To enable the Vietnamese youth to join the international workforce during ASEAN integration, teaching English in general education has undertaken a reform with the aim of intercultural communicative competence instead of communicative competence. Since building learners' intercultural communicative competence requires their personal engagement in social interaction, teachers should follow a proper approach to activate students' participation in intercultural communication. This research studied to what extent upper secondary school teachers perceived and practiced intercultural integration prior the educational reform. Data collected from 101 participating teachers through questionnaires and open-ended questions proved that (1) teachers had good understanding of intercultural integration, but (2) they rarely conducted intercultural activities in practices, and (3) teachers' graduate education, not international experience or coursebook teaching, had a positive impact on their intercultural teaching practices. The findings suggested that educational management should be consistent with the progressive reform through the synchronization of all curricular factors towards intercultural education, and teachers should be oriented with intercultural teaching pedagogy to conduct suitable activities to develop students' intercultural communicative competence.

Intercultural competence (IC) has gained a better positionality in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education in Vietnam to enable young people to become effective global citizens. Accordingly, the development of comprehensive IC is considered to be an officially stated objective of the reformed EFL curriculum, and a great body of intercultural issues reflecting the cultural diversity of countries has been added to the English course books of the upper secondary level. To help EFL teachers with the exploitation of the coursebooks, this perspective paper aims to propose a model for Intercultural Language Learning and Teaching (IcLLT) to shed light on how to integrate culture into teaching EFL in a Vietnamese pedagogical teaching context. This model can be a valuable guideline for EFL teachers to go beyond the language skill-based lesson in order to promote learners’ intercultural communicative competence.

<p>As a part of educational reform in upper secondary education, intercultural competence has been identified as a goal of foreign language teaching to enable the Vietnamese young people to work and study in globalized environment. In fact, culture has been incorporated in the expected English teaching curriculum for general education. Prior the change of curriculum at national scale, this study aimed to explore teachers’ perceptions of integrating intercultural competence into teaching English at upper secondary level. The quantitative and qualitative data collected from 101 teachers of English in a province of the Mekong Delta, indicated that they took the four aspects into considerations, namely learners’ learning strategies and motivations, teachers’ intercultural instructions, course books and curriculum, and management aspects. For better practice of intercultural integration, the teachers had high expectation for pedagogical training to enhance their intercultural competence and intercultural integrating pedagogies. From the findings, some pedagogical implications were made to foster the feasibility of intercultural integration in teaching English in upper secondary level.</p><p><strong>Keywords.</strong> educational reform, intercultural competence, intercultural integration, teachers’ perceptions, upper secondary education</p>

In the context of globalization, intercultural integration has gained a better position in teaching and learning English in Vietnam, even in general education. In fact, intercultural objectives and intercultural content have been added to the expected curriculum and pilot coursebooks for teaching English in upper secondary education. Prior to the implementation of the new curriculum, it is essential to explore how teachers deal with intercultural content provided in the coursebooks. From the view of intercultural teaching, this study focuses on the positionality of intercultural objectives and intercultural teaching strategies in teachers’ practice. Data collected from 101 teachers through questionnaire and six class observations illustrate that (1) teachers did not include intercultural objectives in EFL lessons and (2) they rarely conducted intercultural language activities in their teaching practice. It is recommended that intercultural education needs more attention from educational managers to support the EFL teachers in upper secondary schools to incorporate culture into their teaching more effectively, which contributes to the accomplishment of a reformed English curriculum objective – building comprehensive intercultural competence for the students.

This present study aims to investigate the impact of explicit lexical collocation instruction on Vietnamese students' vocabulary use and their attitudes on the explicit lexical collocation instruction during online teaching due to COVID-19. Participants were 47 EFL students, divided into the experimental group and the control group learning online via Google Meet. Results collected from two writing tests (pre and posttest) and semi-structured interview demonstrated that the vocabulary use in students' writing performance in the experimental group had a significant improvement after receiving the explicit lexical collocation instruction online and students had positive attitude toward the explicit lexical collocation instruction. It is recommended that the application of explicit lexical collocation instruction at the beginning of a writing period in EFL teaching. It is recommended that EFL teachers can integrate lexical collocation instruction into teaching writing online to improve students' English proficiency in terms of quality of vocabulary use and writing performance.