Vietnamese Education Copy

Vietnamese school and academic writing (vi-VN)

Vietnamese education writing fails by flattening a rigidly hierarchical, legally codified system into one generic voice. A teacher writing to a 9-year-old, a school broadcasting to parents, and a university registrar addressing an adult student are three different registers with three different pronouns — and two of the genres here (report-card language, diploma reissuance) use wording set by a Ministry circular, not by house style.

This skill covers instructional and administrative writing only. E-learning product UI, gamification, and subtitles belong to vietnamese-tech-writing; tutoring-centre, test-prep, and study-abroad advertising belong to vietnamese-business-comms — both are genuinely different registers (software microcopy, regulated advertising) wearing an education topic.

Step 1 — Identify the writer, the reader, and the schooling stage

| Writer → Reader | Register | Notes | |---|---|---| | Teacher → secondary student (THCS/THPT) | edu-k12 (em) | The default K-12 classroom register | | Teacher → primary student (tiểu học) | edu-k12-primary (con) | Set by schooling stage, not the student's actual age | | School/teacher → parents (collective) | edu-parent (quý phụ huynh) | sổ liên lạc, Zalo broadcasts, report-card notices | | University → student (administrative prose) | edu-uni (no direct address) | Transcripts, syllabi, registration — third-person sinh viên |

bạn addressed to a student in a teacher's voice is the single most common machine-translation tell in this domain — it strips the hierarchical respect the relationship requires. Full matrix, including how these four rows sit alongside every other Vietnamese skill's registers: [references/register-matrix.md](references/register-matrix.md). The education-specific detail — the primary/secondary con/em line, quý phụ huynh versus a known parent's own register, and a teacher's self-reference (thầy/cô, never tôi) — is in [references/doc-registers.md](references/doc-registers.md).

Step 2 — Use the statutory grading terms, not the ones that sound right

Grading and credential terminology in Vietnam is set by Bộ GD&ĐT circulars, and they changed recently enough that an LLM's training data still defaults to the abolished terms:

• Secondary (THCS/THPT), Thông tư 22/2021/TT-BGDĐT: overall classification is Tốt /

Khá / Đạt / Chưa đạt. Học sinh Tiên tiến and an overall Giỏi/Trung bình label are abolished — generating them is the clearest tell that a report card is machine-written.

• Primary (tiểu học), Thông tư 27/2020/TT-BGDĐT: routine assessment is qualitative, not

numeric — Hoàn thành tốt / Hoàn thành / Cần cố gắng. Cần cải thiện is the calque; the statutory phrase is Cần cố gắng.

• Higher education, Thông tư 08/2021/TT-BGDĐT: credit is tín chỉ, never tín dụng (that

is financial credit). GPA is written with a Vietnamese decimal comma (3,6/4,0), and maps to Xuất sắc / Giỏi / Khá — an untranslated 3.6/4.0 is a locale bug, not a style choice.

• Diplomas, Thông tư 21/2019/TT-BGDĐT: an original diploma is issued once. A lost diploma is

never "reissued as an original" — the correct, and only legal, output is cấp bản sao từ sổ gốc (a copy from the master register).

Full tables, article citations, and effective dates: [references/grading-terminology.md](references/grading-terminology.md).

Step 3 — Look up the term before inventing one

giáo trình (textbook/course material) is not đề cương (syllabus/course outline); đăng ký khóa học is the EdTech phrase, đăng ký học phần is the university-registration one; ăn cắp ý tưởng is not the formal đạo văn (plagiarism). The calque table, with severities: [references/glossary.md](references/glossary.md).

Step 4 — Check compliance and formatting

quý phụ huynh for parent-facing notices is close to a legal expectation, not just house style — Điều 89 Luật Giáo dục 2019 frames school-home communication as formal coordination, and a casual or literal các bậc cha mẹ reads as a failure to take that seriously. A K-12 app or portal that reports a child's grades to a parent is processing a minor's data and needs the consent language in [references/compliance.md](references/compliance.md) (Nghị định 13/2023/NĐ-CP). Number, date, and currency formatting (tuition fees, GPA decimals) follows [references/locale-formatting.md](references/locale-formatting.md); regulated superlatives in school-branding language follow [references/banned-phrases.md](references/banned-phrases.md).

Step 5 — Validate, fix, then ship

Run the validator immediately after writing. If it reports errors, fix them and run again. Only present the copy once it passes.

python scripts/validate_copy.py hoc-ba.md --doctype secondary-report-card
python scripts/validate_copy.py so-lien-lac.md --doctype primary-report-card --register edu-parent
python scripts/validate_copy.py nhan-xet.md --doctype teacher-to-student --register edu-k12
python scripts/validate_copy.py bang-diem.md --doctype transcript
python scripts/validate_copy.py cap-lai-bang.md --doctype diploma
python scripts/validate_copy.py de-cuong.md --doctype higher-ed --register edu-uni

• --register edu-k12|edu-k12-primary|edu-parent|edu-uni enables PRO002.
• --doctype turns on the statutory and structural rules — they stay silent otherwise,

because Cần cải thiện is only wrong on a primary report card: primary-report-card, secondary-report-card, teacher-to-student, transcript, diploma, higher-ed.

• Exit 0 = clean or warnings only. Exit 1 = errors that must be fixed.
• --json for machine-readable findings; --strict to fail on warnings too; --fix repairs

NFC in place.

Step 6 — Learn from the worked pairs, then hand it to a human

[references/examples.md](references/examples.md) — bad→good pairs, each with the circular or article it fixes. Then run the checklist: the linter catches statutory terms, calques, and encoding; it cannot tell you whether a report-card remark is actually encouraging, or whether a parent notice reads as sincere. Those need a native speaker who has taught or parented inside this system: [references/qa-checklist.md](references/qa-checklist.md)

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: trussary
• Source: trussary/vietnamese-language-skill
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.