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Abstract
Despite a long historical French presence in Vietnam, only 0.5% of Vietnamese people speak French today. As in other countries of South East Asia, language instruction in Vietnam has mainly focused on English for several decades. This paper provides an overview of a project called ‘French bilingual classes’. The main aim of the study is to analyze the benefits and the challenges identified by local teachers and researchers who have been involved in this program. The data are extracted from a corpus of 62 out of 468 papers written in French and presented during the annual Seminar on Action Research organized from 1999 to 2009 in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. The analysis of this discursive resource illustrates an overall acknowledgment of the positive outcomes of the program. However, in concordance with studies of English language teaching in Vietnam, the pitfalls identified in our corpus indicate that the major challenge is the implementation of a learner-centered and an action-oriented pedagogy in an educational context generally qualified as traditional. By providing new insights on bilingual education in Vietnam, our study will contribute to the current debate regarding the sustainability of innovative language curricula and multilingual education in the Asian context.
Notes
1The official name was long and unclear (‘Enseignement Intensif Du et En Français’ – EIDEF – Intensive Teaching of French and in French), so generic terms such as ‘bilingual classes’ and ‘French bilingual program’ have rapidly replaced it.
2For example, 2000_01_VVD for a single quotation in a specific category, or 2003_02_DKV_1,2,3 to indicate the detail of the quotation when several extracts have been identified in the same segment. For clarity purpose, only the most representative quotations are referenced in brackets.