Hoang Bao Nguyen

Qualifications

• Bachelor of Arts (BA), Commerce and Economics, Van Lang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
• Bachelor of Arts (BA), Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language/ESL Language Instructor, University of Education, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Experience

Bao taught English as a Second Language in Vietnam to local students at Vung Tau Community College, covering basic to pre-intermediate levels.

Since coming to Australia he has successfully drawn on his skills, knowledge and experience as a language teacher to teach Vietnamese. He has taught Vietnamese at Sydney Community College since 2014.

Teaching style

Bao’s lessons focus on communication skills, vocabulary building for everyday situations, basic grammatical structures and some of the ‘flavour’ words and expressions.

Understanding the Vietnamese alphabet is an important part of each lesson because the familiar-looking characters have some very important extra marks (called diacritics) which affect meaning and pronunciation. Although conversation skills are usually the main focus for students, Bao makes sure to build reading and writing skills too so that students can use the written language as an aid to learning.

Instruction is in both Vietnamese and English, with Vietnamese used as much as possible in activities across all skills as well as in functional language.

Bao considers all students’ objectives in learning Vietnamese, as well as their past experience with the language and incorporates this into lesson plans.

Bao has travelled extensively in Vietnam. He is keen to introduce students to the major attractions of his homeland, as well as provide some insight into life off the tourist route.