THE EFFECTS OF TECHNOLOGY-ASSISTED LISTENING PRACTICE ON MOODLE ON ENGLISH-MAJORED FRESHMEN'S LISTENING PROFICIENCY

This research was conducted to investigate the effects of technology-assisted listening practice on MOODLE on English-majored freshmen's listening proficiency as an alternative to traditional teaching and learning English. An interesting question, however, was how to apply this mode of teaching and learning English listening within the Vietnamese context. In Vietnam, few studies have been carried out on the advantages and disadvantages that university teachers and students encountered in implementing English listening practice with MOODLE assistance to meet the demands and interests of the students and support instructional practices. Therefore, this quantitative-method research was conducted to examine this interesting area with sixty-four English-majored freshmen. The data were analyzed from a pretest and post-test. The findings prove that technology-assisted listening practice on MOODLE had positive effects on English-majored freshmen's listening proficiency.  Article visualizations

Sustainability drivers and practices in Vietnamese manufacturing: a multiple-case study through the lens of the Sustainability Marketing Mix

The present rate and extent of the Southeast Asia region\u27s economic expansion, social disintegration, and environmental destruction necessitate additional academic research and industry action. The importance of exploring the Marketing function in the pursuit of sustainable development (SD) by the private sector has called for the discipline’s innovative ideas to address pressure from stakeholders not only on firms’ economic, but also social and environmental performance. Emerging economies, such as Vietnam, present dilemmas since rapid mass economic development aimed at lifting standards of living creates serious threats to social imbalance and environmental health. Although businesses in Vietnam have been increasingly recognising their role in contributing to SD, little is known about the driving forces of sustainability initiatives in Vietnamese manufacturing firms, and how they integrate sustainability practices from the marketing’s viewpoint via its ten controllable elements designed for the purpose of achieving SD- the Sustainability Marketing Mix (SMM) which is an extension of the classic ‘4Ps’. The research aims to have a novel and timely contribution to the literature of the Marketing discipline and assist managers to improve their sustainability performance

The Effects of Technology-Assisted Listening Practice on Moodle on English-Majored Freshmen’s Motivation for Learning Listening at a University in The Mekong Delta

Purpose: This study was to investigate the effects of technology-assisted listening practice on MOODLE on English-majored freshmen's motivation for learning English listening at a university in the Mekong Delta. Approach/Methodology/Design: Two groups of sixty-four mixed-gender freshmen majoring in English language studies participated in this quasi-experimental study. To collect data, a pre-questionnaire, a post-questionnaire, and interviews were employed. Findings: The findings indicated that technology-assisted listening practice on MOODLE improved English-majored freshmen's listening motivation in specific areas for learning listening; however, this was a variance development. Practical Implications: This study was aimed to help language teachers and students benefit from technology-assisted listening teaching and learning. Originality/value: This study innovates by applying the MOODLE system to increase students’ listening motivation at a university in the Mekong Delta

EFL TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS ABOUT IMPLEMENTING ACTIVE LEARNING TECHNIQUES IN TEACHING SPEAKING

Active learning has indicated its important role in learners’ speaking process and involved students in classroom activities. Therefore, there is a pressing need for implementing active learning techniques to engage students in speaking English. The research entitled “The EFL Teachers’ Perceptions about Implementing Active Learning Techniques in Teaching Speaking” was conducted to obtain two research aims, including (1) to find out teachers’ perceptions about implementing active learning techniques in their speaking classrooms; (2) to investigate the benefits and difficulties of implementing active learning techniques in teaching speaking. This is descriptive research using mix-methods. The participants were 56 teachers who are from two English language centers in Can Tho City responding to the questionnaire. Besides, semi-structured interviews were also administrated to investigate the benefits and difficulties teachers faced when implementing active learning techniques in teaching speaking. The findings show that teachers had positive perceptions of implementing active learning techniques in their speaking classrooms in the Mekong Delta and provided some valuable information for further topic-related research.  Article visualizations

Examining the Part-of-speech Features in Assessing the Readability of Vietnamese Texts

The readability of the text plays a very important role in selecting appropriate materials for the level of the reader. Text readability in Vietnamese language has received a lot of attention in recent years, however, studies have mainly been limited to simple statistics at the level of a sentence length, word length, etc. In this article, we investigate the role of word-level grammatical characteristics in assessing the difficulty of texts in Vietnamese textbooks. We have used machine learning models (for instance, Decision Tree, K-nearest neighbor, Support Vector Machines, etc.) to evaluate the accuracy of classifying texts according to readability, using grammatical features in word level along with other statistical characteristics. Empirical results show that the presence of POS-level characteristics increases the accuracy of the classification by 2-4%

BioCaster: detecting public health rumors with a Web-based text mining system

Summary: BioCaster is an ontology-based text mining system for detecting and tracking the distribution of infectious disease outbreaks from linguistic signals on the Web. The system continuously analyzes documents reported from over 1700 RSS feeds, classifies them for topical relevance and plots them onto a Google map using geocoded information. The background knowledge for bridging the gap between Layman's terms and formal-coding systems is contained in the freely available BioCaster ontology which includes information in eight languages focused on the epidemiological role of pathogens as well as geographical locations with their latitudes/longitudes. The system consists of four main stages: topic classification, named entity recognition (NER), disease/location detection and event recognition. Higher order event analysis is used to detect more precisely specified warning signals that can then be notified to registered users via email alerts. Evaluation of the system for topic recognition and entity identification is conducted on a gold standard corpus of annotated news articles

Awareness And Risk Behaviors Towards Zoonotic Disease Among Ethnic Minority In Mountainous Area Of Central Vietnam

Background: As a result of the population explosion and rapid urbanization, human activities have been causing negative impacts on the environment. The changing patterns of transmissible diseases among wild animals, livestock and human have been getting more and more complicated in the context of climate change. Ethnic community from mountainous and isolated areas undoubtedly are the most vulnerable, with the high risk of emerging and re-emerging zoonosis. Objectives: To explore the awareness and risk behaviors of the residents in Nham commune, A Luoi district towards zoonosis transmission. To determine the factors related to the risk behaviors of the residents. Methods: A sectional-cross study was conducted among 230 residents whose ages range from 18 – 85, currently living in Nham commune, A Luoi district, adjacent to the Vietnam – Laos border. All participants were interviewed directly with a questionnaire including the following categories: demographics, household wealth, awareness of zoonosis, livestock management and behaviors related to wildlife animals. Descriptive analysis and multivariable logistic regression analysis were conducted to determine factors associated with risk behaviors. Results: The proportion of respondents who have heard about zoonotic diseases was 40%. The majority of subjects raise free-range livestock (83,4%), especially on poultry and cow. The percentage of participants who consumed culled sick and dead animals accounted for 26%, over 30% of villagers slept in forest and more than 50% consumed bushmeat. Risk behaviors related to management livestock and wildlife were statistically significantly associated with gender, age of subjects, educational background, household wealth, information approach on zoonosis, and the number of livestocks. Conclusions: The proportion of respondents who have heard about zoonotic diseases was 40%. The high-risk group falls on those who consume dead domestic animals, wildlife animals and sleep in the forest. Behaviors of human-wildlife contact and zoonosis are quite common with the Nham locals, which emphasizes the necessity for intervention programs in zoonotic disease control.

Detection of co-infection and recombination cases with Omicron and local Delta variants of SARS-CoV-2 in Vietnam

The first nationwide outbreak of COVID-19 in Vietnam started in late April 2021 and was caused almost exclusively by a single Delta lineage, AY.57. In early 2022, multiple Omicron variants co-circulated with Delta variants and quickly became dominant. The co-circulation of Delta and Omicron happened leading to possibility of co-infection and recombination events which can be revealed by viral genomic data. From January to October 2022, a total of 1028 viral RNA samples out of 4852 positive samples (Ct < 30) were sequenced by the long pooled amplicons method on Illumina platforms. All sequencing data was analysed by the workflow for SARS-CoV-2 on CLC genomics workbench and Illumina Dragen Covid application. Among those sequenced samples, we detected a case of Delta AY.57/Omicron BA.1 co-infection and two cases of infection with Delta AY.57/Omicron BA.2 recombinants which were nearly identical and had different epidemiological characteristics. Since the AY.57 lineage circulated almost exclusively in Vietnam, these results strongly suggest domestic events of co-infection and recombination. These findings highlight the strengths of genomic surveillance in monitoring the circulating variants in the community enabling rapid identification of viral changes that may affect viral properties and evolutionary events