Form- focused instruction- a case study of Vietnamese teachers’ beliefs and practices

INTRODUCTION Born, bred, and educated in Vietnam, where teachers were viewed as „wells of wisdom‟, all my school life was dedicated to the memorisation of factual knowledge in order to return it in the examinations. 35 years ago, I entered the university to study English. It was my first experience with foreign language learning. Like other students, I was taught grammar deductively because Grammar-Translation was (and still is) the dominant approach to language teaching. The key classroom activities that we, the students, were expected to undertake were learning grammatical rules, doing grammatical exercises and translating literary texts from English into Vietnamese. The textbooks were written and imported from the former Soviet Union. Upon graduation from the university, I got a job as an English language teacher at the same university where I was taught English. Although I was unable to use my English for any communicative purposes, I managed to teach well simply because I, again, spent most of the class time explaining the grammatical rules to my students and got them to do the grammar exercises in the coursebook. The students worked very hard with those rules and exercises. Then I had the opportunity to study for my Master‟s Degree in TESOL in an American university in the heyday of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). There I was taught things like „communicative competence‟, „communicative language teaching‟, „inductive teaching of grammar‟, „integrated approaches to language teaching‟, etc. I was excited with the new ideas of language teaching, reflecting on my teaching and feeling happy to find an answer why my students were not able to use English communicatively. Also, during this time, I came across Kennedy‟s outlines for research agenda for learning to teach, which read as follows: Teachers, like other learners, interpret new content through their existing understandings and modify and reinterpret new ideas on the basis of what they already know or believe” (Kennedy, 1992, p. 2). Although I noted down the above quote carefully, I was unable to make sense of it. Returning to Vietnam, I became a teacher educator. Needless to say how enthusiastic I was in training student teachers how to use the communicative approach to their future career. I did not get any feedback from the student teachers, so I took it for granted that they would teach the way they were trained. In 1999, I conducted my first empirical study on English language teaching and I was disappointed to find that teachers overemphasised grammar instruction at the expense of communicative skills. Teachers told me that the communicative approach was not suitable to their students, who were eager to learn grammar for the examinations (Canh, 2000). Then I found the book “Teacher Learning in Language Teaching” edited by D. Freeman and J. C. Richards (1996). Reading the book through I realised that teachers taught the way they thought it was appropriate to their students rather than the way they were trained at the university. But I, as a product of the behaviourist approach to education, had quite vague ideas about the influence of teachers‟ thinking on their teaching. While I was teaching a graduate course in 2004, my students were presenting their assignment on focus on form, and I found that they preferred teaching grammar deductively. Below are some extracts of their presentations: It cannot be denied that grammar teaching helps learners discover the nature of language, i.e., that language consists of complicate patterns that combine through sound or writing to create meaning … As a high school teacher, grammar teaching always plays an important part in my teaching. Although the curriculum is designed basing on the communicative approach and its aim is to enable students to communicate using the target language in daily life, our students‟ goal is to pass the English test in the graduate[ion] examination which mostly includes exercises related to grammar. So my teaching mainly centers on helping students to master grammar as much as possible (Thanh Hoa). This method of teaching [focus on form] doesn‟t coincide with what most of teachers of English at high school[s] in Vietnam are doing. We teach grammar separately, not in the lessons of practicing skills [skills lessons] where grammar is not the main point of teaching. … Students whose grammar background is good can quickly acquire the accuracy in using the language they are learning (Do Hoa). Recalling what Kennedy said in 1992, I managed to get the point. Evidently, teachers are not resistant to change but they simply reinterpret the top-down change through the lens of their own knowledge and beliefs about the intended change, their students and their teaching. Hargreaves and Evans (1997) have noted that “legislation only sets a framework for improvement; it is teachers who must make that improvement happens” (p. 3). Hence, a reform agenda cannot be successful without teachers‟ beliefs being oriented toward the reform agenda (Battista, 1994). According to Johnson (2006), the emergence of a substantial body of research now referred to as teacher cognition (Borg, 2003a; Burns, 1996; Freeman, 2002; Farrell, 1999; Ng & Farrell, 2003; Woods, 1996) is the most significant advancement in the field of second language teacher education. Studies of teacher cognition have “helped capture the complexities of who teachers are, what they know and believe, how they learn to teach, and how they carry out their work in diverse contexts throughout their careers” (Johnson, 2006, p. 236). As Breen (1991) comments: By uncovering the kinds of knowledge and beliefs which teachers hold and how they express these through the meanings that they give to their work, we may come to know the most appropriate support we can provide in in-service development (p. 232). In Burns‟ (1996) opinion, such an endeavour will contribute to the development of “informed theories of practice” (p. 175). The literature on educational innovations explains that the gap between intended curriculum and the implemented curriculum is due to the complexity of teaching. Teaching involves a variety of complex psychological and sociological processes (Clark & Peterson, 1986), and it is shaped by what teachers know, believe, and think (Borg, 2003a, 2006; 2009; Burns, 2009; Farrell & Kun, 2007) as well as the attitudes, expectations and motivation of the students. This implies that theoretical insights, no matter how sound they are, alone cannot help solve a simple practical problem. Studies by Burns (1990), Kumaravadivelu (1993), and Nunan ( 2003) have suggested that despite teachers‟ self-reported commitment to communicative language teaching, that commitment is rarely enacted in the classroom. As a language teacher and a language teacher educator, I have always asked myself the following questions: Why is classroom teaching so largely unaffected by the development in theory and research ? Why is it difficult to take in the full meaning of theory without experience? Why is it difficult to resolve at the level of practice the tensions between teaching in the best ways possible and teaching to cover the prescribed curriculum content? The following statement from the Report by the National Institute of Education in the United States of America (1975) was really thought-provoking to me: It is obvious that what teachers do is directed in no small measure by what they think.… To the extent that observed or intended teaching behaviour is “thoughtless”, it makes no use of the human teacher‟s most unique attributes. In so doing, it becomes mechanical and might well be done by a machine. If, however, teaching is done and, in all likelihood, will continue to be done by human teachers, the question of relationships between thought and action becomes crucial. (p. 1) Burns (1992, 1996), Yim (1993), Borg (1998a, 1998b) and Farrell (1999) are among researchers within the field of second language teaching (L2) that have acknowledged the gap in the research agenda for L2 teaching due to a lack of attention to the teachers‟ beliefs about grammar teaching. Despite a global surge of interest in the study of teachers‟ beliefs and of their relationship to teachers‟ classroom practices (Borg, 2006), the number of studies in pertinent research domains of non-native English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teachers remains much smaller compared to the amount of literature about native-speaker English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teachers‟ beliefs in western countries (Borg, 2003a, 2006; Zeng & Murphy, 2007). Given the fact that non-native EFL teachers “face different challenges than those teachers whose subject matter [English] is their own first language” (Bailey, Curtis & Nunan, 2001, p.111), non-native EFL teachers whose social and cultural backgrounds in which they teach the target language are different, their beliefs about language teaching may not be similar to those of native speaker ESL teachers. It is, therefore, critical that this research gap be filled. Regarding form-focused instruction, there is considerable controversy in the field of second/foreign language teaching as to whether the grammar of the target language should be explicitly taught to students, and if so, how? Arguments in this area have tended to be derived from theoretical explanations of language and language learning. Despite the controversy among academics, grammar teaching “has continued to be one of the mainstays in English language training worldwide” (Hinkel, 2002, p. 10). Until recently, little is known about non-native speaker teachers‟ beliefs and their actual practice in the area of grammar teaching. In Vietnam, Canh and Barnard (2009b) are the first (and the only one up till now) to study teachers‟ beliefs about grammar. However, the study was merely a questionnaire survey with a small number of Vietnamese teachers (N=29) at the university level. The attempt to occupy this research space together with the interest in understanding Vietnamese secondary school teachers‟ beliefs about grammar and their work in grammar teaching were instrumental in driving me to conduct this case study. The Vietnamese educational system, which is quite similar to what Fotos (2002) describes, “is controlled by a central agency that determines the curriculum to be taught and the textbooks to be used. … In secondary schools the teaching of EFL is usually test driven, preparing learners for the university entrance examinations” (p. 142). It is useful to explore how such a highly centralised system in a collectivist culture influences teachers‟ beliefs and practices, particularly with reference to grammar teaching. The present case study, thus, complements other studies conducted elsewhere and adds to the body knowledge of second/ foreign language teachers‟ beliefs in general, but more specifically, beliefs about form-focused instruction held by Vietnamese EFL teachers which to date have remained unexplored. The participants in this study, like a majority of Vietnamese upper secondary school EFL teachers, were working under a difficult, under-resourced circumstance, where they were inadequately paid and did not have easy access to expert knowledge about second language acquisition and professional development opportunities.