Lecturers of English in Vietnam: the commodification of their knowledge and expertise

Though a communist country, the Vietnamese government has accepted that it must be involved in global trade with non-communist countries if it is to raise the living standards of its people. Part of this involvement has been the increasing use of English, the lingua franca of trade, in Vietnam. English is taught at all stages of education, from primary school to university. My study focused on the teaching of English by Vietnamese university lecturers. Most lecturers were poorly paid, and to increase their incomes, they taught English outside as well as inside the university. In my study, teaching outside one’s university was described as moonlighting, though it should be noted that this teaching was not carried out covertly. The theoretical insights of Bourdieu guided my work. I used his concepts of field, capital, disposition, and habitus to examine how English lecturers commodified their English expertise and thereby acquired various forms of capital in the university field. I used Bourdieu’s three-step approach to analysing the data I collected by focusing on: (1) the field of interest; (2) the capital held by players in the field; and (3) the habitus and strategies used by players as they competed in the field. Data were collected through interviews (with 24 lecturers, 8 university administrators, and 8 managers of private English centres) and an online survey to lecturers (114 completed the survey). The university was the field of interest. Vietnamese universities varied in the extent to which they were autonomous or heteronomous institutions. The more autonomous universities were prestigious public universities allowed by the government to exercise a degree of control over their operation. Universities in rural and remote areas tended to be more heteronomous, poorer, under stricter control by the government. It was difficult for them to attract students because students preferred universities in urban areas. Lecturers in these rural and remote universities exercised little control over their academic lives because they could not attract sufficient students to their classes and they were poorly paid. Lecturers’ age, qualifications, experience, university affiliation, and gender affected the capital they accumulated and the moonlighting they undertook. Lecturers with desirable qualifications, especially PhDs from overseas universities, were likely to work in the more prestigious universities in major cities. These highly qualified lecturers moonlighted to enhance their economic capital, but, in addition to economic capital, they moonlighted to enhance their cultural capital (improved teaching skills and opportunities for joint research projects with lecturers from other universities) and their social capital (broadened their academic circles). With enhanced cultural and social capital, these lecturers could apply for promotion and hence enhance their symbolic capital. However, there were downsides to moonlighting for many poorly paid lecturers working outside the prestigious universities. They had to moonlight to provide a living for themselves and their families. Too much moonlighting reduced the quality of their teaching inside the university and reduced the time they could devote to research. This in turn reduced their chances of promotion.