The Vietnamese Language Table (VLT) was initially formed in response to the challenges posed by the pandemic, which prevented students from participating in conversation hours or language tables in person. It was also a collaborative effort to overcome the lack of resources and personnel that hindered the organization of such extracurricular activities. Organized and facilitated by a dedicated group of volunteer Vietnamese lecturers, VLT has successfully addressed the aforementioned issues by providing virtual conversation hours for a large population of L2 Vietnamese students.
The VLT program offers meetings for three proficiency levels: Beginner (Novice-Intermediate Low), Intermediate (Novice High – Advanced Low), and Advanced (Intermediate High-Advanced High). Each month, there has been a meeting for each level, and students could join any VLT session of their interest.
Following the principles proposed by Leeser and White (2016), we aimed to create tasks that foster interpersonal communication, closely resemble real-life communication, and utilize students’ or other authentic L2 input sources as informational sources. These tasks are designed with manageable steps and include linguistic support and follow-up activities. A typical language table session includes warm-up activities, breakout room activities, collaborative tasks, and a post-session follow-up. Furthermore, we aim to create an ‘ecology’, or community, of learners. The VLT team has kept all students updated with its activities by posting information about past and future events on a website. Students from each group receive emails before each of the events with information about the language table sessions. Activities in each session have been archived on the web page for each level (using Padlet for the Beginner and Intermediate groups and Blogspot for the Advanced group so that anyone can visit and recap the sessions). Teachers are also able to access the VLT website in order to get ideas for oral communicative tasks or remake and adapt the available Padlet for their classrooms.
Since Spring 2022, the VLT team has been collaborating to build a virtual community that stays connected and practices speaking Vietnamese. We hope our work can inspire other LCTL teachers to collaborate to create a stronger community of learners.
* This article was published in the ACTFL LCTL SIG Newsletter Spring-Summer 2023.
References
Leeser, M. & White, J. (2016). Interactive tasks. New York: Routledge.
An Sakach
Trang Tran