As part of the efforts to overcome the difficulties, local boarding schools for ethnic minority students have organised regular thematic seminars to seek measures to increase the quality of English teaching at schools.

At a recent seminar among the local boarding and semi-boarding schools for ethnic minority students in Mu Cang Chai district, Nguyen Hoai Thu, a teacher of Khao Mang secondary boarding school for ethnic minority students, performed an English teaching session to a ninth-grade class.

Mu Cang Chai is a poor district with over 90 percent of students from ethnic minority groups. Foreign language has been a tough subject for both students and teachers.

The shortage of English-language teachers is among the greatest difficulties in the locality.

The district is home to 37 schools from pre-school to secondary levels with 642 classes and over 21,000 students. But it has only 29 English-language teachers. The schools need additional eight teachers for secondary schools and 15 for primary schools.

Nguyen Van Tuan, deputy head of the district’s Education-Training Division, said that in order to overcome difficulties in English teaching and learning, the schools have encouraged the teachers to work overtime, while designing plans to improve the quality of teaching and learning activities and creating a favourable environment for local students to learn English.

In primary schools, teaching programmes have been made suitable to each level, with intensive support to fifth graders.

Schools across the district have fostered connections with those in urban areas to learn their teaching methods with an aim to inspire students’ interest in the subject.