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This is a result of a pilot study undertaken to explore the key influences shaping the schooling and education of Thai ethnic students living in rural mountain villages in one of the poorest and least educated regions of Vietnam. This study used a qualitative multiple case study approach and gathered information using multiple semi-structured interviews with four senior secondary students, their parents and their teachers. Two of these students were males and two were female, and two were achieving high grades while the others were receiving low grades. During the interviews, information was collected on the influence of families, Thai culture and identity, the school, school policies, teaching practices, school resources, the physical environment, weather, and school relationships on student learning and well-being. In relation to school relationships information was collected on teacher-student, student-peer and school-parent relationships. This study took a socio-ecological approach. In analysing the data collected, 15 key influences were identified that shaped the schooling and education of the four study participants. These influences were: economic vulnerability and hardship of families, special challenges for students travelling to and from school, commitment to after school duties on the family farm, the parents lack of education and schooling, problems relating to the national curriculum and how it is taught, lack of special support for students learning Vietnamese as a second language, use of a teacher-centred pedagogy rather than a student-centred one, limited learning support when students had learning difficulties, the impact of grades and level of academic achievement on motivation and engagement, lack of recognition of Thai culture and identity, student perceptions of social difference, impact of teacher-student and student-peer relationships on student learning, students use of coping strategies, limited school facilities and teaching resources, and teachers who have received limited training and professional development.

This paper examines the possibility of viewing TESOL teachers' identities through the metaphor of 'poet-teachers', viewing second language teachers as creative and collaborative meaning-makers. We analyzed interviews, poems and classroom discourse among 16 Chinese, Vietnamese and English L1 speakers who participated in poetry writing course as a component of their TESOL teacher preparation curriculum. We identified three qualities related to poetic habits of TESOL teacher identity. Firstly, "creative (l)imitation" which enhances their identities as connected to and expanding from past structures, yielding new future selves. Secondly, the practice of "surprising oneself" in and through an L2, shifting scripted perceptions of language learning toward improvisational play. Lastly, teaching poetry illuminated the ways in which the language classroom becomes a site for dialogic collaboration, two-way exchanges where creative meaning-making can occur for both teacher and student alike. The results suggest "imitation, surprise, and collaboration" can create emotionally and linguistically rewarding experiences, encouraging the TESOL educator to identify as co-learners and to grow as interactive producers of meaning, not just passive instructors and receptors of language form.

Informed by Dörnyei's L2 Motivational Self System and intended to fill a gap in learning motivation research on languages other than English (LOTEs), this study investigated learners' motivation for three language clusters -- Southeast Asian (Vietnamese, Thai and Malay), Northeast Asian (Japanese and Korean) and European (German, Spanish and French) -- and compared the results against the same learners' English learning motivation. Regression analyses revealed that for all three language groups, the strongest predictors of intended effort were learning experience, followed by ideal self and culture/community interest. Ought-to self and instrumentality, both promotional and preventive, were ruled out in all three LOTE regression models. The significance of learning experience as a motivational predictor was comparatively new in LOTE-related findings. These learners' English learning motivation presented a similar but more complicated picture, with predictive variables being, in descending order, learning attitude, culture/community interest, learning experience, ideal self and instrumentality. While externally imposed motivators played a role in English, they did not do so for the same learners in LOTE situations. Discrepancies with earlier results concerning LOTE motivation as well as with similar learner populations are discussed. Implications for both pedagogical practice and the theoretical development of foreign language motivation are suggested.

This essay comprises multiple sets of dialogues between us as colleagues and friends as we revisit the question of the status of English as a global language. Through the metaphor 'multiple classrooms of life', we share reflections and narratives arising out of our experiences with English that are embedded in our professional work, scholarship, pedagogy and creative interests. Our discussion encompasses a range of artefacts, including excerpts from our diaries, poems, vignettes, visuals, letters, songs and anecdotes. This amalgam of materials represents our personal engagement with English, as distinct from treating the spread of English simply as a metanarrative played out at a remove from personal experience. We reconstruct 'sparkle moments' arising from personal encounters and social interactions that have caused us to reflect on the role of English in our lives. We thus focus on ideology as personally felt and lived from within and through inter-personal interactions.

Because English is widely used as a lingua franca, language testers have started to consider the introduction of non-native accents into English listening tests. This study investigates how accents influence test-takers' performance, and also elicits test-takers' subjective perception of accents. Eighty adolescent L1-Mandarin test takers were divided into four groups of equal proficiency, with each group listening to one accented version of the same English listening test. The test input was delivered in Australian, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Mandarin-accented English varieties with tasks measuring lexical and propositional comprehension and consisting of picture selection, true/false, and gap completion items. Test-takers' perceptions of accent familiarity, comprehensibility, and their attitudes were also measured. Results indicate that the test takers who received Mandarin-accented input performed best, lending support to a shared-L1 effect, with the strongest advantage for lexical comprehension. No significant difference was observed in test scores among the groups exposed to non-Mandarin accents. Findings also reveal that the type of accent was not significantly related to test-takers' attitude toward it. The central implication from this study is that there is potential for the inclusion of non-native accents into listening tests for adolescent learners if the shared-L1 effect can be addressed.

An ontology is an effective formal representation of knowledge used commonly in artificial intelligence, semantic web, software engineering, and information retrieval. In open and distance learning, ontologies are used as knowledge bases for e-learning supplements, educational recommenders, and question answering systems that support students with much needed resources. In such systems, ontology construction is one of the most important phases. Since there are abundant documents on the Internet, useful learning materials can be acquired openly with the use of an ontology. However, due to the lack of system support for ontology construction, it is difficult to construct self-instructional materials for Vietnamese people. In general, the cost of manual acquisition of ontologies from domain documents and expert knowledge is too high. Therefore, we present a support system for Vietnamese ontology construction using pattern-based mechanisms to discover Vietnamese concepts and conceptual relations from Vietnamese text documents. In this system, we use the combination of statistics-based, data mining, and Vietnamese natural language processing methods to develop concept and conceptual relation extraction algorithms to discover knowledge from Vietnamese text documents. From the experiments, we show that our approach provides a feasible solution to build Vietnamese ontologies used for supporting systems in education. (Contains 6 tables, 7 figures and 10 online resources.)

Drawing upon the literature on the history of the language teaching methods focusing on the use of L1 in L2 teaching, the debate surrounding the role of L1 in the L2 classroom in general and in the English classroom in particular and recent studies of the issue, this article presents at its core a study that investigated the attitudes of Vietnamese university teachers toward the use of Vietnamese in English Language Teaching (ELT) in the context of Vietnam. A total of 12 teachers from three universities in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam participated in the study. The data was collected via questionnaire and semi-structured interview. The findings support the judicious use of Vietnamese in some situations in ELT. The results also highlight that the use of Vietnamese is not the same in all ELT classrooms. Instead, it should be adapted to suit the context of a specific classroom.

Purpose: Sequential bilingual children in the United States often speak 2 languages that have different social statuses (minority-majority) and separate contexts for learning (home-school). Thus, distinct factors may support the development of each language. This study examined which child internal and external factors were related to vocabulary skills in a minority language versus English. Method: Participants included 69 children, aged 5-8 years, who lived in Southern California, spoke Vietnamese as the home language, and received school instruction in English. All participants had at least 1 foreign-born parent, and most mothers reported limited English proficiency. Parents completed a telephone survey, and children completed measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary in each language. Using correlations and stepwise regression, we examined predictors of vocabulary skills in each language that were internal to the child (age, gender, analytical reasoning, phonological memory) or that pertained to the surrounding environment (cumulative exposure, quantity and quality of input/output). Results: Vietnamese vocabulary outcomes were related to multiple external factors, of which input and enrichment activities were the best predictors. In contrast, English vocabulary outcomes were related to internal factors, of which age and phonological memory were the best predictors. Parental use of Vietnamese contributed to children's Vietnamese vocabulary outcomes but was not related to children's English vocabulary outcomes. Conclusions: Vietnamese exposure does not hinder English development. Children from immigrant families are learning English with or without familial support. Rich and frequent exposure and opportunities for practice are essential for the continued development of a minority first language.

This study explores the interplay between early reading, identity and bilingualism. Reading identities, or understandings about what reading is and whom one is as a reader, have been linked to reading achievement and the development of reading skills. Only a small portion of the overall research on reading identities has included dual language learners. This exploratory study provides a description of the reading identities of three dual language learners in prekindergarten. Data include child-centered interviews, child and classroom observations, teacher interviews and a family questionnaire. Methods centered on the use of child-oriented data collection protocols, and the inclusion of children in the interpretation of their own work and language. Through the exploration of three cases, this study documents the ways that reading identities were constructed, taken up and expressed by the participants. This study provides evidence that dual language learners are actively constructing ideas about reading, bilingualism/biliteracy, and whom they are as readers as they learn to read. These findings show that framing early reading in an identity perspective presents opportunities to look more holistically at the language and reading practices of dual language learners as they learn to read and navigate two or more languages at home and school.

This study used a brief vocabulary training paradigm to examine two factors for cross-language transfer: how similar the first language (L1) is to the second language (L2) and L1-L2 proficiency levels. Fifty-four sequential bilingual children (aged 6-8) with similar L2 English proficiency levels were assigned to three equal groups: a Vietnamese-English group with low L1 proficiency, a Spanish-English group with low L1 proficiency, and a Spanish-English group with high L1 proficiency. Individual training consisted of two mediated learning experiences conducted in the L1 targeting eight vocabulary items using narrative-based activities. Four of eight target words were cognates between Spanish and English. Pre- and posttesting measured definition quality in the L1 and L2. All groups showed improvement in the L1 following training, but only the Spanish-English group with high L1 proficiency improved in L2 English, revealing a degree of spontaneous cross-language transfer among children with high L1-L2 proficiency.

The aim of this study was to present a protocol for the validation of the Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) System's conversational turn count (CTC) for Vietnamese speakers. Ten families of children aged between 22 and 42 months, recruited near Ho Chi Minh City, participated in this project. Each child wore the LENA audio recorder for a full day. Two native speakers listened to 10-min extracts of the recordings from each family and labeled conversational turns according to the coding protocol. Their results were compared with the findings from the LENA software. A Spearman rank correlation test indicated a strong level of correlation between the LENA software and the human coders, r[subscript s](18) = 0.70, p < 0.001. The LENA System's CTC provides a reasonably accurate estimate of conversational turns in Vietnamese recordings, showing that this protocol can yield significant results. Discrepancies between the coders and the software are discussed, and the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed protocol are highlighted.

Drawing on the recent call for repositioning youth as creative and responsible agents in language and education research (e. g., McCarty & Wyman, 2009) and the notion of engaged ethnography (e.g., Davis & Phyak, 2015), the researcher engaged 16 minority student youth in a remote mountainous province in Vietnam in interrogating the realities of the current language policies (LP) while working actively with them to give rise to effective and responsive LP transformations. Youth's resistance to the current LP, their critical awareness of their linguistic wealth, and their comprehensive recommendations for LP improvements greatly affirm themselves as resourceful and responsible agents in decision-making and pedagogical revitalizations. This article calls for respecting and recognizing youth's power, voices, and rights, and invites them to deconstruct educational policies to promote multilingualism and effective educational change. Towards this end, I discuss implications to promote youth engagement in language education policies and practices.

This paper reports a study that investigated the role of prior native or first language (L1) phonological and phonetic learning on the integration of vowel quality features in the production of second language (L2) vowels by examining adult L2 Korean learners' production of Vietnamese monophthong vowels in an imitation and a read aloud tasks. Three groups of participants took part in the study (11 control Vietnamese, 11 Korean learners of Vietnamese, and 10 control Korean). The stimuli consisted of 9 Vietnamese monophthongs [foreign characters omitted] and 8 Standard Korean vowels [foreign characters omitted]. The results showed that Vietnamese vowels [foreign character omitted] and /e/ produced by Korean learners merged in vowel space, proving how a phonemic merger in L1 can influence speakers' perception and production of non-native vowels. Moreover, the three Vietnamese vowels [foreign characters omitted] produced by Korean learners in both tasks tend to cluster together. In general, the findings of this study showed that Korean learners transfer their L1 vowel quality features into the production of Vietnamese vowels.

This paper examines the intonation of English statements and questions produced by Vietnamese speakers at two differing levels of proficiency. The goal of the study is three-fold: (1) analysing the final tunes and the prosodic structure observed in information-seeking questions, namely Yes-No question, Or-question, Tag-question and Wh-question, (2) evaluating which characteristics of the L2 English intonation can be clearly derived from the observation of the data, and (3) whether the L2 English intonation patterns are transferred from Vietnamese. A data set of 25 sentences that included 5 statements and 20 information-seeking questions were constructed. Ten native Australian English speakers as a control group and 20 Southern Vietnamese speakers of English (10 beginners and 10 advanced speakers) were recorded. The final tunes (the direction of the final F0 contours) of the sentences were analysed. The result showed that while the advanced speakers of English mostly produced intonation patterns that are typically used by native English speakers, beginning speakers of English used a variety of tunes, several of which are deviate from the native-like standard and clearly transferred from the tone contours in Vietnamese. The findings of this study have an original and significant contribution to the literature because it investigated into the prosodic transfer of intonation patterns between two typologically distinct languages: English, a stress accent language and Vietnamese, a contrastive contour tone language and has implications for intonation teaching.

This article examines a group of Vietnamese ethnic minority students' language attitudes towards formal and informal language policies of the domains of school, church and ethnic community and towards their individual bilingualism. Multiple semi-structured interviews with eight college-age minority students are used as the main source of the data. Findings reveal that school language policy contributed to shaping the students' view of "language-as-problem" in valuing Vietnamese, while church and community language policies shaped the "language-as-right" orientation in relation to their first language. Under the mixed influences of language policies of these domains, the students considered their bilingualism as a "resource" that could help them to maintain their ethnic features and join the mainstream flow simultaneously. Being aware of the sample size and other methodological considerations, we suggest that there may not be essential conflicts between bilingual identity and national solidarity in the same minority language speaker in a polity such as Vietnam. Based on these insights, we would like to consider language diversity, bilingualism and cultural heterogeneity as a resource rather than a problem in defining language policies for national development and social inclusion and harmony in Vietnam.

As a way to examine the validity of deficit perspectives on multicultural children in South Korea--namely, children of mixed parentage who are said to suffer from speech problems and school failure, this study examined their everyday and academic Korean proficiency and its association with their educational achievements. The primary data sources for this study included fieldnotes produced over 11 months of fieldwork at three focal students' homes and schools, their academic records and their academic vocabulary test results. Adopting an ethnography of an embedded case studies method, this paper employed inductive thematic analysis. This study revealed that multicultural children did not exhibit any difficulty in communicating with others in everyday Korean but that they had varying degrees of academic vocabulary mastery. This study further confirmed the tight relationship between academic vocabulary knowledge and school success. In addition to the discussion of conditions that could widen the gaps in academic vocabulary repertoire among children, this paper called for more explicit academic vocabulary instruction for children in need, regardless of their multicultural background.

This study reviews empirical data from the U.S. Census, American Community Survey (ACS) and academic journals to explore K-12 and higher educational outcomes pertaining to Southeast Asian American (SEAA) males. We argue that the empirical dismissal of SEAA males in social science research reinforces a longstanding agenda of structural neglect and invisibility. By disaggregating some of the existing data for Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese subgroups from the broader "Asian" group, we hope to repudiate the model minority myth and stereotypes related to masculinity. Findings revealed that SEAA males had K-12 and higher educational outcomes that contradict the standard conception of academic and financial success. We situate the findings of the article in a discussion of intersectionality and the mainstream cultural forces that impact SEAA males.

Help seeking is regarded as an important learning strategy that reflects students' metacognitive and domainspecific skills and knowledge. This study developed a proactive online discussion forum that strengthens social networks in an online discussion forum to facilitate help seeking for problem solving. This forum allowed students to proactively invite friends or potential experts to participate in problem solving. A quasiexperimental approach was conducted with a sample of 37 students. The students' behaviors of problem solving, ego network patterns of problem solving, and perceptions of help seeking were addressed as dependent variables to assess the effect of the proactive online discussion forum. The analysis results revealed that the students in the experimental group exhibited more frequent participation in problem solving, and showed more positive attitudes towards help seeking. The results also indicated that the experimental group demonstrated more in-depth participation patterns of ego networks. The findings provide some evidence for the effectiveness of the proactive online discussion forum in terms of promoting students' participation in problem solving and their attitudes towards help seeking.

This article reports on language narratives in the ecology of a Vietnamese community language school (VCLS) in Australia. The study takes a dialogical perspective, where the stories about language that informants in the research setting tell are understood to shape and be shaped by the contexts in which they are told. Systematic analysis of deictics, reported speech and evaluative indexicals in stories told during 19 interviews with 34 students, teachers and administrators (20 hours 53 mins) was conducted to investigate how informants talk about language and language use and how this impacts on the language learning environment in that context. The results show how narratives both echo and contest ideas about language and language planning in the wider context. The "narrative of separate multilingualism" echoes monolingual views of language, advocating separate spaces for the use and development of different languages. In contrast, the "narrative of flexible multilingualism" frames multilingual practices as a natural part of daily life and at the VCLS, but constrained in other spaces. The study illustrates the gap between multilingual practices and monolingual ideologies and approaches to language education. It contributes to the literature calling for revised approaches to language education planning and multilingualism in Australia.

The teaching and assessment of essay writing at primary schools throughout Vietnam is regulated by the Ministry of Education and Training. The analytical error-recognition method of assessment, however, does not facilitate direct interpretation of students' writing competence. In this study, which involved samples of Grade 5 students in five provinces in Vietnam, a combination of traditional and partial credit scoring rubrics was developed to enable data analysis using the Rasch model. Based on such analysis, a continuum of writing ability at Grade 5 level was identified and a mastery level defined in terms of writing skills. The study has implications for possible changes in future assessment and marking schemes.

This case centers on a Vietnamese language and culture program situated within an urban context. It illustrates how sociohistorical and geopolitical contexts interplay in understanding relations within schools as well as school-community relations. A new ethnoburb creates both opportunities and challenges for the Vietnamese community related to cross-ethnic dynamics and the way interactions are shaped bureaucratically, socially, and politically. Increasing proximity of differences produced through processes of urbanization provides opportunity for school and community leaders to examine mechanisms (assumptions about difference, bureaucratic expedience, socio-political power, notions of "natural" social hierarchies, etc.) by which in/tolerance and alienation are produced.

This study examines the under-explored phenomenon in Vietnamese tertiary settings of code-switching practised by EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers in classroom instruction, as well as their awareness of this practice. Among the foreign languages taught and learned in Vietnamese universities, English is the most popular. The research design involved data-driven analysis of 12 teachers' code-switching behaviour in the EFL classroom from four different main sources of information: classroom observations, class recordings, interviews with the observed teachers, and field notes. The findings show that teachers practised code-switching very commonly in their English instruction, for both pedagogical and affective reasons. Code-switching, when done deliberately and selectively, can be a positive strategy to use in the EFL classroom, but not if done habitually and automatically. Since code-switching is a natural occurrence amongst bilingual speakers, teacher training programs may need to include code-switching as a deliberate teaching strategy. In addition, before any government policy or guidelines on code-switching are introduced, teachers need specific training on strategies for its effect use. The interviews with the Vietnamese university EFL teachers revealed key reasons for their code-switching in the EFL classroom, which are similar to those found in other studies. These are examined with a pedagogical and affective focus.

As the younger generation in Vietnam increasingly switches between the English and the Vietnamese languages, numerous linguistic and sociocultural strictures arise. Foregrounding the preservice English-language teachers of this generation, this article locates them in a dilemma between the discourse of globalization and their code-switching practices, on the one hand, and the moral-guide duty they are expected to fulfil within the discourse of linguistic nationalism on the other hand. Drawing on a case study conducted with survey questionnaires (N = 483) and focusing on interviews and focus groups (N = 15), this article reports the confusion, the decisions, and the negotiations made by different preservice teachers as they were faced with this dilemma. Particularly underlining the theme of negotiation, the article proposes certain changes to the English-language-teacher training curriculum in Vietnam.