Access English in Vietnam continues to support Primary English teachers and trainers across the country as the project moves into its fourth phase.

As part of British Council Vietnam’s long term strategy to support the Ministry of Education and Training’s ambitions to make English a compulsory subject from Grade 3, we continue to work with our cohort of 41 Primary English trainers from Departments of Education and Training and tertiary institutions in Danang, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

Over the duration of the project, the trainers have become increasingly professional, independent and well-prepared. For the latest round of practice teacher trainer workshops, the trainers themselves designed 3-day workshop plans and materials on topics related to the needs of local primary school teachers which made direct reference back to the local ‘Let’s Learn’ and ‘Let’s Go’ coursebooks.

Chinh, one of the trainers from Danang University reflects on the planning process:

We have worked so hard over the past week. What we have now is a plan for the practice workshops in July even though it still needs some work. What I really liked in Phase 4 is our group made the choice about the topic for the practice workshop based on teachers’ needs as well as the current teaching context for Primary English in Danang…….This workshop helped us learn a lot. I’m very impressed by how the master trainers asked us to work out the outcomes of each session so that in the end, we could have an overall aim for the whole workshop. In other words, we had to develop in a logical way.

The first two 3-day teacher training workshops on Adapting Activities from the Coursebook and Developing Oral Skills were delivered in Danang and Hanoi at the end of July. A third 3-day workshop on Classroom Management will be delivered in Ho Chi Minh City at the beginning of August. Over 200 primary English school teachers will be trained up in these workshops.

The materials, once trialled will be uploaded onto the Access English share point and shared across the training teams in Hanoi, Danang and Ho Chi Minh City.

Recent discussions with Departments of Education in Danang and Ho Chi Minh City confirm that they are keen to use the British Council trained local trainers to deliver more and more face-to-face training to local primary school teachers with the support of the British Council. In response to this demand we are already working with our local trainers to plan another round of workshops for next winter.

For further information about the project please contact Rebecca Hales at rebecca.hales@britishcouncil.org.vn