impact

Service-Learning (SL) has been internationally gaining in popularity in the field of teacher education in higher education thanks to its benefits. However, this pedagogical method is still new in some EFL higher education settings like Vietnam. This qualitative study investigates the undergraduate students’ attitudes after their implementation of an SL-integrated teaching practicum unit at some EFL community classes. In the study, seventy-eight fourth-year students of English in the pedagogy sector at a department of English of a university of foreign languages in Central Vietnam were involved as participants. They were guided to contact community learners of English, observe classes, design lesson plans, do micro-teachings, and finally write reflections. The findings from the reflections revealed that all of the students had positive attitudes towards SL and the teaching practicum unit, which made impacts on their personal growth, classroom management skills, profession, and community-related aspects. Recommendations concerning how to make SL and SL-integrated courses more effective were put forward at the end of the research study.

Iranian National University Entrance Exam (INUEE) as a nationwide high-stakes test is held annually to screen Iranian high school graduates and admit them into higher education programs in universities. This high-stakes examination has a wide range of impacts on test takers as the primary stake-holders and the parents, teachers, and high school principals as the secondary stakeholders. This study reports the impacts of INUEE on high school teachers and principals. To this aim, 27 teachers and 18 principals from three western provinces of Iran sat for a structured interview. Each interview lasted nearly 30 minutes. All the interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. Next, following the Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) as the basis of analysis, the transcriptions were subjected to content analysis to extract common patterns and recurring themes. Content analysis was applied to codify the transcribed interview data through an inductive process of frequent moving back and forth to extract common patterns and recurring themes of the data. After coding and 'quantitizing' the data (Dörnyei, 2007), the basic themes were identified, frequency counted, and tabulated. The results indicated that from the majority of the participants' perspective, the INUEE has detrimental consequences for students, teachers, school principals, and the educational curriculum. The findings of the study underscore the consequential invalidity and unfairness of the test and its negative impacts on different aspects of the educational system. The findings provide practical implications for educational policy-makers, school principals, and teachers highlighting the necessity of their awareness of negative consequences of INUEE.