Introduction

Nine Vietnamese provinces, 12 co-ordinators, 34 VTTN trainers, 7 British Council trainers and 360 upper secondary school teachers came together in a series of workshops with a common aim - to spend three days exploring how best to teach grammar.
Under the workshop title "Grammatically Speaking" participants explored ways of teaching grammar in communicative and student-centred ways.
There were two main aims:
1. To improve the learning of students by creating new lessons from existing textbook materials.
2. To look forward to the introduction of the new upper secondary school textbooks (New Tieng Anh), due to be introduced into year 10 in September 2005. These books take a communicative approach to teaching, so in the workshops participants looked at a range of teaching techniques and activities that will be needed when these books arrive in the classroom.

What follows in this newsletter are some of the checklists, lesson ideas and communicative activities that workshop participants produced in the nine VTTN workshops up and down Vietnam.

"GRAMMATICALLY SPEAKING"

Content

• Thinking about teaching and "What makes a good lesson?"

• Demonstration lessons
- a traditional teacher-centred lesson
- a video of a PPP (presentation, controlled practice, further practice) lesson in a 'live' classroom
- a student-centred lesson

• Classroom management in the communicative language classroom
- how to use pair work and groupwork to increase student participation

• Building the 'repertoire' of teaching activities
- sharing activities and testing them out

• Putting it all together
- adapting and supplementing existing textbook materials

• Peer-teaching - demonstrations and evaluations

* Hue province was unable to hold a workshop in February/ March. However we would like to thank Hue VTTN members for their input into the preparation of these workshops. We look forward to the next VTTN workshop in Hue this summer.

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