Luan Thanh Nguyen

This study maps a narrowly defined Scopus indexed corpus on pre-service teacher education in English as a foreign language and English as a second language contexts from 2020 to 2025. The corpus contained 34 English language documents retrieved through a title-based search and analysed with Bibliometrix, igraph, and VOSviewer. The analysis examined annual publication and citation patterns, recurring terms, highly cited documents, country and author collaboration, and reference co-citation. Publication output increased unevenly from four documents in 2020 to nine in 2025. Term patterns suggest a movement from pandemic and distance education language towards language teaching, World Englishes, practicum, and teaching strategies. Citation visibility was concentrated around a small number of documents, especially one 2020 article, and citation counts were treated as visibility indicators rather than evidence of quality. Country and author collaboration appeared fragmented, with several small components and only one recurring research team. Reference co-citation was also weak, suggesting limited shared intellectual grounding within this title defined corpus. The review offers a cautious map of what is visible in Scopus and identifies priorities for future research, including broader database comparisons, clearer terminology, stronger cross-national designs, and closer links between teacher education research, practicum supervision, curriculum development, and technology literacy.

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.

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.