Pre-service teachers' perceptions about teaching speaking at high school in Vietnam

Although research on teacher cognition has become a well-established domain of inquiry for language teaching over the past few decades, very few in-depth case studies have explored teachers’ beliefs on their pedagogical practices in classrooms in an under-resourced EFL context like Vietnam, where overly large classes, poor equipment, inadequately trained teachers, time constraints and written grammar-focused examinations are the norm (Hoang, 2011; Le, 2011; Le, 2014; Nguyen, Fehring & Warren, 2015).The present qualitative case study seeks to occupy such a research space. Specifically, it aims to explore and understand the perceptions of a small group (N=8) of Vietnamese pre-service teachers, undertaking the same teacher education programme, about the teaching of speaking and how they go about teaching speaking in practice. It also aims to investigate what underlies the participants’ perspectives in order to gain insights into the factors that affect and shape their speaking instructional decisions in the classroom. Data obtained for this study were from multiple sources including semi-structured interviews, document analysis, classroom observations and stimulated recall interviews. Following a data-driven approach, themes were developed and used in analysis for drawing a constant comparison among the participants (Glaser & Strauss, 1999; Merriam, 2009). From analysis of the data, the findings of the study showed that the eight pre-service teachers strongly valued the learning of speaking and favoured communicative methods for the teaching of speaking. However, due to the influence of various contextual factors, for example, students’ low motivation for learning English for communication, teaching materials, large class-size and school teachers’ supervision, the participants’ stated perceptions appeared to diverge in practice. Although the findings of this research cannot be generalized beyond the context in which the data were collected, it contributes to academic understanding of teachers’ cognitions and their instructional strategies in practice in the context of Vietnam, and possibly in other similar contexts, and adds to studies in teacher cognition. Drawing on the findings of this study, implications for teacher education and language policy are discussed