Speaker
Description
Textbook adaptation is common in Vietnamese EFL classrooms, yet the teacher-centred decision processes that produce everyday changes remain insufficiently described. Drawing on Borg’s work on teacher cognition and a Vygotskian sociocultural activity perspective, this qualitative study examines adaptation as professional agency enacted within institutional constraints through semi-structured interviews with ten in-service teachers, analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings show that adaptation functions as a routine practice of autonomy with alignment: teachers treat the textbook as a curricular spine by preserving core aims and sequencing while reshaping peripheral activities to sustain access, participation, and lesson coherence for particular groups. Modification and addition emerged as the dominant, lower-risk strategies for calibrating difficulty and localising content through adjustments to task procedures, interaction formats, prompts, and examples. By contrast, omission and substitution operated as higher-risk interventions used when activities were judged unable to achieve their intended curricular function under time, level, or programme pressures. Decision making was shaped by an ecology of three interacting domains, wherein teacher cognition and affect calibrated the scope of change, learner variance and engagement needs acted as immediate triggers, and institutional mandates set boundaries for acceptable adaptation. The session will offer a practice-grounded model of adaptation decision-making and targeted implications for mentoring, teacher education, and materials development to strengthen principled, context-sensitive teacher agency in comparable EFL contexts.
