Situated in the Vietnamese context, this article argues that rather than sideline knowledge of learners in favour of subject matter knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge as the basis of the knowledge base of LTE, prominence should be given to knowledge of learners if teachers' competence to teach responsively is desired.

This paper reports a study that examined the categories of pedagogical knowledge (knowledge related to the act of teaching) of novice ESL teachers as gleaned from their verbal reports of what they were thinking about while teaching and compared these categories to those found for experienced teachers in an earlier study (Gatbonton, 1999). The goal…