A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON MAKING INVITATION IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE IN TERMS OF CROSSCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

4. What are the implications of the similarities and differences in making spoken invitations in the English and Vietnamese to English learners? 5. Methods of the study In carrying the research I have adopted such methods of study as descriptive methods, contrastive analysis, statistic techniques and observation. 6. Design of the study The study consists of three parts: Part A Introduction deals with Rationale, Aims, Scope,Research Questions, Methods and Design of the study. Part B Development consists of three chapters: Chapter1 talks about Literature Review,Chapter2 states on making invitation in English and Vietnamese, some similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese invitations. Chapter 3 Application for English learners in translation will be pointed out. Part C Conclusion will be shown, followed by References part.

HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF ENGLISH

GRADUATION THESIS

A COMPARATIVE STUDY

ON MAKING INVITATION IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE

IN TERMS OF CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Supervisor: M.A Nguyễn Văn Quang Name of student: Đinh Phương Thúy Date of birth: 26/01/1991

Class: K17A5 (2010-2014)

Hanoi 2014 DECLARATION

I hereby declare that this thesis is my own work and effort and that it has notbeen submitted anywhere for Where other sources of information has beenused, they have been acknowledges

Hanoi, 4 May 2014

I must offer my profoundest gratitude to my thesis advisor, M.A Nguyen VanQuang Form finding an appreciate subject in the beginning to the process ofwriting thesis, M.A Nguyen Van Quang offers his unreserved help and guidanceand lead me to finish my thesis step by step Without his kind and patientinstruction, it is impossible for me to finish my thesis

I am also indebted to my friends, who squeeze time from their busy schedule tohelp me finish my thesis, they are all busy with their own thesis but they arewilling to give their helping hands as soon as I am in need

Finally, I am grateful to my parents and my sisters who always support mespiritually throughout my life and provide a carefree environment for me, sothat I can concentrate on my study I am so lucky to be one of my family’smembers

PART A: INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale

There is no doubt that today mastering a language is very necessary because itcan give learners important opportunities to communicate to study and workeffectively abroad It is very difficult to master a foreign language because theenormous vocabulary and profound understanding in grammar are not enough

So it is necessary for learners to understand the culture of the language that theywant to master Let take English and Vietnamese as an example There aredifferences in the use of language between English and Vietnamese To learn alanguage means to learn the culture of the country where the language isspoken This can help learners to master this language as well as immerse in tothe culture and daily life the target language to comprehend that language

Acquiring a second language demands more than learning new words and another system of grammar (Levine and Adelman, 1982) The goal of

learning language nowadays is to be able to have effective communication withnative speakers However, communication can fail to achieve as themisunderstanding of the country’s culture The good knowledge of thecountry’s culture can helps learners to interact well with the people in the nativecountry where the language is widely spoken As a result, it is very difficult tocombine culture and use cultural knowledge well in learning a language Eachlanguage and the culture of the country cannot be separated from each other.Each country has its own traditions, customs, rituals reflected by the language.Understanding social conventions and attention to such concepts aspoliteness, and face, which are important to members in a particularculture, will certainly enable us to better comprehend the different ways ofspeaking by people from different cultures, thus helping eliminate ethnic

stereotypes and misunderstandings Problems arise as language learners arenot competent and fail to understand the cultural- social aspects ofcommunication Take speech acts of invitation as an example Vietnamesesaying goes: "Khách đến nhà không trà thì bánh" (when guests come, either tea

or cakes should be served) This saying highlights the importance ofinvitation in Vietnamese culture, where invitation speech acts takes importantrole in daily life interactions Invitation is a very essentials part in daily life inall cultures Wall (1987) indicated that many of our daily socialinteractions involve making invitations and responding to them Everydaypeople are usually invited to do small things including going somewhere,drinking something, eating food or in special occasions such as weddings,birthday party, graduation So that making invitation is now very important inour daily life It is a speech act used very often in communication People canuse it both in spoken and written forms in many ways It helps people to create,maintain and reinforce a good relationship with other people

Take these two following sentences as examples:

(1) Alan and I wanted to have a few people over for a dinner party

to celebrate finishing my dissertation, and we’d like to invite you especially, since you’re chairman (Tillitt & Bruder, 1999, p.23)

(2) Ăn cho vui Cô Nga (Thach Lam, 2000, p.167)

English and Vietnamese have some similarities in terms of making invitations

in daily life interactions Many cases of making invitation are different inVietnamese and English Therefore it is very important to making an invitation

to be suitable to a particular culture avoid causing hurts, shocks,misunderstanding and misinterpretations A frequently misunderstood area inAmerican verbal interaction is that of extending, accepting, and refusinginvitations (Levine & Adelman, 1982) Moreover, helping Vietnamese

learners of English master and use invitation-making effectively is verynecessary

For the above-mentioned reasons, the study is implemented to find out thesimilarities and differences in making invitations in English and Vietnameseand to help English learners have good conversations with foreigners.Furthermore, the study is a hope to give some reliable suggestions formaking invitations in particular, and raise the importance of applyingcross-cultural activities to learning English to English majors who want tomaster English and want to live in English speaking countries

2 Aims and objectives of the study

The thesis aims to find out the good ways to make invitations in Vietnameseand English native speakers In addition, this paper aims to find out thesyntactic and cultural similarities and differences between spoken invitations inVietnamese and English native speakers

3 Scope of the study

This paper focuses on how to make invitations in English and Vietnamesespeakers This paper, moreover, aims to analyze the similarities and differences

in making invitations in English and Vietnamese

4 Research questions

The research is aimed to answer the following to answer the followingquestions:

1 How to make spoken invitation in the English culture?

2 How to make spoken invitation in the Vietnamese culture?

3 What are similarities and differences in making spoken invitations inmaking spoken in the Vietnamese and English cultures?

4 What are the implications of the similarities and differences inmaking spoken invitations in the English and Vietnamese to Englishlearners?

5 Methods of the study

In carrying the research I have adopted such methods of study as descriptivemethods, contrastive analysis, statistic techniques and observation

6 Design of the study

The study consists of three parts:

Part A -Introduction deals with Rationale, Aims, Scope, Research Questions,Methods and Design of the study

Part B- Development consists of three chapters: Chapter 1 talks about LiteratureReview, Chapter 2 states on making invitation in English and Vietnamese, somesimilarities and differences between English and Vietnamese invitations.Chapter 3- Application for English learners in translation will be pointed out.Part C - Conclusion will be shown, followed by References part

PART B: DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER ONE: LISTERATURE REVIEW

1 1 Politeness strategies

Politeness, an issue which has a great impact to human being and deeply

influences to human interaction, will be now discussed right in this part because

politeness is basic to the production of social order, and a precondition

of human cooperation … any theory which provides an understanding of this phenomenon at the same time goes to the foundation of human social life.

(Brown and Levinson, 1987) In language studies, politeness implies thefollowing: "(a) how languages express the social distance between speakersand their different role relationships, (b) "how face-work, that is, the attempt

to establish, maintain, and save face during conversation, is carried out in aspeech community" (Richards et al 1985, p.281)

Languages differ in how they express politeness In English, phrases like: It’shot here I wonder if I could open the window? Can be used to make arequest more polite In other languages, the same effect can be expressed by aword or particle Politeness markers and the use of address forms conveydifferences between formal speech and colloquial speech

Human communication establishes and maintains not only a comfortablerelationship between people but also a social harmony Therefore, ininterpersonal communication, in terms of politeness, every participant notessocial factors such as age, gender, power and distance among the interlocutors.Moreover, politeness may be described as a form of behavior which is exercised

in order to consolidate and promote relationship between individuals or, at least,

to keep it undamaged According to Leech (1983), politeness means tominimize the effect of impolite statement or expression (negative politeness)and maximize the effects of polite illocutions (positive politeness) (Leech,1983) However, the best-known theory is developed by Brown and Levinson(1978, 1987) Their universalistic formulation of politeness theory isproblematic in some aspects The main issue of politeness is the notion of face.Face is defined as “the public self-image that every member wants to claimfor himself” (Brown and Levinson 1987, p.61) "Face" associates with theEnglish idiom to lose face which means “to do something which makes otherpeople stop respecting you; to not maintain your reputation and the respect ofothers” Brown and Levinson treat the aspects of face as “basic wants”, anddistinguish between positive face and negative face Positive face is interpreted

as the want of every member to be desirable to, at least, some others,whereas negative face is the want of every “competent adult member” forhis actions to be unimpeded by others (1987, p.62).Moreover, Yule (1996)argues that in most English speaking contexts, the participants in aninteraction often have to determine, as they speak, the relative socialdistance between them, and hence their face wants (1996, p.61) “In everydaysocial interactions, people generally behave as if their public self-image, ortheir face wants, will be respected If a speaker says something that represents

a threat to another individual’s expectations regarding self-image, it isdescribed as a face threatening act Alternatively, given the possibilitythat some action might be interpreted as a threat to another’s face, thespeaker can say something to lessen the possible threat This is called a facesaving act.” (Yule 1996, p.61).Analyzing politeness, the anthropologistsBrown and Levinson (1987) distinguishes between positive strategies ofpoliteness, those which show closeness, intimacy, and rapport between thespeaker and the hearer, and negative politeness strategies, those whichindicate various degrees of social distance between the speaker and hearer

In this sense, politeness varies to show awareness of another person’sface in situations of social distance or closeness The choice ofappropriate politeness strategies in a given context depends on a number

of factors Brown and Levinson (1987) groups these factors into a simpleformula consisting of three independent variables, namely the socialdistance (D) of the speaker and the hearer (a symmetric relation), therelative power (P) of the speaker and the hearer (an asymmetric relation),and the absolute ranking of impositions (R) in the particular culture Thesocial distance (D) is a symmetric social dimension of similarity/differencewithin which the speaker and the hearer stand for the purposes of this act Insome situations, D is based on an evaluation of frequency of interaction and thetypes of material and non-material goods (embracing face) between S and H.The evaluation will be usually measures of social distance relied on stable socialattributes The relative power (P) which is an asymmetric social dimension isthe degree to which H can impose his own plans and his own self–evaluation (face) at the expense of S’s plans and self – evaluation.Generally, there are two sources of P, either of which may be authorized

or unauthorized – material control (over economic distribution and physicalforce) and metaphysical control (over the actions of others, by virtue ofmetaphysical forces subscribed to by those others The absolute ranking (R) ofimposition which is situational and cultural defined is the degree to whichthere is an interference in the speaker ’s wants or self-determination orapproval (speaker ’s negative and positive wants) There are normally twoscales or ranks which are identifiable 21 for negative–face: a ranking ofimpositions in proportion to the expenditure of services (including thetime provision) and good (including non –material goods such asinformation, regard expression and other face payments) As for positive –face, the, ranking of imposition embraces an assessment of the amount of

"pain" given to the hearer ’s face, based on the differences between the

hearer ’s desired self-image and that presented in face threatening acts.Cultural rankings of facets of positive face (like success, niceness, beauty etc.)can be ranked in specific circumstances, so do the negative face rankings.Besides, that there are also personal rankings can explain why some peopleobject to certain kinds of face threatening acts and some do not These threefactors affect indirectness in human interaction, especially in the choice ofpoliteness strategies which is an essential aspect of inviting Together withcross-cultural perspective, politeness is another aspect which is used to createthe framework for data analysis Basing on the theory of Brown and Levinson(1987), a bank of 6 situations was designed to elicit offers These situationswere grouped according to three variables, namely social distance (D) of thespeaker and the hearer , the relative power (P) of the speaker and the hearer(an asymmetric relation), and the absolute ranking (R) of impositions in theparticular culture The situations under study were as follows:

 The speaker has more power than the hearer; they are unfamiliar witheach other

 The speaker has more power than the hearer; they are familiar with eachother The speaker and the hearer are equal in power; they areunfamiliar with each other

 The speaker and the hearer are equal in power; they are familiar witheach other

 The speaker has less power than the hearer; they are unfamiliar with eachother

 The speaker has less power than the hearer; they are familiar with eachother2.2 Generalization of speech acts

1.2 Generalization of speech

1.2.1 Definitions of speech acts

J Austin (1962) takes the pioneering role in formulating the theory of speechacts According to him, all utterances should be viewed as actions of thespeakers, stating or describing is only one function of language He pointsout that the declarative sentences are not only used to say things or describestates of affairs but also used to do things

Also, in 1962, he defines speech acts as the actions performed insaying something When people produce utterances, they often performactions via those utterances These actions are called speech acts: such asapology, complaint, compliment, invitation, promise, or request A speechact is part of a speech event The speech act performed by producing anutterance, consists of three related acts including locutionary act,illocutionary act and perlocutionary act They are listed as follows:

Locutionary act is the basic act of producing a meaningful linguistic

expression The locutionary act is performed with some purposes orfunctions in mind

Illocutionary act is an act performed via the communicative force of

an utterance In engaging in locutionary acts we generally also performillocutionary acts such as informing, advising, offer, promise, etc Inuttering a sentence by virtue of conversational force associated with it

Perlocutionary act is what we bring about or achieve by saying something,

such as convincing, persuading, deterring perlocutionary acts are performedonly on the assumption that the hearer will recognize the effect youintended.Speech acts, since then, developed by many famous philosophersand have been central to the works and further developed by many otherphilosophers and a great concern of any research paper in terms of doingresearches on linguistic fields

The two other famous linguistic researchers are Schmidt and Richardswho reaffirm that: speech act theory has to do with the functions oflanguages, so in the broader sense we might say that speech acts are allthe acts we perform through speaking, all things we do when wespeak The theory of speech acts is partly taxonomic and partlyexplanatory It must systematically classify types of speech acts and theways in which they can succeed or fail It must reckon with the fact that therelationship between the words being used and the force of theirutterance is often oblique

Paltridge (2000) defines that a speech act is an utterance that serves afunction in communication Some examples are apology, greeting, request,complaint, invitation, compliment or refusal A speech act might contain justone word such as "No" to perform a refusal or several words or sentencessuch as: "I' m sorry, I can't, I have a prior engagement" It is important tomention that speech acts include real-life interactions and require notonly knowledge of the language but also appropriate use of that languagewithin a given culture Socio-cultural variables like authority, socialdistance, and situational setting influence the appropriateness andeffectiveness of politeness strategies used to realize directive speechacts such as requests (p.15)

Yule (1996, p.47), another famous linguist, defines that "in attempting

to express themselves, people do not only produce utterances containinggrammatical structures and words, they perform actions via thoseutterances." According to him, actions performed via utterances are speechacts In daily communication, people perform speech acts when they offer anapology, greeting, complaint, invitation, compliment or refusal Since peopleoften do more things with words than merely convey what words encode,

speech acts have to be seen from real-life interactions For example, in aclassroom situation, when a teacher says:

May I help you??

Is a request more than a question

In the same way, when a student talks to his friend,

We’re having some people over Saturday evening and wanted toknow if you’d like to join us

This example is an invitation more than a question Moreover, speechacts require not only knowledge of any languages but also the culture

of the country where this language is use

For examples in Vietnamese when we utter:

Where are you doing? means we are greeting the people we meet

1.2.2 Classification of speech acts

According to Yule (1996), there is one general classification systemthat lists five types of general functions performed by speech actsincluding declarations, representatives, expressives, directives, andcommissives

 Declarations are speech acts that change the world via theirutterance The speaker has to have a special institutional role, in aspecific context, in order to perform a declaration appropriately Forexample, "Priest: I now pronounce you husband and wife."

 Representatives are speech acts that state what the speaker believes

to be the case or not Statement of fact, assertions, conclusions anddescriptions are examples of the speaker representing the world as he or

she believes it is For example, “The Moon goes round the Earth." or "It

is windy today."

 Expressives are speech acts that state what the speaker feels.Theyexpress psychological states and can be statement of pleasure, pain, likes,dislikes, joy and sorrow For example, "What a great party!"

 Directives are speech acts that the speakers use to get the hearer to

do something They express what the speaker wants For instance, "Stand

up, please!"or "Could you open the door?"

 Commissives are speech acts that speakers use to committhemselves to some future action They express what the speakerintends They are promises, threats, refusals, pladges For example:

"I’ll give one hand." or "I’ll be back."

Yule (1996) also presents a table showing speech acts classification asfollow:

Table 1

Speech act types Direction of fit S=Speaker

X=SituationDeclarations

The usefulness of speech acts analysis is illustrating the kinds of things wecan do with words and identifying some of the conventional utterance forms

we use to perform specific actions However, we need to look at moreextended interaction to understand how those actions are carried out andinterpreted within speech events To compare selected speech acts from two

languages, the topic is still vast and could not be treated exhaustively inany one work The cultural norms reflected in speech acts differ not onlyfrom one language to another, but also from one regional and social variety

to another So, the different cultures find expression in different system ofspeech acts, and that different speech acts become entrenched, and, tosome extent, codified in different languages Of these types, thecharacteristics of invitations can be easily recognised in commissives anddirectives In our daily interactions, inviting is one kind of speech act that iscommonly used with high frequency

1.2.3 Direct and indirect speech acts

In the former part, classification of speech acts has made clear in terms ofthe speaker's intention of Yule (1996) This part takes a look at another way

of classifying speech acts

Another approach to distinguish different types of speech acts is based

on the relationship between the structure and the function Yule (1996)claims that three structural forms (declarative, interrogative, imperative)and three general communicative function (statement, question,command/request)

Eg:

You wear a seat belt! (declarative)

Do you wear a seat bealt? (interrogative)

Wear a seat bealt! (imperative)

(p.54)

They can be combined to create two other types of speech acts: directand indirect speech acts The following example illustrates this:

Yule (1996) defines that whenever there is an indirect relationshipbetween a structure and a function, we have an direct speech act as in thefollowing examples:

Do join me for a coffee? (Le Huy Lam, 2000)

Whenever there is an indirect relationship between a structure and afunction, we have an indirect speech act as in the following examples

Would you like to come over for dinner tomorrow? (Tillitt & Bruder, 1999)

It is not only used as a question but also a request, hence it is considered to

be an indirect speech act He adds that indirect speech acts are generallyassociated with greater politeness in English than direct speech acts

1.3 Invitations as speech acts

Before we get to know the definition of the phrase ‘Making an invitation’,

we first do through the meaning of the verb ‘invite’ and the noun

‘invitation’

To “invite”, according to Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary means to

“ask somebody to come to a social event” or “to ask somebodyformally to go to somewhere or do something”

An ‘invitation’ is ‘a spoken or written request to somebody to do something

or to go somewhere’, ‘the act of inviting somebody or of being invited’, or ‘acard or piece of paper that you use to invite somebody to something’ as inthe examples below:

I would like to invite you to a party next Friday.(Tillitt & Bruder, 1999)Would you like to come over my place on Thanksgiving?

I’d love to Shall I bring anything?

Similarly, Vietnamese dictionary (1994) defines "lời mời" as a wish or a

polite request that somebody does something or goes to somewhere.The following examples illustrate this:

Anh Tuệ, mời anh vào chơi! (Khai Hung, 1988)

(Mr Tue, Come in, please!)

Rước cụ ngồi chơi (Khai Hung, 1988)

(Get - you - sit - play)

In his dissertation, Nguyen Van Lap (2005) points that "Invitations arepolite utterances, requesting others to do something together, whichsatisfies both the speaker and hearer's benefits”

Le Thi Mai Hong (2009) indicates that invitation is the act of inviting

or a requesting to participate, be present or take part in something.Invitation is also a speech act that expresses the speaker’s friendliness,politeness as well as respect and hospitality toward the hearer." Inaddition, Wolfson (1989) defines invitations as speech acts that containreference to time and/or mention of place or activity, and most important, arequest for response

After the above-mentioned definitions we can have the meaning of the

phrase ‘making an invitation’ in English It is the act of making a spoken or

written request to somebody to go somewhere or do something

It is based on the relationship between the inviter and the invitee According

to Searl (1976), the goal of the spoken interaction is to communicate things

to the hearer by getting him/her to recognize the intention that one has tocommunicate those things Invitations which are based on a daily basis

happen in all the walks of life, to name but three, inviting for meals, socialevents or other occasions.

To begin with, eating together is a great way to spend time with one’s familyand friends, but how to create a suitable invitation for meals is not easy Itmuch depends on family members’ status, age, and distance amongparticipants Making invitation for meals, we have some kinds of belowquestions:

Eg:

“Would you like to have dinner with us?”

“Would you like to come over our house and have dinner with us?”

“If you would come over to our house, we could have dinner together?”

“Do you think we could cook and have dinner together?”

“Let’s have dinner together.”

Another context in which invitations are used is inviting for social eventslike: birthday parties, wedding parties, farewells, ceremonies,anniversaries…In these events, the inviters usually have intention to invite in

a formal or imformal ways

Eg:

“Our dear father Brian Jacobson is turning 65 next month We are hosting a surprise birthday party to pay tribute to his life and his hard work in buiding his successful catering business.”

“Come and join us in wishing David Banner a very happy 30 th birthday.”

It is indicated that the British frequently invite other people to a party, ameal, an event, a movie… Broadly, these appear to be almost the same asthe occasions where Vietnamese invite their acquaintances.

English people usually make an invitation directly That means the invitershave a tendency to give the invited people the direct content of the invitation.For this function, English invitation has some patterns as basic formsincluding directive sentence, performative sentence, some kinds of questionsand the sentence with ‘if’

1.4 Pragmatics and cross-cultural pragmatics

As the study is centered on the speech act of invitations in terms of cross cultural perspective It is, therefore, necessary to look at some basicinformation on what is called pragmatics and cross - cultural pragmatics Pragmatics, since its appearance, has excited great attention from manyleading linguists Enormous efforts have gone into reaching a satisfactorydefinition of this linguistic phenomenon The notion of pragmatics isclarified by Richards, Platt, & Webber (1992, p.284) as follows:

-Pragmatics includes the study of:

How the interpretation and use of utterances depend on knowledge of thereal world;

How speakers use and understand speech acts;

How the structure of sentences is influenced by the relationshipbetween the speaker and the hearer

Of the above issues, the study of speech acts is considered to be ofhigh importance to pragmatics

Yule (1996, p.3) defines pragmatics as follows:

Pragmatics is the study of speaker meaning.

Pragmatics is the study of contextual meaning

Pragmatics is the study of how more get communicated than is said

Pragmatics is the study of the expression of relative distance

As "every culture has its own repertoire of characteristic speech acts"and "different cultures find expression in different system of speechacts and different speech acts become entrenched, and to some extent,codified in different languages"(Wierzbicka (1991, p.25) Nguyen ThienGiap (2007) states that in different cultures, speech acts are performed indifferent ways through different languages

Linguists, these days, has studied, contrasted how language is used indifferent cultures, which is called contrastive pragmatics Nguyen ThienGiap (2007) adds that in order to master a language successfully, tocarry out effective intercultural communication, having the knowledge ofthe language is by all means insufficient, but the knowledge of pragmatics is

a must

Through what has been discussed so far, the speech act of invitations inEnglish and Vietnamese is not exception It is discussed in the studyunder contrastive analysis The cross-cultural perspective, certainly, is agreat concern during analysis

CHAPTER TWO: MAKING INVITATION IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE

The previous chapter has established the frame work of the theoreticalbackground from which the speech act theory, invitation and other issues related

to the matter of this thesis have been introduced This chapter focuses onclassifying clearly about direct and indirect invitations as well as the similaritiesand differences in making invitation in English and Vietnamese.

2.1 Categories of inviting in English and Vietnamese

The invitations can be direct or indirect utterances This paper goals toinvestigate the similarities and differences in terms of syntactic and cross-cultural features of spoken invitations in English and Vietnamese, in the effort

of increasing not only the effectiveness of learning invitations utterance inEnglish and Vietnamese but also the ability to use language for English learners

in Vietnam

Nevertheless, there is a little proper work on inviting in both languages.The analytic framework of this study has been collected from a number ofEnglish and Vietnamese researches as well as practical textbooks toinvitations which contains different forms of inviting These are dissertations

by Nguyen Van Lap (2005), Luu Quy Khuong (2004) Tran Yen Bao Tran(2009), and Tillitt and Bruder (1999) In these researches and textbooks,different linguistic forms of invitations are specified and found out In thisstudy, categories of inviting in English and Vietnamese be respectivelydiscussed

Tilltitt and Bruder (1999) has introduced numerous structures of Englishinvitations used in formal situations to informal ones In his dissertation,Nguyen Van Lap (2005) has introduced forms of Vietnamese inviting includinginvitations in with performative verb (mời) and invitations withoutperformative verb Luu Quy Khuong (2007), in addition, has introduceddifferent kinds of direct invitations in English and Vietnamese He indicatedsimilarities and differences between English and Vietnamese throughcontrastive analysis Plus, another research goes to Tran Yen Bao Tran