Speakers
Description
Deemed “a powerful test of a powerful language” (Hamid, 2016, p. 472), the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) has extended from its original purpose of assessing candidates’ language proficiency to other roles in socio-political and tertiary education policies (Green, 2019; Pham & Bui, 2019). Notably, substantial critiques have also emerged regarding its hegemonic portrayal of English and reinforcement of imbalanced power dynamics (Pearson, 2019). However, given its cumulative prevalence and growing censure in Viet Nam, how IELTS is discussed in the news media remains understudied. Our corpus-assisted discourse study aims to address this gap by investigating the representations of IELTS in three Vietnamese online newspapers: VNExpress, Tuổi Trẻ Online and Dân Trí. We collected 1,200 online articles published from 2003 to 2024, each containing the search term ‘IELTS’ at least once, to create a corpus of approximately 985,590 words. Keyword Co-occurrence Analysis (Clarke et al., 2021) was employed, with adjustments for the Vietnamese language, to discover dimensions of key n-grams which co-occur across the texts in our corpus. The qualitative and inductive examination of the key n-grams and texts most associated with these dimensions revealed major discourses around learning processes, implications of test results, and regulations of test administration. In identifying these discourses, this study is an endeavour to call to attention practices that facilitate sustainable linguistic development in education.
Biography
Hoa Ninh is a full-time lecturer in the English Department at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Education and an academic lead at EdSpace. She received her Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics with distinction from Cardiff University (UK). Her research interests include corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, health communication, and learner agency. As a university lecturer, she teaches Linguistics-related modules for undergraduates and as an English language educator, she mostly works with high school students and adult learners.
Linh K. Bo holds a Master's in Discourse Studies from Lancaster University and he is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Discourse Analysis at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Education. His research focuses on corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, and multimedia in language education, with a special interest in writing skills development. As an EFL teacher, he mainly works with IELTS preparation and academic writing courses for Vietnamese high school and university students.
Mai Thanh Nha Nguyen received her Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics and TESOL from Lancaster University (UK). With an interest in language education, particularly literacy studies, her research focuses on language educators’ identities, material utilisations, and writing proficiency. As a language educator, she primarily works with high school and university students in IELTS preparation and English for Academic Purposes courses.
Henry Duc Lai is a freshman in the Bachelor of Psychology program at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Viet Nam National University Ho Chi Minh City. He earned his Master’s degree in Computer Science from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology and has over six years of experience in Data Science at Unilever Vietnam. Beyond his day-to-day managerial responsibilities, he is passionate about applying his analytical skills to social research projects in both psychology and education.
