Vietnamese University EFL Teachers’ Reported and Classroom Practices in Teaching Listening

This study explored Vietnamese university EFL teachers’ perceptions of the importance of listening skill and their reported and classroom practice in listening instruction. The exploration of the teachers’ teaching practice was centered among three aspects including listening subject matter contents, listening lesson design, and the activities they employed for listening lessons. Six lecturers who taught listening skill to English-majored undergraduates at a university in Vietnam participated in the study. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews and classroom observations. Findings from the study showed that the teachers had an intense awareness of listening skill as a crucial input source for language learning whereas the position of listening as a macro-language skill seemed to be downplayed. In both reported and classroom practices, vocabulary, topical knowledge, and listening strategies were found to occupy a central position as teaching content. In designing lessons, the teachers appeared to align more with the “comprehension” or “product-oriented” approach which further bears a resemblance to the presentation, practice, and production (PPP) model with some updated features. The teachers were also found to share a common group of instructional activities in each of the three lesson stages. These findings provide important bases for future endeavors to further improve the effectiveness in teaching and learning the listening skill at the tertiary level.