Looking at students reading Kieu stories, singing Tuong and acting as Xuy Van pretending to be crazy, lecturer Le Thi Bich Huong of the Department of Asian and North African Studies in Ca' Foscari Venezia University in Italy said that she sometimes can't believe she can do what many people have considered useless.
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At a class to teach Vietnamese language |
She recalled while others slept 8 hours a day, she only took a 2-hour nap. Because she didn't have money to rent premises, she had no choice but to pick up students at home while serving meals. Teaching one or a dozen students, she carefully prepared their syllabi. When she heard that some women opened a class to teach Vietnamese to a few students, she also prepared a lesson to help them. Then she came up with extra-curricular activities such as practicing Cheo, Tuong, Quan Ho Vietnamese traditional drama to nurture students’ culture in addition to Vietnamese language lessons.
When it comes to teaching and keeping Vietnamese and Vietnamese culture in Italy, people can immediately understand how difficult it is. The country is shaped like a boot stretching along the sea, and each city is dotted with a few dozen Vietnamese settlers, totaling about 5,000-6,000 people, which is nothing compared to the number of Vietnamese in big cities in Poland, Germany, Czech, France, and the US.
Students studied the Vietnamese language for three years, but they in fact learnt Vietnamese in three months. It took her 4 hours a day to go to and back between Bologna and Venice, plus extracurricular activities, so she and her students were racing against the time. She felt so proud that nine students received their bachelor's degrees in the first class of 2019 – 2022; moreover, 6 more students graduated in June. She will welcome more students in September.
Even in lovely Belgium with about 13,000 Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Belgian people, it is not easy to organize classes. Every summer, it is expected enough students to start in September. Vietnamese class is a project started in 2012 by the Belgium-Vietnam Alliance (BVA), with great merits of Mr. Huynh Cong My - now the President of the General Association of Vietnamese in Belgium. About a year later, Ms. Nguyen Bich Diep went to Brussels and joined hands with the project.
Ms. Diep recollected that after she had joined for a year, two classes for adults were organized besides a children's class which was maintained from the beginning. Expenditures included renting a place, paying teachers' salaries, and buying textbooks, which are difficult to balance with income from moderate tuition fees. It was impossible to break even, but BVA has 3 pillars including economy, culture and society, so they still maintain the Vietnamese class as the pillar of culture. Vietnamese grammar is not too difficult to learn except for hard rhyme. In order to have the most effective teaching method, she had to choose the most neutral curriculum and the most neutral words.
When it comes to teaching Vietnamese abroad, people often bring up the story that Poland built Lac Long Quan School which was founded in 2007. Every year, 150-200 students enrolled in Lac Long Quan School. Poland has a large community of Vietnamese people, so a large number of students registered to study in the school obviously. But does the love of the mother tongue and many Vietnamese values through the medium of Vietnamese communication have enough vibrations to spread? Therefore, the idea of founding a forum ‘Preserving the Vietnamese language abroad’ was initiated by Mr. Le Xuan Lam - Chairman of the Board of Directors of Lac Long Quan School and some teachers.
Mr. Le Xuan Lam contacted Ms. Tran Thu Dung in France, and then colleagues at the Faculty of Linguistics of the General University in Russia. Everyone enthusiastically introduced and connected widely. The first workshop was hosted on June 27, 2021 with the participation of more than 100 teachers, lecturers, and language researchers from 28 countries. After that seminar, July 15, 2021 officially became the founding date of the forum for preserving Vietnamese abroad.
Now, the forum for preserving Vietnamese abroad is two years after its establishment. The events to mark the forum's second anniversary celebration took place on July 15 and 16 in Poland, including an online seminar and discussion on July 15 with the topic ‘Discussion on teaching and learning Vietnamese in the world’.
Lots of authors from Poland, Belgium, Germany, Taiwan (China), the Netherlands, Korea, Italy, Slovakia, and France have signed up for papers such as ‘Inspiring Mission - Vietnamese: Loving Beauty and Intelligence’, ‘International Vietnamese language proficiency test and statistics’, ‘Learning and teaching Vietnamese as a foreign language in France’, ‘Experience in writing Vietnamese textbooks and teaching Vietnamese as a foreign language’. Vietnamese language teaching proved that the forum is rich in reference and application value as well as convenient for research and policy making. The silhouette of a community project has been foreseeable.
How will the project "What I want to do" of each individual teaching Vietnamese abroad develop next? Ms. Le Thi Bich Huong suggested that UNESCO has an International Mother Language Day on February 21 every year as migration is a global concern. As long as people stay active in their place, and learn through local cultural centers, there will always be an opportunity to teach and spread the Vietnamese language.
Teacher Ha Thi Van Anh from the Department of Vietnamese under the Institute of Languages of the Taras Shevchenko University in Ukraine showed a message from her graduate who wrote that these 6 years have been very useful and the student is so grateful to her.
