Reflection without reflection: disentangling reflective practice from reflective literacy in Vietnamese EFL teacher narratives

Reflective teaching is widely treated as essential to professional development (PD), yet assumptions about what ‘counts’ as reflection (e.g. its form, visibility, and progression) often go unexamined. This study interrogates the conflation of doing reflection with showing reflection by distinguishing reflective practice (situated sense-making that informs pedagogical action) from reflective literacy (the capacity to render that reflection legible through talk, writing, or artefacts). Focusing on Vietnamese university English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching, we analyse in-depth narrative interviews with six teachers positioned at early-career, mid-career, and experienced stages using a thematic-narrative approach. Career stage is used as a descriptive sampling lens rather than a causal explanation. The study contributes (1) a clearer operational distinction between enactment and articulation, (2) an empirically grounded account of how these two dimensions are differently configured across teachers, and (3) an analytic map for examining the institutional conditions that make certain reflections legible while obscuring others. We discuss implications for programme design and policy, arguing for PD ecologies that recognise multiple forms of evidence of reflection beyond formal artefacts and resist audit-driven reductions of teacher expertise.