Thinh Van Le

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools in recent years has entailed arguments both for and against their use for teaching and learning among policy makers, schools, teachers, and researchers. While the debates have not reached a consensus yet, many teachers struggle with using them. To help build the literature on GenAI for English language teaching (ELT) and assist teachers to use GenAI effectively in their teaching, the current study adopts a qualitatively driven convergent mixed methods research design with Technology, Pedagogy and Content Knowledge (TPACK) as the theoretical frame work. TPACK domains serve as the major themes for data analysis on benefits, challenges and strategies regarding GenAI in ELT. Data collection involves 41 ELT teachers at universities, K–12, and language schools engaging with background and reflection surveys, focus group discussions, and activities during two virtual workshops. A three-month interval between the workshops allows teachers to apply what they learn in the first workshop in teaching and addressing challenges while using GenAI. The results reveal various benefits for teachers, e.g. saving time and generating ideas for teaching preparation. There are also challenges relating to technology (e.g. lack of technological competence), pedagogy (e.g. students’ misconduct), and content (e.g. response accuracy). The study proposes a set of strategies for good practice including pedagogy first, quality focus, prompt engineering, and appropriateness. The results highlight the significance of teacher and learner agency to complement the TPACK model and the importance of pedagogical principles (e.g. flexible and creative use of GenAI for teaching) in ensuring appropriate and effective adoption of GenAI in ELT.

High school students in Vietnam still struggle with listening skills after many years of learning English because of the forms-focused instructions. To improve students’ listening skills, the study employed extensive listening skills. The current study employed mixed methods to examine whether extensive listening had any effects on high school students’ listening performance. Participants were 100 high school students divided into 2 groups: the Experimental Group (EG) and the Control Group (CG). The EG was additionally exposed to extensive listening outside the classroom for around 06 months. The study used pre-and post-tests to measure improvement in the students’ listening skills after the treatment, and an interview with 10 students in the EG to clarify their experiences with extensive listening. The study showed that extensive listening could help high school students improve their listening skills. Furthermore, students admitted that extensive listening benefited their general language learning and listening skills.

In the era of educational digitization, many teachers have widely adopted the flipped classroom approach to enhance their English teaching, supplementing in-class time and promoting learner autonomy. However, the application of the flipped classroom approach in teaching grammar to high school students remained underexplored, with limited research investigating its impacts. This study aims to investigate the impact of the flipped classroom approach on the grammar performance of high school students and their attitudes toward this instructional method. Forty-eight students, divided into a control group and an experimental group, participated in a 10-week grammar course. The study employed a pre-test and a post-test to examine the impacts of this approach in teaching grammar and semi-structured interviews to explore students’ opinions. Results revealed that after the treatment, the experimental group achieved better grammar performance than the control group. Positive attitudes toward the flipped classroom strategy were also recorded in students’ responses. These findings suggest further pedagogical implications for flipping grammar classes to improve both students’ academic performance and communicative competence.

In Vietnam, the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) issues uniform curricula and textbooks, sets goals, and implements assessments nationwide for high school schools. This means every Vietnamese public high school has to use the prescribed textbooks to teach the same content following a page-by-page schedule throughout the school year, undergo identical assessment tasks, and try to maintain similar outcomes regardless of geographical or socio-economical differences. In such a system, classroom teacher’s voices are usually under-sounded and little research has been conducted on teachers’ perspectives regarding these crucial components of their profession. This study presents how high school EFL teachers perceive and cope with the top-down system in terms of objectives, curriculum, methodology, assessment and outcomes in Vietnam. Data were collected from 163 teachers using an online survey on their attitudes towards the objectives, curriculum, methodology, assessment, and outcomes as determined by MOET. The results showed a discrepancy in the curricula and assessment. While the curricula emphasized communicative competence, the assessment heavily focused on forms. As a result, although some teachers tried to diversify their teaching method, they eventually focused on grammar, reading comprehension and vocabulary for students to achieve satisfactory results in the national examination.

University students in Vietnam do not have enough time to practise their listening inside the classroom. Outside the classroom, they do not have chance to practice it. To supplement time constraint in the classroom, extensive listening was employed to assist students to develop their listening skills. The study aims to investigate whether extensive listening ameliorates students’ listening proficiency. Two groups of students from two intact classes: the control group (n = 32) and the experimental group (n = 32) were selected. Before the semester started, all students sat for the pre-listening test. After that, students in the experimental group were advised to listen to fifteen suggested sound files with one file for each week. They were also instructed some listening strategies to self-practise at home while students in the control group did not do any listening tasks at home. After 15 weeks, students in both groups took the post-listening test. The post-interview was conducted to explore how students practiced their listening out of school. The results showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in the post-test. Some students in the experimental group reported that they practised listening many times and tried to learn as much vocabulary as possible.