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ViVEXELT (Vietnam Virtual Exchange for English Language Teaching) stemmed from a collaboration between a UK university and a University in Vietnam. A £30,000 grant was awarded by the British Council Vietnam Digital Learning Innovation Fund – Response to COVID 19, “designed to encourage partnerships between the UK and Vietnam which generate new research, insight and/or innovations to support Vietnam’s National Foreign Languages Project (NFLP) in its ambition to improve the teaching and learning of English in Vietnam by 2025, and beyond” (see https://ViVEXELT.com/about-us-2/).
Building on the work carried out in Vietnam since the government introduced the ‘National Foreign Language Project 2020’ in 2008 (Le, et al., 2020), ViVEXELT focused on setting up a sustainable and inclusive model of continuous professional development (CPD) for English language teacher education. The major challenge identified by Le (2020) in Vietnam was that English language teachers do not always engage with the new language policy because they feel they do not ‘own’ the change process. Le also stressed that it is of fundamental importance to provide English language teachers with opportunities to engage “in continuous knowledge-building processes throughout their careers in order to reframe their praxis in a dialectical unity of theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge gained from both their access to expert knowledge and their situated experience” (2020, p.17). ViVEXELT therefore aimed to address “Theme 2 - Capacity Building” through the development of an ELT cross-educational-sector and inclusive knowledge-sharing continuous professional development (CPD) virtual exchange (VE) programme for practicing teachers, students engaged in teacher education courses at university and teacher educators. Providing synchronous and asynchronous opportunities to knowledge-share on ELT, ViVEXELT encouraged its participants, both in the UK and in Vietnam, to co-create ELT materials relevant to their contexts to teach speaking online and become more invested in taking ownership of their teaching practice with the underpinning of relevant scholarship, while also developing online interactional skills, a priority area identified by the funders. It aimed therefore at creating an ELT Community of Practice (CoP) (Wenger, 1998) through VE as an intercultural/international teacher education approach: a transformational Third Space (Bhaba & Rutherford, 2006) for knowledge exchange, a point further explored in the literature review below.