Coventry University and Hanoi University of Science and Technology are committed to ways of internationalising the learning experience that comply with Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) principles to foster the development of intercultural awareness and global citizenship attributes, Virtual Exchange (VE) or Telecollaboration is one of them (Orsini-Jones & Lee, 2018).
Building on the work carried out in Vietnam since the government introduced the 'National Foreign Language Project 2020' in 2008 (Le et al., 2020), ViVEXELT (Viet Nam Virtual EXchange for English Language Teaching) focused on setting up a sustainable model of continuous professional development (CPD) for English language teacher education. The major challenge identified by Le et al. (2020) was that ELT teachers in Vietnam do not engage with the new language policy because they feel they do not 'own' the change process. ViVEXELT aimed to support a 'bottom up' shift in language policy and aimed at:
- improving the speaking and interactional competencies of English language teachers at the time of COVID;
- encouraging English language teachers, who are female in the majority, to become more confident in addressing the requirements on the new CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) Companion Volume (Council of Europe, 2020), that now includes the development of online interactional skills;
- supporting the demise of the 'native speakerism' rhetoric (Rubdy, 2015; Holliday 2006) and boost the confidence of teachers whose first language is not English to take control of their teaching and learning actions through a decolonised VE Third Space (Bhabha & Rutheford 2006);
- developing further student-centred ELT pedagogy.
One of the tasks designed to achieve the above aims was the collaborative design of lessons plans inspired by the UN SGDs. This task gave participants the opportunity to knowledge-share across educational sectors and across continents in a North-South exchange that was both local and global. The task stimulated a discussion on the global SDG topics that mattered in terms of positive impact on local ELT realities, and this led to the co-creation of lessons plans to teach speaking online at the time of the pandemic.
The paper will report on the lessons learnt from this project in terms of EDI and of making the SDGs relevant to language learning and teaching in local contexts, but starting from the sharing of global perspectives.
Bibliography
Bhabha, H. K., & Rutherford, J. (2006). Third space. Multitudes, (3), 95-107.
Council of Europe (2020). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning ,teaching, assessment – Companion volume. Council of Europe https://rm.coe.int/cefr-companion-volume-with-new-descriptors-2018/1680787989
Holliday, A.R. (2006). Native-speakerism. ELT Journal (60), 4, pp. 385-387,
https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccl030
Le, V. C., Hoa T. M., Nguyen, T. M. H., Nguyen, T. T. M. & Barnard, R. (eds.), (2020). Building Teacher Capacity in Vietnamese English Language Teaching: Research: Policy and Practice. Routledge.
Orsini-Jones, M., & Lee, F. (2018). Intercultural communicative competence for global citizenship: identifying cyberpragmatic rules of engagement in telecollaboration. Palgrave MacMillan.
Rubdy R. (2015). Unequal Englishes, the Native Speaker, and Decolonization in TESOL. In R. Tupas (Ed.) Unequal Englishes. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137461223_
ViVEXELT https://vivexelt.com/
