Strategies for Formalizing and Distributing Rights and Responsibilities in Vietnam's 2019 Education Law: Critical Discourse Analysis Based on Data Archives

Abstract

This article examines how the discourse of Vietnam’s 2019 Education Law realizes legitimation strategies in relation to educational objectives and governance roles within a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis (corpus-assisted CDA) framework. Drawing on Van Leeuwen’s (2007) legitimation model, the entire legal text was manually annotated using UAM CorpusTool and cross-validated through keyword-in-context (KWIC) searches in #LancsBox X. The analysis concurrently codes provisions concerning obligations, rights protection, and resource guarantees across key actor groups. The findings indicate that rationalization and authorisation are the dominant legitimation strategies, whereas moral evaluation occurs only sparingly. Legitimation density is highest in Chapters 1–2, while authorisation is relatively more salient in Chapters 3–6. Educational institutions bear the highest density of obligation-related provisions; protective regulations primarily target learners, whereas material resource guarantees remain comparatively limited. The study proposes a replicable procedure for comparing legitimation across legal and policy texts, and suggests that resource mechanisms and operational, implementation-oriented provisions should be strengthened in subordinate implementing instruments and in future legislative revisions.