Tin Tan Dang

Multicultural education research has expanded rapidly, but its definitions remain varied and the distinction between representation and equitable participation remains unresolved. This thematic-bibliometric review of one publication year examines 210 English-language articles published in 2025 and classified in the field of Social Sciences in Scopus, the sole database. The articles span 135 sources and 56 affiliation countries. The single-year design offers a concentrated view of contemporary conceptual patterns without estimating change over time. Bibliometric analysis examined publication, authorship, affiliation-country, keyword, bibliographic coupling, and cited reference patterns. Hybrid codebook thematic analysis examined how titles, author keywords, and abstracts framed multicultural education, without appraising complete articles. Keyword and co-citation patterns connected educator learning with diversity, equity, culturally responsive teaching, intercultural competence, policy, and a shared knowledge foundation in culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogy. Six themes addressed recognition, culturally grounded pedagogy, institutional enactment, power and formal inclusion, learner development and access, and conceptual and evidential gaps. Through the theoretical framework, the themes inform a provisional educational ecology specific to this corpus. Within this heuristic, representation becomes consequential when learners and communities can influence knowledge, interaction, decisions, and access, and when unequal power and resources are addressed. Equitable participation serves as a normative analytical organising principle, not a new theory or an outcome demonstrated across the corpus. The review contributes a relational account of recognition, pedagogy, institutions, power, access, and evidence quality in multicultural education. Further research should examine these proposed relations across time, disciplines, languages, settings, databases, and complete articles.

This study maps a narrowly defined Scopus indexed corpus on pre-service teacher education in English as a foreign language and English as a second language contexts from 2020 to 2025. The corpus contained 34 English language documents retrieved through a title-based search and analysed with Bibliometrix, igraph, and VOSviewer. The analysis examined annual publication and citation patterns, recurring terms, highly cited documents, country and author collaboration, and reference co-citation. Publication output increased unevenly from four documents in 2020 to nine in 2025. Term patterns suggest a movement from pandemic and distance education language towards language teaching, World Englishes, practicum, and teaching strategies. Citation visibility was concentrated around a small number of documents, especially one 2020 article, and citation counts were treated as visibility indicators rather than evidence of quality. Country and author collaboration appeared fragmented, with several small components and only one recurring research team. Reference co-citation was also weak, suggesting limited shared intellectual grounding within this title defined corpus. The review offers a cautious map of what is visible in Scopus and identifies priorities for future research, including broader database comparisons, clearer terminology, stronger cross-national designs, and closer links between teacher education research, practicum supervision, curriculum development, and technology literacy.

English language education in Vietnam is shaped by renewed policy reform, marked by a focus on proficiency development and evaluation mechanisms. More recently, an expanded ambition positions English as a language of instruction in schools. In this context, an updated overview of research directions is necessary to understand what the TESOL and EFL community is prioritising and to identify potential gaps between research and policy. This study uses 1,891 accepted submissions from VietTESOL International Convention from 2021 to 2025 and employs a thematic analysis to identify research trends. Texts were tokenised into content words, lemmatised, and counted using document frequency, with each word counted at most once per record. Annual counts were normalised by the number of records per year to obtain average per record values. Keywords were then classified into upward, downward, constant, and fluctuating trends and interpreted through their discourse contexts. The upward trend shows research on pedagogical aspects, learning engagement, and learners’ contexts. The downward trend shows research on generic online learning mode and pandemic context. Research on learning activities and assessment tended to be stable, regardless of the temporal changes. Research on productive skills and classroom practice appeared to be fluctuating. These findings indicate partial alignment with national priorities on proficiency and evaluation alongside limited visibility of research constructs linked to lifelong learning and sustainability. Targeted research funding, dissemination incentives, and practice-linked research programs are suggested to strengthen the alignment between research practice and policy planning.

This editorial introduces a reprinted issue that consolidates four influential but difficult-to-access articles on learner autonomy, student engagement in virtual learning spaces, and teachers’ ideas in English language education in Vietnamese higher education. Drawing only on the reprinted works and accompanying framing documents, it argues that autonomy is best understood as a dynamic cycle of initiating, monitoring, and evaluating learning, and as a socially shaped capacity emerging through interaction, negotiation, and community participation. The editorial synthesises empirical evidence that student engagement in a Moodle-supported environment is differentiated and patterned (task-, content-, and community-oriented) and that meaningful online interaction and community formation require explicit pedagogical facilitation, assessment-aligned task design, and links to offline relationships. It further highlights how teachers’ beliefs and institutional, personal, and social mediators condition technology uptake and shape learners’ online participation. To conclude, the editorial proposes a prospective agenda focused on operationalising autonomy in technology-supported learning, testing design principles for sustainable online communities, and examining teacher facilitation under emerging digital conditions.

Learner autonomy has been an important focus of educational practices and research for more than three decades. Various methods of promoting learner autonomy in foreign/second language education have been attempted, and different theoretical approaches have been proposed. These multifaceted developments of learner autonomy have been debated, and several perspectives of this capacity have been suggested. Taking this into account, this paper provides a synthesized overview of learner autonomy. It starts with an introduction of the definition of learner autonomy in relation to a critical analysis of the four perspectives adopted in learner autonomy research. It then presents and analyses different models of learner autonomy. The discussion continues with critiques of leaner autonomy promoting practices in traditional classrooms and those with ICT support. Finally, the paper suggests a theoretical framework to convey the principal processes of learner autonomy and an analytical framework to understand this construct at the operationalised level.

Responses of Vietnamese undergraduate students majoring in English to the integration of a Moodle site during an upper intermediate macro-skill course highlight differences in learner autonomy and expectations. Students’ general attitudes towards, and participation in, this online Web 2.0 environment provide the basis for the research reported in this paper. Qualitative data from individual interviews ranged from neutral to very positive. The data also identified three patterns of online participation: task-oriented, content-oriented and community-oriented. These patterns reflect a transition in the local students’ learning expectations and behaviours towards controlling their learning processes and socialising activities in their formal learning. The paper concludes with a number of pedagogical suggestions for the process of technology integration in education in the local context. These are aimed at better engagement of students in the process of personalising online learning environments to suit their needs.

Online communications have been widely researched in different education contexts during the last two decades. Together with the development of emerging technology, educational applications have received a huge change in e-communication modes, from unidirectional to interactive websites, asynchronous to synchronous exchanges, and stand alone to networked real-time simulations. These have constituted a platform for the development of online social life and communities. To take advantage of this environment for educational benefits, this study particularly attempts to investigate the habitual behaviors of undergraduates in Vietnam who study English as a Foreign Language when they interact with a Moodle site during an English course. It specifically focuses on students‟ expectations and awareness of online communication, their preferences related to instant messenger and blogging, and influential impacts on the formation of the online communities. Qualitative data from individual interviews and document analyses have shown that students prefer to use synchronous communication modes and look for instant responses regardless of how often they go online. In addition, the shaping of the online educational communities needs a lot of support, reinforcement, and nurture from the facilitators and real life connections. Finally, the discussion suggests a possible analytical framework for online learning community investigation.

This paper is to address the responses of Vietnamese undergraduate students and three teachers of English to the integration of a Moodle site during a language skill course. It particularly examines the teachers’ perceptions of this interactive web-based technology and their actual usages during the course as well as the students’ participation in this online environment. Qualitative data from the teachers’ reflections indicated three factor groups that significantly contributed to their attitudes toward and employment of ICT, namely personal, institutional, and social. In addition, students presented the three patterns of online participation, namely task-oriented, content-oriented, and community-oriented. These reflected a transition in both teachers’ practices and students’ learning expectations and behaviors. The paper finally concludes with a number of pedagogical suggestions for the process of integrating technology in education in the local context to engage students in the online learning processes with more personalized learning environments.