Vietnam Virtual Exchange for English Language Teaching

Project overview

ViVEXELT (Vietnam Virtual Exchange for English Language Teaching), is a collaborative action research project between Coventry University and Hanoi University of Science and Technology aimed at supporting the professional development in innovative digital technology of teachers of English in all educational sectors in Vietnam at the time of the COVID pandemic.

Funding was awarded by the British Council Vietnam Digital Learning Innovation Fund – Response to COVID 19, with the Ministery of Education (MOET) in Vietnam to encourage partnerships between the UK and Vietnam which would generate new research, insight and/or innovations to support Vietnam’s National Foreign Languages Project (NFLP) in its ambition to improve the teaching and learning of English in Vietnam by 2025, and beyond.

The core ViVEXELT team comprised the two project leads from Coventry University and HUST, English specialists from the School of Humanities at Coventry University, the then English Language Manager at the Migrant and Refugee Centre in the UK, a consultant on e-learning from the University of Southampton , and English language teachers and teacher educators from three more universities in Vietnam (see the ViVEXELT webpage).

ViVEXELT focused on setting up a sustainable and inclusive model of continuous professional development (CPD) for English language teacher education. Providing synchronous and asynchronous opportunities to knowledge-share on ELT, ViVEXELT encouraged its participants, both in the UK and in Vietnam, to co-create ELT materials relevant to their contexts based on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Project objectives

The project aimed to:

1. Create a cross-educational sector UK/Vietnam ELT Community of Practice (CoP) through virtual exchange as an intercultural/international teacher education approach;
2. Enable English language teachers and students in teacher education in Vietnam and in the UK, who are female in the majority, to knowledge-share on online innovative digital pedagogy at the time of COVID;
3. Boost the confidence of teachers whose first language is not English to take control of their teaching and learning actions through a non-threatening dialogic knowledge-sharing international decolonised VE Third Space;
4. Develop further student-centred ELT pedagogy based on real world task and the SDGs;
5. Research how the VE approach could support the participants with coping with teaching online at the time of the COVID 19 emergency and beyond.

Impact statement

The project was successful at enabling local and global knowledge-sharing on digilat innovation on ELT. The project attracted 331 participants from 41 different educational institutions distributed across the whole of Vietnam, including remote areas and from 5 HE institutions from the Midlands and the North of England and an NGO in Coventry in the UK. There was cross-educational sector representation, that included English teachers from state primary and secondary institutions in Vietnam; teacher educators and English language teachers from tertiary institutions in Vietnam and in the UK, teachers of English to refugees and migrants in the UK and private school teachers in Vietnam for pupils from age 4 to 18, as well as students in teacher education in both the UK and Vietnam. The participating students from the UK lead HE institution were from ODA (Official Development Assistance) countries in the majority (ie: Pakistan, Albania, India, Nepal, Iraq and Nigeria) and this added an extra layer of multicultural international ELT knowledge-sharing and inclusivity to the project.

181/331 participants obtained a ViVEXELT CPD certificate and 90% of participants stated that the CPD experience through Virtual Exchange had been positive, transformational and supportive at the time of the COVID pandemic.

ViVEXELT provided a sense of safety and community support at a critical time, when participants (and these were female in the majority) were in need of both emotional and pedagogical help during a pandemic.

Outputs

Orsini-Jones, M. (2023). Virtual Exchange as a Transformational Third Space for English Language Teacher Education: Discussing Project ViVEXELT. International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching (IJCALLT), 13(1), 1-20. http://doi.org/10.4018/IJCALLT.334712

Orsini-Jones, M., Thi Ngoc Thuy, B., Wells J., Preshous, A., Nguyen Thi, T.T. & Butt, F. (2023). Action-research and role-reversal-informed creation of a Zoom breakout room guide for e-CIIC mediators. In M. Orsini-Jones, C.A Hildeblando Júnior, A., Cerveró-Carrascosa, S, Di Sarno-García, & A. Aşik, A. (Eds.). (2023). Discussing Global Citizenship in Language Learning and Teaching – Symposium Proceedings. (pp. 61-72). Coventry University. Retrieved from: https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/files/78357068/Orsini_Jones_et_al.pdf