Agency and Language-in-Education Policy in Vietnamese Higher Education

With the diversification of contexts in which LPP processes take place, from traditional national to supra-national and sub-national settings, the authors of this chapter—which draws on three recently completed doctoral studies on agency and language-in-education policy conducted in three universities in Vietnam—note a growing analytical emphasis on agentive processes that, they argue, echoes the ‘agency turn’ in social sciences and reflects recent postmodern tendencies in LPP research. Aligned with this perspective, they examine the nature of agency as exercised by English language and content area academics in enacting three forms of language-in-education policy in higher education in Vietnam: (1) a policy to develop learner autonomy to transform students into critical, responsible and life-long learners; (2) an EMI policy to enhance students’ content knowledge and English proficiency; and (3) an assessment policy that draws on the Common European Framework of References (CEFR) for Languages to measure Vietnamese students’ English proficiency. The first study draws on data from interviews and classroom observations, and examines teacher agency in the English language classroom towards fostering learner autonomy. The second study examines EMI in academic programs within the context of internationalizing higher education. The third study considers qualitative data collected over a six-month period that revealed intrapersonal and interpersonal tensions in the way agency is exercised by university teachers in responding to the CEFR policy. Drawing insight from these studies, Hamid et al. discuss the potential and the need for emerging forms of agency in language-in-education policy in higher education.