Dear GUAVA friends and colleagues,
Greetings and Happy New Year 2024! We hope everyone enjoyed a restful good winter break, and the beginning of your new year has brought joy and happiness.
At GUAVA, we believe that a new year is a time for reflection on our past activities while looking ahead to the future. In 2023, we implemented various changes and improvements. For instance, under the guidance of our dedicated webmaster, Huy Phung, the GUAVA website found a new home on WordPress, a more suitable web content management system for GUAVA to function as a resource hub to better support our members and colleagues.
Following the success of the inaugural GUAVA Connect event in November 2022, our second GUAVA Connect event took place in November 2023 with the theme “Exploring Collaboration: Vietnamese Language Programs in the U.S. and Vietnam.” The special invited guests, Drs. Nguyễn Nam and Vũ Minh Hoàng from the Vietnam Studies Center at Fulbright University Vietnam, shared their many activities at Fulbright University with our friends and colleagues. GUAVA Connect has become our yearly signature networking platform, aiming to share and exchange ideas while fostering personal connections with guest lecturers and participants on various topics of interest.
In 2023, we also initiated the dissemination of a monthly e-newsletter to provide you with updated information on workshops, conferences, job announcements and other events of interest. If you haven’t done so, please subscribe to get your latest info! We will continue to publish traditional newsletters as “special editions” to showcase specific topics, featured articles or commemorate special events. To start off this year, we present a beautiful newsletter that we hope you’ll enjoy. We invite you to read the two featured articles.
The first examines a trending and important topic: the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for teaching Vietnamese as a foreign language. Dr. Lương Thị Hiền discusses the advantages and the potential risks of AI and its impact on the role human teachers including ourselves. We encourage you to read and form your views on this much-debated topic, as it becomes increasingly present in our lives.
The second article explores how to design interactive learning materials using an open-source authoring tool called H5P. Hoan Nguyen makes a compelling case for H5P’s functionality and user-friendly features, demonstrating one particular activity called “Sort the Paragraphs” to show how H5P can create activities that can be used to teach listening, reading, and writing in various languages, not just Vietnamese.
Last but not least, we bring you flowers! From a carefully arranged flower basket on a bicycle peddled through the streets of Hanoi to rows of cherry blossoms swaying in the fresh spring air, we hope you take a moment to appreciate nature’s beauty and simplicity, finding joy in daily life, as the saying “stop and smell the roses” encourages all of us to do so.
On behalf of GUAVA, I warmly wish you and yours much health, happiness and prosperity in the Year of the Dragon 2024!
Thúy Tranviet, PhD
GUAVA President
