Study English, my dear students!
That’s the message of Dr. Vu The Dung – Vice Director of HCMUT – VNU, to all the students.
English is not a language anymore, it is now an inevitable trend. – Photo: Scorp
Today, I would love to express some devoted messages for you, my HCMUT students. Study English, excellently!
1. Communicating with employers & recruiters, I was told that they all wanted to offer HCMUT’s engineers abroad training programs, but the fact that the engineers were not good in English so they have to choose other engineers.
2. Working with foreign cooperators, specialists, our engineers cannot show their abilities adequately because of English unproficiency.
3. English now is no longer a language or a choice anymore, it is an inevitable trend. People now are USING English, not just LEARNING English anymore. English is a working & living environment. Information & data are abundant for English USER. Without English, the most common language in use, the world would have been more like a well.
4. Some students bemoan that they have no talents for English, they cannot learn English well. It is a certainty that billion people are learning and using English and you, students, are not worse than those billion people. The problem here is your way of thinking that if you think you cannot learn, you will never succeed it. This is the difference between successful people and unsuccessful people. Ones always think that they can do anything; other people can do it well, they also can do it well. The other ones always blame for the situations, the difficulties, the lack of time, money, etc. Don’t blame all day, take action!
5. How to study? Careful study, deep learning will be effective.
6. Talking to students make me understand that why students learn English ineffectively. Students always learn to reach the number of lessons, vocabularies, not to learn the essence.
The importance when learning languages are:
- Read out loud, clearly, repeat reading many times.
- Learn by heart
- Practice writing
- Practice speaking in front of the mirror
7. Instead of concentrating on reading passages or conversations with your eyes, start listening to the CD player, repeat after the player, speak out loud & clear. If there are hard words to spell, try to practice more times. For the first listening, repeat it 8-10 times until you feel it so fluent. Then, look up all the vocabularies in the dictionary to understand deeply each new words. After that, read & start to answer the questions of passages out loud. Note that you are learning a living language, if you just read with your eyes, you will forget it easily.
8. Students should try to carefully read a reading passage as instructed above rather than trying to finish 2-3 reading passages a day. If it is possible, interpret the reading into Vietnamese, the more fluently the better. When doing interpretation, you will see it is not easy at all, if you can do well & smoothly, you then reach the higher level of your learning language.
9. Start doing the same with the next 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th…reading passages. Be patient and you will see your improvement when you do the 6th, 7th,8th passages, that the time spending on learn by heart, deep understanding & interpreting are much less than before.
10. The learning strategy is to learn 10 lessons with 110% memorizing & understanding in place of learning 20 lessons with little comprehension.
11. By doing so, you are not just practice reading, but also exercise speaking and translating. The English language appeals to more lively to you.
12. What about writing? Start with handwritten copy the sample passages, read out loud and write down 1-3 writing sample passages every day. Next, rewrite the passage based on your memorizing. After 20 to 30 days practicing writing, your writing will be improved.
13. Listening? Listening to English music. Watch HBO or Star Movies films & programs with English subtitles every day.
14. Speaking? Join in some English Clubs, or you can practice with the mirror. Prepare a topic, write out the outline and exercise speaking in front of the mirror, question & answer yourself. Practice a topic several times a day.
15. Of course, I don’t mean to instruct you to learn English in place of your instructor. I am sharing my experience with you, my students!
Use English!
Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT) – Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City (VNU HCM), is one of the key university in Vietnam that started training & teaching in English. From 2006 until now, HCMUT has launched English training programs, and articulation programs to provide for local students as well as international ones.
Study programs of HCMUT are accredited by local & international prestigious organizations, namely MOET (Ministry of Education and Training of Vietnam), AUN – QA (ASEAN Universities Network – Quality Assurance), ABET (Accreditation Board of Engineering & Technology – USA), etc.
Dr. VU THE DUNG
Vice Rector of the HCMUT
Translation: Ngoc Tram
