What are linguistic difficulties for Vietnamese students in learning English?

Navigating the Verb Labyrinth: Linguistic Challenges Faced by Vietnamese Learners of English

Vietnamese students often demonstrate impressive aptitude in English, yet consistently struggle with a particular grammatical hurdle: verb tenses and aspects. This difficulty stems not from a lack of intelligence or effort, but from a fundamental difference between the grammatical structures of Vietnamese and English. Understanding this difference is key to developing effective teaching strategies and providing targeted support for Vietnamese learners.

The core issue lies in the contrasting ways Vietnamese and English express time and the duration or completion of actions. Vietnamese, unlike English, lacks explicit grammatical markers for tense and aspect. While temporal information is conveyed, it’s often done implicitly through context, adverbs, and particles, rather than through verb conjugation as in English. This implicit system, perfectly functional in Vietnamese, creates significant challenges when students attempt to master the explicit tense and aspect system of English.

For example, the distinction between the present perfect (“I have eaten”) and the simple past (“I ate”) is often blurred for Vietnamese learners. In Vietnamese, a single verb form might suffice to express both completed actions in the past and actions completed recently with ongoing relevance to the present. The subtle nuances conveyed by the auxiliary verb “have” and the past participle in the English present perfect are absent in their native language, leading to overgeneralization and inaccurate application. They may use the simple past inappropriately in contexts requiring the present perfect, or vice versa, because their intuitive understanding of time doesn’t map directly onto the English grammatical framework.

Furthermore, the continuous aspect (using “-ing” forms) poses another significant obstacle. While Vietnamese has ways to indicate ongoing actions, these are not consistently mirrored in the grammatical structure of the verb itself. The subtle differences between the simple present (“I eat”), present continuous (“I am eating”), and present perfect continuous (“I have been eating”) can be particularly confusing, resulting in inaccurate choices that impact the overall meaning and fluency of their English.

The problem is not merely a matter of memorization; it’s a challenge of conceptual understanding. Vietnamese learners need to consciously unlearn their implicit understanding of time and action and actively build a new, explicit understanding based on the English grammatical system. This requires targeted instruction that explicitly contrasts the two systems, providing ample opportunities for practice and feedback, and focusing on the meaning conveyed by different verb forms in context rather than relying solely on rote memorization of rules. By addressing this fundamental linguistic difference, educators can effectively support Vietnamese learners in navigating the complexities of English verb tenses and aspects and achieving greater fluency and accuracy in their English communication.