Educator Perspectives on the Impact of New Englishes on Practical Education

Author: Nguyen Hong Oanh (Department of Foreign Languages, Banking University of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam)
Speaker: Nguyen Hong Oanh
Topic: Anthropological Linguistics
The (SCOPUS / ISI) SOAS GLOCAL CALA 2020 General Session

Abstract

Literature on teaching practices throughout Asia has exposed that language educators and students direct considerable effort and emphasis to developing English native-like accents and mannerisms. Exposed to the language styles of ‘native’ speakers of English, students learn and utilize communicative exchanges. However, language education has recently seen a dramatic growth in the number of non-native English speakers globally. The number of English as a secondary discourse speakers now outnumbers that of English as a primary discourse speakers. Consequent to the rising number of these non-native English speakers, scholarship has inquired into how pedagogies should be developed in order to raise the effectiveness of language education in Asian contexts, leading to a significant transition in methodology of language pedagogies.

This paper asks the following research questions: How should teaching shift so to accommodate contemporary language-teaching contexts in Vietnam, and what are the pedagogical implications for such a shift in language education at the tertiary level for business related courses in Vietnam? For this, the study employs a Vygotskian theory to determine how students collaborate through Asian pedagogies to gradually develop higher orders of thinking, and hence increasingly effective methods of classroom engagement. The study then proposes a model of education, and pedagogical pathways to integrate this framework into educational praxis in Asia, and through drawing effectively from these English as a secondary discourse speakers, while concurrently aiming to develop ‘native-live’ skills.

Keywords: EFL Teachers’ Perspectives