I am writing this hoping it helps you find somewhere effective and affordable to study, because plenty of places now use the "foreign teacher" label to justify higher fees.
An unwritten rule
In schools in Vietnam, foreigners are always paid more than Vietnamese staff.
A friend of mine who worked at an international school described it: teachers holding foreign passports taught the English classes on salaries that went a long way locally, while teachers with Vietnamese teaching degrees worked as assistants for far less.
The same thing happens at private centres, especially where a "foreign teacher" is the proof of quality being sold. When I started teaching, centres would bring a foreigner in to talk for twenty or thirty minutes of a ninety-minute class, once a week, purely so they could advertise that they had one.
This comes from parents and students not having the information. When they prefer a foreign teacher, centres scramble to find foreigners regardless of whether they hold any teaching qualification, and put the price up accordingly.
It used to make sense, and no longer does
I think that model was reasonable ten or twenty years ago, when learners had no quality source of spoken English. Back then you genuinely had to bring native speakers in. Even having them model the language so students could hear real English was worth something, and nobody expected them to explain grammar.
2024 is different. Spoken English is everywhere online, and plenty of foreigners visit Vietnam. Carrying on as before is inappropriate, wasteful, and damaging to highly capable Vietnamese teachers.
What Vietnamese teachers bring
A Vietnamese teacher understands what it is like to learn English as a second language, so they understand the learner's process far better. A native speaker acquired English from infancy. It is a completely different experience.
Vietnamese learners study grammar in order to understand how to deploy the language, and that makes them faster. Two to three years can get you to competence. Many native speakers can produce the language but cannot explain it. Several have told me that grammar was the part of CELTA that frightened them most, because they had never had to explain it before. Much as we Vietnamese are not experts in Vietnamese grammar either.
What learning English in 2024 actually means
Learning English today is not about taking down sentences from someone who speaks it well. It is about learning to use the tools to meet your goals in conversation, life and work. When you meet a new word, do you know how to look up not just its meaning but its pronunciation, its usage and when it is appropriate? Do you know how to use free online tools properly to keep improving without a teacher?
A successful teacher's students in 2024 should be able to:
- Use online tools to keep teaching themselves every day.
- Keep improving quickly, and settle fast when they move to an English-speaking environment.
- Know the tools and methods for learning a language, and apply them to a third language if they want one.
And the teacher should be able to:
- Help learners speak confidently without fear of mistakes, through encouragement, explanation and enough practice.
- Supply methods that transfer broadly, across topics and across languages.
On the practical side, a teacher needs to know how to plan a course. Four lessons or ten is easy. Sixty-four to seventy-two lessons across six months to a couple of years takes training to build properly. Classroom management is the same: one-to-one is straightforward, but a class of eight to ten, let alone twenty, needs real training to run so that everyone still gets enough speaking practice.
Where I land
Native speakers do pronounce more accurately and know more idiom and slang. I just do not think that is worth three times a Vietnamese teacher's salary.
I hope this helps people choose a teacher on skill and experience rather than discriminating by passport. That serves your learning and your wallet, and it also makes the Vietnamese passport itself carry a little more weight.
If we discriminate against each other, we can hardly complain when outsiders do it.