Teaching mission in French as a foreign language (FLE) at the Programme de Formation d’Ingénieurs d’Excellence au Vietnam (PFIEV) in Da Nang, Vietnam

Enhancing language skills and success for engineering students

From October 20 to 24, 2025, the Programme de Formation d’Ingénieurs d’Excellence au Vietnam (PFIEV) atDa Nang Polytechnic Institute (DUT – University of Danang, University of Science and Technology) welcomed Isabelle Salengros-Iguenane, a French as a Foreign Language (FLE) teacher at theÉcole nationale des ponts et chaussées (ENPC – Institut Polytechnique de Paris), as part of a teaching and pedagogical expertise mission.

This mobility is in line with the PFIEV’s objective of reinforcing French language skills, developing students’ autonomy and supporting local teaching teams, in conjunction with prospects for academic mobility to France.

Mission objectives

The mission had complementary objectives:

With students

  • Identify difficulties encountered in learning French ;
  • Reinforce motivation and commitment to learning;
  • Suggest strategies for greater autonomy ;
  • Help students prepare for the Diplôme d’Études en Langue Française (DELF) level B1 exams, with particular emphasis on oral production, pronunciation and prosody.

For teachers

  • Present the didactic approaches to FLE used at the École nationale des ponts et chaussées (adult training, task-based approach, learner-centeredness);
  • Encourage the sharing of teaching practices;
  • Strengthen professional exchanges between French and Vietnamese teams.

Course of the mission

The mission began with an institutional reception attended by university management, the Faculty of Advanced Science and Technology (FAST ) and PFIEV managers. This meeting provided an opportunity to present the program, its infrastructure and its excellent results in terms of professional integration.

Several interactive seminars were then organized for preparatory and engineering students (up to 70 participants, with heterogeneous FLE levels). The sessions, conducted in French with mediation in Vietnamese, focused on :

  • presentation of the École nationale des ponts et chaussées ;
  • the challenges of multilingualism for future engineers ;
  • the main difficulties encountered in learning French and the levers for progress;
  • pronunciation, prosody and phonetics, with an emphasis on body language.

A targeted DELF B1 preparation workshop also brought together a small group of particularly committed students, enabling more in-depth and individualized support.

Finally, a special session dedicated to teachers of French as a foreign language at the PFIEV in Da Nang dealt with teaching methods, the choice of teaching aids, managing large groups, and the constraints involved in combining teaching and research activities.

Lessons and contributions

This mission highlighted :

  • a concrete contribution for students, giving them ways of gaining confidence in speaking and becoming more autonomous in learning French;
  • support for local teaching teams, through the sharing of practices and in-depth didactic exchanges;
  • a strengthening of the academic partnership between the Da Nang PFIEV and the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, opening up prospects for future cooperation.

More broadly speaking, this mobility illustrates the added value of PFIEV’s short-term missions, in terms of training quality, student success in learning French and the sustainability of Franco-Vietnamese cooperation.