In the trend of globalization and the massive educational reforms in Vietnam, defining and redefining the teachers’ teaching philosophy is essential to encourage the changes to better suit the new era of learning situations. This paper investigates the ELT teachers’ cognitive tendency between the borderline of oppressive education and critical theories for emancipation using an empirical study. The ELT teachers in different types of institutions were selected to do the survey with open-ended questions for data collection regarding their teaching reality and demands of the future transformation in their career. The data was then analyzed using Padilla’s technique of unfolding matrix to classify the data relevant to different categories which could be recognized in different critical pedagogical perspectives of Paulo Freire, Jacques Rancière, and Gert Biesta. The research findings imply that the ELT participants contradict themselves between their teaching reality and their future demands for the next generations of language learners although they claim the thorough understandings of how the languages should be learned in the contemporary era.