Charles Sturt University in Australia has released a book to provide Vietnamese families living in the country to teach their children Vietnamese at home, reported VNA Friday.

VietSpeech Multilingual Children. Source: csu.edu.au

Titled “VietSpeech Multilingual Children”, the book is the product of research on pronunciation and language for Vietnamese children in Australia funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC).

The book is freely available online.

VietSpeech aims to support Vietnamese-Australian children and families to maintain their home language, enhance speech skills in Vietnamese and English and equip English-speaking professionals to support multilingual children’s speech.

A database of Vietnamese-Australian children’s speech acquisition and a Vietnamese-English speech program will be developed as part of the research.

Expected outcomes include enhanced language maintenance and scalable prototypes for other languages.

Charles Sturt University in Australia. Photo: AP

The book covers topics such as the benefits of preserving their native language and multilingualism, ways to help children adapt to the Vietnamese language, and communication skills.

Dr. Tran Hong Van, the co-author of the book, said it will provide parents with the tools to help their children learn the Vietnamese language and develop bilingual skills.

According to Professor Sharynne McLeod, the other co-author, said mother tongues are at risk of disappearing within three generations among migrant families. Many children cannot speak their mother tongue fluently when they start school.

Vietnamese is one of the five most spoken languages in Australia (along with Mandarin, Arabic, Cantonese, Italian) and is spoken by 1.2% of the Australian population, according to data of Australian Bureau of Statistics 2017.

There are over 300,000 Vietnamese people living in this country, accounting for 1.26% of the population.

McLeod said now is an important time for the Vietnamese community in Australia to maintain the mother tongue for younger generations.

The authors hope that the book will be popularised not only in Australia, but also in other countries with large Vietnamese populations such as Canada and the US.

Australia Continues To Support For Vietnam's Vocational Education The Australia’s next phase of support for Vietnam’s vocational education and training (VET) was launched on April 14.

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