[jackbl]

Something similar to sgp currently, chinese student very bad in mandarin.

Vietnamese children said to ‘lose roots’ at international schools
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VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnamese parents who send their children to ‘international schools’ dream they will gain the skills there to become ‘world citizens.’ Must this be at the cost of their ability to function effectively within a Vietnamese cultural context?

Students of Horizon International School in HCM City are learning Vietnamese

“I was astonished to realize that many of my nine and ten year-old students can speak English very well, but find it difficult to express their ideas in Vietnamese,” said a teacher at one of HCM City’s ‘international schools.’ “If you shut your eyes and listen, you’d think they were foreigners, not Vietnamese children.”

“One of my students whispered to me that his father had been keen for him to study at international school. However, now that he cannot speak Vietnamese easily with his father, his father has gotten angry and forces him to go to learn Vietnamese,” the teacher added.

The Tuoi Tre reporters to whom the teacher confided then decided to find out if it’s true that some Vietnamese children may grow up into foreigners.

Vietnamese is not a core subject at international schools

At many international schools in HCM City, students study foreign curriculums in the morning. In the afternoon, they have a few periods of instruction in the Vietnamese language as well as more English practice.

Trang, a teacher who teaches subjects in the national curriculum as set by the Ministry of Education and Training, said: “At my school, Vietnamese language, history, geography and morality are treated as extracurricular subjects. Therefore, the students’ results in these subjects is not used to assess or grade them.”

“I teach only one period each day to every class,” she added. It’s impossible to go into details in such a short time. Because the school doesn’t assign much importance to these subjects, the school management board does not examine the lessons regularly. I get no professional training and little in the way of teaching materials. Moreover, because these are regarded as “extracurricular” subjects, the students do not give them their whole mind.”

Le Ngoc Diep, Head of the Primary Division at the HCM City Department of Education, insists that under the current regulations, international schools which teach foreign curriculums can only enroll foreign students.

However, as an ‘experiment,’ the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) has allowed international schools to enroll Vietnamese students in recent years, provided that the schools teach the Vietnamese students certain subjects stipulated by MOET. These include Vietnamese language, morality, and social studies.

Diep said that there are some 15 such international schools in HCM City. However, it is his Department’s view that many of them either fail to teach in accordance with MOET’s curriculums, or just teach the subjects in a cursory way.

Tuoi Tre’s investigation found that some schools cut the number of classes and lessons for the “Vietnamese” subjects, lack learning materials and don’t support the teachers the way they should.


Tongue-tied in their mother tongue

A father who requested anonymity related that when he enrolled his son in an international school in HCM City’s District 5, he had to sign a commitment that the child will study there until he graduates.

“They warned me that students will learn in English in the morning, and that they will have only one period of Vietnamese per day,” the man said. “At that time, I did not much care about this. As far as I was concerned, the important thing was that my child could study in a good environment and within a modern education scheme which allows him to create and play.

“However, I feel sad now, having realized that my son is very bad at Vietnamese. Though he is at fourth grade, he cannot read fluently the worlds on signs in the supermarket,” he said.

Loan, mother of a student at Horizon School, said she knows some parents who cannot communicate with their children because they cannot speak English, while their children are not good at Vietnamese.

Fearing that her child “might lose her roots,” Loan said, she investigated the schools carefully before choosing a school that teaches the Cambridge curriculum in the morning and the MOET curriculum in the afternoon. “However ‘up-to-date’ they may be, children must know their origins,” she said.



Is truly bilingual education hopeless?

Some international schools have admitted that they find it hard to follow the current regulations on teaching a Vietnamese curriculum.

Le Thi Hong Lien at the new Canadian International School (Binh Chanh district, HCMC) said time pressure prevents the school from providing as many periods as MOET requires. And if the children had to learn all the required lessons, she speculated, parents will complain and even transfer their children to more lenient schools.

Huynh Van Ngon from APU International School (Binh Chanh) explained that the students will be overloaded if they have to follow both curriculums. He said it’s natural that students of international schools are not as good at the Vietnamese language as the students at state-run schools

The Deputy Director of the HCM City Education and Training Department, Nguyen Hoai Chuong, doesn’t buy these excuses.

“I’ve been to lots of countries; Vietnam is like none other. Though in other countries children are taught foreign languages from an early age, they aren’t taught a foreign language in place of their mother tongue.”

“Sure, we can learn international technologies, but we must retain a Vietnamese spirit,” he said. “Schools that want to develop and endure must follow the requirements of Vietnamese law.”

VietNamNet/TT