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Vietnamese ethnic minority students’ language practices under the influence of external interventions: A management perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2019

Trang Thi Thuy Nguyen
Trang Thi Thuy Nguyen*
Affiliation:
University of Queensland, Australia
*
Address for correspondence:Trang Thi Thuy Nguyen School of EducationThe University of QueenslandSt Lucia 4072, Australiatrang.nguyen@uq.edu.au; idathuytrang@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article examines Vietnamese ethnic minority students’ language practices under the influence of external interventions from a language management perspective. It focuses on the ways the students engage with various levels of interventions in their language practices. The study mainly draws on a group of college-age minority students’ experiences and perspectives collected through semistructured interviews. Findings suggest that the students, in making decisions to use their ethnic language and Vietnamese, the mainstream language, responded to interventions by the school and the ethnic community by adapting to the latter's language policy, while reinterpreting to conform to/deviate from interventions by other individuals such as their parents, their teachers, or their peers. In that process of managing their language practices, they reframed their identity in which both maintenance and transformation orientations were active. Implications related to minority language policy and language maintenance are then suggested. (Language management, individual language management, language practices, language choice, language policy, language maintenance, ethnic minority)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 48 , Issue 5 , November 2019 , pp. 745 - 767
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Dr. Obaid Hamid for his great suggestion on the use of Petrovic and Kuntz's language policy framework. I would also like to sincerely thank the two reviewers and the editors of Language in Society for their valuable comments and feedback on earlier versions of this article.

References

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