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.

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.

Think-aloud is described as a strategy in which students verbalize their thoughts while they read. This strategy is used to help students monitor their own thinking and comprehend the text. This current study aimed to examine the effects of the think-aloud strategy on EFL young learners’ reading skill practice and identify their attitudes towards the think-aloud strategy used by the teacher in teaching at a foreign language center in Can Tho city (Southern Vietnam’s Mekong Delta region). This study was experimental research using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The quantitative approach was used to investigate the effects of the think-aloud strategy on young learners’ reading skill practice while the qualitative data was collected to understand the young learners’ attitudes towards the use of the think-aloud strategy in teaching and learning reading skills. Pre-test, post-test, and semi-structured interviews were used to collect the data. The study was conducted with one group of participants. The participants included 25 students who were at the age of 10-12 years old. The results from the pre-test and post-test showed that there was a significant difference in the students‘ reading comprehension performance after the intervention. Thus, the think-aloud strategy has a great impact on the improvement of students’ reading comprehension. Besides, there was no difference in reading comprehension achievement between males and females before and after the treatment. Especially, the results from the semi-structured interview revealed that all students had positive attitudes towards the think-aloud strategy.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0981/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Community service learning (CSL) has been regarded as a pedagogical tool which provides students with opportunities to participate in a service activity to meet social needs and simultaneously gain benefits for themselves. There has been a tendency in the world to include CSL in higher education training programs. This study aims to investigate Vietnamese EFL teachers' and students' perceptions of CSL and their practices of a CSL-integrated course at a university of foreign languages in central Vietnam. The study involved 61 teachers and 201 students and employed quantitative and qualitative approaches. The findings revealed that both teachers and students showed strong support for CSL, and that the teachers, especially more experienced teachers, had more positive beliefs than the students about the five categories surveyed: perceptions of CSL, role of the school, benefits for teachers, benefits for students, and feasibility of CSL integration. Also, the participants believed that CSL was to be a tool to help students develop professionally, personally, and academically.

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.

Hoạt động Người học Đánh giá Hiệu quả Dạy học (NHĐG- HQDH) được xem là một công cụ đánh giá hiệu quả một khóa học tại các cơ sở giáo dục trên thế giới với nhiều lợi ích khác nhau (Marsh, 1987; Hejase và đồng sự, 2013). Tuy nhiên, việc áp dụng hoạt động NHĐG- HQDH ở các trường học vẫn còn hạn chế vì nhiều lý do khác nhau (Centra & Gaubatz, 2000; Stowell, Addison & Smith, 2012). Nghiên cứu mô tả này thực hiện nhằm mục đích tìm hiểu giáo viên và học viên Anh ngữ nhận thức như thế nào về hoạt động NHĐG- HQDH cũng như tìm ra sự giống và khác biệt giữa hai nhóm nhận thức. Nghiên cứu được tiến hành với sự tham gia của 60 giáo viên và 100 học viên tại một trung tâm ngoại ngữ ở Đồng bằng Sông Cửu Long. Các số liệu định lượng được thu thập thông qua bảng câu hỏi. Kết quả nghiên cứu cho thấy: (1) hầu như tất cả giáo viên và học viên nhận thức cao về hoạt động NHĐG- HQDH, liên quan đến sự cần thiết và lợi ích của nó, ngoại trừ độ chuẩn xác và tính ổn định; (2) cả hai nhóm đối tượng thừa nhận thường xuyên tham gia hoạt động NHĐG- HQDH và thể hiện sự ưa chuộng của họ đối với một số bước trong quy trình của hoạt động đánh giá; (3) có những điểm giống nhau và khác biệt chính trong nhận thức về hoạt động NHĐG- HQDH giữa giáo viên và học viên. Cuộc nghiên cứu kết lại bằng một số gợi ý nhằm giúp hoạt động NHĐG- HQDH đạt hiệu quả cao hơn trong tương lai.