ENCOUNTERING ECHOES: ECHOING ENCOUNTER
Following Rolf Hughes’ notion of exposition (2015) as the act of creating a field of encounter, this inaugural issue reframes exposition as a space of echoing—a resonance between the seen and unseen, the said and unsaid. To encounter is to come up against what resists assimilation—an idea, a material, a history, a theory, or another being. To echo is to let that encounter reverberate and transform. Between encountering and echoing lies an ethics of care, speculation, and reciprocity—a willingness to stay with what is incomplete, uncertain, or even misread.
In line with the Arts of the contact zone (Pratt 1991), encounters are never neutral; they unfold in zones of tension, translation, and transformation. Similarly, Studio Note treats encounter and echo as creative and critical forces that shape our practices, pedagogies, and therefore our identities.
We invite contributions that explore encountering and echoing as speculative and performative acts of research.
Studio Note Journal Nº 1
Editors-in-Chief | Alphabetic Order:
Niloofar Amini
Gareth Jones
Jorge Valdovinos
Laura Yuile
Associate Editors | Alphabetic Order:
Eman AlHabashneh
Francesca Brunetti
Ruehl Muller
Mohammed Ali Sharieff
Raynal Somiah
Yvan Tina
Zihong Yue
Typeset in:
Editorial Team
Copy Editing:
Editorial Team
Proof Reading:
Editorial Team
Design:
Editorial Team
Published by:
University for the Creative Arts | ICI
Publication location:
Farnham, Surrey, UK
Xiamen, Fujian Province, China
Online publication date:
Summer 2026
ISSN: 2978-8080 (Print)
E-ISSN: 2978-8099 (Online)
studionote@uca.ac.uk
www.studionotejournal.org
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STUDIO
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Editorial Vision
Events
Issues
Losing Face or Losing Voice? Encounters of Language
Mindsets and Speaking Anxiety in Vietnamese EFL Classrooms
Le Thi Thuy Mai - mai.ltt@due.edu.vn, Pham Dieu Tien - tienpd@due.edu.vn
While Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety (FLSA) is a universal phenomenon, for the Vietnamese learner it operates within a unique gravity. Here, the classroom is not merely a workshop —dare we say factory?— for skill acquisition; instead, it is a site of encounter in which the act of speaking can echo beyond the utterance itself, as it becomes inextricably tied to the preservation of the social self, or mất mặt. Mất mặt is a culturally loaded Vietnamese expression built on the concept of ‘face’ (mặt), which represents social visibility, reputation, moral standing, and the way one is evaluated by others. To lose that face (mất) is not simply to feel embarrassed internally, but to suffer a public degradation of one’s recognised social position. The idea connects to the ancient Southeast Asian honour–shame systems wherein social order is maintained less through internalised guilt and more through external recognition and avoidance of disgrace. The later spread of Confucianism—where one’s moral worth is based on role performance (ruler and subject; parent and child; teacher and student, etc.)—formalised and moralised it, embedding it in hierarchy and ritual.
At a basic level, mất mặt occurs when there is a mismatch between how a person is expected to appear (competent, respectable, etc.) and how they are revealed to be in front of others. In this sense, a private failure is not necessarily mất mặt but becomes so when it is witnessed or acknowledged socially. Importantly, mất mặt is relational rather than psychological in that it does not describe an emotion in the first instance, but a social event. One might feel shame consequently, but mất mặt refers to the loss of standing itself, not the feeling. This is why the phrase is often used even when the person involved shows no outward embarrassment. The damage exists regardless of subjective response. As Mak (2011) and Pham (2014) argue, in collective cultures, face is a borrowed asset lent by the group; to lose it through public error is to encounter a kind of ‘social bankruptcy’.
Speaking in a second language places learners in a position of immediate public exposure where each spoken turn becomes a point of encounter between the performed self and the evaluative socio-cultural gaze (wherein these mistakes, now rendered visible to peers and instructors, are interpreted as a failure of competence, diligence, or role performance). In a context where social standing and peer evaluation carry significant weight, this exposure heightens anxiety and often leads to silence, avoidance, and self-censorship. Fear of negative evaluation is therefore intensified by concerns about losing face, particularly in classroom settings characterised by public correction, competitive comparison, or unexpected oral performance. As a result, speaking anxiety among Vietnamese learners functions less as a purely psychological barrier and more as a socio-culturally mediated constraint, with tangible consequences for participation, confidence, and academic persistence.
The Fixed Mindset and Silence as Strategy
Lou and Noels (2017) identify entity theory as a meaning-making system that dictates how a student interprets struggle. For the student trapped in this fixed architecture, an error is not a data point but a final verdict, and correction is not guidance but an indictment of intelligence. And, because a large number of Vietnamese students view their face as fragile and their ability as static, the risk of speaking becomes mathematically unjustifiable. The fixed mindset acts as a rigid frame that essentially locks the student into a state of paralysis. They are caught in what Horwitz et al. (1986) calls the anxiety of identity loss, where the imperfect L2 self feels like a fraudulent version of the competent L1 self.
Thus, the collision of these two forces (the Confucian fear of wrongness and the fixed mindset’s belief in stasis) naturally results in a behavioural output of silence. However, the aspect which is to be stressed is that this silence is then often treated as passivity rather than that what it is: an active defence mechanism. MacIntyre et al. (1998) and Ryan and Mercer (2012) describe this withdrawal of willingness to communicate: to speak is to risk the “law-breaking” act of making a mistake; to remain silent is to preserve one’s dignity. Thus, the mindset acts as the student’s own hindrance: it guards their face by locking the door to the very practice required to learn. The tragedy, however, as Mercer (2011) notes, is the formation of a vicious cycle. Silence preserves face in the short term, but it guarantees stagnation in the long term, which only further solidifies the student’s belief that they simply lack the static trait one is born with (or bestowed with from the gods) needed for language learning.
In one cohort, to the best of our knowledge, no explicit humiliation ever occurred. Corrections were measured, feedback was polite, and no student was singled out for ridicule (even by peers). Yet over time, it appeared that a subtle hierarchy consolidated itself whereby certain students were tacitly recognised as strong English speakers. Notably, this was never tangibly visualised (students did not announce they were good or bad, or form friendship/seating cliques, etc.); rather, those who could not match their high-performing peers became quieter and more cautious, their contributions shorter and increasingly formulaic.
One student in particular, a young male who was typically associated with performative masculinity and exaggerated bravado—colloquially known as trẻ trâu (literarily a young buffalo) in Vietnam—began the semester participating freely. After a few weeks, he started laughing before answering questions, framing his responses as jokes. His errors were minor and rarely corrected in detail. However, his laughter preceded the error, not followed it. It appeared to function as a pre-emptive softening of what might be exposed. The shift was not triggered by any dramatic incident but rather seemed to follow a gradual recognition that he could not consistently match the fluency of a few high-performing peers (a comparison that was never formalised, yet was continuously visible). In this instance, mất mặt did not manifest as a withdrawal into silence but as a strategic modulation of self-presentation, as, given his investment in bravado, overt retreat would itself risk signalling weakness. The joke preceded the mistake so that the mistake could not fully signify. In this way, he preserved standing not by avoiding exposure, but by controlling how that exposure could be interpreted.
A Premature (But Possible) Solution
Because much of the growth mindset literature emerges from Western, individualist settings, its direct transfer may be ineffective. A more viable solution would involve adapting the framework to environments where public evaluation carries heightened weight. This could include reframing visible error as evidence of disciplined striving, embedding feedback within collective improvement models, and structuring assessment to reward revision and persistence. The aim would be to shift the cultural meaning of performance from a test of fixed capacity to an index of ongoing development, thereby reducing the perceived reputational risk attached to speaking.
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Mercer, S. (2011). Towards an understanding of language learner self-concept. Springer.
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Shenk, J. (2014). The end of ‘genius.’ The New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-genius.html