Articles

Primary school students of ethnic minorities in the northern mountainous region of Vietnam have unfavorable economic and social conditions, which has a huge impact on the quality of education in these areas, especially life skills education. Based on this proposition, the author has identified teachers’ viewpoints on the need of educating life skills for this target group of students and difficulties in implementing life skills education. Survey tools used in this research include questionnaires and interviews, direct observation with 218 teachers in Thai Nguyen, Bac Kan, Ha Giang, Cao Bang, Lang Son, Dien Bien, and Lai Chau provinces. The survey results show that most teachers are aware of the need to implement life skills education and have regularly implemented life skills education for ethnic minority primary school students in the northern mountainous areas, albeit with limited effectiveness. At the same time, the study also shows that the main difficulty preventing teachers in this area from implementing life skills education for students is that students’ parents are unaware of the role of life skills education and that schools focus too much on teaching the Vietnamese language and Mathematics to students, so they have not paid enough attention to the methods and forms of organizing life skills education. From this research, we propose a group of measures to organize and replicate the topics on life skills education for teachers in the regions to raise awareness about the use of diverse methods and forms of organizing life skills education in daily teaching activities. In addition, we also propose groups of measures to promote coordination between schools, families and social communities to raise awareness about the role of life skills education for ethnic minority students in the northern mountainous areas of Vietnam.

The current study was conducted to investigate high school EFL teachers’ perceptions towards the role of content schema activation that is focused on the pre-reading stage of their students’ reading comprehension ability and to find out the most common instructional strategies EFL teachers use to foster schema activation in the EFL classroom and gain insights into possible difficulties EFL teachers face when activating schemata in the reading lessons. The participants included 77 EFL high school teachers in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. To collect the data, a 22-item questionnaire and the semistructured interview on the teachers’ perceptions were carried out. The findings showed that although the participants had a positive perception towards the role of schema activation in English reading comprehension, they confirmed instructional strategies were not often used to activate students’ schemata in English reading comprehension. In addition, the participants tend to use more simple strategies, such as questioning, brainstorming, discussion and using audiovisual aids than complex strategies, Know - Want to know - Learned chart, semantic mapping, and anticipation guide, in order to activate students’ schemata. Most possible difficulties in activating students’ schemata in English reading comprehension were also revealed, such as the students’ limited linguistic knowledge, unfamiliar reading text’s topics, limited time for teaching reading, time-consuming work in designing the effective and appropriate schema activation activities, and the large classes. Pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research are presented based on these findings.

Past research has reported that training on other aspects affected the learner’s language complexity but did not substantially promote accuracy or the results were too ambiguous to determine if accuracy was also improved (Ellis, 1987; Crookes, 1989; Wigglesworth, 1997). This study set out to determine if this is also the case for speed reading courses, in which EFL learners are trained to improve their reading fluency. An experiment was conducted on university students in order to see if their language knowledge accuracy would improve when their reading fluency developed. During the experiment, two treatment groups and two control groups were following an English program at university while the treatment groups also followed a speed reading course, which lasted two months. A set of language memory span tests were given before and after the treatment. The results indicated that although improvement in reading fluency facilitates language complexity, it does not assist language accuracy development to a remarkable degree.

This article reflects a comparative analysis and assessment on structure of the education system of the countries, comparing structure of Vietnam national education system and ISCED 1997-2011(UNESCO), giving some basic orientation on Vietnam national education system appropriate to the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED 2011) and the Vietnamese National Qualifications Framework (VQF).