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Vietnamese find it hard to use … mother tongue

Update 26/12/2012 - 07:49:15 AM (GMT+7)

Many Vietnamese have difficulty in using their mother tongue because the teaching of the language has been ignored at most universities, a college lecturer said in an exclusive article for Tuoi Tre.

Vo Anh Tuan, a lecturer at Ho Sen University located in Ho Chi Minh City, said that 90 to 95 percent of the students once attending his Vietnamese skill classes admitted they “understand but don’t know how to express themselves in mother tongue.”

A higher percentage said they “can speak but fail to write down their ideas,” Tuan added.

The academician said that engineers at many construction firms are really afraid of preparing documents in Vietnamese.

“Almost all of the engineers I have contacted said that they can think of ideas but writing them out is simply impossible,” Tuan said.

Vo Anh Tuan, a lecturer at Ho Sen University located in Ho Chi Minh City, complained that since the current curricula focus mostly on Vietnamese literature and not on Vietnamese communication, many students lack practical writing and reasoning skills in their native language.

The lecturer quoted Dr. Tran Van Tieng, Dean of the Oriental Languages and Cultures Department, as remarking that a strong command of Vietnamese will help students, especially majors in business administration, international relations, and hospitality, confidently communicate with others in a business environment.

The instructor of general knowledge and skills cited an HR manager of a company in the southern province of Binh Duong as saying that his subordinates, including law majors, frequently misspell words in writing reports while they can smoothly speak their mind.

People working in the media industry are surprisingly among the most frequent misspellers, Tuan said, citing a report by group of experts from Hanoi.

Omission

Many junior colleges and universities currently pay little heed to the teaching of Vietnamese, Tuan pointed out.

“The majority of public junior colleges and universities, except for pedagogical schools and some social sciences and humanities establishments, do not run courses in practical Vietnamese, let alone natural sciences institutions,” he observed.

He specified that practical Vietnamese courses are not included in the current training programs of most faculties of the natural sciences universities under the Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh City, which is made up of the country’s top-tier universities.

The situation is far worse at private junior colleges and universities, considered to offer lower-quality education than their public counterparts, he said, adding that some of them stopped running Vietnamese courses in 2009 even though they had taught them earlier.