During her trip to Hanoi to attend the Fourth International Conference on Vietnamese Studies, Professor Quyen Di Chuc Bui (University of California Los Angeles and California State University, Long Beach) accepted an invitation to give a presentation at the Faculty of Vietnamese Studies and Vietnamese Language on the morning of November 29, 2012. The topic of the presentation was “Orientation for training in Vietnamese Studies in the United States”.This is the second scientific activity of the Faculty in the 2012-2013 school year. Many faculty members, collaborators, and some retired teachers and international students attended the presentation. In two hours, Professor Quyen Di introduced to the audience a fairly general picture of the institutions that provide training in Vietnamese Studies (VNH) and Vietnamese Language, in which the University of California Los Angeles is an institution with a Vietnamese Studies program that has a large number of students. Professor Quyen Di said that in the United States, there are a number of universities that teach VNH, there are Vietnamese language classes at Harvard, the UC system (University of California), Yale, Cornell,... Vietnamese language centers. For example, in the Cali area alone, there are more than 100 centers, in churches, pagodas, community organizations, and at Community Colleges. Southern California has more than 15,000 Vietnamese students, and about 1,500 volunteer teachers.
Professor Quyen Di also said that in reality, there is no separate major called Vietnamese Studies in the United States, but only a major on Southeast Asia (including Vietnamese Studies). However, UCLA has a larger Vietnamese Studies program than other majors, established for students to broaden their knowledge, pay attention to the language, culture, and society of Southeast Asia (Thailand, Cambodia, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, East Timor...). Regarding the students in the United States, there are two groups of students: the group of Vietnamese origin (heritage students), the group of non-Vietnamese (non-heritage students), there are also some mixed classes of the two groups, and the professor admitted that it is very difficult to teach mixed classes because of the different levels of Vietnamese.
The advanced VNH class is taught about Vietnamese literature (divided into 3 areas: oral literature, literature written in Chinese and Nom characters, literature written in the national language). Here, the professor has found famous works in Vietnam to teach: for example, short stories by Nguyen Huy Thiep, "The Sorrow of War" by Bao Ninh, "The Land of Many People and Many Ghosts" by Nguyen Khac Truong, "The Endless Field" by Nguyen Ngoc Tu... for students to learn and interpret Vietnamese folk songs and proverbs or even watch movies and listen to songs. At the end of the course, there may be a form of test such as making a film based on ideas from a fairy tale like Tam Cam or inspiration from folk songs like "Yesterday, I was splashing water at the communal house / I forgot my shirt on the lotus branch"... In which the scriptwriter, actors, and director are all students and the scoring is based on many factors, including whether the pronunciation is clear or not.
