About my scholar interests

Where I am now

I'm currently enrolled in the doctoral program in Language and Literacy Education at Purdue University. Here I learn about the development of English language among learners, how languages are acquired and more Qualitative and Quantitative Research. This is just my first year, so more is yet to come.

Upon the completion of this program, I hope to master my research skills. Though I'm more interested in Qualitative research, I will have to be proficient in both approaches to read, write, and explain all aspects of research paper.

My Intellectual History

Back in the days when I was in Vietnam, I taught English to Vietnamese and Korean children in 2019 and I was really interested in how they can learn a language at their age. I also wonder if children have a chance to sit together in a multicultural environment like this. Later on, I worked in a university in Danang to teach English to new students. Again, I can see students putting their effort to learn English. Some of them thrived, yet some others struggled. One interesting thing I noticed during my teaching is that they could process academic texts pretty well, and I was thinking that "we have been introducing them the world full of academic language without showing the love for reading with informal contexts. They have never touched the literature for the young adults. Instead, they were given dry, dull and boring passages, excerpts from newspapers, lectures, textbooks to check their understanding." Such thinking drove me to study the acquisition of language via pleasure reading or extensive reading.

I was also offered to teach Foundational College Skills, Critical Thinking, and Project-based learning at the university. I also discovered that students are still facing lots of challenges from their college life, and they still struggle to succeed academically and they have not exhausted the resources from what their university has to offer. I also realized that much of the assessment given to the students are quiz-based, and they were memory test rather than a comprehensive assessment of how much students use their critical thinking skills or how they apply their academic skills to practice, let alone language learning practices. This also triggered me as a researcher to continue working on how to help students thrive at university. I also look forward to creating an environment where students could be encouraged to use English to improve their language proficiency. All those problems led me to think at a broader sense, and to identify what works the best for Vietnamese learners. As a result, I came to Purdue in pursuit of my research.

My research interests

Researching language teaching and learning is not an easy process as it involves lots of other fields such as linguistics, psychology, and other relevant subjects (or content areas), as well as educational research. My personal interests go to:

• Second language acquisition: This is a big field of study that includes too many things
• Extensive Reading: This is my most favorite field of research. As a language learner, I really enjoy reading and not the academic texts of course. I used to spend lots of time looking for foreign books that suited my age to read and wrote some reviews on them. When I started teaching English to my students, I realized that there were little to nothing but academic books and textbooks around my students and they had very few choices to make to read. I want to see if reading for pleasure, or extensive reading, could nurture their motivation to learn English, compared to the traditional classroom reading. Also, I want to see the relationship between extensive reading and other languages skills such as writing, listening, and speaking among Vietnamese EFL students.
• Qualitative research on Learning Styles, Strategies, and Learner Characteristics. There are three elements that I want to look at and I would love to study how Vietnamese EFL students learn, and what have been the strategies among the best students, and why some students are struggling with English language learning. 
• Studies on the application of project-based language learning. I also wish to perform experimental studies using project-based language learning to measure how much students grow after the project compared to traditional language learning approaches.
• Self-determination theory application on language learning and second language acquisition. Self-determination theory (SDT) is one of the most influential theory of motivation developed by Professor Richard Ryan and Edward Deci and has been studied by numerous language researchers. I won't go too much into the details of the theory here, but I am interested in examining the relationship between learners' autonomy, comepetence and their language proficiency. And whether SDT implemented practices could improve learners' motivation to learn English. 
• Language skill assessment. Assessment is an important facet of language teaching and learning, and in many Asian countries, language tests are growing fast and people are racing against each other to achieve the highest scores on the test due to its high-stake nature. This has affected numerous students, parents, teachers on how they perceive language learning. I also want to look into this phenomenon to figure out why it happens and what we can do about it.
• Language curriculum development. This was my most recently emerged interests. When I worked as a lecturer in Vietnam, I had a chance to join in the ASEAN Quality Assurance network in which I joined a team to review and evaluate a curriculum to measure if the learning outcomes matched students' learning progress and if the program meet the satisfaction of the society. That was also the reason why I chose Curriculum and Instruction as one of my major goal of study.
• Research on Multilingualism. I have little knowledge of this but it was also my interests as I want to learn a lot of languages.

That's all for now, and I hope to find myself time and materials to conduct research little by little.

My professional goals

I wish to achieve mastery in doing both qualitative and quantitative research in language education. I also wish to teach Vietnamese students about how to conduct research and how to succeed at university. Additionally, I am planning some courses on English language learning and provide an English-speaking environment to EFL students. As for my lifetime goals, I am determined to speak as many languages as possible. I want to understand and appreciate the culture of all the communities around me, so learning languages is the very first step towards them. 

Until next time, see you!