English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in Vietnamese Universities: Policies of Encouragement and Pedagogies of Assumption

Internationalisation and English medium education in Vietnamese universities: Professional role transformation among English language lecturers

“…Collaborative relationships with colleagues and ready access to the internet assisted them in these transformative efforts, as did their fluency in conversational English and their ELT pedagogical skills. Unlike many content lecturers, who do not accept the role of language teachers within their disciplinary teaching (Airey 2012;Vu and Burns, 2014;Pham and Doan 2020) and are unwilling to comment on language features (Horie 2018), these ELT/EMI lecturers showed themselves well able to do so, and received acknowledgement from colleagues in confirmation. This provides endorsement for the position put forward by Susser (2017) that ELT expertise does offer some compensation for lack of disciplinary expertise.…”

“…In terms of internationalisation and glocalisation, the aim of EME across Vietnamese universities has been to ‘promote international exchange, increase revenue, raise the quality and prestige of educational programs, and provide a well-qualified, bilingual workforce for Vietnam’s rapidly-developing economy’ (Nguyen et al, 2017: 37). Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that the implementation of EME in a number of universities was initially as a remedy to financial pressures (Nguyen et al, 2016; Pham and Doan 2020), in other words as a strategic imperative. Central to the success of that imperative were the intended roles of English within the internationalisation initiatives, as a means both of attracting students from other countries and improving the English of domestic students.…”

“…However, since the COVID-19 pandemic there are signs in Vietnamese universities of an emergent ‘place-based’ internationalisation (Phùng and Phan 2021: 252) which brings glocalisation more to the fore through ‘commitments related to local/community engagement, student wellbeing, and care’. Through policies, curriculum design guidelines and professional development, institutional m anagement of language will need to play a large part in this transformation, replacing the inertia and neglect of recent years (Nguyen et al, 2017), where staff have been given incentives to engage in EME but not guided by clear policy nor provided with targeted professional development (Macaro et al, 2020; Pham and Doan 2020), and where students have often been insufficiently supported to develop their English proficiency for academic and specific disciplinary purposes (Arnbjörnsdóttir, 2017; Lin and Lei, 2021; Tran and Hoang, 2019). Across Vietnam, students as agents in EME bring with them diverse and often limited levels of both general and academic English proficiency, making it difficult for them to access the curriculum effectively and to learn through English (Phuong and Nguyen 2019a; Sahan et al, 2022).…”

“…In terms of institutional support for participants’ role transformation, it is noteworthy that none of the employing universities had developed a specific EME-related policy to guide pedagogy. This reflects a more general lack of appropriate policy and explicit guidelines for EMI implementation in Vietnamese higher education (Tri and Moskovsky 2019; Pham and Doan 2020). Providing direct evidence of the institutional conflation of EMI and ELT reported in the literature (Dearden 2018; Bradford 2019), the Geography Lecturer commented: ‘To be honest, I don’t think our university is aware of the differences between EMI and ELT’.…”

“…There is no sign that the impetus of this internationalisation process will ease in the foreseeable future. On the contrary, there is often a sense of ‘strategic imperative’, with non-educational objectives such as income and reputation being prioritised over educational quality (Bowles and Murphy 2020; Pham and Doan 2020; Pham 2022).…”