The national foreign language teaching program will not succeed unless the targets and implementation are changed, the component projects are redrawn.

Reviewing the three-year implementation of the program, Vu Tu Anh, deputy head of the program’s management board, said the biggest achievement is that Viet Nam  has jumped by 12 grades in the international ranking on English skills.

However, Anh admitted that too many problems had arisen during the English teaching program.

The majority of English teachers are unqualified to teach English at general schools. The only solution to the problem is to send substandard teachers to re-training courses. However, it is very difficult.

“They (the teachers) find it difficult to arrange their time to both give lesson at school and attend refreshing courses,” Anh explained.

According to a teacher in Hanoi, on average, every teacher has 30 lessons a week, while he has to spend the remaining time on the other schools’ works as well.

Meanwhile, Nguyen Thu Anh, an English teacher of the Ngoc Thuy Secondary School in Long Bien district in Hanoi, said she doubts that the short term training courses will help upgrade teachers’ qualifications.

“Are you sure that the teachers’ qualification will be improved such after some short term training courses? I believe that learning foreign languages is a long-term process,” she said.

Pham Ngoc Phuong, Chief Secretariat of the Ministry of Education and Training, also admitted that the quality of the refreshing courses was “unsatisfactory”.

Schools sent teachers to refresher courses, while they are still asking them to fulfill the duties assigned by the schools.

Meanwhile, the schools’ management boards did not keep a close watch over the training and did not assess the efficiency of the training courses.

Deputy Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Minh Hien said that from the 2014-2015 period, schools need to commit to produce the English teachers who can meet the standards of the European common framework on English skills.

He also said that candidates have to meet the European standards to be eligible to attend the competitions to become English teachers at general schools.

However, educators have warned that the goals are unattainable.

Another member of the national English teaching program’s management board said the unsatisfactory results of the program implementation over the last three years show the unreasonable design of the program.

He went on to say that if the program is not redrawn, many targets will be unreachable, and the program will fail completely.