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Vietnam’s efforts to better teach its students English have encountered a problem as electronic reading pens, education officials’ latest initiative, are now regarded as inconvenient and ineffective by local English instructors.

The officials hoped that the devices, able to read encoded text when pointed at particular books, could help elementary and middle school students pronounce English words correctly, something Vietnamese teachers are unable to do thanks to their non-native accent.

But things have not gone as planned, because the English teachers argue that machines cannot outperform them in teaching pronunciation to students at an early age.

“We ourselves will have to correct their tongue positions if proper pronunciation is expected of elementary and middle school students,” said Giao, an English teacher at a middle school in Hanoi.

Some other English teachers in neighboring Hoa Binh Province said that students will have to incur extra costs, in addition to tuition and a matrix of fees, to buy the devices if they want to listen to the sounds they produce.

“Each of us is now provided with a reading pen,” a Hoa Binh teacher said. “But its loudspeaker is simply not loud enough for the whole class to hear, and even worse is that we do not have time to bring it to every student during a class session.”

Many pens produce distorted sounds while others fail to provide correct pronunciation, even though they cost VND1.5 million (US$72) to 2 million ($96) each, quite high by local living standards, many teachers complained.

Encrypted books are also a big problem as they are now in short supply, educators said at a recent conference in the capital.