Success with English

In August, VTTN held its National Conference in Hanoi. Teachers, trainers and ELT specialists from all 61 provinces attended, making this a truly national event. The conference was opened by the British Ambassador, Warwick Morris and Vice-Minister Tran Van Nhung from the Ministry of Education and Training.
The three day event was led by a leading light in the ELT world, Peter Grundy (MPhil), Deputy Dean of the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Durham University. He was supported by 8 VTTN co-trainers.
What was the conference about?
The conference title says it all! "Success with English". Following the provincial workshops, the conference continued to look at how to make the current textbooks more communicative and how to adapt them to involve learners in the lessons more. Often challenging, but never dull, the focus was certainly on 'success' and how to achieve it in the classroom.
The following pages outline some of the issues, ideas and activities from the conference.

Day 1
Communicative Language Teaching

During the Wednesday afternoon session, the conference participants took part in a number of communicative activities and considered some of the principles of CLT and how these could be applied in the Vietnamese classroom.
'Generic ideas are repertoire builders, specific ideas are expensive.'
During the conference, Peter returned to the idea of 'Repertoire', an idea that was raised at last year's national workshops.
Every experienced teacher has a 'repertoire' or 'bank' of activities for teaching. A repertoire activity is not a 'one-off' activity but a 'generic activity', one which can be used again and again with a wide range of different materials and classes. The larger your repertoire, the more choices you can make when you are planning your lessons and the more chance that your lessons will be interesting for both you and your learners.
All of the activities from the National Conference were 'generic activities' rather than 'one-off' activities. A selection of these activities is presented on the following pages. Happy reading!

Day 2
New ways of working with texts

On Thursday morning, the conference looked at new ways of working with texts. We looked at activities under 4 headings:
1. Pre-reading and reading: before and as you meet the text.
2. Establishing familiarity with the text
3. From Familiarisation to Interpretation
4. Working on a Text
After the plenary sessions, the workshops looked at specific texts from English/Tieng Anh 10,11 and 12 and applied new pre-, while-, and post-reading activities to them.

Day 3
Learning to learn

On Friday morning, the conference was introduced to some new ideas connects with 'Learning to learn'.
What we teach and watch our students learn are often two very different things! Most of the learning is done by learners in a very private way. In order to maximise the benefits of language learning, it is very important for students to know 'how to learn' in the most efficient way possible, both in on outside the classroom. The following activity is designed to get learners thinking about 'how to learn'. The activity is also communicative by design, so learner will use language to talk about language learning - learning English and learning how to learn English - killing two birds with one stone!

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