Bans in primary school English classes

I can see how the names thing could be reasonable but banning tech in the class???????

The whole world sees the advantage of properly used tech but they don't want it - ouch!

Names, maybe, but technology? Come on! Every student in the class has replaced their baby bottle with a smart phone. What's going to happen when they go overseas to college? I am not aware of any colleges that doesn't use technology. They will be expected to use it,  and use it properly - finding reliable web sources, citing those web sources etc...besides, it's just common sense!

I teach conversation (NEVER grammar and all that stuff because I'm rubbish at it and fall asleep when I try to remember the stuff).
'A pencil' is in grade 1's text book book but a slide with pictures later and it becomes a long, green 2B pencil.
Easy when the kids have pictures and reminder text on the screen.
That's before I start on videos in the Powerpoint slides.
Banning A/V is a very bad idea.

I still can't believe the story is true.

I've built a complete set of Powerpoint presentations from grades 1 to 6, added a load of Cambridge stuff to the lessons and built a full stage with lighting and a sound system that includes 3 radio microphones.
The kids love the style and their mummies and daddies love that the kids love it.
The stage has a pull down screen that shows the output from a 500 lumen LED projector and sound comes from a nice little amp hidden in a desk. The MC position has an independent amp with a single wired mic on a stand.
By grade 5 I have kids doing Shakespeare's sonnets and 6 sees discussions such as the value of disabled people in society, all in very nice English.
Tell me tech doesn't work and I'll ask you how much booze you drank last night.
I can imagine what the kids would say if I stopped using that lot in favour of just talking.
I also do personal social interactions.

Thanks the lords I'm not in Vietnam.

This was probably voted on by those who own their own private English centers.  It should help the private schools become even more popular.  The poor kids are the ones that will suffer.

Thinking again, they've effectively banned Cambridge and all other language examinations that involve a listening test.
The kids can't practice test conditions so they'd have to go into the exams without training.

Hate to agree with the new rules but it seems quite logical to me. I can imagine given my child a name in my home country and the teacher starts calling the child something else.
I can understand that for the Western teacher teaching the class that pronouncing some Vietnamese names can be hard. But that is the breaks....go home and practice them.
As for tech in the class room for an ENGLISH language class...why?
I like the other article thought. A university in HCM is going to start teaching all the course material in English. I have long said that for Vietnam to advance they are going to have to move away from their one syllable rudimentary language. The Vietnamese language has 250,000 words, the English language 1,250,000.

Vagabondone wrote:

The Vietnamese language has 250,000 words, the English language 1,250,000.

How and where did you get that information?  I didn't know there was a person out there in the world who was so fluent in Vietnamese language, to the point that s/he could count all the words that have ever existed or have ever being used in this country and somehow came up with the number 250,000.

I would truly want to learn about the source whence you based your statement.  Please share.

Vagabondone wrote:

As for tech in the class room for an ENGLISH language class...why?.

A few well chosen pictures and a short video can get a difficult concept over with ease.
Of course the teacher needs a little imagination and a good understanding of the subject in hand so they can pick the right media to achieve the goals in question.

Think 6 year old, then think how you're going to get them to talk about a chair.
I use a vid of a guy using a chair as a climbing frame - The kids watch it and describe what they saw.
The chapter wants the vocab and a verb or two but I get way more, a load of adjectives, loads of verbs and conversation the kids want to engage in.
I take away the need to remember the basic words because there's a picture of a chair with "CHAIR" written next to it, I use a lot of repetition of the target word and get the kids to use it a lot in their answers, questions or statements.
The kids remember the word with ease and there's a lot of bonus work, all because of a picture and a short vid.
The big word here is WANT, the kids want to remember, they WANT to learn and they WANT to talk.
It's fun, interesting and exciting so the kids WANT go for it.
I had grade 1 kids on stage explaining a little about Shakespeare last week, that's using radio mics in front of the whole class. I just mentioned Shakespeare and told the kids they'd get a small reward if they could tell me three things. More than half the class managed to get it right wanted to read out their work on stage. None had to do it because it was optional but loads did because they WANTED to.
Tech makes learning easy and fun for the kids (If it's used properly). One example - I always carry a radio mic with me in class and I hand it to the KG1 and KG2 kids when they want to speak - By grade 1 they're using it independently with good microphone technique.
Tech in class - why would you not use it?

Perhaps you can explain the downside of kids wanting to learn because they enjoy the work and how getting them way above the required standard is a bad thing.

As you can imagine, it's pretty dynamic stuff that requires me to be mobile in class but it's worth every moment when you see the results.

Vagabondone wrote:

I have long said that for Vietnam to advance they are going to have to move away from their one syllable rudimentary language. The Vietnamese language has 250,000 words, the English language 1,250,000.

This is almost beyond refutation.  The Oxford dictionary website says they have "full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words."  https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explo … h-language  They note that their total includes several direct loaner words as English is inclined to do.  They also discuss the dilemma of how to count compound words such as hotdog.  Vietnamese does not compound words but keeps them separate.  That does not mean that a language is rudimentary at all or that it cannot express the full range of human thought.  Just as in English, Vietnamese can express words related to modern technology through borrowing from Latin or other languages or it can create new words.  There is a way to say "typewriter" in Vietnamese but it is máy đánh chữ the equivalent of "you" "name" "word".  When a Vietnamese speaker hears these monosyllables, he does not think of the components but of the thing, the typewriter.

Compounding into single words is a generally a written, not a spoken phenomenon.  Some compounds make the total length shorter by dropping syllables, but that is not a requirement for cognition.  Vietnamese obviously compounds in speech but not in writing as in my typewriter example.  Even if you do not speak the language, just look at the signs on the shops and you will see what I mean.  Also, I believe that there are particles in Vietnamese that are never used by themselves but are still written as separate monosyllabic words.  By contrast, mid-19th century Hawaiian newspapers were written without spaces between the words at all but the people could still read them.  At the time, Hawaii was the most literate country in the world.  If compound words were an indication of linguistic advancement, we should all be looking up to Germany, and you know how that worked out in the 1940's.

Most college educated native English speakers have a vocabulary of not more than 80,000 words. http://highered.mheducation.com/sites/0 … lary_.html  How many do you know, Vagagabondone?

Lastly, I will leave you with the fact that Shakespeare used 31,534 words in his full oeuvre and actually made up 1700 of them. (By the way, oeuvre doesn't count because it's French.) 

Now that I have cooled off     from writing my reply to the naive ideas that have been presented about the Vietnamese language, I would like to comment on the original post and the link. 

I agree with the government about using students Viet names.  It is a matter of respect.  I have taught students in both Vietnam and the US who could be called less than the best but I have found that students can sense if they have their teacher's respect and act accordingly.  As difficult as it may be to get the names right, it tells them that you are making the effort and not just there for the pay.  I do prefer public schools that have student names as well as numbers on their patches.  It is bad enough if you have 300-400 different students in the course of a week.

As far as A/V, I completely agree with Fred and others.  Fortunately the school where I did most of my work at had large TV screens set up for laptop inputs.  I employed a similar method by showing a 5 minute short film, often with no words.  I then asked students to develop a timeline of what happens in the move.  For the less advanced, I put their statements on the board so that we could reorder them later and read them aloud in unison.  For more advanced students I asked them to respond individually as well as even to develop imagined dialogue.  The good thing is that it forces original expression which is perhaps one of the most difficult things in a new language while the movie makes it fun.

Besides being used as a reward, I think music if properly utilized can help a lot with pronunciation.  Music utilizes the rhythm of the language used and so makes proper pronunciation easier.  I have a program that can lift YouTube videos and turn them into mp4 files.  I started with just music but then I discovered that most pop songs have what they call lyric videos. These work great as they help the kids associate the songs with the meaning of the words.  You can also use lyrics to discuss the idioms that frequently appear in pop songs.  When Carly Rae Jepsen sings "I really like you" it is a great way to contrast it with the "I very like you" that so many Vietnamese children say.  Its so much better if they hear it from her in a song than from me.

Grade 1 has a chapter about the park, my task being to get the students to discuss the bits in the text book. It was supposed to be pronunciation and basic sentences but I go way past those goals by using a video.
The first vid is a swing in school, something the kids know about so, as you'd expect, the basic vocab comes out but not a one of the kids gets excited.
Then I play this (edited to remove the kiss)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B36Lr0Unp4

You can't shut them up after that, all wanting to talk first and a whole new world of descriptions and feelings come out of their mouths.

It's easy to get the kids wanting to learn if you get them excited about their lessons.

re #14:  "The Vietnamese language has 250,000 words"
While living in VN, I also came across this figure in a publication, perhaps in an article about the Vietnamese Language Institute (Viện Tiếng Việt),  where researchers have been trolling through newspapers printed since 1986 looking for and recording new words. Up until about ten years ago, when I read the article, they had recorded 42,000 new words. Not a bad effort at all! New words keep coming into Vietnamese all the time, as they do in English. I have even seen the new English word 'selfie' in VN newspapers, so that would qualify as a new VN word, too.

re #13: "Vietnamese is such a rudimentary language..."
I beg to differ. Vietnamese is tends to stress how things are done and by whom. So they have lots of pronouns and lots of verbs. When learning Vietnamese I compiled a list of all the different verbs "to carry" that I came across. I stopped when I reached twenty three, as I considered that would be sufficient to get me through most situations.

I learned years ago in a basic linguistics class that almost every pre-modern language, including English, had about 20,000 to 30,000 words in common usage and that all the rest are the result of technology, beginning with the industrial revolution.

.. and entertainment

supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

The regulations also ban the use of tools such as cassette players, CD players and smart boards to play music or videos for students during class.

That right there shows how out of touch the education bureaucrats are about tech. Cassette players were 1970s, CD players 1980s-1990s, mp3 players 2000s, smartphones now. 'Smart boards' =

However, I wonder, what problem they are attempting to solve? Perhaps they found some derelict teachers subjecting kids to periods of just watching movies? If so, then yes, 'personal social interactions' with teachers is better than lazy dependence on tech. In other words, tech alone can't teach well, but teachers can implement tech to enhance teaching (so sez I).

danhask wrote:

It should help the private schools become even more popular.  The poor kids are the ones that will suffer.

Sad.

The regulations also ban the use of tools such as cassette players, CD players and smart boards to play music or videos for students during class.

The term "smart boards' used in the article was an inaccurate translation.  The statement used in Document 3390/GDĐT-TH issued by Department of Education and Training of Ho Chi Minh City (the first time in my life I use this name, and only because it's part of a title) for the instruction English in primary schools, year 2017-2018 is exactly like this:

"... không sử dụng các thiết bị nghe - nhìn như cassette, CD, bảng tương tác nghe nhạc, xem video ... trong giờ dạy để học sinh có cơ hội thực hành tiếng Anh với giáo viên"

The correct translation is: 

"... not using visual and auditory tools such as cassettes, CDs, interactive whiteboards to listening to music, watching videos, etc. during classroom hours so students can have the opportunity to practice English with the teachers" (not a good sentence grammatically, but that's how the original sentence was written -- badly -- in Vietnamese, and I don't want to correct it.)

So, Gobot's thought ("Perhaps they found some derelict teachers subjecting kids to periods of just watching movies? If so, then yes, 'personal social interactions' with teachers is better than lazy dependence on tech")  is on par with the government's goal. 

The document continues as this:

".. yêu cầu các trường tiểu học dùng kinh phí xã hội hóa để chi trả thù lao cho giáo viên bản ngữ/phần mềm bổ trợ tiếng Anh với sự đồng thuận, tự nguyện của phụ huynh học sinh. Giáo viên bản ngữ cũng là thành viên giáo dục trong nhà trường nên cần tham gia các hoạt động ngoại khóa, sinh hoạt khác của nhà trường ngoài giờ giảng dạy trên lớp. Đặc biệt, giáo viên bản ngữ chỉ được dạy bổ trợ những tài liệu được Sở GD-ĐT cho phép sử dụng, tuyệt đối không dạy những tài liệu chưa được thẩm định, cho phép.'

Translation:

"Primary schools are required to use social funds to pay for native English-speaking teachers or English support teachers with a voluntary consent from the students' parents (another poorly written sentence).  Since native-speaking language teachers are also members of the schools, they need to participate in extracurricular activities or any other activities beyond classroom hours.  In particular, native-speaking teachers are only allowed to use materials supported by the Department of Education and Training, and absolutely not to use any teaching materials that have not been evaluated or allowed."

#21 - Thank you, Ciambella, for your informative post.
Re: "In particular, native-speaking teachers are only allowed to use materials supported by the Department of Education and Training, and absolutely not to use any teaching materials that have not been evaluated or allowed."

When my wife volunteered me to teach some children in our lane, they would show me their coming tests, which had multi-choice questions and they had to pick the correct answer.  Quite often ALL the given answers were incorrect and I had to explain to my students why.   I'm not sure if they believed me or not.  The point is that the DET does not supply correct teaching materials so that the teachers can't help but teach badly.

ralphnhatrang wrote:

Quite often ALL the given answers were incorrect ... The point is that the DET does not supply correct teaching materials so that the teachers can't help but teach badly.

Since the DET can't even write a few sentences clearly or correctly in their own language (as the examples in that document), I would not dream that they could do better in English.

For further discussion, see:
http://tuoitrenews.vn/news/city-diary/2 … 41739.html

Yep, looks like everyone except the government agree it's a bad idea to ban A/V.
I only teach oral skills and I have no idea what I'd do if they were daft enough to ban it here.
A 2 minute example of whatever does wonders as long as you follow it up properly.

I think this goes beyond the Govt banning Technology from teaching anything in schools - I think the old Vietnamese teachers themselves are tech challenged and are afraid of it.  My two kids 9 & 10 both have smart phones, have had them for a couple of years, can do things on them most older Vietnamese can't.  I once started free english classes in my home in Phu Ninh, Dong Thap province for the middle school kids in the afternoon after school, had a big screen and projector setup on an upstairs balcony.  I got a visit by three teachers and a local policeman (who is younger and looked totally embarrassed by the visit, but he was forced)  I was accused of teaching the children 'bad things in American Language'  (notice they refrained from saying English)  they gave me a note in really poorly constructed english outlining my crimes.  I tried to talk to them in english, and it is evident they only knew what they taught, their comprehension was little or none.  I was demanded to sign a poorly written agreement to stop teaching 'American' to the students, which I refused.  I offered to show these "teachers" what I taught the kids, they weren't interested, so I discreetly turned on the projector and Sesame Street in english with vietnamese popped up for the younger kids.  One lady yelled 'you teach childen cotton  cotton, not englis, dis not englis teach'.    I gave them their agreement back and told them what I do in my house is my business.  My wife came back from the market later and asked me what I did,  I told her and she laughed, saying these old ladies 'couldn't speak english if their life depended on it.  FYI, my wife learned english by watching all my movies when we first met, later got better and better.  So the pushback is more older Viet teachers, not the government, I guess the teacher unions are powerfull in Vietnam.