This
weekend we were very pleased to host two visitors from Pham Ngoc Thach
University, Hồ Chí Minh City, Việt Nam. They were Lê Thi Thanh Xuân
(Xuân) and Lê Khánh Điền (Điền). Xuân and Điền have almost completed their speech
pathology course at Pham Ngoc Thach University and have received a Hoc Mai Foundation scholarship to study in Australia for 3 months. I taught them when I visited in 2011, and have been working with Xuân on her final project via Skype for a
number of months. It was good to work face-to-face on our phonological analysis
of Vietnamese children’s speech.
One of the most exciting aspects of the weekend was
that it snowed in a nearby town. This was the first time that Xuân and Điền had
ever seen snow! They also enjoyed many other Australian cultural experiences,
including seeing kangaroos in the wild. They made us a fantastic Vietnamese
dinner of phở and spring rolls. My family wished that they could stay for
longer because we learned so much from their visit.
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| Điền and Xuân's first experience of snow |
