Gender differences between Vietnamese and Australian speakers in making apologies = Sự khác biệt về giới giữa người Việt và người Úc trong cách xin lỗi. M.A. Thesis Linguistics: 602202

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ĐOÀN THỊ PHƯƠNG GENDER DIFFERENCES BETWEEN VIETNAMESE AND AUSTRALI

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

ĐOÀN THỊ PHƯƠNG

GENDER DIFFERENCES BETWEEN VIETNAMESE AND AUSTRALIAN SPEAKERS IN MAKING APOLOGIES

SỰ KHÁC BIỆT VỀ GIỚI GIỮA NGƯỜI VIỆT

VÀ NGƯỜI ÚC TRONG CÁCH XIN LỖI

M.A Minor Thesis

Field: English linguistics Code: 60 22 02 01

HANOI - 2018

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

ĐOÀN THỊ PHƯƠNG

GENDER DIFFERENCES BETWEEN VIETNAMESE AND AUSTRALIAN SPEAKERS IN MAKING APOLOGIES

SỰ KHÁC BIỆT VỀ GIỚI GIỮA NGƯỜI VIỆT

VÀ NGƯỜI ÚC TRONG CÁCH XIN LỖI

M.A Minor Thesis

Field: English linguistics Code: 60 22 02 01

Supervisor: Dr Hà Cẩm Tâm

HANOI - 2018

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DECLARATION

I certify that the work contained in this thesis is the result of my own research, and this thesis has not been submitted for any degree at any other university or institution

Hanoi, September 2018

Signature

Đoàn Thị Phương

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Dr Ha Cam Tam I am blessed to have known you and to have been accepted as your student in this MA coursework program My professional development has been growing increasingly with your precious guidance and continuous motivation My special thanks also go to Prof Gary Carkin for his suggestions, and comments, which all helped to make this thesis

I wish to thank Ms Hien for releasing the burden of data collection in Australia I would also like to express my gratitude and appreciation to all the Australian and Vienamese respondents for their willingness to have their apology expressions and complete the questionnaires for the data of the present study

I would like to express my thanks to my mother and father for their whole hearted encouragement without which I would not be able to accomplish this study

Hanoi, September 2018

Đoàn Thị Phương

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ABSTRACT

The present study investigates gender differences in the use of apologies between Vietnamese and Australian speakers via a Discourse Completion Task questionnaire The questionnaire consists of four situations Forty informants were divided into 2 groups, Australian and Vietnamese and each group consists of ten males and ten females Data were analysed based on Holmes' (1990) model Findings reveal no fix or noticeable gender disparity between males and females within languages, however, there are differences in gender between the two languages, which may result in disparities between the cultures The results of this study contribute to the current theoretical debate on gender topics

Keywords: Apology, Apology Strategies, Vietnamese, Australian English, gender

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TABLE OF CONTENS

DECLARATION i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii

ABSTRACT iii

TABLE OF CONTENS iv

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS vi

LIST OF TABLES vii

PART A: INTRODUCTION 1

1 Problem statement and background 1

2 Aims of the study 3

3 Scope of the study 3

4 Research questions 3

5 Significance of the study 3

PART B: DEVELOPMENT 5

Chapter 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 5

1.1 Theory of speech acts 5

1.2 Apology as a speech act 5

1.3 Apology strategies 6

1.4 Politeness 9

1.4.1 Politeness theory 10

1.4.2 Social variables affecting politeness in interaction 10

1.4.3 Politeness and gender 11

1.4.4 Politeness and culture 11

1.5 Previous studies on apologizing 12

Chapter 2: METHODOLOGY 15

2.1 Data collection instrument 15

2.2 Subjects 15

2.3 Discourse completion task (DCT) 16

2.4 Data collection procedure 17

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2.5 Analytical framework 18

Chapter 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION 20

3.1 Main strategies and sub-strategies by Vietnamese and Australian males and females 20

3.1.1 Main strategies by Vietnamese and Australian males and females 20

3.1.2 Sub-strategies by Vietnamese and Australian males and females 23

3.2 Main apology strategies and sub-strategies distribution across situations by Vietnamese and Australian males and females 29

3.2.1 Main apology strategies across situations by VS and AS 30

3.2.2 Sub-strategies across situations by VS and AS 36

PART C: CONCLUSION 41

1 Recapitulation 41

2 Limitations of the study and suggestions for further research: 42

REFERENCES 44 APPENDIX A I APPENDIX B II

A request for forgiveness

A request for sympathy Accepting the blame Expressing self-deficiency Expressing lack of intent

An offer of repair/redress Male

Female Australian Australian English Vietnamese

Vietnamese speakers Australian speakers Australian males Australian females Vietnamese males Vietnamese females Strategy

Situation

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1 Apology strategy framework 19

Table 3.1 Main apology strategies by Vietnamese speakers (VS) 20

Table 3.2.Main apology strategies by Australian speakers (AS) 21

Table 3.3 Comparison of main apology strategies by VS and AS 22

Table 3.4 Sub-strategies of Ex.Apo by VS 23

Table 3.5 Sub-strategies of Ack by VS 24

Table 3.6 Sub-strategies of Ex.Apo by AS 25

Table 3.7 Sub-strategies of Ack by AS 26

Table 3.8 Sub-strategies in Explicit expression of apology by Vietnamese and Australian males and females 27

Table 3.9 Sub-strategy distribution of Ack by VS and AS 28

Table 3.10 Apology strategies across situations by VS 30

Table 3.11 Main apology strategies across situations by AS 32

Table 3.12.Main apology strategies across situations by VS and AS 34

Table 3.13 Sub-strategies of Ex.Apo across situations by VS 36

Table 3.14 Sub-strategies of Ex.Apo across situations by AS 37

Table 3.15 Sub-strategies of Ex.Apo across situations by VS and AS 38

Table 3.16 Sub-strategies of Ack across situations by VS 39

Table 3.17 Sub-strategies of Ack across situations by AS 39

Table 3.18 Sub-strategies of Ack across situations by VS and AS 40

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PART A: INTRODUCTION

1 Problem statement and background

Relations between Vietnam and Australia have grown rapidly and effectively

in recent years, especially since the establishment of the bilateral comprehensive partnership in 2009 and the signing of the declaration on enhancing the Vietnam-Australia comprehensive partnership in March 2015 The two countries have strong cooperation in investment, education, labor, tourism, and science and technology According to Foreign Investment Department (2017) investors from Australia invested 396 projects in Vietnam, with a total registered capital of $ 1.82 billion, ranked 19/116 countries and territories invested in Vietnam Australians born in Vietnam represent the sixth largest migrant community in Australia whereas around 28,000 Vietnamese students enroll in education institutions in Australia each year, which gives Australia as one of the most destination for Vietnamese students‟ studying abroad The context is an important reason for the need to gain deeper understanding of the aspects of the two languages and cultures since Geertz (1973), Trice and Beyer (1992) pointed that: “Communication across cultures is, by definition, problematic, for cultures are systems of symbolic meanings shared by one group yet foreign to another”

Speech acts have been shown to vary in conceptualization and verbalization across languages and cultures According to Wierzbicka (1994), people from different cultural backgrounds often realize speech acts differently, using different linguistic forms, social norms or conventions, and speech styles The variations have often accounted for undesired social consequences, and caused communication breakdown and misunderstanding in societies It is for such reasons, that the majority of speech act and pragmatics studies are comparative in nature and often conducted cross-culturally

The speech act of apology, in particular, has gained a great deal more attention and interest among sociolinguistics and pragmatics scholars compared

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with other speech acts Presumably, this is not only due to its vital social functions (Lakoff, 2001), but also to the fact that such a speech event is believed to be one of the commonest speech acts in society (Cordella-Masini, 1989) Apart from its frequent usage, the act of apologizing is also seen to have certain social qualities, and is regarded as a unique representation of people‟s speech behaviour as it involves many aspects of social, psychological, linguistic, and paralinguistic values

or subtleties in its realization Not only is it believed to be complex in nature, but also the realization of such a remedial exchange has also been proven to be both linguistically and culturally specific (Holmes, 1990; Blum-Kulka and Olshtain, 1984) Therefore, as Bataineh and Bataineh (2008) regard it, it is a problematic speech act that is often difficult to learn for most foreign and second language learners

The subject of gender and apology has attracted the attention of many scholars however, their findings are quite different The study of Holmes (1989) showed that New Zealand women apologized and were apologized to significantly more than men Whereas Bean and Johnstone (1994) found that American males apologized twice as often as females during telephone interviews Besides, Deutschmann (2003) reports that there are no significant gender differences in the use of apology in English

In spite of being among the most-interesting topics in the world, the speech act of apologizing is still an under-researched one in Vietnam, especially in terms of gender variation Some Vietnamese authors have been working on this topic such as Dang Thanh Phuong (1999), Kieu Thi Hong Van (2000) and Nguyen Thi Thuy Trang (2010), however, none of them focused on the act of apology on gender or cross culture between Vietnamese and Australians To fill this gap, the present study endeavors to investigate a relatively unexplored aspect of apologies, namely, gender differences between Vietnamese and Australian speakers in making apologies

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2 Aims of the study

This study aims to investigate the differences between Vietnamese and Australians in expressing their apologies in respect of language and gender variables in situations under study It examines how the act of apology is realized cross-culturally, in both languages, looking specifically at differences and commonalities in the use of strategies It attempts to determine if there are any differences in the apology strategies employed by the native speakers of both languages with regard to language and gender variables

3 Scope of the study

The study only examines potential gender differences in the ways young adult Australians and Vietnamese make apologies and the use of linguistic strategies

in both languages to achieve the appropriate degree of politeness in the contexts studied Speech features such as overlaps, intonation pattern, turn operation, and non-verbal expressions are not included The age of participants is limited to 20 to

30 years old The study focuses on apologies among participants who are identified

as friends having an equal status and power Four situations were developed with the level of offence as moderate How apologies varying in degree of imposition, social relationships and power status or social distances between interlocutors are

5 Significance of the study

The present study will hopefully add to the existing literature on speech acts and pragmatics To the best of the researcher‟s knowledge, there has been no cross-

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cultural apology study focusing on gender of both languages Thus, the results can provide useful information about how the speech act of apology is realized in both languages in terms of politeness conceptualization and verbalization They can also provide a basis for comparing the use of linguistic, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic values in the realization of apologies in both languages and identifying common features in cultural and politeness patterns in both languages

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PART B: DEVELOPMENT Chapter 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 1.1 Theory of speech acts

Searle (1969) and Austin (1962) are the pioneers of the speech act theory, which includes the way people apologize, promise, request and perform other linguistic acts The concept of speech acts was defined by Austin (1962, p.6) in the first

edition of the book How to do things with word, which indicated that " the issuing

of the utterance is the performing of an action"

Austin (1962, p.151) classifies speech acts into five categories:

1-“verdictives,” which represent acts that give a verdict,

2- “exercitives,” which express power on the hearer,

3-“commissives,” which commit the speaker to doing something,

4-“behabitives,” which express different social behaviors such as apologizing, congratulating, and the like, and

5- “expositives,” which are conversation or argument related, such as “I assume” or

“I concede” (p 151)

The original classification initiated by Austin including five basic was developed into an alternative taxonomy of the fundamental classes of illocutionary act by Searl (1976) The taxonomy consists of five types of general functions performed by

speech act (i) Declaration - declaring, christening, (ii) Representatives - asserting, disagreeing, (iii) Expressive - thanking, apologizing, (iv) Directives - ordering, requesting and (v) Comissives - promising, offering

These notions have contributed to the understanding of apology They have played a prominent role in shaping the central and focal thoughts for the analysis of apologies in the later parts of the present study

1.2 Apology as a speech act

Olshtain (1989, p 156 -7) defines an apology as „„a speech act which is intended to provide support for the hearer who was actually or potentially malaffected by a violation‟‟ When he/she agrees to offer an apology, the speaker

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expresses his/her willingness to humiliate him-/herself to an extent which, by definition, makes an apology a face-saving act for the hearer and a face-threatening act for the speaker

In addition, Aijmer (1996, p 81) also argued that:

What seems to be necessary is that the „apologiser‟ has done something which is annoying or damaging to the person to whom the apology is addressed The apologiser now regrets having done the act and takes responsibility for it by uttering an apology

Holmes (1990, p 159) defines apology as a speech act addressed to B‟s face needs to remedy an offence for which he takes responsibility and thus to restore the equilibrium between A and B (A is the apologizer, and B is the person offended)

Trosborg (1995, p 146) states that apology is designed to repair damage in social interaction She also adds that:

It coincides with social goal of maintaining harmony between speaker and hearer This act is face-saving for the hearer and functions to diminish friction in interaction For these reasons, it might be anticipated that speakers would not hesitate to issue apologies However, as apologies are issued at the cost of the speaker, who often has to humiliate him /herself, these acts are face-threatening to the speaker…

Bataineh and Bataineh (2008) define apology as a speech act in which the wrongdoer acknowledges responsibility and seeks forgiveness for what he/she has done to the victimized person; the offence could be related to psychological, physical, or material matters

Obviously, the above mentioned definitions, irrespective of the different terms employed, are similar in three aspects: (1) parties involved: hearer/speaker; victim/apologiser, etc.; (2) offence/violation: done by speaker/apologiser to hearer/victim and (3) the act of apologising: acknowledgement/regret, etc Simply put, an apology is a social act uttered to maintain relations (or relationships) between at least two participants

1.3 Apology strategies

According to Olshtain and Cohen (1983), the five strategies which make up the speech act set of apology consist of the first two which are general and the three later which are situation specific:

3 Explanation: the explanation or account of situations which caused the apologizer to commit the offense, i.e “I have family business,”

4 Offer of Repair: the offer made by an apologizer to provide some kind of payment for damage caused by his or her infraction, which can be specific or non-specific, i.e “I will do extra work over the weekend.‟, and

5 Promise of non-recurrence: the commitment made by an apologizer not to let the offence happen again, i.e "It won‟t happen again.”

Olshtain and Cohen‟s (1983) taxonomy was also revised by Holmes (1989, 1990), who believes that it is necessary to remodel these strategies in order to make them clearer Holmes categorizes the apology strategies in four super strategies with eight sub-categories:

A Explicit expression of apology

A1 Offer of apology, e.g I apologize

A2 Expression of regret, e.g I am afraid, I am sorry

A3 Request for forgiveness, e.g Excuse me, Forgive me

B Explanation or account, e.g I wasn’t expecting it to be you

C Acknowledgement of responsibility

C1 Accepting the blame, e.g It is my fault

C2 Expressing self-deficiency, e.g I was confused

C3 Recognizing V as deserving apology, e.g you are right

C4 Expressing lack of intent, e.g I didn’t mean to…

C5 Offer of repair/redress, e.g I’ll replace it for you

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D Promise of forbearance, e.g I promise that it won’t happen again

Olshtain and Cohen (1983) and Olshtain and Weinbach (1987), for example, propose some of main structural components of an apology They include: (a) an illocutionary force indicating device or use of an explicit apology; (b) an expression

of responsibility/blame; (c) an explanation of account; an offer of repair; (d) promise of forbearance; and (e) an expression of concern for the victimized person Holmes (1990) finds that on many occasions, the speakers tend to employ more than one strategy in their apologies In her New Zealand data, she found that the

combination of an explicit expression of apology with Explanation or account was

mostly used On other occasions, however, a number of strategies can be

represented only through the use of Sorry by the speaker, particularly when

addressed to a close friend

Trosborg (1995) with her study on request and apologies across cultures set

up a list of apologizing strategies with quite the same basic strategies but some strategies have been added basing on data collected from her research:

Strategy 0: Opt-out: Complainee does not take on responsibility,

Strategy 1: Minimization,

Strategy 2: Acknowledgment of responsibility,

Strategy 3: Explanation or Account,

Strategy 4: Apologize,

Strategy 5: Offer of repair,

Strategy 6: Promise of forbearance,

Strategy 7: Express the concern for the hearer

Based on DCT data from 100 American and 100 Jordanian university students, Bataineh and Bataineh (2008) come up with a more detailed version of strategies They include: (a) explicit apology (used to show one is sorry explicitly); (b) accounts (used to explain the offence); (c) description of damage (used to describe what changes have been inflicted on the object in discussion or the repercussions of a certain deed on others); (d) reparation (used to repair the

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damage); (e) compensation (used to compensate for the physical or material damage); (f) promise not to repeat the offence (used to assure that the offence will not occur again); (g) explicit assessment of responsibility (used to describe the speaker‟s role in the offence); (h) negative assessment of responsibility (used to deny the responsibility); (i) positive assessment of responsibility (used to admit the responsibility); (j) contextualisation (use to explain the whole contexts of the offense); (k) self-castigation (used to claim critical responsibility for the offense); (l) gratitude (used to show gratefulness to be given chance to express his/her sincere apology); and (m) showing lack of intent to do harm (used to convince the unintention of the offense)

The above researchers made efforts to identify and propose semantic formula for apology strategies, however, most of the formula are situational and cultural For the given situations, this current study adopted the framework of apology strategies proposed by Holmes (1990)

1.4 Language and gender

Ever since Lakoff ‟s pioneering work on women‟s language, the field of feminist linguistics has been continuously gaining in popularity and broadening its scope Early work described women‟s language as insecure and ine¤ective ( Lakoff

2004 [1975]) and linked linguistic gender di¤erences with unequal distribution of power (e.g.,Fishman 1983)

Whereas these studies have been criticized for portraying women as „„merely aberrant or defective copies of men‟‟ (Bergvall 1999: 278), research into girls‟ and boys‟ socialization patterns no longer measured women against a male norm It was shown that interactional styles are forged in early childhood and suggested that women and men are members of di¤erent „„sociolinguistic subcultures‟‟ (Maltz & Borker 1982:200) Numerous studies confirmed this theory by providing empirical evidence for gender-specific language usage (e.g., Tannen 1994; Holmes 1995; Coates 1994, 1996)

1.5 Politeness

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1.5.1 Politeness theory

The speech act in general and the act of apology in particular is also closely related to the concept of politeness Lakoff (1990, p 34) defines politeness as a set of "interpersonal relations" aimed at making communication smooth through keeping the possibility of conflict and confrontation which are innate in human communication, to the minimum

Watts (2003, p 39) characterizes politeness as follows:

1 Politeness is the natural attribute of a 'good' character

2 Politeness is the ability to please others through one's external actions

3 Politeness is the ideal union between the character of an individual and his external actions

Studies of politeness have been carried out by many researchers (Lakoff, 1973; Brown & Levinson, 1987; Yule, 1996, Watts, 2003 etc.), the root and most common approach is Brown and Levinson's politeness theory (1987)

Central to Brown and Levinson's politeness theory is the abstract notion of

"face" According to Brown and Levinson (1987), "face" is defined as "the public self- image that every member [of a society] wants to claim for himself" and there are two types of face:

 Negative face is "the want of every competent adult member that his actions

be unimpeded by others"

 Positive face is "the want of every member that his wants be desirable to at least some others"

1.5.2 Social variables affecting politeness in interaction

According to Crystal (1992), our language has a clear relationship with the following identities:

 Physical identity (age, sex, physical type, physical condition)

 Psychological identity (personality, intelligence, etc.)

 Geographical identity (region of the speaker, accents, dialects, linguistic

areas )

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 Ethnic and national identity (ethnicity, nationalism)

 Social identity (class, status, role, solidarity, distance)

 Contextual identity (setting, participants, activities)

The present study focuses only on apologies between Vietnamese and Australian participants who are identified as friends having an equal status and power The variables affecting politeness in the act of apology in the study mainly are gender of the participants

1.5.3 Politeness and gender

Tannen (1991, p.18) claims that gender differences in conversational styles are reflected in the politeness norms of men and women Women and men have different conversational styles, to which she assigns the labels „rapport-talk‟ and

„report-talk‟, respectively Women use language for „intimacy‟ in conversations, something which they are socialised to do from an early age For women, conversations thus represent “negotiations for closeness in which people try to seek and give confirmation and support, and to reach consensus” (Tannen 1991, p 25) Men, on the other hand, view conversation as competition, where the main purpose

is to gain self-esteem at the expense of others

1.5.4 Politeness and culture

According to Deutschmann (2003), the „social norm‟ view of politeness assumes that each society has its own set of prescriptive rules which dictate what constitutes „good manners‟ in a given situation, “a positive evaluation (politeness) arises when an action is in congruence with the norm, a negative evaluation (impoliteness, rudeness) when an action is to the contrary” What counts as polite behavior (including values and norms attached to such behavior) is culture specific and language-specific (Gu, 1990)

The culture of Vietnam is greatly influenced by Chinese culture, French civilization, Buddhist philosophy and Communism, as well as the ongoing globalization process (Them, 1998) However, traditional Vietnamese culture is still preserved while accumulating and localizing foreign cultural influences (Them,

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1998) In modern times, although Vietnamese people have learnt additional politeness strategies through interaction with their oversea friends, traditional politeness has been well maintained One of the unchanged thinking modes in the Vietnamese is the indirectness in their speech Besides, Hofstede describes Vietnamese culture as high power distance, high collectivism, moderate uncertainty avoidance, and high context The characteristics of communication in Vietnam are considered to be indirect, ambiguous, harmony-oriented and reserved

The culture of Australia is a Western one therefore it belongs to the context" group (Hall, 1976) According to Hofstede (1980) the Australians tend to

"low-be more individualistic and "low-be a moderately low power distance culture where people believe in minimizing status differences between individuals and sharing power The Australian culture is, additionally, regarded as a rational one, this is a law-governed culture within which social behaviors are mostly practiced through legal ethics Thus, directness is appreciated in the Australian culture (Crawford, 1966)

The differences between the two cultures therefore are believed led to the disparities in politeness norms between the Vietnamese and Australians

1.6 Previous studies on apologizing

One of the most significant and highly seminal works on the illocutionary speech act of apology was reported in the Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) conducted by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984) This project was designed to investigate speech act patterns (i.e., requests and apologies) across different cultures in an attempt to establish similarities as well as differences between native speakers and non-native speakers The researchers studied eight different languages: Australian English, American English, British English, Canadian French, Danish, German, Hebrew, and Russian The authors found that respondents pursued similar strategies in their apologies and requests, but still exhibited culturally different tendencies in their use This situation was attributed to three different variables: (a) situational (b) cross-cultural and (c) individual

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Another popular author studying apology must be mentioned is Holmes Her study (1989) focused on a range of strategies used by New Zealanders with consideration of various social factors as well as the distributional patterns for women and men She, for instance, found that, in 183 remedial exchanges in the corpus with the total number of 295 occurrences of apology strategies and based on gender, both women and men largely use the same strategies, women tended to use apologies more than men, women apologized to other women more than to men, and men apologized to women more than to men

Besides, Bergman and Kasper (1993) conducted an experiment in which they examined the perception and performance of native speakers of Thai and those of English speakers with a variety of contexts, i.e., how they would perceive the offence and how they would choose to apologise in different contexts Results indicated that the offender takes on more responsibility when he or she is closer to the hearer As for the strategies employed, accepting responsibility and expressing

an explicit apology (IFIDs) were reported to head the list of participants‟ choices, whereas promise of forbearance was at the very bottom of their selection of apology strategies

Deutschmann (2003) based on a corpus of 1700 British speakers to investigate the sociolinguistic factors that affect the frequency and types of apologies The findings shows that no overall gender differences in the frequency of apologizing, however women used relatively more additional strategies involving the taking on of responsibility for an offence than men and men tended to use more

„Sarcastic‟ apologies than women Younger speakers in the corpus apologised far more frequently than older speakers, as did middle-class speakers compared to

working-class speakers

Nevertheless, most studies on apologies have focused largely on Western languages, studies on Asian and Eastern languages remain very few (Nureddeen, 2007) Apology studies in Vietnamese are quite few and mainly in descriptive and contrastive pragmatics theses To the best knowledge of the author, there are three

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studies on the speech act of apologizing by Phuong (1999), Van (2000) and Trang (2010) Phuong (1999) compares and contrasts the English and Vietnamese apologies and responses His study shows that English and Vietnamese differ in terms of directness and indirectness levels in the given contexts, and that the English use more lexico-modal markers than Vietnamese Meanwhile the Vietnamese employ more politeness markers in their apologies and responses

In another trend, Van (2000) examines the realization patterns of apology in English and Vietnamese with respect to strategies, remedial support and internal modification in relation to the variation of context-external factors and context-internal factor Data from the study reflect the significant effect of the age of the Hear with respect to the Speaker on Vietnamese patterns of apologies whereas it cannot be found in the English group Also, Vietnamese speakers took Power and Distance into consideration more than English speakers in the acts of apologizing

Different from Phuong (1999) and Van (2000), Trang (2010) compares and contrasts apology strategies in Vietnamese English and American English The

findings shows that American speakers mainly chose the strategy Offer of repair to apologize, the Vietnamese ones prefer to show Concern for the hearer reflecting the

images of the cultural traits of a sentimental Vietnamese culture and a rational American culture

In short, the speech act of apology has been exploited by a lot of researchers

in various languages, however, the comparison of Vietnamese and Australian English apologies with focusing on gender are still uncovered The present study emphasizes gender differences between Vietnamese and Australian speakers in making apologies

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Chapter 2: METHODOLOGY

2.1 Data collection instrument

A variety of data collection techniques and methodological frameworks have been used in empirical pragmatics and speech act research Golato (2003) mentions several techniques which have been often employed in pragmatics, such as Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and Questionnaires, Role Play, Field Observation, and recording of Naturally-Occurring Conversations In the present study, the author uses DCT as a means of data collection instrument because according to Beebe and Cummings (1985), DCTs are believed to be highly effective means of:

a gathering a large amount of data quickly;

b creating an initial classification of semantic formulas and strategies that will occur in natural speech;

c studying the stereotypical, perceived requirements for socially appropriate (though not always polite) response;

d gaining insights into social and psychological factors that are likely to affect speech and performance;

e ascertaining the canonical shape of refusals, apologies, partings, etc., in the minds of the speakers of that language

(Beebe & Cummings, 1985, p.13) Beebe and Cummings (1985) also pointed that the DCTs did not elicit natural speech with respect to actual wording, range of formulas and strategies, length of responses However, within the time and resource constraints available, a DCT proved to be the most suitable method in designing the research

2.2 Subjects

The study involves a total of 40 participants They are 20 native speakers of Australian and 20 native speakers of Vietnamese In each of these categories there are 10 males and 10 females The majority of them are students studying in various

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majors at Melbourne and Haiphong universities They were selected on the basis of the researcher‟s personal contacts The age of the participants ranges from 20 to 30 years This age group was chosen because the majority of college students are in this age range, thus making it practical to approach them Also, studies have indicated that people at this age have unique speech styles and behaviours and they are normally categorized as “young adult” (Coulmas, 2005)

2.3 Discourse completion task (DCT)

In the present study, the DCT consists of four apology situations involving gender variable and is designed in English for AS and in Vietnamese for VS A discourse completion task is divided into two parts Part I contains demographic questions about participants such as sex, age, highest level of education and nationality This part was designed to classify the gender of respondents and to choose the respondents whose nationalities are either Vietnamese or Australian, with the age of 20-30, and similar level of education Part II contains descriptions of

4 situations potentially involving apology Each situation encouraged reflection on how people believed they would respond The following is a sample of the DCT:

QUESTIONNAIRE This questionnaire is intended to collect apologies by speakers in the given situations The information collected will be used for the analysis of the MA thesis

on Gender differences between Vietnamese and Australian speakers in making apologies

You are kindly requested to provide responses as natural as possible to the situations given below The information will be only used for the aims of the thesis

2.4 Data collection procedure

The present study was undertaken in two stages It began with preliminary questionnaires and interviews (pilot) which ask information from 20 native speakers

in both languages about the popularity of the situations and the severity of offence

in the situations This information is a preliminary attempt to select possible apology situations, making sure that they are common and having similar severity

of offence to both communities Based on the information obtained from the participants through questionnaires and interviews, four most common apology situations in both languages are then selected

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The second stage was collecting the apology expressions from native speakers of both languages in the selected situations A total of 40 participants taken from both communities (20 each), whose ages ranges from 20 to 30, who are males and females and studying various subjects at Melbourne university and Haiphong university, were approached and asked for their willingness to have their apology expressions Participants were asked to express an apology to a friend of equal status as naturally as possible in each of the four selected situations They were

provided with written descriptions and explanations of the situations

2.5 Analytical framework

After the data were collected, they were decoded The present study confines itself to the analysis of apology strategies, and is based principally on Holmes‟ (1990) strategy classifications All responses were firstly grouped into general strategy classifications, and then sub-strategies classifications using linguistic devices provided by Holmes (1990) with some modifications As there were apparent differences in English and Vietnamese apology realization patterns, the model was slightly modified to adapt to both Australian English (AE) and Vietnamese (V) Holmes presents a set of explicit apology expressions which are

categorized into three subgroups They are [1] Offer of apology, e.g I apologize [2]

Expression of regret, e.g I am afraid, I am sorry and [3] Request for forgiveness,

e.g Forgive me However, there is the so called “thông cảm” in Vietnamese apology expressions, which is roughly translated as “request for sympathy” in English (Van, 2000), while there is no equivalent expression in Australian English Thus, in the present study, explicit apology is re-categorized into four groups like

[1] Offer of apology, [2] Expression of regret, [3] Request for forgiveness and [4]

Request for sympathy Moreover, since no evidence of the sub-strategy Recognizing victim as deserving apology was found in data of the present study, the sub-strategy

was omitted Hence, apology strategies were regrouped as the following:

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Table 2.1 Apology strategy framework

A Explicit expression of apology

I promise that it won‟t happen again

The next step was to categorize the strategies according to research variables: language (Australian English and Vietnamese); gender (male and female); and situations All apology categories were tabulated according to the above variables and mainly focus on gender variable Then they were counted to find out the percentage of each strategy category within each research variable This simple quantitative operation was merely intended to draw out similarities, differences, and the trends of apology strategy categories within research variables, and ultimately to answer research questions regarding the apology strategies used by both groups of participants

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Chapter 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

This chapter presents and compares apology strategies and then apology strategies between men and women in Vietnamese, in Australian English, and in Vietnamese and Australian English It starts with a description and comparison of

sub-the main apology strategies: Explicit expression of apology (Ex.Apo), An

explanation or account (Exp), An acknowledgement of responsibility (Ack), and A promise of forbearance (Pro.For), noting apparent differences in the distribution of

these four strategies between genders and between the languages It then describes

and compares apology sub-strategies of Ex.Apo and Ack in each language and between the languages Explicit expression of apology (Ex.Apo) includes An offer of

apology (Apo), An expression of regret (Reg), A request for forgiveness (For) and A request for sympathy (Sym) and An acknowledgement of responsibility (Ack)

consists of Accepting the blame (Bla), Expressing self-deficiency (Self-def),

Expressing lack of intent (Lac.Int) and An offer of repair/redress (Rep)

3.1 Main strategies and sub-strategies by Vietnamese and Australian males and females

3.1.1 Main strategies by Vietnamese and Australian males and females

Table 3.1 Main apology strategies by Vietnamese speakers (VS)

Notes: Ex Apo = Explicit expression of apology

Exp = An explanation or account Ack = An acknowledgement of responsibility Pro For = A promise of forbearance

Table 3.1 presents main apology strategy distribution between Vietnamese male and female participants It is observable in the table that there is hardly difference in the percentage of apology between the genders The largest