Response paper 1 EFL 523

NAME: LÝ HOÀNG LINH THẢO             RESPONSE PAPER #1

EFL523- COHORT 1- HCMC

 

PHAM HOA HIEP'S VIEW ON TEACHER DEVELOPMENT IN VIETNAM

 

Pham Hoa Hiep's article offers an extensive look at teacher development- a real need for English departments in Vietnam. It focuses not only on teacher training and teacher development but on some suggestions to improve professional development amongst EFL teachers.

 

Great teachers help create great students. In fact, research shows that an inspiring and informed teacher is the most important school-related factor influencing student achievement, so it is critical to pay close attention to how we train and support both new and experienced educators.

 

I have been teaching English for 14 years and it is true that there are some problems in teacher education as Pham Hoa Hiep includes in his article. Because of the severe shortage of teachers of English many years ago, Vietnam gave birth to a mass of teachers of English. Most of them received inadequate teacher training. As a result, they cannot meet the great demand for English teaching. In the other hand, teacher development has not been emphasized inadequately. Seminars or workshops seem to be rare in Vietnam. "The staff of our English department meets a couple of times a semester. We just meet for administrative work but rarely for professional development purposes" (Pham 2000). In fact, after they attend workshops to learn new teaching methods, they attempt to apply them in their teaching. Hence, when they get a result not so good as they expect, they soon fall in the disappointment and again, follow their prefered method.

 

Moreover, self- study is not fully noticed by some teachers. Obviously, some teachers in Vietnam are busy working all day. They have no time to relax, no time to well- prepare for all the lessons they will teach and of course no time to think of how to make the learners understanding the lessons easily and joyfully. Different classes with only one way of teaching really spoil the interest of the learners and even of the teachers.

 

I am very interested in the solutions he points out. Actually, I have applied some of them such as organizing a shared teaching folders, getting students to work in group, motivating students by warm-up activities, observing classto get more experices in teaching from colleagues. They all can work well if I spend more time and energy working on them. "Nothing valuable comes to you without paying". You can attend many teacher training courses getting new methods of teaching but if you do not dare to put them into practice, they are useless indeed. Initially, the process to success may be painful. Try not to be discouraged.

In conclusion, change does not mean doing a different thing but doing the same thing differently. I now begin to see that comprehensive career-long teacher development and institutional reforms is the real agenda. I find this article very informative and it gives me more strength to keep on applying these useful solutions in my real teaching in the hope that my students and even myself will have more motivation and improvements.