Vietnamese language program expansion builds cultural community

De’Vonte Tinsley came to Penn in part because it taught Vietnamese, his interest both intellectual and personal, he says. 

A second-year Ph.D. student in history, Tinsley is studying the history of Vietnam and the Soviet Union and is now married to his wife, from Vietnam.

“We also wanted to be able to teach our kids Vietnamese, and it’s usually easier if both parents can speak the language,” he says.

In the two years since Tinsley has been at Penn, the Vietnamese language program has grown out of its traditional home at the Penn Language Center and into the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

The surge has partly been driven by interest among “heritage speakers” who grew up speaking the language at home and who want closer ties with their family members, such as parents or grandparents who speak primarily Vietnamese, or family members in Vietnam, lecturer Hanh Nguyen says. “They mostly want to connect with their roots,” she says. 

Learning Vietnamese can also expand career opportunities, especially with last year’s signing of a comprehensive strategic partnership between the U.S. and Vietnam and Vietnam’s continued economic growth, she says.

Among many students, learning the language can evolve into a new sense of identity. That was the experience for Cecilia Lam, a second-year student from Philadelphia, who was taught Vietnamese by her grandfather starting around age 4. She says it’s the best way to communicate with family overseas or who aren’t fluent in English. “I didn’t want to lose the language,” Lam says.

When Nguyen began teaching Vietnamese at Penn in 2018, there were elementary and intermediate levels with only a handful of students, she says. Now there are around 30 at those two levels. The program has since added an advanced level as well as a specialty course for people in the health professions.

And this spring the elementary level will grow to two sections covering the same content: a shorter class for heritage speakers and a longer class for actual beginners. “It helps students with more practice, and those who are pretty good at speaking already can speed up or have a shorter time in class,” Nguyen says.

The expansion has helped integrate several graduate students who are studying Vietnamese for scholarly purposes, says Christopher P. Atwood, chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

“It allows the East Asian department to give a better set of tools for our students to understand East Asia in the whole,” Atwood says.

The department also offers Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian. Atwood says the move to incorporate Vietnamese within the department wouldn’t have been possible without support from the School of Arts & Sciences and the Center for East Asian Studies, specifically Fred Dickinson and David Dettmann.

The program expansion included adding a Fulbright language teaching assistant hosted by the Penn Language Center, funding for activities that create cultural connections, and linkages with other schools and departments such as Penn Carey Law, Penn Engineering, the Wharton School, Penn Nursing, the School of Veterinary Medicine, and the Department of English.

The classes in Vietnamese are focused on comprehension and real-life applications, such as traveling, handling day-to-day situations, or talking with relatives. With the focus on communication, there are no final exams, just presentations. “That’s the main purpose, if they are able to make people understand and they understand people,” Hanh Nguyen says. “I tell students: You are not going to learn a language. You learn the culture and then build a community.”

The Vietnamese community at Penn has also been a driving factor, Hanh Nguyen says, pointing to the work of the Vietnamese Student Association in recent years. “They feel like they have a community,” she says. “We can talk to each other, not only in English, but also our home language.” The Vietnamese population in the United States is estimated to be more than 2 million, with 60% hailing from Vietnam. 

At Lam’s high school, there wasn’t much Vietnamese cultural awareness so finding a community at Penn was a positive experience only enhanced by the language classes. “Every single time there was a class, I’d look forward to seeing the professor and my classmates,” she says. “On top of that, our professor really cares for all of us, not just the language,” Lam says. “That definitely built a strong and tight-knit community here at Penn.” 

Jenny Nguyen is a heritage speaker who grew up speaking Vietnamese at home. The College first-year from Philadelphia just didn’t learn to read or write it.

“I honestly love it,” Nguyen says of learning the language. “This class has made me so many friendships, from freshmen to graduate students. It doesn’t look like any of my other classes, where they’re all freshmen. People have to take this because they want to learn Vietnamese.

“I didn’t expect to build such a greater community with this class. I’m always laughing, there’s always jokes being made. Our professor makes the class giggle; she makes class fun,” she says.

Michelle Vo, a third-year student studying neuroscience in the College, grew up in Philadelphia translating for her parents, who immigrated from Vietnam just before she was born. She says one challenge has been learning to read and write the language.

“In English, if we were to just read the word you could figure it out just phonetically and translate it over,” she explains. “In Vietnamese, there are different tones and accent marks. Each word phonetically has a different sound because of the tones. Reading it, you have to pay attention more than just speaking it.”

Before starting Vietnamese at Penn last year, Vo says, “if you were to give me a paragraph, I’d only be able to read it based on the context if I didn’t know what it was versus me now, knowing how to read the words and put it together.”

Tinsley praises Hanh Nguyen’s work helping non-heritage speakers get up to speed in the challenging tonal language. “I was coming in from the complete bottom, from scratch. That was really tough,” he says.

Lam recommended Vietnamese to students who don’t have family ties to the country. “It’s a really good class to not only learn the language but also meet other students,” she says.

Jenny Nguyen says learning Vietnamese has brought her closer to her parents, who speak the language exclusively at home. “I’m just learning more about my culture,” she says.