Implementing Task-Based Language Teaching in Vietnamese Secondary Schools: What Hinders EFL Teachers?

Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) has aroused interest of researchers as well as practitioners in education worldwide since the 1980s. In Vietnam, TBLT has recently been promoted in EFL/ESL education at all levels to develop learners' communicative competence; as a result, EFL teachers need to take major shifts in learning objectives, learning activities, teaching techniques, materials, assessment methods, etc. into consideration. This study aimed to explore the secondary school EFL teachers' challenges they have faced during the task-based teaching process. Ninety-six teachers working as full-time teachers of English at sixteen secondary schools in Vung Tau City, Vietnam answered a closed-ended questionnaire and participated in semi-structured interviews. The results indicated that the participants faced two types of challenges, namely objective and subjective when TBLT was implemented in their language classrooms. The objective challenges, in particular, consisted of class size, incompatibility between the curriculum and the focus of TBLT, preparation time, uncertainty about teacher's role, and deteriorating English grammatical competence, whereas lack of assessment skills for task-based learning performance was considered the most problematic subjective cause to them. Noticeably, the participants showed the willingness to apply TBLT because of their adequate knowledge of TBLT and sufficient English proficiency.