Keyword: language transfer

ABSTRACT: In Vietnamese public schools serving ethnic minority learners, English language instruction often unfolds in linguistically complex and culturally mismatched classrooms. This narrative case study explores how one Vietnamese English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher responds to the challenges of teaching English to Khmer learners in a rural secondary school in the Mekong Delta. Drawing on a written reflection composed during a professional development course, the study examines how the teacher makes sense of her learners’ persistent grammatical difficulties, rooted in first language (L1) transfer from Khmer, and how she navigates the cultural dissonance between textbook content and learners’ lived experiences. Findings reveal that the teacher reframes language “errors” as patterned responses to structural distance, and that she enacts responsive teaching through chunk-based instruction, visual scaffolding, and culturally localized tasks. Her practice illustrates how small, context-driven adaptations are reconfigured when English is learned through Vietnamese by Khmer-speaking learners, making visible the interpretive work teachers do to turn structural distance into pedagogical resource. By foregrounding the voice of a teacher working in a triadic language environment (Khmer, Vietnamese, and English), the study theorises teacher responsiveness in such settings and offers an empirically grounded account of multilingual pedagogy and teacher agency in under-researched Southeast Asian classrooms.