A Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Approach to Materials Development: Teaching Vietnamese as a Second Language to Ethnic Minority Primary School Students

This chapter reports an innovation in teaching Vietnamese to ethnic minority primary students in Vietnam, which involves the development and piloting of a Vietnamese practice book for Grade 5. Guided by the goals of developing pedagogically sound materials to facilitate students’ acquisition of Vietnamese as an L2, we adopted a culturally and linguistically responsive approach to designing our materials. In developing the package, materials including texts and illustrations were adapted and selected to both represent the students’ cultural values and practices and to facilitate their target language learning through their prior knowledge and mother tongue. The book includes examples of culturally and linguistically relevant visual illustrations, role models, texts and learning activities and received positive initial feedback from the teachers. After piloting the materials, analyzing the teacher participants’ feedback, and reflecting on the project, we suggest that further work be done in this area so that more and richer materials that cater to all ethnic minority groups are available to the teachers and students.