The emergence of English as a global lingua franca, coupled with the profound impact of globalisation and neoliberalism in language policy planning, has influenced the Vietnamese Government to embark on a national foreign language project, aiming to enhance the English capacity of school students. New English curricula and textbooks were developed, adhering to the principles of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). This study is an attempt to explore teacher attitude and understanding of the new curriculum and its pedagogic underpinning. Data obtained from a teacher survey (n=347) and interviews (n=16) reveal doubts and negative attitude among teachers about the feasibility of the curriculum goal. The findings also indicate that teachers had an incomplete understanding of CLT, along with a range of local challenges to the successful enactment of the new communicative curriculum. Implications are proposed in light of these findings, including the need to adapt rather adopt CLT and the prioritisation of teacher professional development, among other structural changes.