VietTESOL International Convention 2026

This paper examines how English is currently enacted in first-year speaking classrooms and considers what it means to reposition English from a foreign language subject to a communicative resource. Drawing on a corpus of 57 recorded and transcribed student dialogues from an English-major cohort at a Vietnamese university, the study analyzes recurrent interactional and linguistic patterns. The data reveal systematic grammatical instability, limited turn expansion, minimal negotiation of meaning, and frequent breakdowns in response development. More importantly, the dialogues often function as recitation of prompts rather than as genuine interaction. These findings suggest that, despite curricular emphasis on communication, English remains largely task-bound and form-oriented. The paper argues for an ESL-oriented speaking pedagogy that prioritizes interactional competence, spontaneous meaning-making, and dialogic engagement. Grounded in classroom evidence, the study offers pedagogical directions for aligning speaking instruction with the broader repositioning of English in Vietnamese higher education.