Vietnamese EFL teachers’ experiences of the new English curriculum : A cultural-historical activity theory perspective

The emergence of English as a global language has had a considerable impact on national education curricula in many non-English-speaking countries, including Vietnam. Recently, the Ministry of Education and Training in Vietnam has introduced the new English communication-oriented curriculum for upper-secondary education; however, little is known about how the new curriculum is perceived and enacted by EFL teachers at the classroom level. An interpretive multiple case study design was employed to investigate how participant EFL teachers perceived and enacted the new curriculum; and explore the influences that conditioned these processes in the rural, suburban and urban areas in Vietnam. The current study adopted cultural-historical activity theory (Engeström, 1993, 2014; Leont’ev, 1978, 1981) as its theoretical lens to shed light on EFL teachers’ experiences of curriculum reform. Qualitative data were generated through multiple interviews, classroom observations and documentations over seven months. The findings revealed that the teachers’ enactment of the curriculum was a socially mediated activity. The teachers aspired and struggled to enact the curriculum within the pull of the status quo. The enactment processes were non-static, dynamic and highly individualised through the teachers’ agentive engagement in the negotiation process between the old and new practices. The study identified a wide range of inter-related influences from personal, school, and broader socio-cultural contexts of teachers’ work that conditioned the teachers’ experiences of the curriculum reform. The results of this study suggest that policymakers inadequately considered teachers’ perspectives and the realities of their work in the curriculum planning and implementation process, which led to the challenges of its implementation at the local level. The thesis concludes with the implications for language policy planning and for the implementation of teacher support in response to curriculum change. It argues for the need to conceptualise teachers’ enactment of the curriculum in the socio-cultural context of teacher’s work for achievement of the desired curriculum implementation outcomes