Personal Reflection 4

Nguyen Hoang Dung

INTRODUCTION

My practicum at the Vietnam Học viện Hải quân in Nha Trang was one of the most formative experiences in my MA TESOL journey. Unlike a conventional teaching practicum, this trip required me to work across several professional roles at the same time: seminar organizer and presenter, classroom observer, micro-teacher, and leader of Group 2B. What made the experience especially meaningful was that it took place in a highly disciplined military environment, where punctuality, coordination, and professional conduct were not optional habits but institutional expectations.

During the practicum, Group 2B delivered a seminar for second-year cadets on how to improve English through dictation, with a particular focus on demonstrating how a dictation-based framework could be adapted and applied through the Daily Dictation website. In addition, I observed Ms. Ngô Thị Hương Giang’s listening and speaking class on the topic of military technology, which gave me a valuable opportunity to examine ESP teaching in a real local context. I also conducted my micro-teaching segment in a 90-minute group lesson on the topic “Your Favourite Subject,” where I was responsible for approximately twenty minutes of the while-speaking stage, specifically the monologue task designed in the style of IELTS Speaking Part 2. The lesson itself targeted second-year cadets at approximately A2-B1 level and combined CLT and TBLT principles through vocabulary work, guided speaking, model analysis, peer feedback, and a survey task.

More importantly, this practicum reshaped not only my teaching skills but also my professional identity. It forced me to think more critically about how pedagogy must be adapted to context, how leadership can function through structure rather than authority, and how discipline and time management are inseparable from teaching professionalism. In this reflection, I critically discuss the professional skills I developed and the changes in my behavior and perception after this experience.

PROFESSIONAL SKILLS I HAVE LEARNT FROM THE PRACTICUM

One of the most important skills I developed during the practicum was analytical and assessment skills. Observing Ms. Giang’s class allowed me to move beyond being a passive watcher and to become a more critical observer of teaching. I noticed several strengths in her lesson. First, her classroom presence was highly effective. She used body language, movement, and monitoring strategically rather than remaining fixed in one place. By moving around the room and checking students’ progress, she maintained attention and kept the lesson dynamic. In a military classroom where discipline is already strong, this kind of purposeful movement did not merely control behavior; it sustained engagement. Second, I found her contextualization of the lesson particularly valuable. When teaching a lesson on military technology, she connected the content to the Vietnamese context and occasionally used brief Vietnamese to check understanding. I do not see this as a weakness in communicative teaching. In an ESP setting, conceptual clarity matters, and strategic use of the first language can function as pedagogical scaffolding rather than as a retreat from English. At the same time, I also identified one weakness: some instructions, particularly in the vocabulary grouping stage, seemed somewhat vague or overloaded. Since the task required students to group pictures, identify categories, and label them, clearer modeling would have reduced uncertainty and made the activity more efficient. This observation was valuable because it helped me realize that in ESP classrooms, interesting content alone is not enough; instructions must be precise enough to channel student attention productively.

My analytical skills were further developed when I reflected on my own micro-teaching. In our group lesson, I was responsible for the monologue speaking section during the while-speaking stage. My part included introducing the cue card, guiding students to analyze the model answer, highlighting a five-part structure, mining useful transferable expressions, and preparing students for peer feedback and pair practice. The lesson plan clearly organized the speaking task around five cue points: what the subject is, when the student started learning it, what they do when learning it, what knowledge they gain from it, and why they like it. It also emphasized the use of useful expressions and peer feedback criteria such as covering all five points, maintaining clear order, adding supporting details, using appropriate vocabulary, and showing clear pronunciation.

What went well in my teaching was that I helped students see that a speaking model should not be memorized mechanically but analyzed as a framework for idea organization. This was important because the lesson plan itself anticipated the risk that students might copy the sample instead of adapting it. I think I performed well in explaining the structure of a good answer and in drawing students’ attention to transferable expressions rather than overemphasizing specialized vocabulary. This aligned well with the handout, which encouraged students to notice expressions such as “My favourite subject is…,” “I started learning it…,” “When I learn this subject, I usually…,” and “From this subject, I get useful knowledge about…,” all of which could be adapted to many subjects, not only Marine Radar.

However, the practicum also exposed several concrete weaknesses in my micro-teaching. My supervisors Ms. Nu Anh and Ms. Mai pointed out that my Teacher Talking Time was still too high for a speaking lesson, and I agree with that evaluation. One clear example was the individual planning stage, where I overloaded my instruction by asking students to find and underline useful expressions in the sample, choose a subject, avoid copying the model, and write keywords for five cue points all at once. Although these steps were logically related, they were delivered too densely, which increased cognitive load and delayed student production. More broadly, this feedback made me realize that instructional clarity in a speaking class depends not on how much the teacher explains, but on how efficiently students are moved into speaking. I also learned that scaffolding and lesson flow need to be more deliberate: the stages of the lesson should be explicitly connected so that each step prepares learners for the next, rather than feeling like separate classroom events. In addition, I became more aware that effective lesson design is not about including many activities, but about selecting fewer and developing them with sufficient depth. Finally, my supervisor’s comments highlighted the value of concise boardwork and visible linguistic support, such as highlighting keywords and preparing pronunciation support for difficult vocabulary. If I were to reteach this part, I would simplify the instruction into shorter steps—for example, “Choose one favourite subject. Write keywords only for five points: subject, time, activities, knowledge, and reason. Don’t copy the sample.”—and rely more on clear visual support to reduce teacher talk and maximize student speaking time. Overall, this experience taught me that successful speaking lessons require not only communicative tasks, but also economy of instruction, coherence of flow, and carefully timed support. 

The practicum also significantly strengthened my planning skills. As the leader of Group 2B, I had to coordinate multiple layers of work: choosing the seminar topic, dividing responsibilities among members, arranging meetings, leading rehearsals, gathering feedback from the supervisor, and making sure that our lesson and seminar were coherent. In the seminar, I helped coordinate the group’s workload and directly presented the demonstration section to show cadets how the dictation framework could be applied through the Daily Dictation website. Yet the most valuable lesson was not simply that planning leads to smooth execution. It was that good planning must anticipate contextual constraints. Because cadets were not allowed to use phones or personal electronic devices in class, we could not assume technology-assisted learning in the same way we might in other educational settings. As a result, we redesigned the dictation demonstration into a low-tech but highly interactive activity: we divided the class into twenty-five groups, gave each group one A3 sheet and one marker, played each sentence three times, asked groups to write the sentence on paper, and invited the fastest group to bring their answer up for checking. Afterwards, the class repeated after the audio to reinforce pronunciation. This experience taught me a critical lesson in planning: pedagogy cannot be transplanted unchanged from one context to another. A good TESOL activity must be adapted not only to language objectives, but also to institutional conditions, learner habits, and available resources.

At the same time, I also realized one limitation in our dictation framework. Although the activity generated a highly competitive and fun atmosphere, it could also allow stronger students to dominate while quieter members participated less. In other words, the activity was successful in producing energy, but not automatically in producing equal participation. If I were to improve it in the future, I would assign clearer rotating roles within each group, such as listener, writer, runner, and pronunciation checker, and I would include a brief individual follow-up after each round to ensure that learning was distributed more evenly. This reflection has made me more aware that engaging teaching and equitable teaching are not always the same thing.

Another major area of growth was communication. Communication in this practicum did not simply mean speaking English well; it meant negotiating with peers, updating the supervisor, adjusting instructions, and ensuring that the whole group shared the same understanding of the work. As group leader, I learned that effective communication often depends less on dramatic speeches than on consistency and clarity. Since our group had no serious conflicts or missed deadlines, it would be easy to say that leadership was simple. In reality, the absence of conflict itself reflected the value of structure. We held meetings to unify our approach, rehearsed seriously, revised materials based on feedback, and made sure that every member understood not only their own part but also how it connected to the whole lesson. I also learned to communicate upward and downward: upward by seeking feedback from the supervisor, and downward by bringing that feedback back to the group in a constructive way. This taught me that leadership communication is not about imposing control, but about maintaining shared direction.

Leadership was perhaps the most personally meaningful skill I developed. Before this practicum, I tended to think of leadership mainly as assigning work and making sure people met deadlines. This experience made me realize that leadership also involves foresight, organization, and emotional steadiness. My group members were cooperative and proactive, which certainly helped, but leadership still mattered in setting the rhythm of meetings, leading rehearsals, checking materials, refining scripts, and solving small emerging issues before they became larger ones. In this sense, I learned that good leadership often looks quiet from the outside. It is expressed through structure, follow-up, and reliability rather than visible authority.

Finally, the practicum deepened my cultural competency and contextual awareness as a TESOL trainee. Teaching and learning English at the Học viện Hải quân was clearly different from teaching in more ordinary contexts. The cadets’ English proficiency was relatively good, but the classroom culture was shaped by military norms: disciplined timing, formal institutional routines, and limited use of personal devices. Moreover, the military and maritime topics required the teacher to possess at least sufficient background knowledge to mediate specialized content meaningfully. This experience challenged any simplistic assumption that a general communicative lesson can just be brought into any classroom unchanged. Instead, I learned that pedagogy must be adapted to local teaching realities. In this context, adaptation did not mean lowering standards; it meant making instruction, materials, and activity design genuinely fit the learners and the institution.

CHANGE IN BEHAVIOR AND PERCEPTION

The practicum changed my behavior in a very concrete way, especially regarding discipline and time management. I was not responsible for the full ninety-minute lesson by myself, since my teaching segment lasted about twenty minutes within the while-speaking stage, while the pre-speaking and post-speaking stages were taught by other group members. However, the overall lesson still had to fit a rigid institutional timetable, and each of us had to deliver our assigned part without overrunning. This mattered because at the Học viện Hải quân, class timing was strictly regulated: the lesson began and ended according to the academy bell, not according to the teacher’s convenience. This environment made me confront a truth about myself. In the past, I had sometimes been careless about punctuality. At the Học viện Hải quân, I saw that time discipline is not a small personal habit but a professional ethic. Even a slight delay or an overlong explanation can affect not only one teacher but the flow of the whole lesson and the work of one’s teammates. As a result, I became more serious about rehearsing my timing, preparing more carefully, and respecting institutional routines.

My perception of students also changed. Before the practicum, I unconsciously held a stereotype that naval cadets would be overly serious, rigid, and perhaps less responsive to interactive language activities. That stereotype was broken during our Daily Dictation demonstration. When the class was divided into groups and turned the task into a fast-paced paper-based competition, the cadets were highly energetic, engaged, and comfortable. They did not resist participation; they responded enthusiastically when the task was meaningful and well-structured. This experience reminded me that learner engagement cannot be predicted simply by institutional image. Even in a military setting, students can be lively and communicative when the pedagogy invites them into the lesson.

My sense of national and professional identity was also affected by the practicum. Visiting the traditional room of the academy and the sailing ship Lê Quý Đôn made the experience more than an academic exercise. It awakened in me a stronger feeling of patriotism and respect for the institution. More importantly, it made me imagine my own future differently. I no longer see teaching merely as classroom delivery. I increasingly see it as service within a meaningful institutional context. This is why my long-term goal has become clearer: after completing my master’s degree, I want to return to the Học viện Hải quân as an English lecturer, but as a better-prepared, more disciplined, and more context-sensitive educator.

In terms of self-evaluation, I believe I contributed actively and responsibly to the practicum. Although I was challenged by a sore throat and a hoarse voice throughout much of the trip, I remained committed to fulfilling my responsibilities in both the seminar and the micro-teaching. This experience served as a powerful reminder that professional conduct is tested most significantly not when conditions are ideal, but when one must maintain a high standard of responsibility despite physical discomfort. I did not merely perform my own teaching segment; I also helped draft and refine the lesson plan, contributed to the handout, gave feedback on other members’ materials, led rehearsals, revised scripts and instructions, and handled issues that arose during the preparation process. At the same time, this practicum taught me that contribution should not be measured only by visible performance. It should also be measured by how much one helps the group function effectively. From that perspective, I believe I made a meaningful contribution, though I also recognize that I still need to improve my instructional clarity, reduce teacher talking time, and trust students more by creating more space for them to speak.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, my practicum at the Học viện Hải quân was a deeply valuable experience that strengthened my professional skills and transformed my personal outlook. It developed my analytical skills through classroom observation, sharpened my planning through seminar and lesson preparation, improved my communication through leadership and coordination, and deepened my cultural competency by forcing me to adapt TESOL pedagogy to a specialized military context. Just as importantly, it changed my behavior by making me more disciplined, punctual, and professionally self-aware.

What I take away most from this practicum is not the illusion that I have already become an accomplished teacher. Rather, it is the clearer understanding that becoming a good educator requires more than enthusiasm. It requires structure, reflection, adaptability, and discipline. This practicum confirmed for me that I want to continue growing in that direction. After graduation, I hope to return to the Học viện Hải quân as an English lecturer who is not only more knowledgeable, but also more mature, reliable, and worthy of the context in which I teach.