15 Things about Vietnam: Part 1

Speaking English

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.

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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. . .