Interactive Listening in Teaching Vietnamese to Foreigners: Defining Criteria and Exploring Perceptions of Teachers and Learners

Listening is a fundamental yet difficult competence of foreign language learners, especially of the Vietnamese language, whose instruction and evaluation methods are still predominantly passive and transactional. The paper deals with the necessity to re-interpret the concept of listening as a two-way process, and to focus on the aspects of two-way communication, active participation of a listener, problem-solving, and goal attainment in communication. The method involves a quantitative survey of 118 respondents, including teachers and learners of Vietnamese as a foreign language. Based on theoretical constructs and research findings, the study outlines the requirements of interactive listening and the shortcomings of the available textbooks and tests that ignore communicative interaction. The results indicate a great deal of support for including interactive aspects in teaching, learning and assessment. The research suggests criteria to assess interactive listening and recommends guidelines to create more communicative Vietnamese textbooks and testing systems.