Vietnamese EFL Secondary School Teachers’ Practices of Adapting Speaking Tasks in the New English Textbooks

Speaking proficiency is important to language learners.The ability to structure talk facilitates effective communication with other interlocutors.A strong spoken command positions them to actively interact with their teachers and peers to hone their academic mastery.This article reports the result of a study that aims to identify EFL Vietnamese secondary school teachers' practices of adapting speaking tasks in the reformed textbooks 'Right on!' in a province in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam.This case study, joined by three experienced teachers through in-depth interviews, document analysis (textbooks and teaching plans), and classroom observations, addresses the gap in our concerns about the differences between teachers' self-reported and actual classroom practices.The results show that those teachers all have positive beliefs and willingness to adapt speaking tasks designed in the textbook to hone their students' speaking performance; however, sometimes they remained with the suggested teaching plans in the teacher guide or changed and expanded the scenario but failed.This paper also points to a need to incorporate a sufficiently intensive professional development program of task-based language teaching for current teachers in Vietnam.