Across the world, the first accounting course provides serious challenges for teaching. These arise from powerful negative perceptions which include the anxiety associated with tertiary-level study and the differing backgrounds or majors of students required to take the course. This paper outlines some examples of nontraditional teaching techniques and highlights how the course could be best structured to overcome such negative views while at the same time responding to the changes in the industry. The design and content of the proposed course emphasizes the USER approach and is directed to English as second language learners. This is a case study in an Australian offshore campus and is the end result of the progressive improvement in the structure and delivery of the course.

The Southeast plays a very important role in Vietnam’s economic development. Despite a high concentration of social scientists in the Southeast region, there remains a paradox that the Southeast culture has not been sufficiently researched into. Applying the method of cultural zoning based on the changes of the three dimensions Subject – Space - Time developed by the author, the article concludes that the Southeast is a separate cultural zone besides the Southwest and lists some typical characteristics of the Southeast in terms of cultural elements (focusing on the organizational culture) and the system of cultural personality characteristics of Vietnamese people in the Southeast. An analysis of the Human Development Index (HDI) of the Southeast shows that this development is unbalanced and unsustainable. To achieve balance and sustainability, more investment must be made on the culture and the people; community-village type behaviors should be replaced by community-society type behaviors; and the urban way of living, the urban culture and good urban citizen character should be promoed while limiting the rural/agricultural lifestyle and characteristics.

Binh Duong has rapidly transformed during the period 1999-2009, from a agricultural province to industrial one. The paper explores the shift of occupation-based social structure of Binh Duong during that period. Using the data sets of Census 1999 and 2009, the paper analyses the evolution of the occupational figure in Binh Duong by ten occupational categories and four occupational strata, and the differences in this figure by residence, gender, ethnic, and religious variables. Findings show that the occupational structure of Binh Duong is more developed than the one of the Southern Key Economic Zone. Its change in rural areas is more significant than in urban areas. There are not considerable differences by gender, ethnicity, and religiousness. The findings are suggestive for a further analysis using the data set of Census 2019 on the evolution of occupational figures in Binh Duong during the previous twenty years (1999-2019).