Staff profile

Bio

Vu Tran-Thanh is an ESRC-funded doctoral student at the School of Education, Durham University. Prior to his studies, he worked for seven years as a high school ESOL teacher and two years as a teacher trainer in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Vu founded and runs a professional learning community called TESOL Research Collaboration Network, which gathers and supports early career researchers in language education in Vietnam. This group has organised multiple professional development activities for both practising ESOL teachers and researchers in Vietnam for the last two years.

Vu mainly explores language teacher education and queer inclusivity in the language classroom. He has presented at different international conferences and published in some peer-reviewed journals. Besides, Vu has served as a reviewer for a number of conferences and journals in his field, such as Reflective Practice, VietTESOL Convention, TESOL International Convention & Expo etc.

For his doctoral project, Vu investigates the construction of LGBTQ+ language teachers' professional identities as they include queer-related materials into their classrooms. He believes that queer teachers are being unintentionally discriminated against by not sufficiently being considered as professionals. 

• language education
• queer theory
• teacher education

Chapter in book

• Tran-Thanh, V., Nguyen, H., & Le, H. (2023). Professional Identity Under Reconstruction: Stories of Vietnamese ESOL Teachers’ Integration of Technology. In D. Tafazoli, & M. Picard (Eds.), Handbook of CALL Teacher Education and Professional Development: Voices from Under-Represented Contexts. Springer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0514-0_20

Conference Paper

• Tran-Thanh, V. (2018, December). Integrating Students’ Culture into the English Classroom: Why and How?. Presented at 1st International ASEAN-English Language Teaching Conference, Melaka, Malaysia
• Tran-Thanh, V. (2018, December). Awareness and Avoidance of Cultural Stereotypes in English Language Teaching Resources. Presented at ACTA 2018 International TESOL Conference, Adelaide, Australia
• Tran-Thanh, V. (2014, December). Using the Interactive Reading Model to Develop High School Students' Reading Comprehension Ability. Presented at SGU Conference in Investigating Effective Methods of Teaching Listening and Reading Skills in English, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
• Tran-Thanh, V. (2017, December). Authentic Materials in Teaching English: a Reconsideration of Existing Definitions. Presented at SEAMEO 8th Annual International Conference on Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
• Moore, A., Paiz, J., Tran-Thanh, V., & Ravitch, L. (2021, December). Revisiting the curriculum that dare not speak its name: LGBTQ+ Inclusive Curriculum in TESOL. Presented at TESOL International Webinar, online
• Tran-Thanh, V. (2018, December). Exploring Vietnamese EFL Students’ Attitudes Towards Project-Based Learning Assessment. Presented at Eighth CLS International Conference, Singapore
• Tran-Thanh, V. (2017, December). Preparing Students for Writing: the Combined Approach. Presented at 2017 KOTESOL International Conference, Seoul, South Korea
• Tran-Thanh, V. (2019, December). LGBTQ+ Identities in English Education: Insight from Vietnamese Classrooms. Presented at TESOL 2019 International Convention & English Language Expo, Atlanta, GV, USA

Journal Article

• Dao, P., Nguyen, X., Duong, P.-T., & Tran-Thanh, V. (2022). Learners’ Engagement in L2 Computer-Mediated Interaction: Chat Mode, Interlocutor Familiarity, and Text Quality. Modern Language Journal, 105(4), https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12737
• Tran-Thanh, V. (2021). “Why I Don’t Teach As I was Trained”: Vietnamese Early Career ESOL Teachers’ Experience of Reality Shock. The Australian journal of teacher education, 46(12), https://doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2021v46n12.3
• Tran‐Thanh, V. (2020). Queer identity inclusion in the EFL classroom: Vietnamese teachers’ perspectives. TESOL Journal, 11(3), https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.512