Vietnam’s plan for all students to speak

English didn’t work – but its education

system still shines
-This Week in Asia / Society-
•While the Project 2020 initiative fell short, students in the
country have embraced opportunities to learn the language
•The country ranks ahead of Thailand and Indonesia in English
proficiency, and global test scores show its young are doing well
in maths, science and reading

Vietnam is in the final year of a 12-year, US$446 million initiative to ensure all students become proficient
in a foreign language, namely English. Photo: Alamy
Nguyen Quy Duc, 17, speaks English with a near native accent. Like many
Vietnamese teenagers, he wants to go abroad, hopefully to the United States, to
study information technology. He takes A-level courses in English at his state high
school in Hanoi, the first in Vietnam to offer British-designed advanced courses
certified by Cambridge University.

“We get a chance to learn subjects in English which is very helpful for the future,”
he said.

Vietnam is now in the final year of a 12-year, US$446 million initiative to ensure
all students become proficient in a foreign language, namely English, to effectively
integrate the nation into the global economy. While most indicators suggest the
programme – known as Project 2020 – has fallen short, many Vietnamese students
have nonetheless embraced the expanded opportunities to learn the language.

Vietnam is a young country – almost 40 per cent of its population of over 90

million is under the age of 40 – and around 23.5 million Vietnamese are enrolled in
some sort of educational institute. These include the 1.5 million attending one of
the country’s 235 tertiary education institutes, with 87 per cent attending public
schools and the rest in private ones, according to government statistics.

Nguyen Phu Hoang Lan, a maths teacher at Chu Van An who teaches in English,
said the language proficiency at his school was high.

“They have many chances to study English, from television, to music, from
teachers, to the [A-level] programme … and most of them are really good,” he said.

But the situation at Chu Van An is not the norm. Project 2020 – originally launched
in 2008 – has proven to be a “flop”, in the words of Communist Party-owned
newspaper Tuoi Tre, with insufficient class time devoted to English and unqualified
teachers in charge of classrooms. The state-run Vietnam News Agency also chimed
in, admitting the project had “failed to fulfil targets”.

Retired parliamentarian Nguyen Minh Thuyet, former vice-chairman of the

National Assembly’s culture and education committee, said the programme had
asked for too much from too little.
“I know that this Project 2020 has been applied and has created some initial
movements but its goals were too ambitious while our infrastructure and facilities
were limited, not qualified for the demand,” he said, adding that the government
had decided to go back to the drawing board.

More than 90 per cent of students studying foreign languages in Vietnam are
learning English, said Thuyet, with Japanese and Korean popular in some circles.
Students studying Mandarin, he said, were mostly limited to provinces near the
Chinese border.

James Lumley, a veteran English teacher from the US who formerly taught in
Hanoi and Shanghai, explained that most schools in the capital used English
teachers from for-profit companies embedded in the schools. For a premium,
usually a few hundred dollars a month, students can study English with a foreign
teacher employed by a contracted firm.

“Those companies have exploded to the point now where I would say most schools
in Hanoi employ outside teachers,” said Lumley, who used to teach at Chu Van An.

These teachers, mostly in their 20s and 30s, come from Western, anglophone
countries. Pay ranges from US$15 to US$35 an hour, while the school can be billed
up to US$100 by the company.

Nguyen Dieu Thuy, headmistress of Sai Dong junior school, said she saw a
substantial improvement in her students after they began using foreign teachers for
two hours of instruction per week, on top of the five they were already receiving
from local teachers.

“I can see our students’ ability to speak English has been much better compared
with three years ago,” she said, adding that the Ministry of Education vets the
centres for quality issues.

Dinh Hoang Thang, director of the Centre for Information and International
Cooperation at the Vietnam Institute for Development Studies, an NGO, said there
was a problem finding qualified local teachers as Vietnamese people who excelled
in English usually preferred more prestigious, higher-paying jobs.
“People who are good at English are busy in other fields of work, so they do not
have time to teach English,” he said.

While Project 2020 has fallen short of its target of having all the country’s students
speak a foreign language proficiently, Vietnam’s English-language proficiency is
nonetheless relatively high. In 2018, the EF English Proficiency Index placed
Vietnam at 41st place globally, ahead of Thailand and Indonesia.

Vietnam’s education system shines in other areas, too. Jayant Menon, a lead
economist at the Asian Development Bank in Manila, said he was encouraged by
Vietnam’s high PISA scores, an international study that measures comparative
abilities in maths, science and reading. In 2015, Vietnam’s average score was tied
with Australia and came in slightly better than Britain.

But with the advent of the digital revolution, Menon said the challenge for students
in Vietnam was to adapt to yet-to-be invented technology, as well as the ideas of
the future to drive economic growth.

“Students need to be able to learn how to learn,” he said.