The "Language + Skill" Synergy: Adapting the Guizhou Vocational Education Model for Entrepreneurial Capacity Building in ASEAN

Abstract

Technical and vocational education and training systems in ASEAN are increasingly expected to produce not only employable workers but multilingual, digitally capable and entrepreneurial ones, yet there is little guidance on how a specific foreign model should be adapted to such varied national settings. This paper asks how the Guizhou "language + skill" vocational education model, which links language learning, technical training, industry partnership and international cooperation, can be adapted for entrepreneurial capacity building across ASEAN. Grounded in the policytransfer and comparative-education literatures, the study employs a comparative policy-analysis design operationalised as an illustrative multicriteria decision-making model. It first synthesises evidence on China-ASEAN vocational cooperation, Guizhou practice, ASEAN TVET priorities and entrepreneurship education; it then develops the Language-Skill-Enterprise (LSE) Capacity Model; and it finally applies an AHP-TOPSIS procedure to rank five implementation pathways. The ranking places enterprise order-class apprenticeship first and the offshore Guijiang Workshop second, with labourmarket relevance, entrepreneurial formation, industry partnership and language-skill integration carrying the heaviest weights; sensitivity analysis indicates that the ordering is robust to moderate perturbation of those weights. Disaggregated cases of Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines show that the preferred pathway is context-dependent rather than uniform across ASEAN. The paper concludes that language contributes most to entrepreneurial capacity when it is embedded in work tasks and recognised credentials, and that adaptation should proceed as governed, incremental hybridisation, piloted and independently evaluated, rather than as wholesale export of a fixed curriculum.