Vietnamese Students

Acknowledgements are a widely used genre in academic discourse to express gratitude towards various types of assistance and contribution of individuals and institutions, and they have been reported to be contextually and culturally interwoven. Despite a number of acknowledgement studies in various settings, little is known of how these texts are composed by EFL writers in Vietnam and whether or not the culture has any influence on the composition of acknowledgements as reported in previous studies of acknowledgements. Following Hyland's (2004) and Hyland and Tse's (2004) frameworks, this study investigates the generic structures and linguistic elements of acknowledgements in 202 TESOL master's theses written by Vietnamese postgraduates. The findings were compared with those in the literature to explore cross-cultural variations in acknowledgement writing. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with actual thesis writers. The results revealed that these writers generally followed Hyland's (2004) three-tier structure of writing thesis acknowledgements, but they were frank and less reserved in expressing their gratitude than their Chinese-speaking counterparts. Moreover, socio-cultural expectations, personal dispositions, and individual writing styles mainly affected their move constructions, inclusions of acknowledgees and linguistic choices.

Encouraging students to foster the learning styles and supporting them to strive with the challenges in education are responsibilities of teachers, especially in higher education where students are expected to master their current and lifelong learning. The study, therefore, investigates the impact of teacher feedback on student meta-cognition and explores the link between student achievements and their cognitive skills through a research done on 440 Vietnamese students from 40 universities and colleges in Vietnam. The findings show that only monitoring strongly affect the students' academic achievement, meanwhile teacher feedback has no direct impact on the students' results.

Writing in English is difficult for multilingual learners, and this is not an exception for Vietnamese students who learnt English as-a-foreign-language (EFL). However, few studies have been conducted on how these learners learnt this skill at their up-secondary schools (U-SS). This study thus plans to explore how 335 Vietnamese students at a U-SS perceived the importance of EFL writing, how they learnt it and what difficulties and expectations/suggestions they had in making the learning of this skill effectively. Employing a 5-point Likert-scale survey, open-ended questions and a focus-group interview, the study found these learners' awareness of the significance of this skill for their future betterment. Moreover, similar to students in other EFL settings, these students learnt this skill for learning other language skills, and their teachers did not have enough time to teach and provide feedback on their writing. However, their positive attitudes and how to learn this skill were greatly influenced by their teachers and educational conditions. These findings are therefore expected to shed more light on learners' perspectives in learning EFL writing at the U-SS level so that relevant support can be provided to help the learning of this skill in Vietnam and in similar EFL contexts.