Category: Teaching Notes
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UCSD’s 2nd Annual Vietnamese Folk Games Festival
On May 23rd, 2026, the Vietnamese Language Program at UC San Diego Linguistics Department hosted its second annual Vietnamese Folk Games Festival at Sixth College Lawn, and it turned out to be an unforgettable afternoon. Under the warm San Diego sun, students in the Vietnamese heritage language program and their friends gathered for an afternoon…
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Tết 2026 Celebration & Gathering as a Class Project at UC San Diego
As the Lunar New Year 2026 approaches, the spirit of Tết is already vibrant and warm in all our hearts, even here so far from home. To kick off the festive season and create lasting memories together, the students in my Advanced Vietnamese Class (LIHL 134W_2026) organized an early Tết Gathering centered on culture, community,…
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Humanizing Proficiency-based Reading Materials for Vietnamese Heritage Learners
Heritage learners have unique linguistic and cultural backgrounds that require materials tailored to their lived experiences. This presentation demonstrates how the humanistic approach to materials development (Tomlinson, 2023) can make SEALC-sponsored proficiency-based reading materials more engaging and relevant for Vietnamese heritage learners. By incorporating personalization, cultural relevance, emotional engagement, and communicative tasks, we adapted two…
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Taskifying Literature: Using Reading Circles to Engage Heritage Language Learners
This presentation explores how literature circles, when thoughtfully structured as pedagogical tasks, can provide rich, engaging opportunities for advanced heritage learners of Vietnamese to develop interpretive skills, expand their academic language repertoire, and connect with cultural narratives. Grounded in a Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) framework, the project demonstrates how reading circles built around the Vietnamese…
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Gamification in Heritage Language Classrooms via Blooket
I share my experience teaching Vietnamese as a Heritage language at UC San Diego using gamification. I discuss the challenges of engaging a diverse group of students with varying proficiency levels and how I use Blooket, an online game-based learning platform, to address these challenges. (recording available upon request)
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H5P Activity: Sort the Paragraphs
In this teaching notes, I am going to demonstrate how teachers can modify the difficulty level of a task or activity by using one text and with the same H5P activity. The H5P activity I am choosing is: Sorting the Paragraphs in which learners will be asked to place a number of sentences or short…