A plea for honesty and transparency in English teaching in Vietnam!
I am amazed by the way in which organisations in Vietnam use secrecy to hide important aspects of their service - is this anti-competitive? I for one, am very disappointed with the level of honesty and transparency in the education industry especially English language tuition.
I have carried out a survey to find the prices of courses and tutoring mainly within HCMC in order to find out what real value is available and the amount of complication there is in finding a comparative price makes the process difficult for a normal customer. A future post will deal with issues for businesses and developing English.
I will give one example to highlight the case: I found one provider that publicises a course named 1-2-1 which works out at roughly 400,000vnd per hour for each hour of the course. Undoubtedly there will be some 1 to 1... I hope! but most of the course is in groups of undisclosed numbers . Interestingly the same provider charges over 1.6m per hour for actual 1 to 1 lessons (+ expenses!) This is at best a little misleading.
Take the main factors that should be taken into account when considering the fees you are going to pay for your language classes:
1. Is the teacher a native speaker, just a foreigner or a Vietnamese national? In reality ALL three possibilities are available as 100% of the lessons as well as combinations of 2 or more - 30% native speaker and 70% Vietnamese as well as 50% - 50% native and Vietnamese. This makes it hard to compare. Again a future post will deal with the issue of teacher nationality.
2. How many hours are being taught? ALL schools publish a fee schedule for a course BUT all the courses are different lengths ranging from 12 to 180 hours and from 1 month to 10 months. This makes comparison very difficult.
3. The amount of money that needs to be paid up front for a course? This ranges from 1m to 40.2m vnd. It is not always possible to get all our money back if it is not what you expected. However you must remember that to learn a language takes commitment and I think it reasonable to ask for 2 or 3 months in advance - little real progress will take place in 1 month unless you have a lot of hours.
4. Very importantly - how many students are in a class? Many providers state 'an average of ...' In my experience that can often mean minimum! It would be very hard to claim that you have been lied to if an average of 15 is claimed and you happen to have 18 to 20 in your class? The average could still be 15... try to prove it, where would you get your information from AND it doesn't help you when you have 20 in your class. I hear of class that are meant to be an average of 15 but are actually over 25. You must also be very clear about the importance of this factor, especially for speaking and listening CLASS SIZE is very important and will greatly affect what you get from the class. There is a big difference between 6 and 10 in a class as there is a big difference between having 10 and 15. Class of 25, 30 40 or 50 should be avoided if possible.
5. Tutor qualifications and experience for the group they are taking? This will be the subject of a future post but for now - are children taught by fully qualified teachers or do they hold a CELTA (Certificate in English Language Training to ADULTS) in other words they have gained a 'training' qualification for teaching adults English? Is that a good qualification for teaching kids? To be fair, there wouldn't be enough teachers to fill the demand and a fully qualified teacher gets paid considerably more than a CELTA qualified trainer so it is not in the interests of schools to publicise this.
These are just 5 of the issues that face individual customers seeking English language education / training. All of this secrecy makes choosing the right provider for you a very difficult process and one that enables very poorly qualified and/or experienced 'consultants' to advise potential customers to spend more than they need to on a service that doesn't give them what they really want.
It is no wonder that it breeds desperation. I highlight just 3 of the cases I have come upon over the last few weeks. Vietnamese and foreigners wishing to learn English will take a chance by giving a 'backpacker' $20/hr for several hours up front only for them to never return to fulfil their teaching obligation (this unfortunately is not uncommon) OR for a young Vietnamese waitress I talked to the other day to spend 90,000d/hr on English lessons - wanting speaking and listening and getting written English grammar in a class of 50 from a Vietnamese teacher! OR for a client I met recently to pay for 4 hours a week for 8 years for their child in a very well known (and relatively expensive English centre) only to find that their English wasn't as good as she wanted!
My plea for the industry in Vietnam is to at least start to improve transparency:
State how much your courses are in vnd per hour - and do so on your website
State what the maximum number of students you accept in a class NOT an average which is easily abused.
There are many other ways to improve our industry but for now - these 2 changes would be a big step forward for the people we are here to serve OUR STUDENTS!
Should you have an interest in honesty and transparency or simply want to have a consultation contact me.
President at International Home-schooling
7 年Hi Scott thanks for the reply. I do find this an interesting subject ? I totally agree with your comment regarding CELTYL - not many of the practitioners here will hold that though and considering the majority of teaching is done with kids it would be an idea. Many places don’t even insist on CELTA or TESOL as there simply isn’t enough qualified people to go around. The Teaching / Training discussion is one of interest of course and yes I know it is Teaching and not Training but that is a little bit of an illusion as well. CELTA and DELTA the highest level in this set of qualifications do not give the holder QTS (Qualified Teacher Status) in the UK. So if the holder is not recognised as a teacher in the UK where the qualification effectively comes from is it an appropriate name for the qualification? It also raises a very interesting philosophical debate over the differences between teaching and training. My major concern being the amount of actually observed / assessed teaching that has to be completed in order to qualify – I believe it is 6 hours? This is the bit which makes you a better teacher, 6 hours is better than nothing but not a lot. I hold a B.Ed(hons) which involved 2 years of teacher training (there it is again ‘training’) this does give me QTS. It involved 50 weeks plus of observed teaching placements on a half to two thirds time table i.e. around 15hrs per week of actual teaching during which probably around 6 to 8 hours per week was observed by the class teacher and the visiting university teaching department. The alternative to a B.Ed of course is the PGCE which is a one year course with 30 weeks of observed teaching. Don’t get me wrong I think CELTA and DELTA are good qualifications and like QTS teachers there are good and bad ‘teachers’ and I think for the system to work properly there should be some sort of teacher appraisal system with observed lessons so that standards can be maintained. Sometimes teaching at some centres (and schools to some degree can simply become keeping kids (and parents) happy more than teaching and educating them. This raises my question (the title for the piece) centres are very secretive and very difficult to compare. Most people know very little about education (in fact most teachers – the full-time QTS variety) don’t know that much. They know how to teach their subject but there is a lot more to it than that. So IF the aim is simply to keep the kids happy and the kid’s progress / needs are not being met adequately the parents are ultimately being ripped off. The business becomes almost like one of those subscription internet accounts that will keep taking money from you until you stop it. On top of that class conditions are not exact – ‘average’ numbers not maximums, price comparisons that are almost impossible (I use vnd / per student / per hour), qualifications and nationality of teachers (in some cases the % of time that local and foreign teachers is a factor) and finally no one is particularly honest in how long it is going to take for someone, especially adults to reach the level of English they want to hence most centres tie the student in and make them pay for a whole course which can be a year up front costing as much as 70m+. Whilst that is good business practice it’s not necessarily fair on the student. I just find it an area of education which is often led by local rich people who use it as a cash cow with little thought for the students or parents whose dreams are relying on learning English. Rad