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.

This quasi-experimental study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of applying cognitive linguistics (CL) to teaching English prepositions. The pretest-posttest between-group design was adopted. The participants were selected according to their previous learning experiences, regular out-of-class exposure, eagerness for joining the study, and pretest results. The spatial and metaphorical meanings of the prepositions above, among, at, behind, beside, between, in, in front of, on and under were taught in 4 sessions of 90 minutes. The Cognitive Group received CLbased instructions and the Traditional Group received instructions based on vivid pictures and verbal explanations. The findings showed that the Cognitive Group outperformed the Traditional Group in the posttest in terms of both the spatial and metaphorical meanings. It can be said that CL-based instruction can help learners improve their knowledge of the prepositions better than the traditional pedagogical application. It is recommended that applying cognitive linguistics can help students of other languages master English prepositions. The participants' responses to the questionnaires also assured research reliability and validity.

Purpose: Most EFL textbooks suggest the use of vivid pictures and verbal explanations in teaching English prepositions. However, this word class appears in collocations, and rote-learning does not really help learners retain and use this word class successfully. Cognitive linguistics (CL) has implications for English language teaching as it rests against the relationship between the human mind and language. Several experimental studies have aimed to investigate the effects of CL-based treatment on learners' retention of target foreign or second language. However, most of these studies have not placed an emphasis on the learners' opinions of CL-based teaching. This current study aimed to collect college students' responses to CL-based teaching of English prepositions.

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.

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.