High-school students’ perception of the American War through literature: a case study from Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam

ABSTRACT

The present case study explores the reception of American War literature among Vietnamese high-school students. In April and May 2020, seventy-seven seventeen-year-old students from Lê Hồng Phong High School for the Gifted (Hồ Chí Minh City) participated in this study by answering Google form surveys about literary texts that form part of the Vietnamese national curriculum. The main findings show that 86% of the students deem it necessary to study literary works about the American War because of the historical and documentary value they provide. A vast majority of participants (95%) would be interested in reading literary texts written by American authors to learn about the war from a transnational perspective. This would require an alternative approach to the teaching of the American War in general, and its literary works in particular, with a revision of the national curriculum to include a wider variety of texts and authors.

KEYWORDS:

• American War literature
• peace
• high-school Vietnamese students
• Hồ Chí Minh City
• perception of the American War
• Vietnamese national curriculum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Statement of confirmation

I, Tú Anh Hà, hereby confirm that the manuscript has not been published elsewhere in any form, including in another language.

Notes

1. This paper will adopt the form 'American War' in accordance with the way the conflict is referred to in the Vietnamese national curriculum today. 'American War' is the short for ‘Resistance War against America’ [Kháng chiến chống Mỹ].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tú-Anh Hà

Tú-Anh Hà finished her Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree in Play and Education, Toys and Languages at the University of Cordoba (Spain), Poly-technical Institute of Lisbon (Portugal) and University of Marmara (Turkey) as well as her Master Degree in Learning and Teaching English as a second language in University Rovira i Virgili, Spain. Currently, she is a lecturer at Department of English, FPT University (Vietnam). She is interested in bilingual education, education for sustainable development, focusing on minorities (such as refugees, migrants, ethnics, etc). Her research interests include applying literature, drama and play as methods of integrating equality and equity in the class, education for peace, intercultural education, and early childhood education.

Andrea Roxana Bellot is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of English and German Studies, University Rovira i Virgili (URV), Tarragona, Spain. She holds a BA in English Philology by the University of Barcelona, and she earned her PhD at URV in 2014. Her teaching and research interests fall into the areas of language and literature teaching, and the literary and cultural representations of war.

Thùy Phương Thị Lê is a Philology teacher at Le Hong Phong High school for the Gifted in Ho Chi Minh City. Her research interests include methods of teaching philology for high school students. She can be contacted at: [email protected]