Hanoi (VNA) – First prize of the Young Francophones Reporters –Vietnam 2018 – a journalism writing contest in French language was awarded to Dao PhuongLoan, a student from Hanoi University, in Hanoi on November 9.

Loan won for her reportage titled ‘Les Jeunes Vietnamiens Face des Desours de Hainesur Facebook about Vietnamese youth under the impacts of negative words onsocial networks, particularly, Facebook.

Entitled “The Power of Words”, the contest, the third of its kind held by Le Courrier du Vietnam, aweekly French language newspaper of Vietnam News Agency (VNA), aims toencourage young people to use the beauty and richness of French language towrite about Vietnam.

Through their articles, the writers, many of whom are young students, haveexpressed their feelings, points of view and comments and introduced to theFrench-speaking community Vietnam’s beauty, culture and people.

The contest was sponsored by the International Organisation of Francophonie(OIF), the Embassies of France, Switzerland and Morocco, the FrancophoneUniversities Association (AUF) and the Wallonie-Bruxelles Delegation in Hanoi.

It was also supported by the Vietnam National Assembly, the Ministry of ForeignAffairs and other international organisations and diplomatic agencies that usethe French language in Vietnam.

The contest drew attention from young writers, particularly university studentslearning French throughout the country, as well as young foreigners who live andstudy in Thailand.

The organising board said 20 among a total of nearly 90 entries had beenselected for the final round.

These works had been published in Le Courrier du Vietnam online at and recordednearly 20,000 readers’ like.

Editor-in-chief of the newspaper Nguyen Thu Ha, who is also a co-head of theorganising board of the event, said the third contest’s results met all itstargets of promoting the movement of teaching and learning French in Vietnam.

Ha said the contest also met its targets of diversifying the contents of newsand stories in the context of serving for the national foreign affairs,introducing the country, its culture and people to the community of 88 Frenchspeaking countries and territories and especially creating a playground foryoung people studying French.

Eric-Normand Thibeault, Director of the OIF Asia-Pacific RegionalBureau and also a co-head of the organising board, was impressed at the writingquality this time, saying that young writers through their works had brought indifferent angles of life in Vietnam.

The organising board also awarded one second, third and two consolidation prizes.- VNA