ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHERS' PRACTICES OF DEVELOPING DISCOURSE COMPETENCE THROUGH SPEAKING SKILLS FOR GRADE 10 STUDENTS: A CASE STUDY

Abstract

Being one of the compulsory foreign languages in Vietnam and recently regarded as one of the requirements for higher education enlistment, English has received growing attention from Vietnam high school students (Nguyen, 2021). In Circular 32 (2018), the Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training [MOET] officially recognised communicative competence as the primary outcome of the English National Program of which Discourse Competence (DC) is a crucial component (MOET, 2018). Although the program aims to achieve the outcome with more emphasis on listening and speaking skills, Vietnamese high school students remain to struggle to form extended spoken discourse (Le, 2011). With the view to gaining insights into the actual state of cultivating DC through speaking skills in students, the study investigates four Grade 10 teachers with varied backgrounds and teaching styles in a private school awarded twice by the MOET for educational reforms and their attempts to integrate CLT in the English language teaching curriculum. After conducting the interviews and classroom observation, the findings imply that teachers devised a combination of approaches that had implicit impacts on different aspects of DC-based on students' English proficiency while preserving their teaching philosophies. Such innovativeness could suggest a rudimentary framework for teaching and teacher training programs regarding fostering DC in speaking for EFL students.