We are thrilled to announce the launch of the Vietnamese Language Teaching Hub, a collaboration between GUAVA and the Digitizing Vietnam team. The hub was officially launched at the full-day workshop “Digitizing Vietnam: Vietnamese Studies in the Age of Digital Humanities and Artificial Intelligence” at Columbia University, where GUAVA President Chung Nguyen introduced the hub to the broader Vietnamese Studies community.
Building partially on the Vietnamese teaching resources previously curated by GUAVA board member Huy Phung, the Digitizing Vietnam team worked closely with the GUAVA team — Chung Nguyen and Huy Phung — to add new content and organize the collection, making it more searchable and accessible than ever. Chung Nguyen and Trang Phan also contributed a substantial set of syllabi from Columbia University and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice’s Vietnamese language program, significantly expanding the hub’s holdings at launch.
The hub lives within the Digitizing Vietnam website, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and housed at Columbia University’s Vietnamese Studies Program. It is freely accessible to educators and researchers worldwide.
👉 Explore the Vietnamese Language Teaching Hub
What’s Inside the Hub?
The hub is organized into four sections, each designed to support Vietnamese language educators at different points in their teaching practice.
1. Syllabi
The hub currently hosts 27 syllabi spanning beginner to advanced levels, contributed by educators from different institutions: Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Columbia University, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Contributors include GUAVA members Huy Phung, Trang Phan, Chung Nguyen, with syllabi ranging from Novice Low all the way to Advanced High. Users can filter by institution, author, proficiency level, and semester — making it easy to find a syllabus that matches your context.
2. Instructional Materials
With 31 items and growing, this section is a goldmine for classroom practitioners. Materials include lesson plans and authentic reading texts organized by proficiency level (Novice through Advanced) and tagged by theme — shopping, housing, health and fitness, culture, history, business, social phenomena, and more. Filtering by skill mode (interpersonal, interpretive, presentational) and by approach (task-based learning, project-based learning) makes it easy to find exactly what you need for a given class session. Contributors include GUAVA members An Sakach, Chung Nguyen, Hoa Le, Hong Dinh, Huy Phung, Trang Phan, and many others. The section also links to three open educational resource (OER) textbooks: the OER Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced Vietnamese textbooks — including the task-based intermediate OER co-authored by Huy Phung, Chung Nguyen, and An Sakach.
3. Professional Development
This section archives all six GUAVA newsletters from December 2021 through December 2025, making them searchable and permanently accessible as professional development resources for the Vietnamese language teaching community. It’s a wonderful record of our community’s collective knowledge and growth over the years.
4. Directory
The fourth section of the hub is home to an ambitious and exciting project: the Global Directory of Vietnamese Language Programs, designed and curated by GUAVA member Huy Phung. This directory aims to map, for the first time in a comprehensive and systematic way, where Vietnamese is taught around the world — across universities, community schools, heritage programs, and other educational institutions.
Huy has built the database with entries contributed from the Digitizing Vietnam team, assembling a substantial number of entries that document Vietnamese language programs across multiple countries and contexts. To ensure accuracy and reliability, many of these entries are currently undergoing independent verification before being made fully public. This careful, rigorous approach reflects the scholarly standard the GUAVA community holds itself to — this is not just a crowdsourced list, but a curated, verified academic resource.
Once complete, the Global Directory will be an invaluable reference for researchers studying the spread and institutionalization of Vietnamese language education worldwide, for program administrators seeking peer institutions to collaborate with, and for learners looking for where to study Vietnamese near them or abroad.
This is a project we are watching with great excitement — stay tuned for its full launch!
Why This Matters
One of the persistent challenges in less commonly taught language education is the scarcity of shared, openly accessible teaching materials. Vietnamese language instructors have long relied on informal networks and word-of-mouth to find syllabi and lesson plans. The Vietnamese Language Teaching Hub changes that — it brings GUAVA’s community-curated resources into a searchable, filterable, and beautifully organized platform that any instructor anywhere in the world can access and benefit from.
This is community knowledge, made permanent.
Want to Contribute?
If you have syllabi, lesson plans, or other teaching materials you would like to share with the community through the hub, reach out to the GUAVA Board at guavamerica@gmail.com or the Digitizing Vietnam team at info@digitizingvietnam.com.
A heartfelt thank you to Chung Nguyen for shaping and introducing the hub to the world at Columbia, to Huy Phung for the vision and curation work that made this possible, and to the entire Digitizing Vietnam team for bringing it all to life. We are proud of what our community has built together
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