Power Relations In Vietnamese Culture

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The purpose of this assignment is to discuss various social aspects of power relation between teachers and learners in Vietnamese culture. I. How has that power relation been in Vietnam so far? First, we need to understand what power relation is. According to Oxford advanced learner’s dictionary, 8th edition, “power” is “the ability to control people or things”. Power relation is the division of power between the two groups of people, who have more power over the others. In this assignment, it is the power relation between teacher and students that matters. In this part, I am going to give some examples in response to the first question above. Take a video on YouTube as an example: This video provides us a closer look at a class in a primary school in Vietnam, where teacher and students are taking part in a science class. There is something worth mentioning: First, we can notice that Vietnamese students never call their teacher by his/her first name because they find it disrespectful. Instead, it is advisable for the students to call their teacher by title only, like those students in the first video: they always stand up and say “Thưa cô” before giving answer for…show more content…
In another way, each culture holds different notions of how power distance affects the way its individuals behave. In analyzing the relationship between teachers and students, the teachers are automatically considered the ones with more power whereas the students are, therefore, less powerful. Power distance has great impacts on the relationship between Teachers and students, the way they communicate, the teaching method and so on. Undoubtedly, Vietnam is a large Power distance society, meaning they widely accept the fact that teachers are originally given the dominant role in

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