From a Bird’s-eye View of VARBRUL’s Applicability in Language Variation Analysis to Vietnamese ESL Context

This research project seeks to provide an overview of the application of VARBRUL in sociolinguistics, particularly in research on language variation and change. Additionally, the study ultimately relates previous research to the contemporary Vietnamese ESL setting in order to make recommendations for future research. Sociolinguists are well aware that VARBRUL is an intriguing statistical tool, the core of which consists of multiple logistic regression (Johnson, 2009). Since its introduction by Sankoff in 1975, VARBRUL has been the tool of choice for linguists investigating language variation and change, and it has been constantly modified to provide the greatest ease (Nguyen, 2018). The present secondary research endeavors to review how VARBRUL has aided research in numerous sociolinguistic subfields, including phonetical, semantical, grammatical, and pragmatic variations. These instances will be elaborated on with procedural explanation and interpretation of the results. Importantly, it has been infrequent to identify any use of VARBRUL in the sociological context of Vietnamese ESL, leaving a promising area for Vietnamese sociolinguists to investigate. Potential research in a Vietnamese context would focus mostly on social factors influencing ESL variation and change. Therefore, this study is a reliable resource for ESL teachers who intend to study the factors influencing learners' linguistic variance in order to formulate pedagogical recommendations for improving their ESL instruction. Key words: VARBRUL, language variation, language change, Vietnamese context