Minh Hieu Nguyen
Thesis Title: News Discourse on LGBTQ+ Communities in Vietnam: Multimodal Representations and Public Reception
As a major source of public information, news can influence how marginalised social actors, such as LGBTQ+ communities, are perceived and treated in society. While existing discourse studies have uncovered pervasively problematic representations of LGBTQ+ communities by news media worldwide, there remains a paucity of such research in Vietnam. In addition, previous scholars have primarily analysed textual content rather than images, which are equally important in reinforcing underlying ideologies. They also tend to assume a direct causal relationship between media and audience reception without empirical evidence. To address these research gaps, my project adopts corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and reception-based methods to explore the multimodal representations of LGBTQ+ communities in Vietnamese-language newspapers, as well as Vietnamese audiences' perceptions and attitudes towards these representations. The findings are expected to not only contribute to discourse analysis and communication studies methodologically but also provide linguistically informed insights for LGBTQ+ communities, journalists, media outlets, and policymakers in Vietnam and other similar Global South contexts.
Biography:
At the undergraduate level, I attended Vietnam National University, Hanoi, to read for a BA (Hons) in English (Translation & Interpreting). Graduating with excellent academic performance, I was awarded the Government of Ireland International Education Scholarship (GOI-IES) to pursue an MA in Applied Linguistics at Mary Immaculate College, Ireland, where I developed a strong interest in corpus linguistics and corpus-assisted critical discourse studies. To broaden my skill set, I subsequently completed an MSc in Computer Science with Cybersecurity from Abertay University, Scotland. This degree provided me with essential technical and programming skills, which are highly valuable for computational language analysis. I am currently a PhD candidate in Linguistics and Communication at the University of Birmingham, funded by a UKRI Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) studentship through the Midlands Graduate School Doctoral Training Partnership.
Publications:
Nguyen, M. H. (under review). Talking green in Vietnam: A corpus-assisted critical discourse study of news coverage on environmental issues. Submitted to Applied Linguistics.
Nguyen, M. H. (in press). Stance in CEO statements from U.S. and Vietnamese banks' annual reports: A corpus-based cross-cultural study. Journal of Business and Technical Communication.
Nguyen, M. H. (2025). Identity construction in corporate leaders’ messages: A corpus-based cross-linguacultural study of self-mention. English for Specific Purposes, 80, 109-125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2025.08.001
Nguyen, M. H., & Clancy, B. (2025). Representations of LGBT people in Vietnamese online newspapers: A corpus-assisted critical discourse study. Discourse & Society, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265251354856
Nguyen, M. H. (2025). Rhetorical moves and linguistic realisations of economics research article abstracts in international and Vietnam-based journals. SAGE Open, 15(2), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440251338936
Other Research Interests:
Corpus Linguistics
Critical Discourse Studies
Professional Communication
Translation Studies
Department of Linguistics and Communication University of Birmingham
2025 Cohort
Email:
X: @hieu02hc
Supervisory Team:
Dr Matteo Fuoli
Dr Joe Spencer-Bennett