English remains the biggest choice for general school students

11:21, 2014/02/13

Vietnam has been consistent with its policy on teaching many different languages at general schools. However, it meets a lot of big difficulties that hinder the program implementation.

98 percent of students prefer learning English

Under the current regulations, the foreign languages taught at general schools are English and some other languages including French, German, Japanese, Chinese and Russian.
However, according to the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET), 98 percent of students want to learn English.
Vu Thi Tu Anh, a senior official of the ministry, admitted that the ministry is encountering a lot of difficulties when trying to maintain the teaching of Russian, Japanese, French and Korean at general schools.
The other foreign languages have been accepted by students at universities and junior colleges, but they are still less “competitive” than English.
Also according to Anh, general schools, except the schools for the gifted, only teach English to satisfy the demand of the majority of students because of the problem with the teaching staff.
Meanwhile, Nguyen Hoai Chuong, Deputy Director of the HCM City Education and Training Department, emphasized the necessity of teaching many foreign languages, which allows to diversify languages in the context of the international integration.
Chuong said that in order to persuade students to learn other foreign languages, MOET needs to change the current regulations and then improve the teaching staff.
In HCM City, students are allowed to learn second foreign languages when they enter the 10th grade. However, Chuong thinks that second foreign languages should be taught to 6th graders already.
Nguyen Hoang, Deputy Director of the Nghe An provincial Education and Training Department, believes that Vietnamese students only want to learn English because they cannot see the benefit of other foreign languages. University students, like general school students, don’t want to learn other foreign languages, if they are not the students of foreign language majoring schools.

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