LookAtVietnam – Vietnamese first grade students now are expected to write Vietnamese ‘dictations’ and pronounce English words fluently in the first weeks of the school year.

“Mum, let me go to the teacher’s home to take extra lessons tomorrow,” a little girl of Bau Sen Primary School was overheard talking to her mother after the school lessons.

“I don’t think you need to have extra lessons right now. You are just in first grade,” the mother replied.

However, the little girl did not agree with her mother. “No, this is really necessary,” she insisted. “I need to go to extra classes to have good handwriting. HB in my class is being hit by the teacher because he writes slowly and badly.”

Students having sore stomach when having to go to school

L, the teacher of 1/7 class, admitted she hit little HB, but said that she only ‘slapped him, and didn’t use a ruler’.

“HB is very slow in learning, slow in writing. He still cannot spell well. The boy only knows the sounds I have taught him,” she said.

“But HB is just a first grade student. He has just begun going to school. He only knows the words if you teach him,” said Tuoi tre’s reporter.

The teacher replied that HB’s parents are not helping; they never initialed his workbook. Her class, she explained, is an English-intensive class, where students are more dynamic than students in other classes. Two-thirds have begun to read and write before they go to school.

A little later, the reporter met the father of a student of Hoa Binh Primary School. “Have you heard about the first grade student who was beaten because of writing slowly? The boy has become so afraid of the teacher that his parents have to put him into another class,” the man told the reporter.

Then the man told a story about his own child, Q. At first she was so eager to go to school. Within a week, however, Q took to complaining that she has a sore stomach and she cannot go to school.

“I well understand that her handwriting is not so good as her classmates’, children who have learned to write and read before they entered first grade. That’s why she does not want to go to school any more.”

Students have to learn to read and write in English?

In principle, schoolchildren are not expected to write ‘dictations’ until they are in second grade students. In HCM City, however, many first grade students have to write dictations right in the first week of the new school year.

An experienced teacher in District 9 confirms that students cannot take dictations until they have learned to write words. “That’s impossible at first. It will make many students afraid of going to school because they cannot meet the high expectations of the teachers”.

Primary schools in the center report that 50-75 percent of total students have learned to read and write before they went to school.

Truong Vinh Ky school first-grade student’s homework

Showing the reporter her son’s notebook, T said: “The teacher only gave marks; she did not my show my son how to write. Thus it is I who has to act as teacher to show him how to write, not his real teacher”.

VietNamNet/TT