This study investigates Vietnamese EFL teachers’ beliefs and practices regarding oral corrective feedback, exploring and seeking to explain some of the relationships between beliefs and classroom practices. Data were collected in primary schools in Vietnam, and consist of 24 classroom observations and interviews with six teachers. Overall, the teachers showed high levels of awareness of the benefits of oral corrective feedback. They nominated pronunciation errors as the most important target for correction in the primary context. In practice, although pronunciation and grammar accounted for the majority of the total errors, leading to the majority of total feedback moves, the frequency of feedback per error was much higher for vocabulary errors. Prompts were reported by teachers to be more effective and more favourable than reformulations, but this preference was not reflected in the classroom observations, in which a large number of didactic recasts were used. The observed discrepancies are interpreted in relation to contextual factors and the influence of different sets of beliefs on practices. It was also noted that the linguistic realizations of these teachers’ feedback moves contained some inaccuracies. Implications for educational practice are discussed.

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Both teachers and students are positive about feedback efficacy and necessity. Both teachers and students are positive about explicit feedback types. Students value immediate feedback, while teachers prefer to delay their feedback. Teacher and learner beliefs are influenced by sociocultural and contextual factors. Teacher and learner beliefs are influenced by their experiences.

BACKGROUND: As millions of teachers have been forced to rely upon remote teaching due to the closure of schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is particularly important to understand the extent to which teacher’s psychological wellbeing has been affected by this global health crisis. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis was twofold: 1) ascertain the prevalence of stress, anxiety, depression among teachers during the COVID-19 outbreak; 2) identify the associated factors of these psychological wellbeing domains of the teachers. METHODS: Academic Search Premier, Eric, PsycInfo, Scopus, and Web of Science were searched for articles published from December 2019 and July 2021, using search terms including “COVID-19” “anxiety” “depression” “stress”, and “teachers”. RESULTS: This study included 54 studies synthesising data from 256,896 teachers across 22 countries. The meta-analysis showed higher prevalence of stress (62.6%, 95% Confidence Interval [CI]: 46.1–76.6), compared to anxiety (36.3%, 95% CI: 28.5–44.9) and depression (59.9%, 95% CI: 43.4–74.4) among teachers. Teachers’ experiences of these psychological issues were associated with various socio-demographic and institutional factors, including gender, nature of online teaching, job satisfaction, teaching experience, and the volume of workload. Additionally, several protective factors, such as regular exercises and provision of technical support for online teaching, reduced teachers’ negative psychological experiences. CONCLUSION: There is a need for authorities to formulate educational policies to improve teachers’ wellbeing at the time of global crisis. Special attention should be paid to assist female teachers in overcoming physical and mental stressors.

Recent decades have witnessed extensive research focusing on oral corrective feedback (CF), a key aspect of English as a second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) learning and teaching, but relatively little research has examined the relationship between learner and teacher beliefs about CF. The study reported in this article investigated the relationship between teacher and learner beliefs regarding the optimal targets and sources of CF in Vietnamese secondary EFL contexts. Data which were collected at four Vietnamese public high schools included questionnaires completed by 250 students, interviews with 15 of them, and interviews with 24 teachers. The findings showed that the students were happy to receive CF to all types of errors, including less important errors such as those not influencing their communicative success. The teachers were generally more selective in their choices of error types, but they sometimes faced some tensions between their overall teaching objective and the students' practical needs to learn the material that would be tested in subsequent exams. Regarding CF sources, the students preferred teacher correction to self-correction or peer correction although they believed that self-correction was effective for their learning and wished their teachers would provide them with training on how to conduct peer correction and self-correction. The teachers also thought that it was part of their role to be the main CF providers to ensure the accuracy of classroom feedback. Some teachers were skeptical about their students' ability to provide peer CF. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

Language teacher beliefs have received increasing research attention for the past few decades. However, little is known about the beliefs of pre-service teachers in the pre-primary English as a foreign language (EFL) education context. This qualitative case study extends this line of inquiry by investigating the trajectory of student teachers' beliefs about teaching English to pre-primary learners in Macau within a teacher education course. The participants included 60 pre-service teachers taking an English Language Activities course in their third year of a 4-year Bachelor of pre-primary education program. The data comprised written reflections collected at three points in time during the 16-week course: at the beginning of the course, mid-way through the course, and at the end of the course. The findings showed five broad themes, constituted from 15 subthemes, regarding (1) learners and learning, (2) teaching, (3) subject, (4) self, and (5) learning to teach. The major themes have been documented in the literature, but several subthemes were identified for the first time in the context of pre-primary EFL teacher education. More importantly, the findings revealed that some of the subthemes were newly shaped and several subthemes were reshaped as a consequence of taking the course. The findings were interpreted in relation to the content of the course, the experiential learning opportunities, the pre-service teachers' prior experiences of language learning and teaching, and the local language teaching and learning context. Implications for pre-service teacher education programs are discussed.

Second/foreign language (L2) education reforms have triggered increasing research investigating the effectiveness of and teachers’ cognitions and practices concerning the reformed curricula. This study extends this line of enquiry by employing a sociological perspective, an undertaking that little prior research has demonstrated in L2 teacher cognition literature, to explore teachers’ understanding, knowledge and beliefs about and their actual implementation of a reformed English language curriculum (i.e. task-supported language teaching) in Vietnam. The participants were six experienced English-as-a-foreign-language teachers at a secondary school. The data comprised in-depth semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, lesson plans and classroom observations. The findings showed that the teachers made use of their existing deep-rooted knowledge and beliefs about language teaching and learning to enact the reformed curriculum in their own ways, illustrating a focus-on-forms approach. The study drew on Bernstein's notion of pedagogic discourse to shed light on the teachers’ rationales for their own ways of practice. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) has generated worldwide popularity as a curriculum innovation, and extensive research has investigated various aspects of the approach. However, little is known about the implementation of classroom assessment in TBLT curricula. This study investigated high school English as a foreign language teachers’ beliefs and practices regarding assessment in a curriculum innovation context in Vietnam. Data comprised in-depth interviews with six teachers, as well as testing documents. The findings revealed a strong impact of the high-stakes exams on teachers’ testing beliefs in that they focused explicitly on linguistic items in the assessed content and forms of assessment. These beliefs were accurately reflected in their testing practices. However, both the teachers’ beliefs and practices were contradictory to teaching principles and the expectations of the intended curriculum. These findings suggest that in-service teacher professional development programs are necessary for innovations like TBLT to have a real change in the classroom.