Vietnam mulls removing English from grad exam   Nguyen Vinh Hien, Deputy Minister of Education and Training, is seen in this file photo. Tuoi Tre Vietnamese educators are considering the removal of English from the compulsory tests 12th graders annually take to graduate from high school amid worries over the difficulty in teaching and learning the language in rural areas. Every year local 12th graders are required to pass three tests on literature, math, and English in addition to three other subjects chosen by the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) in a national graduation exam in early June before they can enroll in college. But MoET has announced a plan to rule English out while reducing the number of graduation tests from six to four, with literature and math being compulsory. Under this plan students will be allowed to choose the two other subjects from the following: physics, chemistry, geography, biography, and history. English may be taken to gain extra grades in this exam, the plan says. “There is a disparity in teaching and learning English in different regions across the country,” Nguyen Vinh Hien, Deputy Minister of Education and Training, said Thursday at a conference to debate the plan. He was making a reference to a situation in which students in rural and poor areas do not have the right facilities to learn the language and thus find it truly hard to pass a test on English in the national exam, in complete contrast to their urban counterparts. An education department’s director pointed out at the same conference that many ethnic students in his province, Dien Bien in the north, can hardly learn English because Vietnamese is already a foreign language to them. “They are studying Vietnamese as a foreign language so it is very difficult for them to learn English,” according to Le Van Quy, director of the Dien Bien Department of Education and Training. Furthermore English is not effectively taught in Vietnamese schools, evidenced by students’ failure to use it in daily communication. For that reason MoET is considering new methods to improve the learning and teaching of English, the official Vietnam News Agencyreported. MoET said it will implement the latest plan when the agency has received enough support from local educators. In 2012, thousands of English teachers in 30 Vietnamese provinces and cities were required to sit for a MoET test based on guidelines from the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages to check their listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. MoET demands that high school teachers reach the framework’s second-highest skill level (C1), while elementary and middle school educators must achieve the third-highest level (B2). It was a shock that 97 percent of high school teachers and 93 percent of elementary and middle school teachers failed to meet the MoET benchmarks. In Ho Chi Minh City, 15.5 percent of 1,100 teachers passed the test, even though the southern economic hub has some of the country’s highest academic standards. Most strikingly, those who failed included seasoned instructors who had successfully trained students at leading specialized schools for national competitions and university entrance exams. Many hold master’s degrees in English instruction. Just 165 of 1,500 English teachers passed in An Giang Province, in the Mekong Delta, whereas far fewer passed in neighboring Dong Thap Province and Can Tho City. TUOI TRE