The way to the classroom

Turning away from a busy street full of traffic into a smaller road, one can see the newly built campus of the CFL in the distance. Like many universities and colleges in Vietnam, CFL campus is located in a densely populated residential area. Since the beginning of the construction, still incomplete at the time of the current study, various shops and services were mushrooming to serve a large number of students and staff. Along the road, one can see a coffee shop, a refreshment shop, a hairdresser‟s, a photocopy shop, an Internet shop, another coffee shop, yet another coffee shop, one more Internet shop, a book shop, another photocopy shop, and even „flat for rent‟, among many other premises standing side by side opposite the campus gate. These shops and services are run and managed by local residents who use the front part of their house for these kinds of business. These people are seemingly happy with the existence of the CFL as a symbol of intellectual growth and achievement for the region and as the source of a living for their family. Even the campus gate itself cannot escape from the business-related banderols advertising for short courses in foreign languages, business, and informatics, for BA and MA programs from other universities, both domestic and foreign, for bank accounts, and for a new type of shampoo.

Chapter Two: Background

One step into the gate are two tole-covered garages, one on the left for staff only and one on the right for students. While the staff garage is full of motorbikes, mopeds, and scooters, the student garage is overflowing with bicycles along with quite a few scooters. Whereas the staff garage is free, the student garage charges 1,000 dongs (5 US cents) per bicycle. A wide path between the two garages leading from the gate to the newly-built five-storey, U-shaped, and light-yellow-painted building is obstructed by a large white notice board where one can see a variety of managerial and administrative announcements, mainly made to students. Mostly, the announcements remind the students of the tuition fees, examination results, temporary classroom changes, and the required appropriate dress style, among other things. Some steps further along is another notice board with similar content to ensure students are well informed before going to class. Here in the CFL, like many other colleges, uniforms are not required. Nevertheless, students are asked to dress formally with ankle-length trousers, shirts with collars, and shoes or sandals; no shorts nor slippers are permitted. Female students are requested to wear „ao dai‟, a Vietnamese traditional dress, on special occasions.

Students usually go straight to their classroom or hang around, chatting with friends along the corridors, while teachers may like to go to the common room for a cup of tea before starting their teaching. It is here in the common room, notices for teachers are usually found on the wall or placed under the glass of the large table.

The class will not start until the bell rings. All teachers leave the common room for their class where students are already waiting for them, as expected. Being on time is strictly observed in the college. A late student has to enter the class in a timid manner with an excuse to the teacher who often accepts this but with an uneasy facial expression, indicating that she/he should not be late next time. Following the government‟s working hours, classes in the CFL, like many others, start as early as 7 o‟clock for the morning session or 1 o‟clock for the afternoon session. There are usually 5 in-class teaching hours in the morning and another 5 in the afternoon. Each 5-hour session usually covers two subjects because each subject is normally allocated two or three in-class teaching hours (per week). There is a 10-minute break after each teaching hour. Students attend either the morning or the afternoon session according to their class timetable for the semester. More precisely, to ease the administrative

Chapter Two: Background

work, all students at the same level go to class in only one session of the day for the whole week throughout the whole semester. During the second semester of the academic year 2008-2009 when the current study was conducted, for example, first and third year students occupied the afternoon sessions, while the morning sessions were for second and fourth year students. These were then shifted in the following semester. Similarly, teachers who have classes in the morning will normally have a break in the afternoon before going back to the campus for evening classes, or in fact to teach somewhere else. Quite often, teachers describe their teaching as „ploughing‟ (a field). One of the common rhetorical questions of greeting between English staff is „how many hours do you plough this morning?‟, for example. By the same token, lecturers are oftentimes referred to as „teaching workers‟, by the media in recent debates about the workload that university lecturers have to take nationwide. Clearly, the synchronic style of administration and teaching reflects in the timetable management, which is, by some means, not much different from factory workers or military soldiers.