Speaker
Description
Vietnam has shown an active role in fostering national and regional integration through open-door economic, political and educational policies, one of which is the promotion of English teaching as a foreign language (EFL) at all levels. However, in the context of deep integration between the East and the West, the ability to use English as a lingua franca is never sufficient to prepare students to become global citizens. It is intercultural communicative competence (ICC) that proves to be an important determiner and should be incorporated into teaching and learning English in Vietnam (Vo, 2017). This study investigates how Vietnamese EFL teachers at tertiary level perceive the importance of ICC in English language education, how they integrate ICC into their classroom, and the challenges of cultural incorporation in Vietnam. To achieve the research purposes, both quantitative and qualitative methods were employed, which collected responses from 63 lecturers across the country via questionnaires and in-depth interviews with nine of them. The findings reveal that the teachers are highly aware of the ICC concept and perceive it as an integral part of English teaching. A large number of them have already incorporated ICC in classroom activities to some extent. However, there are still many challenges related to time, experiences, resources and curriculum, so practical recommendations are also pointed out to encourage Vietnamese lecturers’ widespread incorporation of ICC.
Key words: Intercultural communicative competence (ICC), English teaching, Vietnam, tertiary level
Biography
Trinh Thuy Ngan is an English teacher/IELTS trainer with nearly 10 years of experience. She holds a Master's degree in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at University College Dublin, Ireland, and has gained other professional qualifications like CELTA, TESOL and TKT. She is the founder of "IELTS for Better Vietnam" project where she trains IELTS and soft skills for Vietnamese students. Simultaneously, she has recently nominated as the Director of Foreign Language Centre of Van Hien University. Her research interests are intercultural communication in language teaching, English for academic purposes, corpus linguistics and curriculum development.
