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Listening is considered one of the most challenging language skills, so most of EFL learners find it difficult to get engaged in learning it. Various obstacles have been reported causing challenges for EFL learners in English listening comprehension. This study, therefore, aimed to explore EFL students’ learning engagement and their problems in English listening comprehension. The research was conducted at a high school in Ca Mau province, Vietnam with the participation of 180 tenth grade EFL students in answering the questionnaires. The collected quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS software. The findings revealed that EFL students got engaged in listening comprehension emotionally and agentically rather than behaviorally and cognitively, and their emotional engagement tended to be the most influential. It was also found out that EFL students sometimes faced different types of difficulties (perception problems, parsing problems and utilization problems) in their English listening comprehension.

Training teachers to meet the professional standards is one of the top missions prioritized by teacher training institutions. Nevertheless, how student-teachers’ teaching competency is assessed is considered as one of the most concerns by teacher trainers and educators. This study, therefore, aims at examining student teachers’ perception of their teaching competency assessed by a framework for assessing student teachers’ English teaching competency (FASTETC) in the TESOL methodology course at a Ho Chi Minh City-based university, Vietnam. The study involved 85 student teachers majoring in TESOL methodology in answering a self-evaluation questionnaire. The results indicated that the research participants realized they could meet the course outcomes and professional standards in terms of attitudes, knowledge and skills of English teaching methodology (ETM) and English language proficiency. Furthermore, student teachers were aware that their knowledge and skills of ETM outperformed their attitudes of ETM. Such preliminary results can encourage the use of a teaching competency framework for assessing and assuring the quality of student teachers’ teaching competency in similar contexts.

Phrasal verbs are considered an integral domain of linguistics in the English language. However, ESL/EFL students in different contexts seem to avoid using them in their academic writing, especially in English applied linguistics. This study aims at investigating the use of phrasal verbs in the research proposals among Vietnamese M.A. students who were studying at one university in Vietnam. Nineteen research proposals chosen in this study were categorized into five types, including TESOL Methodology, Discourse Analysis, Linguistics, Literature, and Translation. The data were analyzed by the software AntConc version 3.7.8. The findings of the study indicated that the participants had a tendency to avoid using phrasal verbs in their M.A. research proposals like those of the previous studies. Furthermore, they did not utilize many among top 100 common phrasal verbs in BNC by Gardner and Davies (2007). With respect to the functions of phrasal verbs, Vietnamese M.A. students used different subcategories in syntax and semantics. Nevertheless, they paid more attention to the use of transitive and inseparable phrasal verbs as well as phrasal verbs with semi-idiomatic and fully-idiomatic meanings.

It is undeniable that listening comprehension is a fundamental skill in the process of acquiring a language and plays a crucial part in communication although it is not an easy task which requires both background knowledge and linguistic understanding. Therefore, language learners are supposed to employ listening learning strategies to facilitate the process of decoding oral input. This study aimed at examining if the eleventh graders at Duong Van Duong high school used English listening learning strategies and then exploring the frequency of the students’ using these strategies. The present study is a mixed-methods research project in which both qualitative and quantitative data were collected through closed-ended questionnaire and semi-structured interview with the participation of 425 respondents and 20 interviewees. The results of the study indicated that a vast number of the participants employed listening learning strategies at different levels of frequency which were classified into three main groups, namely high use (e.g. cognitive and affective strategies), moderate use (e.g. metacognitive and social strategies) and low use (e.g. compensation and memory strategies).

Reading plays a vital role in improving second/foreign language learning as it can encourage the development of autonomous learners. Furthermore, ESL/EFL learners’ use of reading strategies can be affected by their learning motivation, which can result in the high or low frequent use of reading strategies in reading comprehension. The present study, therefore, investigated the motivation in English language learning and the use of reading strategies among English-majored freshmen at a university in Bac Lieu province, Vietnam. A questionnaire was used to collect data from 180 English-majored freshmen, six of whom took part in semi-structured interviews. The results showed that participants had a high level of motivation in English language learning, and their metacognitive strategies worked better with their reading comprehension than their cognitive and social/affective strategies. The study further unraveled that the more participants were motivated in English language learning, the more they employed metacognitive and cognitive strategies in reading comprehension.

This study aimed at exploring difculties of ESP (English for specifc purposes) reading comprehension faced by English-majored students at one university in Vietnam. Eighty English-majored students were involved in answering a close-ended questionnaire, and three ESP teachers were invited to participate in semi-structured interview. The findings showed that students did not have much trouble in dealing with reading ESP texts; nonetheless, it was sometimes seen that two common areas of difficulties in ESP reading comprehension students were faced with were unknown words and background knowledge of subject matters. This study further revealed that students did not confront much with difficulties of text coverage, organization structure, and grammar used in ESP reading texts.

This descriptive and qualitative study, part of a big project, endeavored to explore the syntactic features of the English discourse marker only and its Vietnamese translational equivalents. It involved the development of a bilingual corpus, which consisted of 168 English and 168 Vietnamese instances of sentences containing only. The interpretive contrastive analysis was employed. The findings reveal that only in English often comes in three positions, namely, initial, medial, final, whereas their Vietnamese equivalent usually appears in initial and medial positions. Additionally, there are more similarities than differences in terms of syntactic functions of only used in English and Vietnamese.