The Heritage Speaker Who Won't Speak in Class
A Vietnamese heritage student in an oral assessment is asked to give a 2-minute talk about a memorable family celebration and then answer two follow-up questions. In class practice she is fluent and animated, using quick turn-taking and slang with friends. In the recorded assessment she speaks for 40 seconds, uses short sentences, avoids the past tense, and falls back on English ('then we, like, went...') three times. When the teacher asks a follow-up in Vietnamese, she answers in English and then apologizes: 'Sorry, I don't know the formal words.' Her pronunciation is native-like; her hesitation is about which register to use.
1. Diagnose the gap. Is this a proficiency problem, a register problem, or an assessment-anxiety problem? Use the evidence to argue for a primary diagnosis and note what is secondary.
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Primary diagnosis: register/audience problem. Evidence:
- She is fluent and animated with friends - productive ability exists.
- Pronunciation is native-like - phonology is not the bottleneck.
- She explicitly says 'I don't know the formal words' - she is monitoring for a formal register she has not practiced.
- She avoids the past tense and uses short sentences - a known avoidance strategy when a speaker is unsure which form is appropriate, not when she cannot form past tense at all.
Secondary: assessment anxiety. The collapse from animated to 40 seconds happens specifically in the recorded condition, so anxiety amplifies the register problem but does not create it.
Not supported: general proficiency deficit. A proficiency diagnosis would predict difficulty with friends too, and it does not.
The exam point: heritage speakers often have broad informal competence and narrow formal competence. Diagnosing them as 'weak' misreads the profile and leads to the wrong remedy (more grammar drills instead of register practice).
2. The teacher wants to scaffold the next attempt without lowering the task. Propose a concrete plan and justify each element.
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A scaffold plan that keeps the 2-minute talk and two follow-ups:
- Pre-teach a small formal toolkit, not a grammar unit. Five or six frames: 'Có một lần...', 'Sau đó...', 'Điều tôi nhớ nhất là...', 'Theo tôi...'. These give her a formal 'spine' without asking her to relearn vocabulary she already owns informally.
- Register-mapping exercise. She lists what she would say to a friend and what she would say to a teacher for the same event; the teacher marks which items are informal-only. This makes the hidden variable explicit.
- Recorded rehearsal with a checklist. She records at home, listens once for content and once for register, and notes every English fallback word. The goal is to reduce fallbacks from three to one, then to zero.
- Keep the follow-up questions in Vietnamese and pre-warn the topics (not the exact questions). This reduces anxiety without removing the unrehearsed element.
- Grade on a register-aware rubric: content, organization, range, and consistency of register, so she is rewarded for using formal frames even if a sentence is simpler.
Justification: the diagnosis was register plus anxiety, so the scaffold targets register knowledge and reduces the recording-condition stress - not general proficiency.
3. When she uses English ('then we, like, went...'), should the teacher treat this as an error to correct immediately, as a strategic resource, or as evidence for the final grade? Argue for one position.
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Position: treat it as evidence for the grade and as a teaching point afterward - not as an immediate correction.
Reasons:
- Immediate correction during a recorded assessment interrupts fluency and raises anxiety, which the diagnosis already identifies as a secondary problem. It also changes the conditions of the assessment mid-task.
- Code-switching is a real communicative strategy, and a single fallback does not destroy the message. But in an oral assessment of Vietnamese, frequency and type of fallback are legitimate evidence of range and control.
- It is diagnostic. 'Like' and 'then we went' show where her formal Vietnamese frames are missing. That list is the syllabus for the next cycle.
So: let the recording run; in feedback, replay the three moments and ask her to supply a Vietnamese frame for each ('Sau đó chúng tôi...'). Then re-record. The grade should reflect that she completed the task with limited formal range, not that she 'cannot speak Vietnamese' - the evidence shows she can.