The Teaching Context
According to Nhan (2013), in Vietnam, English language has become a key subject and received more and more people’s attention as the result of the Economic Renovation (Doi Moi) and the ‘open door’ policy (in foreign investment and the global market) in the late 1980s. This leads to the fact that much effort has been dedicated to improving the quality of English teaching and learning at all levels from primary to tertiary education. Despite much effort having been devoted, the quality of English education has not reached the level expected (Nguyen, 2016). Nhan (2013) reported that 98% of Vietnamese students have spent seven years learning English (from grade 6 to grade 12, ages 11–18) as a compulsory subject in schools but cannot have simple communication. And as an endeavor to boost the quality of English teaching and learning in Vietnam, the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) issued the implementation of CLIL in the formal national education system as a part of the National Foreign Languages Project 2020 (Nguyen, 2016).
After the adoption of a ‘National Curriculum of Basic Education’ in Vietnam in 2002, Primary and Secondary teachers in large cities were expected to adopt a more student-centred pedagogy (McAleavy & Elwick, 2015). This reform encouraged innovative educators to reconsider the approach of isolated disciplinary subjects, to enact changes in pedagogy that are seen in other parts of the world. As a result, interdisciplinary learning such as STEAM/STEM has received attention from the education authorities and scholars (Le et al., 2015). The popularity of interdisciplinary learning in Vietnam is being realised through contests held by the MOET to encourage teachers to incorporate projects to engage their students.
Aligned with this trend, the ‘EduAction Project 2018’ was a collaborative project between an Australian Education academic and two Vietnamese teachers teaching English for primary students. The aim was to trial a CLIL (Content Language Integrated Learning) philosophy of language in context using an integrated learning theme (ILT) for primary students who were new to English. Offered as a summer program, the project lasted for five weeks with nine lessons (two lessons per week and one lesson for the last week), incorporating an ILT called ‘Marvelous me’. In this ILT, four sub-themes were chosen to align with the Vietnamese Early Childhood Education standards and objectives. The reasons why the Early Childhood Education Standards were chosen are due to the fact that the students had not entered primary schools, therefore, they had not been prepared sufficiently to be evaluated by the standards of Vietnamese primary education. In addition, the Mathematics contents of Grade 1 (the first grade of Vietnamese primary education system) might not be familiar to the students, which could not have benefited this target group in their process of learning both a foreign language and Mathematics contents. Instead, the students had been prepared with Mathematics contents of the curriculum for early childhood education, which could be familiar to them, thus become their background knowledge to activate their constructive process of learning new knowledge of Mathematics as well as be the context for the students to comprehend a foreign language. Furthermore, the familiar content could also lessen students’ anxiety level when being exposed to a foreign language, and according to Krashen’s input hypothesis (Ellis, 1999), this could facilitate learners’ input processing.
The sub-themes for the project were: (i) ‘Who am I?’, (ii) ‘Where do I come from?’, (iii) ‘How do I look after myself?’, and (iv) ‘What can I do?’. In the last week, students explained ‘why they are marvelous’ through their performance in a talent show. The contents of Maths made up the subject content of this ILT, including numbers in the range from one to fifteen, two arithmetical operations (addition and subtraction), geometric and three-dimensional shapes (including triangles, circles, squares, rectangles, cubes, cylinders, and spheres), patterns, categorisation and comparison. The contents of Mathematics in each sub-theme were the following:
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‘Who am I?’: students learned about themselves (how to measure their height and weight) and their family, the number of family members and compare the numbers.
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‘Where do I come from?’: students learned about the shape of their city and their country, the shape and patterns of buildings, bridges and houses in their neighborhood, then making the houses with the shapes they preferred from wooden sticks. Students needed to count and calculate the sticks to make the houses or other constructions that they like.
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‘How do I look after myself?’: students learned about their body parts and some food good for their health, categorizing the food and calculating the amount of sugar in the food they eat every day.
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‘What can I do?’: students were exposed to different tasks with Mathematics (addition and subtraction operations, making patterns, comparison, categorization), and they were asked to review all the products that they made in the previous lessons to choose what they wanted to show.
The objectives of the project were to develop students’ English listening comprehension through the project’s ILT that contextualised the content. The expected comprehension outcomes of these were: (i) students can listen and comprehend the requirements of the task, as well as understand the ongoing narrative they are writing; (ii) students can perform the task with the knowledge given; and (iii) students can recount the story that they have written and explain why they are marvelous (by showing their talents, by telling the story about themselves).
The project invited ten six-year-old Vietnamese students who were new to English, and would be attending primary school after the summer.