Unleashing Creative Narratives in Vietnamese

Bich Nguyen, Magnolia High School

As a high school Vietnamese teacher at Magnolia High School, Bich teaching practices were reflective of the explicit language instruction she received in her education. Through Project LEARN, Bich learned that there was "more than one way" to help students develop their understanding of Vietnamese. She began to shift her own instruction to include both Vietnamese and English to ensure that students fully understood what she was saying.

Unit: Con Rồng Cháu Tiên

Below, you will find some of the materials and activities Bich created and used to build students' metacognition around a story titled, Con Rồng Cháu Tiên. This mythological story details the creation of the Vietnamese people. The culminating assessment for this unit was a narrative essay about students' lives.

Setting the Stage

In the slides and handout below, you will find the content and languaging objectives Bich focused on for this unit, as well as her unit overview and lesson plans. Throughout this unit, Bich focused on building students' vocabulary knowledge and usage, reading comprehension in Vietnamese, and ability to fully communicate their ideas and experiences using their full linguistic repertoires. Her overarching goal was for students to deeply engage with the text and make their own connections to it.

Teacher Resource - Lesson Plan.docx.pdf

Bich Slides

Con Rồng Cháu Tiên

To set students up for success, Bich focused on teaching students core vocabulary included in Con Rồng Cháu Tiên using a variety of activities and assignments., including an initial read aloud of the story.

Once she felt the had a strong grasp on the essential vocabulary, Bich broke students up into small groups, where they read the story out loud to one another. During this second reading, students underlined words, phrases, or sentences that stood out to them, and alter used them to create a class dictionary and collective poem. Students then engaged in a third reading where they read aloud their chosen words and phrases.

To further assess students' reading comprehension, students chose one phrase or sentence from the text and spent two minutes writing about anything that came to mind when they thought about the phrase. Students had the freedom to write in whatever language they wished for this activity. When finished, Bich read the story aloud once more, and asked students to share what they had written about the phrase or sentence they had chosen. She concluded this activity by holding a discussion about the story's core themes and what questions, surprises, or emotions emerged within students as they read.

Con Rong Chau Tien.docx (1).pdf

Con Rồng Cháu Tiên Slide.pdf

Final Assessment: Writing Your Own Story

Copy of Narrative Essay Instruction.docx

As the culminating assessment for this unit, students wrote a fiction or non-fiction narrative story of their own. For this assessment, students were encouraged to use their full linguistic repertoire to fully communicate their thoughts and ideas.

Example Essays

In both of the student examples below, translanguaging is clearly visible. Mr. Nguyen noticed that students not only felt "relieved" to use multiple languages in their writing, but also wrote more as a result. Through their essays, students demonstrated their meaning-making about different words, phrases, and concepts in ways that were purposeful, intentional, and made sense to them. It is clear that students successfully acquired and demonstrated their knowledge of Vietnamese through their use of translanguaging throughout this unit and their final essays.

Student A Example.pdf

Student A

Student B Example.pdf

Student B

Empowerment through Expression

"...Then I learned that supporting comprehension is equally important as providing linguistic input in the target language. If my students do not understand the language that I’m using in class, they can’t acquire it. Now when I do comprehension check, students can answer in any languages as long as they can demonstrate what they’re hearing or reading at a deep level. As a result, students participate more during class discussion and in writing because they have freedom to express themselves."

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