings show that the programme already provides substantial foundations in English proficiency development, ELT pedagogy, practicum, assessment, communication-oriented coursework, and digital preparation. However, it remains more strongly organised around preparing student teachers to teach English lessons in classrooms than around preparing them to support wider English use across school life, work across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and exercise pedagogically grounded judgement in digitally mediated contexts. The article argues that the key challenge is therefore not wholesale replacement but selective redesign: strengthening coherence across courses, practicum, and programme outcomes while expanding attention to wider English-use ecologies, school-purpose communication, cross-disciplinary participation, and digital pedagogy.
Biography
Trần Thị Yến is a teacher educator at Thai Nguyen University of Education, Vietnam. Her work focuses on English language teacher education, curriculum and policy reform, and sustainable approaches to language teaching and learning. She is particularly interested in pre-service teacher preparation, social-emotional learning, and the ways teacher education programmes can better respond to changing educational demands in Vietnam. Her recent research examines how English teacher education can support broader, more meaningful, and context-sensitive uses of English in schools, especially in relation to current policy efforts to reposition English within the education system. She has also worked on issues related to programme learning outcomes, pedagogical innovation, assessment, and digital pedagogy in English language teaching. Through her teaching and research, she seeks to contribute to more coherent, contextually responsive, and professionally sustainable models of English teacher education in Vietnam and beyond.
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