Some Vietnamese students might struggle with the English language because there are structural differences between Vietnamese and English. It is important for the teacher to know how English differs from the native language of their students.

Vietnamese students do not place an article before a profession; they might say: She is nurse (53). The teacher will have to help students insert articles. An example activity could involve a teacher showing pictures of people doing different occupations and ask: What is he? Students will respond He is waiter. The teacher will elicit and drill until the student understands that: He is a waiter.

Vietnamese does not have the be verb. Teachers need to help students insert the correct form of be in statements and questions (53). An example activity could focus on using is/are to describe fruit (countable/uncountable). The teacher could set up a breakfast table with different objects on it and ask questions: Are there bananas on the table? Yes, there are. Is there water on the table? No, there isn’t. This lesson will help students understand correct forms of to be.

Like English, Vietnamese follows the subject-verb-object order. However, Vietnamese omits the it when referring to weather, distance, and time: Is raining. The Vietnamese language doesn’t have neuter pronouns (53). An example activity for the neuter pronoun it could be pictionary. Students are divided into teams and are given a slip of paper with ex: snow. Students must draw the weather and other students must guess: It is snowing.

The English language expresses comparisons by adding –er to the adjective (bigger). In Vietnamese the idea of more is shown by adding the word for more after the adjective: The truck big more than the bus. (54). An example activity to help students understand –er could involve objects. The teacher could have a small cup, medium cup, and a large cup. The teacher could start by asking: Which cup is bigger (small cup or medium cup). That cup is bigger. The lesson could be focused on big, bigger, and biggest.

The vowel sounds found in the words hit, bad, shower, and hire (/I/, /æ/, /aʊ/,

/aɪ/) are not heard in the Vietnamese language. Students may confuse words with those sounds (54). To help students with pronunciation, the teacher could draw mouth diagrams. The tongue/lip placements could help the student form these sounds. After the students have begun to hear the difference between these sounds, the teacher can 3x3 choral drill words. By helping the students pronounce words with these vowels, they can begin to decipher between words like hit, bad, shower, and hire.

Vietnamese students will probably have trouble with tenses. The Vietnamese language does not have the same system of expressing events in time. A Vietnamese student might say: We take a trip to Sacramento last summer. The speaker is using context clues to convey the tense, instead of changing the verb like in English (54). The teacher can create an activity focused on past simple to help them with tenses. Students create a survey and question each other to find out where/when/what they did on their last holiday.

These differences can help the teacher understand why their ESL student is struggling with English. It is necessary for the teacher to comprehend the dissimilarities between the English language and the native language of their students, in order to help their students achieve both accuracy and fluency.

Haussamen, Brock. Grammar Alive! A Guide for Teachers. Urbana: NCTE, 2003

Kevin Lakani