Large numbers of younger Vietnamese aspire to speak English and will
see associating with a native speaker as a significant token of achievement.
Many of them have a vastly unrealistic picture of what it takes to learn a
language. And some will have had their innate ability to learn English ruined
by the Vietnamese school system before they arrive in your class.
As you're probably aware, teaching
English is the job of choice for most native English speakers heading off for a
stint in South East Asia. In Vietnam it's the same story. Large numbers of
younger Vietnamese aspire to speak English, and many of them leave high school
with years of English classes behind them, but no practical speaking or
listening skills whatsoever, so the demand for English teachers is high and probably
set to remain so for several decades to come. And while teaching English to
Vietnamese students can be a slog for various reasons, there's no doubt it pays
well; the better-qualified English teachers in Vietnam, whose salaries are
calculated in US dollars and whose activities fan out into neat little range of
speaking engagements and managerial activities, live high on the hog indeed.
As far as finding a place to work
goes, there are a smattering of universities that hire ESL teachers, and an
even smaller number which teach college-level literature and culture in
English. Most jobs teaching English in Vietnam, however, are in English language
centres and high schools, so let's start with them.
English language centres in Vietnam
come in two basic types: the foreign-run and the Vietnamese-run. Foreign-run
centres are normally organized along solid, professional lines. Some cater, in
their dull, professional way, to an elite middle class customer base (ILA, The
British Council), while others cater to more of a mass audience, charging lower
fees and packing more students into classes (VUS, VAC). Then there are the
Vietamese-run centres which are often fairly shambolic in their levels of
organization and professionalism. Many have funny names that are meant to
suggest a certain hi-tech sleekness and a definite connection with the West;
"Space-Age English" (Trung Tâm Không Gian) and "Apollo English".
Beneath the lunar surface of the
language-centre landscape, there are also various mini and micro-centres - hole-in-the-wall
type schools set up by Vietnamese English majors or solo-run by some guy who
learned English in the Philippines and is now trying to make his fortune
assaulting the kids with his thick English accent and his vigorous personal
methodology.
You can work out where you'd be
best off working for. The top-tier foreign-run centres will expect you to have
a uni degree and a formal ESL teaching qualification (either CELTA or TESOL), while
the lower-tier Vietnamese centres will employ you on the basis of the fact that
you are a native speaker and can tie your own shoe-laces.
The atmosphere in class in the
best Vietnamese language centres tends to be moderately serious. Students turn
up to class, diligently do their homework and do serious swotting for tests.
This is because fees in good Vietnamese language centres are pretty steep (most
of an average month's wages for a 10-week course, sometimes more), so parents
expect results. It's also because many of the kids are learning English because
they want to get into American or Australian universities; basically, they need
certain scores in internationally standardized English tests (IELTS, TOEFL,
TOEIC) before they're going to get a look in.
This latter fact leads to some
moderately stupid ideas about learning English that do the rounds of the
Vietnamese student mind. The worst of them is that to get a 6.0 in an IELTS
exam - 6.0 being the basic score you need to get into a normal Western
university - the main thing you have to do is to train yourself to take an
IELTS test. The rigour (i.e. pain) of learning English over a couple of years,
on this picture, is somehow going to be removed by doing practice tests and
memorizing set responses, which is pretty much how most Vietnamese students get
through high school. Unsurprisingly, when it comes to international English
exams administered by Cambridge University, the swotting approach tends to end
in tears.
If you already have a background
in school teaching, or if teaching teenagers sounds appealing, you could also
consider working in a Vietnamese high school. Again there are different types
of schools, with different underlying rules and expectations. There are
top-notch international schools, where student fees (and teachers' salaries)
are similar to the priciest private schools in the West. There are Vietnamese
public schools for the gifted and Vietnamese public schools for the normal.
Probably the biggest division is between Vietnamese public schools in the city
and Vietnamese public schools in the country. Vietnamese students from the
country tend to be MUCH less well-off than their compatriots from the city; in
the classroom they tend to be earnest and vastly passive. Urban middle class
students are the opposite. They're basically at school to have a good time and
to give their teachers the run around - to indemnify themselves against the boredom
of long school days, anodyne lessons, masses of homework and the ever-present
spectre of exams.
Of course, the atmosphere in the
classroom depends a lot on the age of the kids and their particular take on
study and life. No matter what type of Vietnamese school you teach in, there
are always a small core of kids who consider it a privilege to be taught by a
native speaker and a relief not to spend half the class memorizing lists and
regurgitating them in front of the class, they way they do in regular Vietnamese class. These are the really switched on kids. And they're usually switched on, not just because they're learning something they need to learn to get ahead, but because they like the way foreign teachers encourage them to develop the sort of autonomous powers of
thought and imagination that the standard Vietnamese curriculum doesn't allow
for.
Something you might like to try
with adult students, or even with kids, once you've built up a bit of a network
in Vietnam, is organizing private classes at home for small groups. If you stay in
Vietnam for more than three months, you will almost certainly be approached by
friends asking you to open an English class for them and a select bunch of associates.
Being somehow ON THE WAY TO LEARNING ENGLISH, if not actually learning English,
seems to be more or less essential to the self-respect of young urban
professionals in the Vietnam of 2015.
Take this enthusiasm with a grain of salt though. Vaguely aspiring to speak English is something that only gets Vietnamese students so far. And it's not enough to build a viable career in Vietnam around as an English teacher. Most small private classes tend to fall apart after 2 - 3 months, for one simple reason: adult Vietnamese life is massively over-burdened with work and a wide range of compulsory social commitments. Add to that the pressures of having a family and you have a recipe for absenteeism and general flakiness. As much as young Vietnamese adults love the IDEA of learning English, most of them just don't have the time.
Take this enthusiasm with a grain of salt though. Vaguely aspiring to speak English is something that only gets Vietnamese students so far. And it's not enough to build a viable career in Vietnam around as an English teacher. Most small private classes tend to fall apart after 2 - 3 months, for one simple reason: adult Vietnamese life is massively over-burdened with work and a wide range of compulsory social commitments. Add to that the pressures of having a family and you have a recipe for absenteeism and general flakiness. As much as young Vietnamese adults love the IDEA of learning English, most of them just don't have the time.
*
One of the first things you'll
notice when you arrive in Vietnam is that English is very much the GLAMOUR language.
Ads and signs in Vietnam make use of various half-digested English-language memes.
As in China, there are a range of poor translations - the effects of which
range from the clunky to the comic-sublime:
Some Vietnamese who can speak English
like to drop English names and words into the conversation and watch for the kudos that starts flowing their way. Younger generations of
Vietnamese choose an English name for themselves that partly resembles their Vietnamese
name ("Hello, Trang, um, Tiffany.") Young and old deck themselves out
in cheap imported clothing decorated with meaningless semi-English slogans:
If you come across a 58 year
old Vietnamese dame with "Babelicious" emblazoned across her chest,
you're safe in assuming she's not a pole-dancer, just a normal Vietnamese
retiree with average levels of respect for the English language (and absolutely
no knowledge of its actual meaning).
English, be it noted, is not the
ONLY language that symbolically represents the dynamism and modernity that
Vietnamese people nowadays want Vietnam to be a part of. Korean and Japanese
enjoy solid popularity for similar reasons. (Even Thai had a bit of a surge for
a couple of years, possibly because Vietnamese kids suddenly started watching
Thai ghost comedies.)
The language which gets paid a
disproportionate LACK of attention is CHINESE. In cultural and linguistic
terms, China and Vietnam are close neighbours and the economies of the two
places are tightly intermeshed; masses of cheap imports flow across the
border into Vietnam, which has serious trouble producing stuff cheaply enough
to sell back. And yet the Vietnamese are so suspicious of their northern
neighbours that only a tiny minority of Vietnamese learn the Chinese language,
even though, for Vietnamese, it's not that difficult to learn.
Such is the general buzz
surrounding English that older folk often come across as a little embarrassed
that they don't speak it better. Younger generations have no such worries. Wherever
you go in Vietnam, you'll come across teenagers who want to try out their English on
you, 5 year olds who will holler "Hello" at you as you pass them in
the street - and quite a few grown men who do exactly the same. (Often it's the
only word of English they know.)
One of the basic situations you
will find yourself getting into in Vietnam goes roughly like this: You walk into a
Vietnamese government office to get your paperwork stamped; a pleasant, eager
young Vietnamese man comes up to you and, for the sake of trying out his
English, and because he wants to be polite to a foreigner, asks "Can I
help you?" You answer with a simple sentence: "I have an appointment
at 11 with a visa officer." At which point the eager young Vietnamese man
stares at you as if you're speaking Zwahili, then wanders off looking
manifestly disappointed with himself.
This guy's problem, and that of
about 20 million of his compatriots, is that, through no fault of his own, he
was taught English at high school by Vietnamese teachers who (again through no
fault of their own) have never been outside of Vietnam to study English among native
speakers and who might never have had meaningful contact with native speakers
in the course of years (decades . . .) of English studies. Apart from speaking
with thick Vietnamese accents, Vietnamese English teachers tend to concentrate
on grammar and reading - for the simple reason that they themselves have poor
speaking skills and so try to stick to what they know best.
The overall result is that the Vietnamese,
across the board, are still pretty bad at English. Not because they lack the
will to learn English. And absolutely not because they lack the ability or intelligence.
But because learning English in Vietnam still tends to turn into an enormous exercise
in list-making; the whole English-language curriculum is built up around
memorizing set phrases which native speakers almost never use word for word, and
operating grammatical rules, which native speakers often don't apply.
As eager as many Vietnamese are to
learn and speak English, they're secretly bored out of their brains by the way
they're taught it at school. But because they've been taught it (and most other
subjects) in this way for so long, they're also secretly scared of being taught
it in a different way. Therein lies the challenge of teaching English in Vietnam.
Give your class of 15 year olds some basic structures to talk about the types
of photos they like looking at on facebook, then ask them to freely express
their opinions and - what happens? They mightn't jump at the chance to state
their preferences, they might ignore you completely and start climbing the
walls. . .
Great article. This is very useful to crack the IELTS.
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