Answering questions at the National Assembly recently, Minister of Education and Training Pham Vu Luan said: “Vietnam’s way of teaching, learning, and testing foreign languages is like no other in the world,” “students pronounce standardly, but teachers criticize them,” and thus a series of exchanges related to English teaching, especially pronunciation, were shared.
In my opinion, the story of learning and teaching English among Vietnamese people is “like no other” because we are harbouring some very erroneous prejudices.
The biggest prejudice is that “one needs to pronounce standardly.” For many years, the entire English education system in Vietnam has been obsessively blinded by the standard that we must pronounce with a British or American accent. We take pride when our children speak with a British-American accent and take delight in criticizing other people’s children; we agree when our children “laugh hysterically,” saying their teachers’ pronunciation is not “standard.” The obsession with having to speak “standardly” has caused an unknown amount of expense.
You don’t need to pronounce with a standard “British-American” accent to get work done. In the US every year, there are hundreds of thousands of immigrants coming from all over the world, countries where English is not the mother tongue, such as Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, India, China, South Korea, and Vietnam. There are thousands of outstanding professors, doctors, jurists, and Nobel Prize-winning scientists who all speak with a non-“standard” accent. Have you been to the United Nations or the World Bank? Have you heard hundreds of English pronunciations, each person with their own style? Yet those places gather the world’s leading economists and diplomats working together every day.
Have you ever seen a Singaporean, Filipino, or Indian feel ashamed and insecure because they don’t speak English with a “British-American” accent? Those countries have millions, hundreds of millions, to billions of people speaking and using English fluently, and nobody cares whether another person’s accent sounds like British/American or not. The whole world respects Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore and is passionate about the economic insights of Amartya Sen (an Indian economist who won the Nobel Prize)—does anyone care that they speak English with an accent different from British-American?
Every country, person, and ethnic group has a different dialect and accent. Why keep insisting on forcing people to speak with a British or American accent? Even in the US, Black Americans have their own way of pronunciation, and nobody judges them for it. We have never forced people from Nghe An or the Western region (Mekong Delta) to speak with a Northern accent, so why keep expecting our children to speak like Westerners? Look around in Vietnam and see how many people can truly pronounce like a “British-American” accent. I dare to bet that it does not exceed the number of a thousand.
The obsession with speaking “standardly” causes huge expense when learning English. Instead of studying with good Vietnamese teachers, we spend a lot of money studying with “Westerners” and do everything possible to pronounce “standardly.” Granted, studying with “Westerners” builds better reflexes, but the cost is two to three times as expensive. And that obsession will forever be a vicious cycle, because as long as we do not learn in English continuously from a young age and do not live for a long period in the UK or the US, most of us will never be able to pronounce “standardly.”
I used to be a specialized English student at a famous high school in Hanoi, studied at university in Australia, completed my doctorate in the US, and participated in learning, teaching, and working in English-speaking environments, totaling more than 24 years of using English. Even now, I still do not speak English with a British-American accent, and I have never felt insecure about that. My respectable mentors and colleagues come from Turkey, Italy, India, South Korea, and Romania. Everyone speaks English with an accent, some even hard to understand. But they are all very successful.
One of my doctoral dissertation advisors was a British woman of Indian origin. She was born in the UK, attended university at Cambridge, earned her PhD at Yale—some of the most famous universities in the world—and worked at the International Monetary Fund. Yet, she still spoke English with an Indian dialect, according to Indian culture. And she was very proud of that.
The inferiority complex of not speaking “standard” English partly reflects a “small-nation” mindset, always considering oneself inferior to Western Europeans, feeling inadequate, and using being like “Westerners” as part of the yardstick for value. I am sure no country other than Vietnam has the concept of “boi” English, meaning the English (of a waiter) that is not pronounced standardly and lacks proper grammar.
So does “British-American standard” pronunciation have any benefits? I beg to answer that there is no extra benefit compared to pronouncing it well enough to be heard, understood, and used. On the other hand, the harm of fearing non-“standard” pronunciation is endless: It will lead to feelings of inferiority and self-doubt when learning English, causing one to never be able to learn it; it will lead to wastefulness by constantly investing in finding native teachers to learn from, only to forget after a few days because how can we possibly pronounce with the exact accent? It also plants into the minds of generations a “small-nation” mindset of judging themselves as inadequate based on whether their pronunciation accent is “standard” or not.
Go ahead and speak English boldly—even “boi” English is fine—and gradually you will become fluent. Feel comfortable communicating in English even if you don’t speak beautifully. Teachers, be bold in teaching students to know English; don’t “hesitate” over whether you speak standardly or not, because at least the students will be taught confidently by you. Parents, also be bold and save millions of Dong a month instead of wasting money on children learning English with Westerners; use that money to invest in your children studying with good teachers. Office workers and staff: do not feel insecure thinking that you must study until you speak “standardly” before daring to use it.
Be confident, even if the English we speak is Ving-lish (Vietnamese English), because one day we will truly join the English-speaking world of a developed country like Singapore, where people speak Sing-lish (Singaporean English); or a military and cultural powerhouse like India, where over a billion people speak Ing-lish (Indian English). Let’s manage to do that first, before dreaming about the so-called “standard” language.
