Abstract:
Developing graduates’ employability has been an important goal of higher education and requires further research to uncover what constitutes graduate employability and how higher education can support students in obtaining these qualities. Particularly in this globalized and multicultural world, English language and cultural understanding are widely acknowledged as two primary factors for desirable career outcomes, contributing to the development of necessary employability skills. The discussion about graduate employability has been centred around the development of different forms of capital, known as the framework of graduate employability (Tomlinson, 2017). These capital forms include cultural, human, social, psychological, and identity capital, building a well-rounded workforce. Considering the need to develop English language competence and forms of capital for employability, this study is further concerned with the relation between English language learning and capital development and the interrelation among these forms. Taking cultural capital as its focus, this study investigates the development of cultural capital through learning the English language and how such cultural capital contributes to English language learners’ employability regarding the development of cultural capital leading to the advancement of others. The study was guided by the framework of graduate employability with five forms of capital and employed semi-structured interviews with eleven Vietnamese participants from eight academic and professional disciplines. The findings revealed that cultural capital could be developed through the diversity of formal, non-formal, and informal forms of English language learning and the different levels of preference that learners held towards these forms of learning. The findings also indicated the interrelation among these types of capital when the advancement of one kind potentially led to the rise of the others to form graduate employability. Pedagogical implications and directions for future research are recommended to effectively develop cultural capital in different forms of education and further explore cultural capital and employability in Vietnamese higher education.