CULTURAL AND LINGUISTIC TRANSFERS IN THE VIETNAMESE LANGUAGE LEARNING OF AMERICAN STUDENTS AT THE FACULTY OF VIETNAMESE STUDIES AND LANGUAGE, VNU = Hiện tượng chuyển di văn hóa và chuyển di ngôn ngữ trong việc học tiếng Việt của sinh viên Mỹ tại khoa Việt Nam học và tiếng Việt, đại học quốc gia Hà Nội

• Main Author: Nguyễn, Kim Phúc
• Other Authors: Phan, Thị Vân Quyên
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Di văn hóa; Ngôn ngữ học; Tiếng Việt; Việt Nam học
• Online Access: http://repository.vnu.edu.vn/handle/VNU_123/100531
• Institution: Vietnam National University, Hanoi

For many foreigners learning Vietnamese language in Vietnam, communicating successfully in Vietnamese is what they aim at. Especially, to American people, who come from a Western country of which culture and language are a far cry from Vietnam‟s, learning Vietnamese as a foreign language is more or less challenging. In other words, the interference of US culture and language may hinder these students from comprehending and producing Vietnamese successfully. Deeply concerned about the issue, the researcher carried out this study with a hope to examine whether cultural and linguistic transfers occur in the US learners‟ Vietnamese learning in Vietnam. Qualitative approach is employed for the research, with semi-structured interviews and classroom observation utilized as two main data collection instruments. Seven American students who have been studying Vietnamese in Vietnam for at least three months were involved in this study, and five of them agreed to take part in the personal interviews. With classroom observation, video recording is performed in four classes at the Faculty of Vietnamese Language and Studies, VNU. Interviews and classroom tapings reveal that both cultural and linguistic transfers exist in American students‟ Vietnamese learning, and linguistic transfer tends to occur more frequently than the former one. The students tend to produce Vietnamese with negative transfer from English, especially when it comes to intonation of affirmative sentences and questions. Positive transfer, however, is rarely observed in the data. The students are also affected by their native cultural worldviews and thought patterns in L2 acquisition, which significantly causes confusion and misunderstanding in their Vietnamese spoken and written communication. The findings could be of value as a reference for not only American students learning Vietnamese or planning to learn Vietnamese in Vietnam, but also the teachers of the Faculty of Vienamese Studies and Language when suggesting some changes in teaching content and teaching methods in order to meet American students‟ expectation when taking Vietnamese courses in the Faculty.