Teaching Reflection to First-Year Students of ESL: A Three-Year Collective Case Study in Rural Vietnam

Abstract

Reflection has been extensively researched and widely taught to teachers for more than three decades, and more recently, to postgraduate students. Numerous researchers have reported that reflection facilitates deep learning, fosters critical thinking and encourages self- challenge. Yet, to date, very few educators have taught reflection to undergraduate students of English as a Second Language (ESL). Through action research of collective case studies at Quang Nam University, a small university in central Vietnam, our aims were to identify the challenges and the pedagogical changes necessary to teach reflection online to English language students from rural areas of Vietnam. In this paper, we will demonstrate how we have taught reflection online from Australia to three classes of first-year students from rural areas in Vietnam since the start of COVID-19 pandemic. We will explain how we encouraged a total of 39 first-year students studying at a university in a small town in Vietnam to practice reflection while they were learning English with us in an online course of nine-week duration. We will report the challenges we faced and the effectiveness of our methods and provide recommendations for future teaching. We expect that our reflection on our teaching and students’ learning experiences will contribute to the English Language Teaching for the 21st Century Excellence by providing evidences on how educators from an English speaking country can teach reflection and English to first-year undergraduate students in rural areas of Vietnam without needing to travel to meet the students face-to-face.