How is EFL teaching affected by high-stakes English tests?

At various educational levels in Vietnam, the employment of summative tests as an assessment tool for academic performances has been a common practice. At upper secondary level, standardized tests and their results have been used to decide students' graduation or university admission. The tests, therefore, can be said to be high-stakes, not only to students but teachers and administrators at Vietnamese high schools. As a result, learning and teaching are prone to changes under the effects of such high-stakes tests. This study aimed to identify the effects of the high-stakes English test in the National High school graduation exam on teaching of Vietnamese EFL teachers, which has not received much attention from researchers in the field. Using both a questionnaire and a follow-up interview with a group of 8 Vietnamese teachers, the study found that the teachers' teaching content and methodology were steered by the test. The extent of changes in those two teaching aspects, however, was not uniform among the teachers. There existed significant differences depending on how much the teachers related their own personal factors such as beliefs in effective teaching and test preparation to the contextual educational factors and the features of the test itself.