Context matters most!

Directing a private international high school in Vietnam last year provided many lessons. Perhaps the most critical lesson that I learned, however, was that context matters most.

Where are you teaching? Who are your students? What are their motives, goals, and fantasies? What barriers do they face to improve their English? How will their lives change if they speak fluent English? Do they really need to speak fluent English or just get a high TOEFL or TOEIC score? Context, as ever, matters most.

During the last few weeks, I've been revising a conversation book developed for international graduate students and adult American immigrants for advanced adult Vietnamese English language learners. This book project, which started over a year ago, has become a bit of a holy grail. Publishing any book, of course, is a tricky task in a still opening country ruled by communist dictators. On the other hand, many of the obvious revisions and taboo topics apply to many still opening socieites from UAE and Saudi Arabia to China and Russia. You can't talk about "choosing leaders" and "elections" in a society where politics are verboten.While you might be able to discuss personal lifestyle choices in Russia or mention more religious texts, commonsense indicates a similar list of "don't ask" subjects.

Perhaps out of both professional judgment and personal aesthics, I strongly recommend trying to tailor materials to meet the individual needs of your actual students. While it's easy to mock the myopia that can sometimes plague English for Specific Pursposes, we can at least include local cultural and national references as we continue to open doors and minds by teaching English to students around the world.

Or so it seems to me.

So I've added Vietnamese proverbs, local references, and cultural touchstones as I revise Compelling Conversations: Questions and Quotations on Timeless Topics to better match advanced English language learners in Vietnam. I've also made a point of explicitly incorporating more vocabulary from the Academic Word List and included definitions and sample sentences because so many English teachers in Vietnam requested them. Finally, I am adding more explicit teaching instructions and supplemental homework worksheets to easily extend the lessons beyond the EFL or English classrooms. 

Context matters most - and this version should meet the needs of more advanced English language learners in Vietnam.

• Teaching English
• EFL
• ESL
• Vietnam
• context matters most
• revising materials