As part of the National Foreign Languages Project on renovating foreign language instruction, a new English assessment policy that incorporates alternative assessment into teaching English has been introduced to the school system of Vietnam. The current paper discusses the uptake of this innovation by investigating the perspectives and practices of public secondary school EFL teachers. A self-report questionnaire which includes both closed and open-ended questions to elicit quantitative data and qualitative comments was administered to a sample of 164 lower and upper secondary school teachers in four Mekong Delta’s provinces of Vietnam. The results showed that although the teachers were well aware and appreciative of the values of alternative assessment, they held a less positive perception towards the feasibility of those alternative assessment tasks that are so demanding and timeconsuming. They also expressed a weak belief in the importance of these methods to students’ development of proficiency. In practice, they reported rarely using these forms in their classrooms due to students’ proficiency, time and workload pressures, which possibly suggests an interaction of contextual factors with a lack of confidence in implementing them. The results offer useful implications for educators and administrators in terms of EFL teachers’ professional development, training and change support.