To meet the requirements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) Vietnam’s K-12 education has shifted from a content-based to a competency-based approach. Teacher education institutions are, therefore, required to make comprehensive curriculum reforms to align with the K-12 education innovation. This paper is concerned with the adoption of the CDIO (conceive-design-implement-operate) initiative for teacher training programs at Vinh University in Central Vietnam. It gives an account of the large-scale changes that involve significant shifts in the culture of management, teaching, learning and assessment, the revamp of the structure and contents of the curricula, along with enhancement of faculty teaching competence, personal and interpersonal skills, product, process, and system building skills, as well as disciplinary fundamentals. It also describes how the university has adapted the 12 CDIO standards for teacher training programs, and how teacher training spaces, outcome-based assessment and program evaluation have been adjusted in accordance with the CDIO principles. The qualitative research method was employed for an evaluation of the CDIO-based program implementation. The data were collected from interviews with faculty members and students, observations, documents related to the CDIO program implementation, reports of departments and AUN-QA accreditation agency that assessed the programs. It was found that the CDIO approach is highly applicable for teacher training programs; it fits the outcome-based teaching and assessment and the development of professional skills and competencies with which future teachers need to be equipped.

This paper is concerned with a cross-cultural study of modality expressions in asking for permission by Vietnamese and English speakers. The study involved 209 Canadian and Vietnamese informants with the use of a Discourse Completion Task questionnaire. A total of 3000 utterances were chosen for analysis to gain insights into the frequency and types of lexico-modal markers manifested in the two languages. It is found that hearer-oriented verbal style tends to be dominant in Vietnamese while the speaker-oriented strategy is more favored in English. Vietnamese speakers tend to employ direct strategies with a dominant use of appealers which sounds intimate to the hearer. English speakers, by contrast, incline to conventionally-indirect strategies such as Can I, Could I, etc. It is also evident that Vietnamese speakers frequently use politeness markers when they communicate with the older, but they hardly use them for their peers. English speakers, however, use politeness markers for all partners with a slight variation. Another noteworthy similarity is that both Canadian and Vietnamese women modalize their language than men.