Towards the Integration of Culture Into Teaching English in Upper Secondary Schools: Teachers’ Concerns and Expectations

Abstract

<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>

Intercultural Language Teaching in Vietnamese Tertiary EFL Classes: A Participatory Action Research Study

“…For example, in the Vietnamese university context, teachers' random teaching of cultural connotation and cultural facts embedded in lesson topics was observed in Ho (2011a), T. L. Nguyen (2013), V. C. Le (2015), and Trinh (2016). Similarly, the teaching of culture was found to be fact-oriented and topicdependent in Tran and Dang (2014) in FL centre settings, and in Chau andTruong (2018, 2019) in upper secondary school settings.…”

“…Tran (2014), T. Q. Tran and Dang (2014), Ho (2009Ho ( , 2011aHo ( , 2011b, L. Nguyen (2015), L. Nguyen, Harvey, and Grant (2016), Vo (2017), Chau (2018), Chau andTruong (2018, 2019). For instance, Doan (2014) examined the teaching of culture in five tertiary English Teacher Education programs at five universities in the North, Centre and South of Vietnam.…”

“…In this study, data were collected through questionnaire survey and classroom observations. Chau (2018) found the key issues that teachers were concerned with include: learners' low language proficiency and learning motivation, lack of cultural orientation in coursebooks and curriculum, and teachers' lack of background of intercultural integration pedagogy. The teachers were also found to show high expectations for pedagogical training that enhanced their IC and intercultural integration.…”