This year, two of our colleagues, Dr John Bellamy and Prof Rob Drummond, embarked on a new research project on English language use in Vietnam.

Led by Mai Nguyen (Senior Lecturer in TESOL at Manchester Met), MCYS members Rob Drummond and John Bellamy were part of the Manchester Met team working with Huế University of Foreign Languages and International Studies in Vietnam, University of Cambridge in the UK and schools in Huế City on the project ‘English in a multilingual world: Exploring the characteristics of Vietnamese English and its implications for classroom practice’.

Taking inspiration from the Manchester Voices project, the one-year project explored the characteristics of Vietnamese English as spoken by inhabitants of Huế City, Vietnam, and used the findings to inform future classroom practice. The community-engaged research collaborated extensively with schools in Huế City, as part of the project’s focus on taking researchers into the wider community to interact with people in their everyday environments and collect valuable real-world data.

The project organised multimodal (audio-visual) exhibitions of Huế English alongside Manchester English, enabling the Huế community to recognise and

project organised multimodal (audio-visual exhibitions of Huế English alongside Manchester English, enabling the Huế community to recognise and celebrate their Huế English, and learn more about Manchester English. The research also applied the sociolinguistic findings to classroom practice, working closely with English teachers at schools in Huế to co-design and implement lessons using Huế English samples. The Huế school students participated in a competition where they produced their creative podcasts in English about their Huế identity and the role of languages in their lives.

For further information contact:
J.Bellamy@mmu.ac.uk