VietTESOL International Convention 2026

In the context of policy shifts from EFL toward CLIL and EMI in Vietnamese higher education, an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course for Cultural Studies students faces a twofold demand: to develop academic language proficiency, while at the same time delivering disciplinary content that carries a strong regional identity. However, existing publications on CLIL in Vietnamese tertiary education have, on the whole, addressed teacher capacity for CLIL and the ROAD-MAPPING framework at the programme level. To the best of the authors' knowledge, no published study has yet specified a course design that integrates CLIL and ESP for Cultural Studies, and none has linked such a design to Hanoi Studies content. The present paper proposes a CLIL-oriented ESP course design for Cultural Studies undergraduates, with Hanoi Studies taken as the content backbone. The proposed design follows a backward design logic and comprises four components: (i) dual learning outcomes covering both content and language; (ii) a topic matrix that aligns Hanoi Studies themes with language skills and academic text genres; (iii) learning activities that foreground discipline-specific language in the manner of topicalizing language; and (iv) integrated assessment of content and language. The design is positioned within the broader path of repositioning English in Vietnamese higher education, namely the shift from English as a supporting language to English as a medium of disciplinary learning. The paper contributes a reference design for ESP courses attached to local content,and points toward further research on classroom implementation and learning outcomes.