Vietnam: Towards Heteroglossic Bilingual Education–Implications for Teaching English in Vietnam

Advances in neuroscience and digital technologies have helped replace reductive monoglossic views of bilingual education with a more holistic understanding of the value of learning multiple languages. Despite the obvious benefits of a heteroglossic approach to language education—which views a speaker’s linguistic repertoire as inseparable—in practice, monoglossic language ideologies continue to shape foreign language teaching in many countries, including Vietnam. Language teachers still often resort to a ‘monolingual mindset’ that sidelines the value of dynamic bilingualism. Such discrepancy between predominantly monolingual institutional policies and practices, and the multilingual realities of our classrooms, both in countries where English is the main foreign language (such as Vietnam) and in English speaking countries with learners from multilingual backgrounds (such as Australia), can have a profound effect on the learning of students. This paper critically considers some of the latest research on the benefits of heteroglossic bilingual education, including the value of bilingual instruction, traslanguaging and own language use and how they can inform a more respectful approach to teaching English as an International (rather than foreign) language. By comparing English language teaching in Australia with that in Vietnam, it presents the heteroglossic approach to bilingualism as an alternative that has the potential to facilitate ideological spaces from which aspiring and emergent bilinguals can speak, while also upholding their linguistic and cultural identities.