Introduction
In November, 2005, I was informed I would be sent for four months to Vinh University, Nghe An Province, Vietnam, as part of the Fulbright visiting lecturer program. Before this point I knew I would be going to Vietnam sometime in the first half of 2005, although I did not know where, nor what I would be teaching, nor precisely when I was to start. What happens when the teacher/course designer needs to create courses for learners in a context remote from her experience, and in a situation in which knowledge in advance is confused or nonexistent? When the courses are to be taught in an impoverished region in a developing country where resources thought to be basic to many educators in developed countries, such as a selection of textbooks, bookstores, computers and computer printers, copy machines, overhead projectors, and timely mail service, are not readily available? This is a report of what happened in just this situation.

Preparing for Departure
Learning where I would be sent did not necessarily answer the question of what I would teach. I was the first Fulbright person to be sent to Vinh University, although the university had been hosting volunteer native English speaking teachers sent by a Christian organization for several years. While I had lived in the Philippines and Japan, and had taught for many years in Japan, I had never visited Vietnam, nor had I met many Vietnamese English language learners. In the course of researching educational cultures and language development of international teaching assistants (ITAs) in the U.S. (there were two Vietnamese graduate students in an ITA program I worked in), I had done some reading on the history of Vietnamese education (e.g., Dao, Thiep, & Sloper, 1995). I learned that Vietnamese higher education was strongly influenced by remnants of French colonialism, that schools were under central governmental control, that opportunities for higher education were largely limited to Vietnamese under the age of 25, and that Russian and French language study had given way somewhat to English language study in recent times.

   E-mail correspondence with Fulbright officials in Washington, D.C., and Hanoi, and with various officials at Vinh University, did not clarify issues of what I should teach, what materials I should bring with me, what students’ levels or needs were, nor what was available in terms of equipment or other teaching resources such as blackboards, chalk, or computer printers. On one hand, Fulbright officials in Washington stated I would be teaching teacher education courses and that I should not consider myself to be a rank and file English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher. Fulbright officials in Hanoi emphasized that I should “make a lasting difference” at the school and help to bring material changes in teaching methodologies there. And, one real need at the school was to hold an English development course for staff in the International Relations office and faculty members in various departments who wished to study abroad, particularly in Korea, where they would have to pass English tests in order to be eligible for a scholarship there. I should also hold seminars for faculty members on curriculum, testing, or research methods on a monthly basis. While in theory this sounded fine, I had no information on the proficiency of the students for the English development course, nor for type of proficiency (written word versus grammatical knowledge versus communicative competence) for the faculty members, for that matter.

   Correspondence with various parties at Vinh University was equally confusing. Could I teach five EFL classes for the undergraduate students? They want to be English teachers. These could be reading, speaking, listening, or writing classes. Could I teach seven periods? A period is 45 minutes long. We also need a language development course for new teachers to meet from 7 to 10 AM. We need TOEFL or IATEFL preparation classes for our staff, could you teach that at night? In the midst of this, I was urged by the Washington Fulbright people to put together whatever books, tapes, or other materials I wished to use (including class textbooks), pack them into a maximum of four boxes, each of which must weigh less than 40 pounds and measure less than a combined 72 inches (height by width by depth), and do it quickly because the boxes would take a minimum of three weeks to arrive, even by diplomatic pouch. I came to understand several things: First, I was not going to get sufficient contextual information before my departure; Second, what and who I would teach would likely be an issue of confusion and negotiation even after my arrival; and Third, I had better have a plan about what I would do regardless of what or who I was asked to teach once I arrived.

Knowing the Context
Curriculum writers in TESOL rightly point out the importance of investigating the context in which new courses will be developed (Graves, 2000; Richards, 2001; Woodward, 2001). Material and human resources, learner ability, as well as institutional, collegial, and learner perceptions of need, constrain what a teacher/course designer can do. Great ideas about courses in which language learners exchange videotaped diaries will not go far in a context where video technologies are not available, the students are complete beginners who do not feel the need to talk, the school is accustomed to book-based language practice, and the colleagues believe teacher-to-whole class instruction is most suitable. While many teachers develop courses at an informal level without much preparation (as when they are assigned to teach a course new to them, or they change jobs), most language educators would hesitate to formally develop a full blown course with no knowledge of the students or institution. Developing goals, objectives, lesson plans, and materials is time consuming, and what if all of it is wrong for the learners, the facilities, the institution?

One Solution: Knowing my Assumptions
In situations like the one described above, I think teachers are thrown back upon their only, and best, resource—themselves. Based on this, I considered my core beliefs of how language learning is accomplished and what I felt I could do, at base level, with only a few reference books and one or two class textbook sets at my disposal. In essence, I defined “the course,” an action-based core set of beliefs, an agenda, that I would take to a new and temporary teaching context. While I will describe these beliefs in detail below, I will state them briefly here: I believe that the L2 should be used maximally in the classroom, particularly by the learners taking on positions of holders of critical classroom information, for the purpose of increasing fluency. By “critical classroom information” I mean information necessary to the functioning of the class, such as giving directions, putting students into groups or pairs, taking roll, or expanding on utterances I or learners themselves make. I believe that learners should be able to formulate their own language learning goals and should be able to name and use strategies to support those goals. I believe that language learners need to learn features of sociolinguistic and textual knowledge. In other words, I think learners should learn to use language appropriate for some social situations, and that learners should know that conversations and other kinds of communication do tend to follow certain “scripts” in different cultures and can be expressed in a range of forms. Finally, I believe that learners need to learn the role of content schemas (the “scripts” and forms mentioned above) in comprehending and creating English messages, and learn how to use introspective techniques to access and develop those schemas. As might be guessed, my orientation is towards teaching adults who are not complete beginners. But I felt fairly confident I would not be asked to teach young children while in Vietnam.

After Arrival: The Curricular Context
The geographic and institutional context.
Vinh University, founded in 1959, is located in Vinh City, a city of 200,000 on the southern edge of Nghe An Province. The city faces the Tonkin Gulf approximately 200 kilometers south of Hanoi. Nghe An Province has long been one of the most impoverished provinces in Vietnam (Florence & Jealous, 2003). Vinh City is the capital, and has been experiencing some recent economic development, but is not accessible to Hanoi except by a six hour night train, bus, or car ride. There are only a handful of foreigners in the region, and the sight of a foreigner on the street and on campus is an object of curiosity and comment.

   Vinh University is one of the poorest public universities in Vietnam (N. Phuong, personal communication, March 2, 2005). It was founded as a teacher’s college, and continues in this tradition, offering a full range of academic subjects, such as physics, chemistry, political science, forestry, computer technology, and foreign language for the benefit of future elementary and secondary education teachers and their students (Nghe An Provincial Government, 2005). In 2001-2002, it enrolled 15,000 students in undergraduate and graduate programs (Nghe An Provincial Government, 2005). Many students are from Nghe An Province, and will stay in the area once they graduate, sometimes teaching in very rural settings (N. Phuong, personal communication, March 2, 2005). The university is making great strides in building itself up through new construction projects through the auspices of the World Bank (T. Tung, personal communication, March 1, 2005). Yet classrooms continue to be overcrowded and outmoded, and 1950s era equipment is not being replaced, particularly in the science related departments (T. Tran, personal communication, March 2, 2005). Departments do not generally have photocopiers and most teachers make copies at their own expense at one of the many one-room photocopy shops near the campus. Very few individuals own computers or have Internet access on household telephone lines, but in recent years literally hundreds of reasonably priced Internet cafes have opened near the campus and are jammed with students. Teachers go there to check their own e-mail accounts (T. Tran, personal communication, March 2, 2005). Western textbooks, audio tapes and CDs, computer programs, and other instructional media taken for granted by many educators in more developed nations are generally out of reach, both in price and availability, for most departments, faculty members, and students (T. Tran and N. Phuong, personal communication, March 2, 2005).

 The International Relations Office
The International Relations Office at the university undertakes a number of essential functions, including writing grant proposals for World Bank grants and administering those funds for major construction and equipage programs. The office is responsible for interacting with the Vietnamese government to get visas for all of the foreign teachers (English and French speaking) and students at the university (there are students from Laos, Cambodia, Korea, and Thailand). The director makes frequent visits to universities in other Southeast Asian countries to forge relationships with them. It is the International Relations Office that initiated the quest for a visiting Fulbright lecturer. One of their aims was for the Fulbrighter to teach an English enrichment course for faculty members in all departments (biology, technology, and forestry, for example) who aspire to graduate study overseas in Korea, Thailand, and the U.S. This group of students will be described below.

The Foreign Languages College and English Program
Despite this seeming geographic and academic isolation, the Foreign Languages College of Vinh University has made sustained efforts to provide future and current foreign language teachers with a strong basis in language skills, linguistic theory, and teaching methodology. Founded ten years ago, it is one of the newer departments at the university (H. Vu, personal communication, March 10, 2005). It maintains programs in English, French, Chinese, and Russian and employs over 60 full time faculty members (N. Phuong, personal communication, March 2, 2005). In the English program alone, there are four major areas of study: literature/translation, linguistics, methodology, and practical skills (interpreter training). Students must take courses in all four concentrations. Besides skills courses offered in all four skills (reading, writing, speaking, and listening), courses in semantics, discourse analysis, phonetics and phonology, and methodology are required for undergraduate students in the program (T. Tran, personal communication, February 20, 2005). 80-90 students graduate from this program per year. Most become teachers in primary or secondary education while a few are hired by the department to teach at the university, and 10% become interpreters (N. Phuong, personal communication, March 2, 2005). Students with high grades are strongly encouraged to seek graduate education in Hanoi and receive material help from the Science Committee at the university, whose recommendation is a prerequisite to graduate study in Vietnam. According to the dean, the course offerings are as broad as they are due to sustained efforts on the part of the dean and “young” faculty members to improve the quality of the program and the general level of faculty members’ professional qualifications (N. Phuong, personal communication, March 2, 2005). Faculty salaries are very low (U.S. $40 to $60 per month), however, and most faculty members must teach private classes in order to make ends meet. Graduate study, even in Vietnam, remains an elusive goal for that reason. There is a language lab and a department specific library, with a full time librarian, with reference books for students to write their theses, and proposals have been made to the university president to create a multimedia room (N. Phuong, personal communication, March 2, 2005).

The classroom context
Despite these improvements and efforts, the physical condition of the facilities, equipment, and materials remains poor. Classrooms are not heated or cooled (although in some of the newer rooms there are ceiling fans) and with concrete floors and walls, and with doors facing the open outdoors where students congregate, are incredibly noisy. Older classrooms are poorly lit with bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. Students sit on heavy wooden benches behind wooden tables which are crowded into the classrooms, making task work calling for students to move around the room difficult. Many electrical outlets do not work. Tape and video players often do not work or are not available (M. Schott, and H. Vu, personal communications, March 10, 2005). Original versions of reference books, textbooks, audio tapes and CDs are not available and out of the financial reach of faculty members and students alike. The library is not well stocked, and students lack the materials they need in order to write theses (T. Tran, personal communication, March 2, 2005). Faculty members must travel at their own expense to other universities six or more hours away to use their libraries to find and digest teaching ideas, books, and textbooks (H. Vu, personal communication, March 2, 2005).

The undergraduate students
Despite these physical difficulties, the undergraduate students seem to know quite a bit (they know about “schema,” for example) and seem willing to engage in conversations and communicate in English. Higher level students stay after class and ask questions about methodology, and phone or e-mail with cogent requests and questions. On the basis of a placement test administered in their first year, students are placed into three different levels: A (the highest), B, and E (the lowest). They are assigned to a class in which they remain for their entire undergraduate career, such as 43 A2 (my class), which means they matriculated in the 43rd year after the founding of the university (they are juniors), are level A, and are group two within level A. Classes have an average of 30 students. Most are female, with five to six males. In 43A2 (and in one other comparable class I have become acquainted with), knowledge and skill level varies considerably (for example, in one reading task, some students read a 500 word passage in three minutes, while others took eight to nine minutes). This variation in ability is not at first apparent. Classes seem to operate collectively in the sense that if one student does not understand a request or instructions in English, class members stronger in English intervene and explain in Vietnamese, seamlessly, quietly, and quickly. This has been noted in other university teaching settings in Vietnam (Nguyen, 2005; Noseworthy, 2005). The general energy level and camaraderie of the students as a group is very high, which translates into much noise and activity, and so in teacher-to-whole-group communication contexts, it is very easy for weaker, non-comprehending students to fade into the background. As one colleague put it, they are like a “school of fish,” responding and turning and moving en masse. Because of long, crowded rows of tables and benches, it is difficult for the teacher to access pairs or groups of students who are engaged in communicative tasks to hear what students are capable of and to offer feedback (M. Schott, personal communication, March 10, 2005).

The faculty/students
As mentioned above, the International Relations Office sponsored an English enrichment/test preparation course for faculty members in all departments desiring to apply for graduate study abroad. By common consent, the class meets twice a week, 90 minutes each time from 7 to 8:30 PM. At the initial class meeting, 21 class members enrolled. Within weeks, the number of students actually attending has dropped to 15. Ten are men and five are women, in their 20s and 30s. All are full time faculty members at the university, teaching in departments such as information technology, economics, mathematics, biology, and civil engineering. All have at least a B.A. and some have worked in industry or for non-governmental organizations before taking up an academic career. As with the undergraduate students, there is great variation in English knowledge and skill level, although all class members habitually read technical and research reports in their fields in English. The students, being older, are quieter and yet are very persistent in engaging in English conversations with each other and with me. They have more latent knowledge of technical and academic vocabulary than the undergraduates but cannot pronounce the words or use them in conversations. 

Designing and Evaluating “the Course”     
Before arriving in Vietnam, articulating the core beliefs set out above was a major, yet only initial step. In order to decide what books, tapes, etc. to send ahead, and to be optimally functional and purposive upon arrival, I needed to spell out “the course” further in the form of goals that would support objectives that would in turn support the generation of lesson plans, and materials and task ideas. I also found I needed to specify general skill areas that seemed most congruent with my belief that fluency building was my main business. I believed that learners who wish to be English teachers, or who are preparing to take tests to study abroad probably had some knowledge of English grammatical forms and vocabulary but may have limited ability to use that knowledge communicatively. That suggested I should focus on speaking. At the same time, I had a continuing research interest in reading fluency development in EFL contexts (Taguchi & Gorsuch, 2002; Taguchi, Takayasu-Maas, & Gorsuch, 2004), and I wanted to be able to work in two skills areas to increase my flexibility upon arrival. I therefore focused on reading and speaking. I reasoned that these were two skills areas mentioned in e-mails from university personnel, and regardless of what I would be asked to teach after I arrived, reading and speaking could be used for fluency building, and could be used as springboards for skills development in listening or writing if need be.

   To develop the goals and objectives, and to begin the process of materials selection, I wrote down my core beliefs as four goals, which I stated fairly broadly. I mean broad in two senses. First, the goals were broad in content, meaning they could be applied to both reading and speaking skills areas. For example the goal of fluency development is equally applicable to reading and speaking. Second, the goals were broad in that they incorporated the notion of language learning as processes (fluency development, development of awareness of language as having rhetorical organization) but did not specify at what point learners were or should be in these processes (because I did not know how fluent the students were, nor whether anyone had spoken to them about rhetorical patterns in language before). At this point, the goals appeared more like statements of my own intentions or what I considered to be “optimal states” in a classroom, than the more learner focused statements which are found in Table 2 below.

   For the next step, I tested the goals in terms of their applicability to both reading and speaking by writing objectives for them onto a sheet split into two columns, one for reading and one for speaking. I reasoned that if I could not write objectives for both skill areas, then the goal was not useful for me. Like the goals, the objectives seemed more like phrases or statements of intention which held images for me as to what learners should be doing, or seeing, or processing in classes. For example (see Table 1 below):

Table 1
Sample goal and objectives, V.1
Goal: Plans for life long learning: Identification of goals, resources, purposes for learning
Reading
Defining purposes for reading
Identifying sources of L2 reading materials in Vietnam
Identifying interests and needs that can be met through reading

Speaking
Defining goals for speaking
Identifying supports for speaking goals (students supply scenarios, situations, scripts)

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   I set these first goals and objectives statements aside for a few days and then returned to it, collapsing some objectives into a single objective and dropping others. I was pleased to see that all four goals held up to my test criteria of being able to support the writing of objectives in both reading and speaking. This process resulted in a second version of my goals and objectives which I again set aside for a few days. I then tested this second set of goals and objectives afresh by asking myself whether I could use them to select materials to send to myself in Vietnam, and whether I could write a lesson plan each for reading and speaking. Looking at the four goals and the objectives for the two skills areas suggested a number of materials I ought to gather, for example (see Table 2 below):
Table 2

Partial materials list suggested by V.2 of goals and objectives

Materials objectives 60 copies of The University Daily (the student newspaper of Texas Tech University 50 cards of recipes from the local  supermarket         22 copies of Towards Speaking Excellence (Papajohn, 1998) 40 copies of the SPEAK Practice Test (Educational Testing Service, 1996) including two audio tapes

Basis in V.2 of goals, Goal: Maximal engagement in L2 output, input Objective: Reading for various purreading) poses (skimming, close reading) Goal: Communicative competence: focus on social roles, rhetorical organization of texts Objective: description, narration, Cause and effect, processes, persuasion in reading texts Goal: Schema activation, expansion Objective: Schema activation for interviews, monologic talks, teaching sessions Goal: Communicative competence: Focus on social roles, rhetorical organization of texts Objective: Social roles as related pronunciation (intonation), language choices Objective: Communicative functions such as persuading, inviting, arguing a point

For those who are not familiar with the SPEAK® test, this is a set of retired versions of the Test of Spoken English®, produced by Educational Testing Service (ETS)(makers of the TOEFL®). This is a 12-item performance test commonly used as institution-specific tests in U.S. universities to assess international students’ ability to communicate orally. Each of the 12 items on any of the SPEAK tests and the SPEAK Practice Test capture a speakers’ ability to engage in a brief monologic talk by narrating a series of pictures, or persuading a ticket seller or dry cleaner to render some special service, or describing changes in a schedule for a specific group of people. In retrospect, I did not set out intending to prepare any group of students to take the SPEAK test. In fact, I dislike the idea of any course which meets solely to prepare students for tests—they seem to push students into focusing on the wrong priorities. However, the excellent practice materials afforded by the SPEAK test and the strong theoretical basis of the SPEAK in current models of communicative competence, made these materials appropriate for some of my goals and objectives for speaking.

   Based on my provisional goals and objectives, and the resulting list of materials they seemed to suggest, I realized that I still did not know how many students would be in a class, nor how many classes I would teach, so I guessed at the number, reasoning that if I had two classes of 30 or more students (in this case, 22 or 40 books would not be enough) I could use the books or other materials as class sets, with the two (or more) groups of students using them only during class time and in essence sharing them. I could then donate the class sets to the university when it came time for me to leave. To complete my test of the second version of my goals and objectives, I wrote two sample lesson plans, one for speaking and one for reading. By consulting my goals and objectives while planning sequences of specific activities and tasks, I found that I could write what seemed like focused lesson plans which integrated all of the goals at one time of another.

   Finally, I rewrote my goals and objectives into a format I associate with more formal goals and objectives, which involves orienting statements of teacher intention or intuition into what students will do in classrooms. This third version of the goals and objectives, which I now use while teaching in Vietnam, appears in Table 3 below:
Table 3

Table 3
“The Course” Key Elements V.3
Goal: Learners will use the L2 maximally in the classroom for the purpose of increasing fluency. Knowledge, attitude

Reading course
Objective: Learners will read at least one graded reader appropriate for their level using the repeated reading method.
Objective: Learners will read an appropriate number of graded readers of their choice appropriate for their level and be able to retell the stories at a basic level.
Objective: Learners will learn two methods for learning new vocabulary they encounter in graded readers: Repetition and key word. English grapheme training? As needed? Preemptive? On what basis?

Speaking course
Objective: Learners will be accustomed to speaking to each other in the L2 through pair, group, and whole class work.
Objective: Learners will engage in brief monologic talks, first based on outlines they will formulate and later without outlines.
Objective: Learners will use the L2 as sources of critical information in the classroom (calling the roll, giving and receiving their classmates’ instructions, presenting information their classmates need to know).
Objective: Learners will learn word stress and sentence stress of American English pronunciation through listening and speaking tasks, as a means of language practice.

Goal: Learners will be able to formulate their language learning goals and name at least three strategies for meeting those goals.

Reading course
Objective: Learners will articulate purposes they have for reading L1 and L2 texts.
Objective: Learners will be able to identify different modes of reading: skimming, scanning, and careful reading  for global comprehension and engage in tasks to promote differential reading behavior for different purposes. Moved here from first goal (goal on fluency).
Objective: Learners will create personal lists of L1 and L2 texts useful to them.
Objective: Learners will articulate language learning needs and interests, match them to their list of L2 text sources, and then evaluate the match.

Speaking course
Objective: Learners will articulate goals for L2 speaking in terms of where, why, and with whom.
Objective: Learners will create scenarios and situations in which they would like to use English, and then develop outlines and scripts for them.

Goal: Learners will, through classroom practice, learn features of sociolinguistic knowledge and textual (conversational and rhetorical organizational) knowledge.

Reading
Objective: Learners will be able to identify specific features of rhetorical patterns found in graded readers, possibly including: description, narration, cause and effect, comparisons/contrasts, processes, persuasion, expressing opinions.
Objective: Learners will be able to identify sociolinguistic features which define social roles of characters and author purposes in narratives.

Speaking
Objective: Learners will identify and use features of rhetorical organization and communicative functions in SPEAK test tasks, including: description, narration, cause and effect, comparisons/contrasts, processes, persuasion, expressing opinions.
Objective: Learners will be able to identify features of rhetorical organization in L1 and L2 interviews and use them in interview tasks in the classroom.
Objective: Learners will identify and use features of rhetorical organization and communicative functions need to manage basic, brief classroom sessions.

Goal: Learners will, through classroom practice, the role of content schema in comprehending and creating messages, and will be able to use mind mapping and other introspective techniques to articulate these schema.

Reading course
Objective: Before reading graded readers, learners will do mind mapping and other introspective schema activation tasks in class, and do one on their own.
Objective: After reading graded readers, learners will return to mind mapping and other introspective schema activation tasks done in class, and add or revise information.
Objective: Learners will create provisional hypotheses for aspects of culture they are not familiar with in graded readers.

Speaking course
Objective: Learners will use mindmapping and other introspective schema activation tasks in pair and small groups to active schema for SPEAK test tasks, teaching sessions, and interviews.
Objective: Learners will create provisional hypotheses for aspects of SPEAK test tasks they are not familiar with.

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Setbacks and Successes
It is remarkable that given my lack of knowledge of the context, and the realities of the context as it unfolded after my arrival, that “the course” has largely held up. It has held up in the sense that I actively use the goals and objectives resulting from my thoughts on “the course” to plan lessons, devise in-class and at-home assignments, and select and create materials on a daily basis. Articulating, codifying, and using my goals and objectives has allowed me to maintain a sense of purpose and coherence in a situation where it would otherwise be difficult to do so.

Setbacks: Slow mail; perceptual mismatches; location, location, location
When I arrived at Vinh, I found that only two out of four boxes of materials had arrived. This meant I had at my disposal a set of 60 university newspapers, a few copies of SPEAK test practice tests, one copy each of two graded readers I planned to use, A Scandal in Bohemia (Doyle, retold by Holt, 1996) and Strangers on a Train  (Highsmith, retold by Nation, 1995), a few reference books I had brought, including Clear Speech (Gilbert, 1993) and English L2 Reading (Birch, 2002), and one copy each of four reading comprehension tests I had developed in the weeks before my departure. Other boxes (two I had sent to myself and two from a research colleague in Japan) did not arrive for two to three weeks and I was not fully “equipped” with all of the materials I had selected for use until four weeks after my arrival. However, because the goals and objectives for “the course” were not centered on any specific materials, I was able to plan lessons using what materials I had. For the undergraduate students, I used the university newspapers to begin working with them on learning new vocabulary learning strategies (reading), to highlight the contrasts between skimming and careful reading, to introduce and use clarification requests to use in pair tasks (speaking), to introduce students to newspapers as having specific kinds of rhetorical organization (reading), and to encourage sustained silent reading. For the faculty/student class, SPEAK practice tests could be used to introduce rhetorical organization of specific kinds of communicative events, such as persuading someone to clean a suit within 24 hours (speaking). The same material was used to guide the faculty members to using introspective techniques on developing schema for responding to the kinds of items found on the SPEAK test, and for other communicative events that suggested themselves from class discussions on communicative events, such as how introductions might be done in Vietnam and the United States (speaking). This introspection proved effective with the faculty members, as they were older, had had more experience in the world and society, and could articulate how they thought, or did not think, certain communicative events might unfold.

   The fact that I did not have at first class sets of many of the materials I planned to use did not matter because one of the speaking objectives stipulated that learners be sources of critical information for each other. Specific tasks and extracts from the materials on hand were written on the board by pairs of students from both classes communicating the tasks and texts to each other from the printed source. As the teams rotated on and off, and as the rest of the class watched the material emerge on the blackboard, the use of clarification requests became much more prevalent, as all class members wanted to ensure that they understood the material on the board and that the information was accurate. As I became more mobile in the community, I was also able to locate locally available materials that could be used to help students achieve the goals and objectives, such as Clear Speech from the Start (Gilbert, 2001) which had been reprinted and distributed by a Vietnam-based publisher, thus putting the book into the financial reach of students (cost = U.S. 90 cents). This particular book had very helpful sections not only for speaking, but for helping undergraduate students sound out English words while reading (p. 8, p. 20). For faculty members it was useful in helping them realize which words they wished to emphasize in their monologic responses to the SPEAK test and in communicative pair tasks.

   “The course” proved particularly helpful just after my arrival when it became clear that a host of mismatched perceptions about my purpose for being there was at play. As in Japanese universities, foreign teachers at Vinh University are often relegated to teaching undergraduate speaking classes, while reading and writing classes, used to teach grammar, are assigned to Vietnamese teachers.

   With my goals and objectives in hand, I was able to negotiate a clear position for myself by relating both speaking and reading to fluency building during my discussions with foreign language department officials. Because I had ordered graded readers and developed tests on the basis of my goals and objectives, and because I planned to donate whole class sets (40 books each) of two readers, plus accompanying audio tapes and tests that I had developed using texts at the same level as the graded readers, my position was more convincing. I was able to say “I am not prepared to teach multiple speaking classes for undergraduate students, but I am prepared to teach speaking and reading fluency development, which are closely aligned and furthermore I have the materials with which to do that” (I did not mention that nothing had arrived yet). At the same time I was able to fulfill my mandate from the Fulbright Commission, which was to introduce change in way language education was accomplished. To date, three Vietnamese teachers have observed my undergraduate speaking and reading fluency classes, and two others have joined in a research project on reading fluency that I am carrying out with a Japanese colleague. Four students from another undergraduate class have expressed interest in reading fluency methodology, and we have begun weekly sessions in which we engage in reading fluency tasks and then discuss the texts and the methodology in English.

   Students in my undergraduate class questioned why they were reading during a “speaking” class. Through a situation analysis I carried out (interviews with teachers, students, and business leaders, and document retrieval) I learned that in speaking classes Vietnamese undergraduates are used to being given a topic, discussing the topic in small groups (probably mostly in their L1s), and having one group member (the one with the strongest L2) give a presentation. While one half of the class (45 minutes) was spent on silent sustained reading, the other half (45 minutes) was spent on communicative tasks which involved students working in pairs to identify unknown words or to make predictions about the next part of the story or to identify specific rhetorical features, and roleplaying any character dialog within the text according to suprasegmental features of English introduced earlier. However, students did not see these tasks, in which they used the L2 as “speaking” because it did not fit their preconceptions of how English speaking was accomplished in the classroom. This remains an issue in students’ minds, according to a formative evaluation survey done recently. However, a few students have noted on the evaluation forms that they believe the reading fluency sessions helps their pronunciation (at different times, the text being read is read aloud to the class members at the same time they read the assigned passage). This may be one bridge between reading and speaking fluency I can build on for the remainder of my stay in Vinh.

   The location of my undergraduate reading/speaking class changed for every class meeting in the first month. I would go to the classroom pointed out by the departmental secretary only to find that another class was in there, taking an exam. I used different means to find my students (who always seemed to know where to go) such as asking a teacher to telephone a student in the class who had a mobile phone to find out where they were. This cut into classtime, sometimes in serious ways, and also had the effect of changing the conditions in which I had to teach. Some classrooms would have sufficient light, a decent blackboard, and a working electrical outlet (for a tape player) while other classrooms would not. But the fact was that under optimum conditions, I could meet with the undergraduate students for 90 minutes twice a week. It was a challenge to integrate all of the goals and objectives I had articulated into that time frame, and nearly impossible when confusion over the location of the class made further cuts into that time. This underlines a flaw in “the course” which I will discuss below in the evaluation section.

Successes
I was very fortunate that “the course” coincided in several important ways with the needs of the undergraduate and faculty students. In other words, without my knowing it beforehand, “the course” was a fair fit for the context. The undergraduate students really did need help in developing reading fluency. In post-reading, twice-weekly reports, students repeatedly state how much more confident they feel reading English books, and how excited they are to have visible proof that their reading speed is increasing (each student uses a stop watch). The students and the departmental library was also in desperate need of pleasure reading materials, indeed, any English reading materials, a theme that emerged again and again in interviews for a situation analysis with foreign and Vietnamese teachers, the students, and the foreign language college dean. “The course” has now provided the department with two 40 copy sets of graded readers, plus audio tapes, plus time keeping charts, plus four comprehension tests for their exclusive use. In addition, without telling me, Etsuo Taguchi, my Japanese research partner at Daito Bunka University, donated his entire personal graded reader collection of over 100 titles to the department. The readers are now being cataloged and prepared for student use in the departmental library.

   For the faculty member class, using the SPEAK test materials, including the book by Dean Papajohn (1998), proved very motivating. Many items in the practice tests and tasks in Papajohn’s book were useful for exploring the rhetorical organization of many communicative events, and showing the benefits of advance planning and knowledge of schema for foreign language users. Even though most of the classroom tasks were not directly related to the SPEAK test (e.g., practice with suprasegmental aspects of pronunciation, group discussions on differences between Vietnamese and American university education, roleplays based on schema building tasks), the faculty members stated repeatedly that they felt these tasks would help them get better scores on the SPEAK test which would materially assist them during graduate study.

Evaluation
I evaluated “the course” using a daily post-class-meeting log, formative evaluation questionnaires, and information from a situation analysis. Limitations of space prevent a full reporting of all of the evaluation materials. Only the results from the formative evaluation questionnaires will be reported here, and only a few of the quantitative results will be commented on. Midway through the semester I administered three questionnaires, two for the undergraduate students, and one for the faculty members. I dealt with reading and speaking skills separately for the undergraduates and the items and results appear in Tables 4 and 5 below.

Table 4
Results from undergraduate reading formative evaluation questionnaire (N = 29)

For each questionnaire item, students were invited to respond with their level of agreement to the statements in Table 4 above. A response of 1 = “strongly disagree” while a response of 5 = “strongly agree.” A higher mean would mean a higher level of agreement with a statement. The undergraduate students seem to agree that the reading fluency teachniques used in the class are useful (M = 4.214, Mode (the most commonly occurring response) = 5) and that their reading fluency is increasing (M = 4.321, Mode = 4). Tellingly, students note that other reading classes they have had are different than the reading classes generated by “the course” (M = 2.285, Mode = 2). In general, the results noted above reflect positively on reading portion of “the course” and it’s goals and objectives. However, some results suggest problems which might require revision. For example, students only somewhat agree that vocabulary learning techniques that have been introduced are useful (M = 3.928, Mode = 4). A check of the daily research log suggests that the techniques have not been touched on in class that often, suggesting a possible need to refer to the techniques more in class, and invite more direct evaluation of the techniques while they are being used in and out of class. This also underscores the notion mentioned above that there are too many objectives in “the course” to integrate easily into the time available for class meetings. Students only somewhat agree that when they read fast, they can comprehend (M = 3.785, Mode = 4). This is troubling, suggesting that students, while feeling good about their reading fluency increasing, are uncomfortable with the idea that they cannot read slowly and for accuracy, which is what some have reported is what is required of them to do well on tests and in other classes in the program. Perhaps more class time can be spent in pair or group discussions in which students can discuss areas of non-comprehension in the texts.

Table 5
Results from undergraduate speaking formative evaluation questionnaire (N = 29)

Students strongly agreed that they are willing to speak in class (M = 4.315, Mode = 5), that I allowed them time to use English English in class (M = 4.421, Mode = 4), and that pair and small group work was useful for them in class (M = 4.731, Mode = 4; M = 4.421, Mode = 5). I was sensitive to students’ comments that they wanted to do more speaking in class, hence the items focused on speaking time in class. The quantitative results suggest that students do feel they have enough time to speak in class. Yet in written comments made by students on the questionnaire, the theme of wanting more speaking time persists. Fortunately, the comments also offer insights into why students may feel this way:

            -For speaking class, working in group is better than in individual.
            -We need more games that we can play in class to use English more often.
            -Need more time to speak English in class. Play interesting games. Make role play.
            -I hope teacher can give us some methods and create and active  atmosphere in classroom.

   For these students, “speaking” in classes is best accomplished in groups (see notes above on how Vietnamese teachers teach speaking), and playing games. One student’s use of the term “methods” provides a clue about the role of games in Vietnamese foreign language classrooms. The term “methods” is used by my colleagues and other teacher trainers to mean “technique” or “game.” In a seminar given by a Canadian teacher’s organization during the semester at Vinh University, all presentations introduced games which called for the whole group of participants to move around the class, talking to as many people as possible  on topics that were “fun” like “romance,” “the best mate for you,” etc. The noise and activity levels were high, not much like the paired and grouped communicative tasks I had been asking the undergraduates to do, which called for rather more subdued and detailed talk about predictions students had about the upcoming reading, for example. One interpretation of students’ comments is they wanted more “fun” topics and wanted to talk with more people in the class. In short, they had social needs that were closely entwined with their perceptions of how speaking was accomplished in classes. Their comments may alse be a reflection that they wanted to learn games they might be able to use with high school students when they themselves became teachers. Based on other comments made on the reading questionnaire, some revisions I might make are to create tasks in which students must consult more than one speaking partner (although in those crowded classrooms this might be difficult), and in which we might focus on conflicts between characters, or their personalities, or roleplay their repartee, or ask and answer questions about points of the story students do not feel they fully understand.

            For results of the faculty class questionnaire, see Table 6 below:

Table 6
Results from the faculty class formative evaluation questionnaire (N =15)


Results for some items underscore differences beween the undergraduate and faculty classes, both in terms of differences in learning styles and needs of students, and in terms of how different aspects of “the course” have become emphasized in the undergraduate and faculty classes. The adult students seem to prefer talking in pairs much more than talking in groups (M = 4.375 as opposed to M = 3.875). I had noted early on in my log that the class seemed most energetic when they had chances to talk in pairs, particularly if they were paired in male/female dyads. Energy was an issue, in that the class met at night, after class members had had a long day of teaching. In contrast with the undergraduate students, the faculty members’ social needs seemed more in tune with pair work. Faculty members seem content with the amount of speaking done in the class, which underscores the fact that more time is devoted to speaking in the faculty class when compared to the undergraduate class. I emphasize the reading fluency component more in the undergraduate class, although never for more than one half of the 90 minute class meeting. While undergraduates and faculty members may engage in very similar kinds of communicative tasks in pairs and groups, the undergraduate students are more engaged in tasks related to the reading materials suggested by “the course.” I suggest that in the first weeks of my stay at Vinh University, it became apparent to me that the needs and strengths of the undergraduates and the faculty members were quite different.  So, while “the course” is still held together by common goals and objectives, I have emphasized parts of it in one class and de-emphasized other parts in another class.

Time Frame for “The Course”
The curriculum is taking place over the course of the spring, 2005 semester at Vinh University, which runs from February 21 to June 10. Accounting in one week for Reunification Day/Worker Day holidays and one week for examination, this results in 15 weeks of classes for the faculty members (30 class meetings), and 13 weeks for the undergraduates (26 class meetings). Undergraduates have two fewer weeks due to a practice teaching unit they must complete in high schools scatttered throughout the province. Because the goals and objectives of “the course” focus on what I believe are optimal states of learning in classes and not strongly related to any one textbook or body of content, there are no specifications as to how much material is to be covered.

 Materials and Assessments
Assessements, which are ongoing, follow the goals and objectives, and closely resemble tasks that are done in class. In many cases, the assessments are the tasks. Sample assessments are given in Table 7 for the undergraduates and Table 8 for the faculty members. See also Table 9 for sample materials of in-class tasks/assessments for undergraduates and Table 10 for faculty members.

Table 7
Sample assessments for the undergraduate class

Goal: Learners will use the L2 maximally in the classroom for the purpose of increasing fluency.
Reading assessment: Words per minute on two reading comprehension tests written at the same difficulty level, same word length and in the same style as the graded readers used in class, administered at the end of the semester as a post-test. Words per minute calculated from two reading comprehension tests administered as pre-tests (two forms different from the post-test) will be compared to post-test words per minute.
Speaking assessment: During the last three weeks of class, in-class observations will be done to evaluate whether each student actively participates and uses English to complete pair communicative tasks.

Goal: Learners will be able to formulate their language learning goals and name at least three strategies for meeting those goals.
Reading assessment: Collection of forms completed by students on L1 and L2 texts they read and their purposes for reading them.

Speaking assessment: Collection of interview forms which students complete in pairs or small groups in class. Students will query each other on life long learning issues in terms of speaking and share ideas on how to maintain their speaking ability once they graduate (see sample materials below, Table 9).

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Table 8
Sample assessment for the faculty class
Goal: Learners will, through classroom practice, learn features of sociolinguistic knowledge and textual (conversational and rhetorical organizational) knowledge.
Speaking assessment: Students will take practice SPEAK test items which capture the following features of rhetorical organization: narration, cause and effect, persuasion, and expressing opinions. Students will be scored using SPEAK test crtieria and additional notes will be written on the extent to which students use a variety of linguistic forms to realize the rhetorical patterns mentioned (see sample materials below).

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Table 9
Sample materials/task*/assessment for undergraduate class
Undergraduate student life long learning interview task
Goal:          To practice discussing issues, sharing opinions, and naming learning strategies, and to identify and share resources for life long learning and maintenance of spoken English.

Input:           Verbal instructions provided on a form, and the form itself.

Procedures:   Students work in groups of three. One person is in charge of completing the form. A second person is in charge of ensuring each person contributes to the form and to the
discussion. A third person is in charge of asking for help from the teacher, if necessary.

Outcome:    A completed form with responses from all three group
Members.

Life Long Learning and Speaking Group Interview Form
After you graduate, how will you continue learning and using English? This is an opportunity to discuss the strategies we have talked about in class, and to offer some of your own ideas. Work in groups of three. One person is in charge of completing the form for everyone. A second person is in charge of making sure each person in the group contributes to the form. A third person is in charge of asking for help from the teacher.

Write the names of all three group members here:
Group member 1:
Group member 2:
Group member 3:

What work do you think you will do after you graduate?
Group member 1:
Group member 2:
Group member 3:

How much will you use English in this work?
Group member 1:
Group member 2:
Group member 3:

What is one thing you already do to use English outside of school?
Group member 1:
Group member 2:
Group member 3:

What is one way you have heard of from friends to use English?
Group member 1:
Group member 2:
Group member 3:

Together, create a list of at least five additional ways to use English once you graduate:

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* Note: Task components of goal, input, etc. are adapted from Ellis (2003).

Table 10
Sample materials for assessment for faculty class
Sample Practice SPEAK Test item 6*: Students see six frames of a picture story in which a man sits on a park bench with wet paint, discovers the paint on this suit, and takes the suit to the dry cleaners.

Student hear and read: Imagine that this happens to you. After you have taken the suit to the dry clearners, you find out that you need to wear the suit the next morning. The dry cleaning service usually takes two days. Call the dry cleaners and try to persuade them to have the suit ready later today.

Students’ responses on all items, including the one above, are individually tape recorded and scored according to SPEAK test criteria.

Teacher’s/Scorer’s Form
Item 6

20 No effective communication
30 Communication generally not effective
40 Communication somewhat effective
50 Communication generally effective
60 Communication almost always effective

Linguistic forms used in student response for:

Persuasion:

Narration:

Cause and effect:

Expressing opinion:

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Epilog
It is now December, 2005, and I have returned to the U.S. Going to Vietnam, and designing and evaluating “the Course” was an important mid-career task for me. Doing it allowed me to step outside of twenty years of teaching patterns in order to examine my assumptions about learning and how I put these assumptions into classroom practice. The main lesson I have learned is that EFL learners and teachers in developing can be very successful without the generous amount of materials and resources we are used to in more developed nations. I do not present this report as evidence that as an outsider from the U.S. that I know best how to teach in Vietnam, nor can I even claim that my approach was necessarily appropriate for Vinh University. But I do think all teachers must take on new teaching challenges and use these as opportunities for self examination and purposeful change.

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