New Vietnamese Courses for Heritage Learners: Why This Moment Matters
After years of careful development, the Language Center is thrilled to announce that the Vietnamese for Heritage Learners curriculum is open for enrollment for academic year 2026-2027. The two-course sequence brings representation and community to speakers of this Southeast Asian language.
Over 85 million people speak Vietnamese, the official language of Vietnam, and Minnesota is home to one of the largest Vietnamese populations in the Midwest. And yet, it has been over 15 years since the University of Minnesota offered a local Vietnamese language program. In its absence, students have looked to the Big Ten Alliance (BTAA) CourseShare program to partially fill this gap.
Lead design team Amanda Dalola and Ky Win Nguyen discuss why they developed these new courses with Vietnamese heritage students in mind, as they highlight the significance of connection and expression through language.
The heritage learner
This isn’t just a second language curriculum, although it could be used that way. Part of what makes these courses special is who they were designed for: the heritage learner.
When someone has had passive exposure to a language — most often through family or community — they might be able to understand and speak some of it, but not read or write it very well. After hearing from heritage students who were eager to learn their language with a holistic approach that included culture and identity, Dalola and Nguyen knew they had their aim.
“A lot of teaching heritage learners is about meeting them where they are,” Dalola explains. “Helping them recognize the skills in culture and language that they already have, then helping them realize that that's a huge boost when it comes to studying any kind of language.”
Nguyen, drawing from her work as a mental health therapist, emphasizes the value of connecting with diverse backgrounds and experiences: “It has a big impact on the sense of belonging,” she says. “Belonging to identity, community, family.”
These courses aim to honor and build on that approach.
More than grammar
This curriculum was carefully developed from scratch. It includes an Open Educational Resource (OER) comprising ten chapters that aim to represent Northern, Southern, and Central varieties of the language.
“The sociopolitical situation with Vietnamese,” Dalola explains, “is that Northern Vietnamese is the prestige form. It's the form you get a lot of proper print media and all kinds of things in.” However, there are distinct dialect differences in Central and Southern Vietnam. And in the Twin Cities, she continues, “the vast majority of Vietnamese spoken is of the Southern variety, which creates a social conflict when it’s not represented in the classroom.”
This awareness allowed Dalola and Nguyen to be mindful of how sociolinguistic differences would be integrated in these courses.
Heritage learners are recommended to have a basic understanding of the language before enrolling in this curriculum, because the courses are designed to encourage and challenge learners to connect their heritage language skills in creative and meaningful ways. Learners will create meaning from interacting with a wide range of authentic Vietnamese texts — anything from a ticket stub to a social media post, song lyrics to graffiti, and more.
“This project has really helped me to understand that language is not just a tool of communication, but a way to touch base on identity,” Nguyen says. “I see language not as a gap or barrier, but as a tool to allow people to express who they are.”
Not sure where to start?
The Vietnamese Self-Assessment Placement Tool (UMN login required) is designed to help students determine whether they’re ready for these courses.
This self-assessment is non-binding, meaning the results are a suggestion and learners can decide for themselves whether to follow them.
The options are expanding
Learning another language offers variety in navigating and interacting with the world. It allows for a more nuanced way of thinking, especially when engaging with cultures and traditions different from your own.
But for the heritage learner, it means connecting with cultures and traditions that are your own.
Enroll in Vietnamese for Heritage Learners, 2026-2027:
Meet the developers
Ky Win Nguyen is a developer of language curricula and proficiency assessments and the language faculty for Vietnamese. Born in Vietnam, she came to the US as a teenager to fulfill her dream of experiencing a Home Alone winter. Nguyen’s work designing learning materials leans on how language and identity connect and is supported by her work as a mental health therapist. She will be teaching Vietnamese for Heritage Learners I in fall '26, and Vietnamese for Heritage Learners II in spring '27.
Amanda Dalola is the director of the Language Center and an associate professor in linguistics. Dalola’s fascination with language keeps her enrolled in three or so language courses at all times — just for fun. Her specialties in linguistics are phonetics and phonology, which represent the sound-based side of language, and sociolinguistics, known as the social, community- and identity-based side of language.
This story was written by Deborah Sventek, an undergraduate student in CLA.
