The school keeping Vietnamese alive for children far from home

Families who raise children outside Vietnam know the moment well. The child still understands a grandparent on a video call, but answers in English. Trường Tiếng Việt Của Em - "Our Vietnamese School" - was built for exactly that moment: a non-profit project whose stated mission is to preserve and spread the Vietnamese language and Vietnamese culture among young people in the diaspora around the world.

The learning path is deliberately narrow and complete. Forty lessons follow the two "Vui học Tiếng Việt" workbooks published by Ho Chi Minh City University of Education Publishing House. Each book carries four themes, each theme five lessons - eight themes in total - so a family can see the whole road before starting rather than guessing where a lesson sequence leads.

A mother tongue survives abroad only if a child has somewhere to practise it every week.

Every lesson works on all four skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking. Around them the project places images of Vietnam itself - landscapes, culture and people - so vocabulary arrives attached to a place. On the school's own pages that shows up as a map of Vietnam with Hanoi, Ha Long Bay, Hoi An, Nha Trang and Ho Chi Minh City, and an alphabet park where the letters play beside a pagoda, a rice field and a paper dragon.

The project describes itself as a digitisation effort rather than a new curriculum, carried out within the programme honouring the Vietnamese language in overseas Vietnamese communities launched by the State Committee for Overseas Vietnamese Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is also an active member of the network of institutions teaching Vietnamese language and culture abroad, and its copyright is held jointly by Phan Thị Quỳnh Trang, Nguyễn Trần Thanh Hải, Đỗ Thị Phương Mai, Trần Thanh Phúc and Trần Văn Nhật.

Its project team is open about what keeps it running. Trường Tiếng Việt Của Em is non-profit and welcomes support and sponsorship from parents, overseas Vietnamese and other donors; the team can be reached at contact@cvcec.org or on WhatsApp at +1 647 897 2358. For teachers reading this in another country, the model itself is the lesson worth borrowing: take a trusted textbook, digitise it faithfully, and give scattered families one place to open it together.