International students’ experiences are a major concern for universities and educational researchers. Globally, Vietnam is a top source country for international students but little is known about their experience. This study explores the everyday experiences of 10 Vietnamese master’s students from a New Zealand university through a series of semi-structured in-depth interviews. A qualitative approach enabled me to capture the essential meanings of the participants’ experiences and understand what it was like to be Vietnamese students in New Zealand. In academic settings, the students initially struggled to deal with a range of problems related to language and communication. These made them feel overwhelmed and bewildered. During these formative months, many of them experienced language difficulties. These difficulties forced them to learn to deal with challenges and become independent. This research helps universities become more aware of the experience of foreign students studying at the host universities, and thereby take measures to support them in their studies and daily life.

Oral history is both a method of gathering information and an important source of historical data in social history and public history. The narratives of individuals are not only exploited to find historical facts or “additional” details to a grand narrative but uncover the meaning of individuals’ stories for a broader social context. That shift has made oral history increasingly an interdisciplinary research method. However, compared with the popularity of oral history in international academic disciplines, the application of this research method restricts in Vietnam. This article presents the possibilities and prospects of oral history through different research topics/fields in history, at the same time, specify the causes of obstacles to the legitimization of oral history in Vietnam.

This paper analyzes the interpersonal metafunction in text messages of teachers of English at Viet Anh School. The paper uses Systemic Functional Grammar as the theoretical framework which aims to investigate into a language from a qualitative approach. The aim of this paper is to discover how interpersonal metafunction is being served in text messages of teachers of English in terms of mood, speech function, modality and personal pronouns. The analysis indicates that the English teachers often use text messages for providing more information and demanding services by the dominant use of declaratives clauses in their interaction. These English teachers also perform their plans or desires about their future intention through the frequent use of modality such as ‘will’, ‘can’ or ‘could’. Through the analysis of personal pronouns, it can be clear that the English teachers tend to interact with each other by sharing their points of view rather than mentioning about other things or persons. Their social relation is shorten through the popular use of pronouns ‘I’, ‘we’ and ‘you’. Thus, it can be concluded that the social relationship among the English teachers is established and maintained through the use of interpersonal metafunction.