A significant measure of pedagogical scholarship on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) higher education teaching and learning commonly prioritizes a ‘tips and tricks' approach to achieving positive student outcomes. Such often excludes or minimizes the active use of theory, being premised on problematic assumptions that can also potentially stagnate the field itself through circular reasoning. In this chapter, the author offers three considerations as a foundation for critical approaches to language teaching and learning. Firstly, the author acknowledges the performative and discursive capacity of language in shaping teaching and learning experiences; secondly, learners are positioned in this chapter as active agents in the learning process who have the potential to reinterpret or reject teaching and learning approaches; and finally, an argument is made for audience-specific teaching and learning practices using demographic data. To exemplify the application of these three considerations, Stuart Hall's Encoding-Decoding Theory serves as a key theoretical framework in this chapter, in conceptualizing critical approaches to teaching Generation Z learners.

The disruptive nature of the COVID-19 pandemic has created a massive shift in instructional practices in higher education across the globe. The impact of this pandemic on education globally has led to a surge in online teaching and the use of various digital technologies and platforms to support instructional practices. However, this world-changing event has foregrounded the limitations of technology in addition to other important indications, particularly as it relates to the notion of value and by extension value creation. Within the context of the Vietnamese higher education ecosystem, what is evident is that a re-evaluation of values is worth considering, in terms of the value of local higher education institutions, in addition to the value creation produced by the same. This article will engage with pertinent implications for the post-COVID realities which offer untold challenges and opportunities in Vietnam and elsewhere. Moreover, the post-COVID realities of late modernity only serve to accentuate the importance of values and value creation in this context as higher education institutions would re-evaluate, rethink, and retool approaches to instructional practices. A focus on questions of value aids in considering the broader conditions and contexts which support the some of the fruitful and situated outcomes higher education which includes human capital development, employment, social mobility and the production of modern social identities.

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Learner autonomy and motivation have been recognized by academics, researchers, and practitioners as both critical and problematic elements of linguistics and language learning, among other disciplines in higher education. The ongoing challenge lies at the heart of students exercising a critical sense of agency over their acquisition of disciplinary knowledge, educational experience, and applied practice. However, rather than being understood as a socially constructed action or outcome within limited frames of reference, learner autonomy and motivation may be viewed expansively as culture. Drawing on Raymond Williams's theory of culture and John Law's sociological concept of symmetry, this work attempts to explore how learner autonomy and motivation might be fostered and sustained, in an attempt to rethink how learner agency might be positioned as a normative practice.