Over the past few months, English teachers in Vietnam have demonstrated their interest in and passion for continuing professional development (CPD). This month, we feature three activities, events and resources from the past few months that were designed for teachers, either globally or across East Asia, that have proved immensely popular with English teachers and lecturers here in Vietnam. We also show you how you can still access these free resources for your own CPD.
Climate Action in Language Education lesson plans – Vietnam in the global top 10
In May 2021, this collection of twelve Climate Action in Language Education lesson plans by authors ELT Footprint was published on the TeachingEnglish website, providing teachers with step-by-step guidance and resources, an ideal starting point to help address issues of sustainability in the classroom.
The twelve lessons cover a range of levels and age groups, and each explores a different topic, from sports to storms and from families to fashion. They are designed with flexibility in mind, can be integrated within existing curricula and are available in two versions, for classroom-based lessons and online teaching.
The lesson plans were viewed or downloaded almost 100,000 times in just their first four months of being available. During this same period, teachers in Vietnam either viewed the lesson plans or downloaded them almost 3,000 times, putting Vietnam #8 in the world, and the leading country across Asia, only surpassed by countries in Europe and South America.
Want to know more…
As classes in Vietnam return to face-to-face teaching, a greater number of downloads of the face-to-face material is probably expected. While the lesson plans are still available to view and download, these are also currently being developed into a series of ‘bite-size’ lesson activities. In the next few months, we plan to organise a series of webinars to Vietnamese teachers to demonstrate how these could be incorporated into English lessons as part of the Vietnamese English language curriculum.
World Teachers’ Day webinars (October 2021) - Vietnam teachers #2 in the world
To celebrate this Day (5 October) British Council’s TeachingEnglish website organised eight talks across four days in that week. Topics included motivating teachers, teaching digital literacies and also presented research on teaching during Covid-19.
Globally, across the eight webinars there were 17,649 participants from 124 countries worldwide (Zoom and Facebook Live combined). However, almost 10 per cent of that figure (some 1,667 participants) were from Vietnam alone, putting Vietnamese teachers #2 in the world after India.
Given that four of the eight webinars went live at 11pm local time in Vietnam, this really shows the commitment of Vietnam’s English teachers.
In response to the talk on teaching digital literacies, one participant from Vietnam commented, “Digital literacies are important. Students have to be critical and double check what they hear, see, read. I have encouraged my students to attend these webinars and similar ones to be diverse and critical.”
Want to know more…
If you would like to see any of these insightful and engaging talks, you can find recordings of all eight talks here.
New Directions conference (December 2021) - Vietnam attendees #2 in East Asia
New Directions is East Asia’s annual conference exploring the future of language assessment. This year’s theme was ‘Fairer, Greener, Stronger’. As ever, Vietnamese speakers and attendees were prominent.
Indeed, with almost 100 participants registered, Vietnam was second only to China in terms of registrations. Furthermore, the spotlight on Vietnam, which introduced the latest British Council funded research into ‘Classroom-based assessment in Vietnam: Teacher Attitudes, Practices and Needs’ and was sponsored by the VietTESOL Association, was the third most popular of all the country spotlights featured at this year’s conference.
Other sessions included ones on the Future of English in East Asia as well as an ASEAN spotlight.
Want to know more…
In cased you couldn’t register or you missed any of the truly informative sessions at this year’s conference, they are now all available to view here.