While Vietnamese education officials are struggling with hardly effective reforms in English teaching, a prize-winning teacher in Ho Chi Minh City has intrigued her students with clever improvisation.

“Renovation lies in teachers’ successful application of know-how to real work or their willingness to learn from colleagues, not in flamboyant but unfeasible plans,” she says.

Do Thanh Thuy, an English teacher at Xuan Thoi Thuong Elementary School in Hoc Mon District, has won an award for her quality teaching at a city contest and will visit the U.K. under a sponsorship by the assessment arm of Cambridge University.

David Kaye, a judge of the contest who is with the U.K.-based Pearson Group, said that he was truly impressed by Thuy’s teaching, which tremendously inspired her students and gave them a strong motive to continue learning English. She is a little “greedy” as she always prefers integrating multi-tasks into her lessons, Thuy, who is in her forties, admits.

The teacher once chose to teach rice cultivation to her fifth-graders when it came to a lesson about professions, whereas her peers would normally opt for teaching or medicine, which are easier to describe in English.

Thuy visited locals’ houses to consult with them about ways to grow rice and then asked for a few grains to bring home.

“I want to try growing it myself first and then apply what I acquire to my English teaching,” she explains. “Honestly, I knew about this age-old traditional job only in theory.”

The teacher then instructed her kids to cultivate rice in plastic pots for a week at home before bringing them in to school.

Classroom activities revolved around experiences in growing the grains, such as how to select the soil, incubate the seeds, and sow them, all of which was presented, of course, in English.

“I would like them to know about rice farming and how hard it is for farmers to produce rice so that they will treasure what they eat daily, in addition to teaching the foreign language to my students,” Thuy says.

But that is still not enough for her. The woman even turned her classroom into what she called “a reading restaurant” which served “dishes”, like books or short stories in English, as part of the school’s extra-curricular activities.

“Diners” were required to come in groups and “order” the same “dish,” then the restaurant’s “waiters” and “waitresses” would serve by reading it smoothly. 

All of the kids were excited to wear caps, belts, and aprons as if they were working at a real restaurant, and the role-play was more than just beautiful.

“Role-playing encouraged them to communicate in English, while the ‘waiters’ and ‘waitresses’ could help the children read and memorize stories in the books,” Thuy explains.

Thuy often races against time in the classroom in return for diversified materials and activities and active participation from her students, a rare sight in Vietnam’s classes, where students simply stay silent while listening to their teacher on the platform.  

Thuy says she always asks herself two questions: “What am I going to bring to my class tomorrow?," and "What should I do to nurture a love for English in my students?”

That is why she managed to bring a British friend, who is teaching at a major language center in the city, to an exchange session at her school recently.

“It goes without saying how happy my students were,” she says.