News and Events

The HCM City Department of Education and Training has asked public technical and vocational schools in the city to focus efforts this year on improving the quality of teaching as well as the English proficiency of their graduates.

For this, they need to set up extra facilities like separate classrooms for English classes with a maximum number of 25 students, said Dr Nguyen Ngoc Hung, manager of Ministry of Education and Training's National Foreign Languages 2020 Project.

He said at a recent conference on the teaching of English in technical and vocational schools that the project aims at getting graduates of vocational schools, colleges and universities to communicate confidently in English and be able to read documents on specific disciplines in the same language.

For the 2011-12 school year, the city had 48 institutions, both private and public, with a total of 84,820 students.

In some classes, there are as many as 60 students gathering in a room, making it very difficult to teach or learn English properly, said Lam Van Quan, head of the department's higher education, technical and vocational education division.

Most of the institutions have neither the classrooms nor necessary accessories for teaching and fostering the skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing in English, he said.

Besides investing in the facilities required, the department encourages institutions to support English teachers in improving their skills by having them attend training courses, either in the country or abroad, on teaching the language to speakers of other languages, he said.

Furthermore, they are allowed to hire Vietnamese people who have lived abroad or native speakers to teach English as well as take advantage of those with native fluency who are willing to offer volunteer services.

By 2020, each institution should have at least one native speaker on their rolls, Quan said.

Expert assessments of students at technical and vocational institutions show that their English language skills are poor.

Pham Hoang Minh Thao, an English lecturer at the Thu Duc Technology College, said that students are able to achieve a maximum of 370 marks out of 1000 in the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language).

Tran Xuan Ngoc Bach, head of the Phu Lam Technical and Economic College's Foreign Language Faculty, said that there were students from ethnic minority communities in the college who'd never learned English earlier.

A study carried out by the college to assess English language skills of its students in 2011 and 2012 found most of them below average.

They lack confidence and do not dare to communicate in English with their lecturers during class because they are afraid of being reprimanded or laughed at by their classmates, Bach said.

During the final exams, English is a nightmare for them, he added.

Apart from facilities like classrooms and teaching aids, English teaching methods used at technical and vocational institutions were not effective in capturing student interest, Thao said.

Moreover, students themselves do not pay attention and spend enough time on learning English because they think that they will not have to use the language when they start working, he added.