Current English Education in Vietnam: Policy, Practices, and Challenges

This chapter sketches out the socio-economic, cultural, political, and technological changes at the national level in Vietnam since the Đổi Mới policy in 1986, marking Vietnam’s readiness to embrace national economic development, internationalization, and globalization. It reviews Vietnam’s national foreign language policy and current practices of English education alongside the employability agenda in Vietnamese higher education. It also highlights both contextual and pedagogical challenges facing Vietnam’s English language education. It argues that although English skills are classified as essential soft skills necessary for graduates’ employability, the current situation of Vietnamese graduates’ low English language proficiency levels revealed a huge gap between what is intended ambitiously in Government policies and what is actually being implemented at the institutional, curriculum, and subject levels across education levels, including higher education. This Chapter suggests that Vietnamese English education context provides an appropriate case study to investigate how English education can contribute to graduates’ employability.