Accountability asymmetry in outsourced ELT: Classroom authority in Vietnamese secondary schools

Abstract

The expansion of outsourced English language teaching (ELT) has created hybrid governance arrangements in which internationally recruited teachers assume classroom responsibility within public school systems while operating under private contractual oversight. This study employs analytical autoethnography to examine how classroom authority is mediated across three Vietnamese secondary school contexts. Drawing on one academic term of teaching experience, the analysis explores how institutional backing, accountability design, and symbolic positioning interact to shape authority stability. The findings indicate that classroom authority is not primarily determined by individual teaching style or strictness, but by the alignment between institutional co-presence and enforcement capacity. Where disciplinary responsibility is delegated without corresponding enforcement capacity, authority becomes fragile and is reinterpreted as individual failure while obscuring structural conditions. This pattern is conceptualized as accountability asymmetry, whereby responsibility is localized at the teacher while enforcement authority remains institutionally distributed and structural conditions remain invisible in evaluative processes. Although embodied foreignness may enhance student engagement, it does not substitute for institutional legitimacy. The study suggests that classroom instability in outsourced ELT contexts is structurally mediated and has implications for governance design, institutional integration, and accountability in transnational education systems.