Hanh Nguyen

Change in Start time – The meeting will be starting from 5pm, not 6pm as earlier indicated.

How do second language learners improve their language while getting their job done at a workplace? This presentation addresses this question by analyzing a guest-relations officer`s social interaction with international guests at a hotel in Vietnam focusing on her changes and pronunciation of the word massage over 10 months. The findings provide implications for language, teaching and workplace communication skills training.

Hanh Nguyen is Professor of applied linguistics in the TESOL Program at Hawaii Pacific University. Her research interests include interactional competence development, second language learning, conversation analysis, classroom discourse, and Vietnamese applied linguistics. She is the author of Developing Interactional Competence at the Workplace: Learning English as a Foreign Language on the Shop Floor (2024, Routledge, co-authored with Malabarba), Developing Interactional Competence: A Conversation Analytic Study of Patient Consultations in Pharmacy (2012, Palgrave-MacMillan). She is the co-editor of Conversation Analytic Perspectives on English Language Learning, Teaching and Testing in Global Contexts (2019, Multilingual Matters), Talk-in-Interaction: Multilingual Perspectives (2009, University of Hawaii Press) and Pragmatics & Language Learning, Vol. 12 (2010, University of Hawaii Press). Her articles appear in several edited volumes and journals such as Applied Linguistics, Text and Talk, Journal of Pragmatics, The Modern Language Journal, The Canadian Modern Language Review, Language and Education, Classroom Discourse, Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, JALT Journal, and Communication and Medicine. 

This meeting will be a hybrid event. Please join us in person at our regular venue. Dr Nguyen will be presenting online. If you would like to join us from outside the Kitakyushu region, please contact us for the online meeting (Google Meet) link.