Vietnamese EFL High School Teachers' Professional Learning: Can Social Networking Sites Lend a Hand?

Hoang Van Le

A great deal has been published about the educational affordances of social networking sites (SNSs) for teachers. Less research, however, has addressed this topic for teachers who are more dependent on virtual networks for informal professional learning due to financial constraints and a lack of formal professional development. The current study responds to this literature gap by focusing on a Vietnamese context wherein elite tools for professional learning remain unreachable for most teachers. Using an exploratory sequential mixed-methods approach and guided by social constructivist learning theory, the study examines how Vietnamese teachers of the English language have turned recreation-based SNSs into budget-friendly tools for their informal professional learning. This study embraced three aspects of teachers’ interactions on online platforms including their activities and frequency, their perceptions about affordances and challenges, and their self-presentation with reference to teacher identity. The data were extensively collected from four focus groups with 19 teachers and 393 teachers’ responses to a survey. The results show that the teachers conducted numerous activities for professional learning purposes with high frequency, mainly using Facebook and Zalo. The frequency of most activities, and the preferred professional topics for discussion appeared to be independent of teachers’ self-perceived levels of technology competence or teaching experience. Further, the teachers valued SNSs in terms of usefulness, diversity, flexibility, feeling connected and cost-effectiveness. The teachers preferred a lurking presence and less visible interactions, which was interpreted within the concept of teacher identity. Teachers’ responses also reveal limitations and challenges of professional learning via SNSs, including often overwhelming quantities of resources, questionable reliability of shared resources, insufficient guidance, possible misunderstanding, time availability and the unwritten social pressures of being a teacher in a Vietnamese context. The findings offer significant insights, potentially useful in supporting the professional practices of teachers, educators, and SNS providers, especially those in low-resource contexts.

Vietnamese EFL High School Teachers' Professional Learning: Can Social Networking Sites Lend a Hand?

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