Welcome to the latest edition of our CEO’s column News From Adam.
Vietnam has long been an important part of the NEAS footprint. On my recent visit there I was overwhelmed by the energy, dynamism, and sheer creativity of the people. Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi both buzz with more than the traffic that I encountered crossing the road!
I visited existing and potential NEAS members in the university, conventional stand alone, online, and private multi-campus sectors. These are all English language teaching operations of significant scale, and it is very exciting to hear them spell out the future as they saw it. Varied as these plans were, I picked up a few consistent themes that I thought I might share with you:
Language learning has become very closely tied to proficiency test preparation in Vietnam. I know this from my time managing centres in Vietnam where the parents of the mostly young students are looking for recognised, standard and measurable outcomes for the investment they make. Interestingly though, I had some feedback that this focus on specific standardised testing may be peaking. Competition from direct entry pathway programs appears to be gaining some momentum. I also noted marketing for strong differentiated product lines. In other words, branded programs of learning activity, and specifically enrolments into programs for younger learners appears to be growing. This is also the case for online learning programs.
As always, it’s the teaching staff (and those managing them) who are dealing with quality at a day-to-day level, and the hunger for professional development among this group complemented the commitment to continuous improvement that I picked up from the leaders of these organisations. Key areas of interest for teachers were AI and how best to regulate its use, motivating students in the (mostly) monolingual context of Vietnam and the fascinating cultural interplay between Confucian-style learning approaches and the more critical, collaborative, and individualistic drivers that underlie western language learning pedagogies.
I’m very much looking forward to engaging closely with our Vietnamese member community in the coming months and have lots of ideas for developing the NEAS presence there. Of foremost interest for me is finding ways to build connections between this community and the other communities that exist under the NEAS umbrella, including our Australian members.
Of course, I’m here to convey all of this to you because I survived crossing the city streets!
July 2024
