Developing Vietnamese Learning Courses for International Learners: Lessons Learned from Teachers’ Perspectives

Abstract

Educational institutions have placed increasing importance on internationalizing their curricula over the past few decades as a determining strategy to prepare their learners for employment in the global economy. Internationalization of curriculum, particularly at the level of course development, provides an opportunity for teachers to infuse an international dimension into their courses to increase learners’ interest and motivation, and more importantly, to engage learners in authentic and critical regional and global issues that help them understand and analyze their place in this complex interconnected world. At the Center of Foreign Languages of Can Tho University in Vietnam, the program of teaching Vietnamese is designed to offer Vietnamese language courses to foreigners and overseas Vietnamese. This descriptive study was conducted with a group of 7 teachers at the Center who are teaching Vietnamese to international learners from various nationalities with the aim to understand the teachers’ perceptions of an effective internationalized course and to identify successful strategies to internationalize the courses. The results from the survey and a semi-structured interview revealed that localization and standardization are two significant factors affecting the success of internationalizing Vietnamese learning courses.