A contrastive study of attitudinal resources in english and vietnamese news report towards plastic straws

QUY NHON UNIVERSITYTỐNG MỸ LINH A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF ATTITUDINAL RESOURCES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE NEWS REPORTS ON PLASTIC STRAWS Field: English Linguistics Code: 8220201 Supervisor:

QUY NHON UNIVERSITY

TỐNG MỸ LINH

A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF ATTITUDINAL RESOURCES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE NEWS REPORTS ON PLASTIC STRAWS

Field: English Linguistics Code: 8220201

Supervisor: Assoc.Prof.Dr NGUYỄN THỊ THU HIỀN

BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO

TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC QUY NHƠN

STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP

I certify that this thesis A Contrastive Study of Attitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese News Reports on Plastic Straws contains no material

extracted or published elsewhere except where reference is made in the study

This thesis has not been submitted for any degree and is not currentlybeing submitted for any other degree or award

Binh Dinh, 2020

Tong My Linh

Additionally, I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to all of mylecturers who play a significant role in nurturing my interest in linguisticresearch They have provided me with interesting and useful lectures andcreated favorable conditions for me to enhance my skills and widen myhorizon of the knowledge of Linguistics for the past two years.

Next, my sincere thanks go to all of my classmates, M.A students ofEnglish course 21st at Quy Nhon University, who supported me during thetime we took the course together

Last but absolutely not least, from the bottom of my heart, I owe mydebt to my family for their unconditional love and tremendousencouragement Without their supports, I could not have overcome all thechallenges and obstacles on my academic pathway

The thesis applied Appraisal Theory in a contrastive analysis ofAttitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese news reports on plasticstraws The data is composed of 20 news reports (10 in English and 10 inVietnamese) collected from reliable online websites The study aims atdiscovering the similarities and differences between the two languages

regarding Attitudinal resources, namely Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation The research outcomes indicated that the deployment of the Attitudinal

resources in the English and Vietnamese corpus shared certain similaritiessuch as the occurrence of all types of Attitudinal values and the more common

employment of Positive and Explicit resources than Negative and Implicit ones Despite the aforementioned similarities between the two languages, a number of differences were observed in terms of Affect and Judgment The study hopefully provides the language learners useful knowledge of Appraisal

and the features of the evaluative language employed by English andVietnamese writers in their news reports

: Affect: Un/Happiness: Implicit

: Affect: Dis/Inclination: Judgment

: Non-Authorial: Judgment: Normality: Judgment: Propriety: Appreciation: Reaction: Affect: Dis/Satisfaction: Affect: In/Security: Judgment: Tenacity

: Judgment: Veracity: Vietnamese plastic straws news reports: Negative

: Positive

Italics are used for quotes, technical terms, emphasis, and examples

Bold is deployed to mark the first use of technical terms

In the numbered examples: Bold marks the use of what is being

demonstrated

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, the researcher begins with presenting all thepreliminaries of the thesis It starts with the rationale, followed by the aim andobjectives of the study, research questions, the significance of the study andthe scope of the study The organization of the study is presented as the lastsection of the research

1.1 Rationale

It is indisputable that the utilization of plastic straws has become a hotissue lately The small and seemingly harmless utensil that goes generallyunnoticed in our everyday life has made it onto 2018‟s most-wanted list If it

is surprising to hear that plastic straws are receiving backlash, it may be evenmore astonishing to figure out about ninety one percent of the plastic we use

is not recycled and instead ends up in landfills or the ocean It is estimatedthat an average person uses 1.6 straws per day, which means around 8.5billion plastic straws are thrown away each year, potentially contributing toover 150 million tons of plastic in the world‟s oceans Because of thestatistics, some municipalities and corporations are starting to make efforts tofight pollution and control the utilization of plastic straws Additionally,numerous talks, videos, news reports and documentaries have been carried out

to partially contribute to eliminating plastic straws and increasing publicawareness of the issue However, news reports are considered an effectivetool to reflect social issues as well as one of the most popular access for thosedesiring to expand their horizons Indeed, the success of any news reports areattributed to not only the degree of the issues‟ influence but also the reportersthemselves knowing how to get their outcome across to the viewers

It cannot be denied that the framework of Appraisal Theory, which was

conducted by a group of scholars led by two linguists, namely James Martinand Peter White in the 1980s and 1990s, is considered the theory inpsychology that emotions are extracted from our evaluations (appraisals orestimates) of events that cause specific reactions in different people.Essentially, our appraisal of a situation causes an emotional, or affective,response that is going to be based on that appraisal Martin & White (2005)claims that Appraisal Theory framework is a particular approach to exploring,describing and explaining the way language is used to evaluate, adopt stances,construct textual personas and manage interpersonal positioning and

relationships Therefore, Appraisal Theory framework is seen as an effective

tool for analyzing attitude expressions and interpersonal meanings in varioustypes of discourse such as literary works, advertisements, talks, news,academic and narrative discourse

There have been some studies carried out, employing the Appraisal

Theory as a theoretical framework In respect of English literary works, Liu

(2013) carried out a case study investigating the employment of evaluativelanguage between the high-rated and low-rated English argumentative essays byEFL students in two Chinese universities An attitudinal analysis of the novelGreat Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald was carried out by Hadidi &Mohammadbagheri-Parvin (2015) Xiaolin Liu (2010) tried to apply AppraisalTheory into teaching process in an attempt to get better results for students ofEnglish Vo Duy Duc (2011) studied journalistic voices operating in EnglishVietnamese hard news reports in the light of Appraisal Theory Additionally,Appraisal Theory was also applied to examine the social attitudes in newsreports towards an important event Nguyen Thi Thu Hien (2016) carried outresearching the social attitudes in news reports towards President Obama‟s visit

to Vietnam As a result, it can be found that Appraisal Theory has beenapplied in a wide variety of genres, which proves its significance as atheoretical framework to help understand the evaluative language However,there has not been any contrastive study of attitudinal resources in Englishand Vietnamese news reports towards plastic straws, which means there is agap available for my thesis It is for those reasons that inspire and prompt me

to conduct a research on the attitudinal aspects of the news reports towards

plastic straws with the topic: “A Contrastive Study of Attitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese News Reports on Plastic Straws.”

1.2 Aim and objectives

1.2.1 Aim of the study

The study primarily aims to investigate Attitudinal resources used inEnglish and Vietnamese news reports towards plastic straws to find out thesimilarities and differences in the way English and Vietnamese authors showtheir attitudes on such issue

1.2.2 Objectives of the study

For the aforementioned aim to be fulfilled, the research concentrated onthe following objectives:

- To identify the Attitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese newsreports on plastic straws and their occurrence to reveal the choice of language ofevaluation in the reports;

- To discuss the similarities and discrepancies regarding the Attitudinal resource in English and Vietnamese news reports on plastic straws

1.3 Research questions

The study addresses itself to answering the two following questions:

1 Which Attitudinal resources are used and how often are they used in English and Vietnamese news reports on plastic straws?

2 What are the similarities and differences of the Attitudinal resources in English news reports and those in Vietnamese news reports on plastic straws?

1.4 Scope of the study

Though the Appraisal Theory is composed of three domains, precisely

Attitude, Engagement and Graduation, this study focuses on the Attitudinal

resources, namely Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation due to their

considerable significance in revealing attitudes meeting the aim of the study.Additionally, the data source employed in this research is the collection of 10news reports written by English authors and another 10 written by Vietnameseauthors on plastic straws from reliable websites

1.5 Significance of the study

This study is expected to contribute to the research, performance, andinterpretation of attitudinal values from the theoretical as well as practicalperspectives Regarding theoretical aspect, this study lays a stress on thesignificant role of Appraisal Theory as an analytical framework which helps

to highlight the language of evaluation Moreover, this study may be a newapproach to gain an insight into the features of attitudinal values conveyed bynews reports in English and Vietnamese Additionally, it is supposed toprovide a reliable reference for the readers who are interested in attitudinalvalues so that they are likely to have a thorough grasp of the evaluativelanguage Practically, the study is considered to offer specific implications forVietnamese teachers and learners of English concerning sharpening theirEnglish-speaking skills both in classroom contexts and in their dailycommunication

1.6 Organization of the study

This study consists of five main chapters, as follows:

Chapter 1, Introduction, introduces the rationale, the aim and objectives

concise review of the previous studies related to the issues under investigation

is also presented

Chapter 3, Research Methodology, discusses research methods of

research, comprising data collection, data analysis, the reliability and validity

of the research

Chapter 4, Findings and Discussion deals with the analysis and the findings of the study The study analyzes and discusses Attitudinal resources

and the frequency of their occurrence in news reports on plastic straws As a

result, similarities and differences concerning three sub-types of Attitude in

English and Vietnamese news reports on plastic straws are revealed anddiscussed

Chapter 5, Conclusions and Implications, gives out a concise summary

of the research findings, suggests implications for teaching and learningEnglish, and mentions the shortcomings of the research Additionally,suggestions for further studies are also put forward in this chapter

In summary, this chapter serves to provide the preliminaries of thethesis It starts with the rationale, followed by the aim and objectives of thestudy, research questions, the scope of the study, the significance of the studyand organization of the study In other words, Chapter 1 aims at offering anoverview of the contents of the following chapters, contributing to sketchingthe research outline to follow

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter involves a brief overview of the fundamental dimensionsfunctioning as the theoretical framework employed to carry out the study

Specifically, this part of the study is concerned with Attitudinal resources as a system of Appraisal Theory Moreover, this section deals with previous

studies relating to current research

2.1 Appraisal Theory

2.1.1 An overview of Appraisal Theory

Appraisal Theory was put forward by a group of researchers led byProfessor James Martin of the Linguistics Department at University ofSydney in the 1900s (Ruo-mei, 2016)

J.R Martin & David Rose (2003) indicate that Appraisal is a system of interpersonal meanings We use the resources of Appraisal for negotiating our

social relationships, by telling our listeners or readers how we feel aboutthings and people

Martin & White (2005) claim that Appraisal Theory is recognized as a

particular approach to evaluate language, adopt stances, construct textualcharacters, and constitute interpersonal positioning and relationships Itprobes how speakers/writers pass their attitudes, judgments, or opinions onlisteners/readers to form alliances with those who have the same experienceand view and distance themselves from those who do not

Martin (2000) once stressed that Appraisal also explores how attitudes,

judgments, and emotional responses from speakers/writers are explicitly

presented or expressed implicitly in texts Appraisal Theory is performed to

analyze the discourse resources to negotiate the social relationships by tellinglisteners/readers how they feel about relevant persons or things

Appraisal Theory, the evaluative use of language, offers a framework

for assessment of people, things, happenings, places or processes Its main

function is to help “writers/speakers positively or negatively evaluate the entities, happenings and states-of-affairs with which their texts are concerned” (Martin & White, 2005, p 2).

Moreover, Martin & David Rose (2004) state, “Appraisal is a system of interpersonal meaning.” They suggest that the resources of Appraisal are

utilized to arrange our social relationships, by keeping our listeners or readersinformed of our sentiments regarding things and people; in other words, ourattitudes

Meanwhile, according to Richards & Schmidt (2010, p 30), Appraisal Theory is a developing theory within discourse analysis and conversation

analysis It is concerned with the manners of expressing attitudes such as

certainty, emotional response, social evaluation, and intensity Appraisal can

be realized by lexical items or by the entire clauses

Appraisal Theory can be considered “a framework for investigating the mechanisms language employs in the evaluation and adaptation of stances adopted by discourse producers” (Hadidi & Mohammadbagheri-Parvin, 2015,

p 131)

Martin & White (2005, p 34-35) introduce the outline of Appraisal

framework which is divided into three groups of evaluation resources, namely

Engagement, Gradation and Attitude While Attitude is concerned with our

feelings, including emotional reactions, judgments of behavior and evaluation

of things, Engagement deals with sourcing attitudes and the play of voices around opinions in discourse and Graduation attends to grading phenomena

whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred An overview of theseappraisal systems is presented in Figure 2.1 below

Figure 2 1 An overview of Appraisal resources

(Source: Martin & White, 2005: 38)

2.1.2 Engagement

According to Martin & White (2005), Engagement is concerned with

the linguistic resources by which speakers/writers adopt a stance towards thevalue positions being referenced by the text and with respect to those they

address Engagement is composed of two sub-types, namely Monogloss and

Heterogloss While Monogloss relates to factual information (single voice),

Hetergloss gets involved in multiple voices which consist of Contract and

Expand.

2005, p 35) It is divided into two categories, namely Force and Focus.

Martin & White (2005) state that Force covers assessments as to degree

of intensity and as to amount It is in the form of Intensification and

Quantification Regarding Intensification, it assesses the degree of intensity

through the scaling of qualities or processes It is realized via Isolating scaling/down-scaling), Infusing or Repetition (Martin and White, 2005).

(up-Force values in most cases are gradable, but it is not in the case of Focus With reference to Focus, it deals with class membership and points out

how strong or weak that membership is (to our mind) Sharpen (up-scale) and

Soften (down-scale) are the two elements under Focus.

It is irrefutable that a thorough analysis may be obtained by utilizing

Engagement and Graduation to identify sources of evaluation and the degree

of evaluation; however, they do not help much to achieve the aim of thisstudy, so they are not examined

2.1.4 Attitude

Among the three types of Appraisal system, Attitude is considered to be analyzed due to its significance to the study As a result, subtypes of Attitude

work as a framework to uncover evaluative language in English andVietnamese news reports towards plastic straws Therefore, a detailed

description of Attitudinal resources is presented in the following section.

Attitude is one of the three sub-systems of the Appraisal Theory According to Martin & White (2005, p 35), Attitude is concerned with “our feelings, including emotional reaction, judgments of behavior and evaluation

of things” In other words, Attitude is the resource that is applied by the

speakers or writers to express people‟s views, positive and negative feelingreactions with participants and offer the evaluation of things

The Appraisal sub-system of Attitude entails three semantic regions

covering those traditionally considered as emotion, ethics and aesthetics,which are all realized through clusters of grammatical structures especiallyadjectives

White (2015a, p 2) claims that Attitude refers to the sub-system of

evaluative meaning by which addressees are positioned to adopt a positive ornegative view vis-à-vis experiential phenomena or propositions about thosephenomena

Attitude is itself classified into three territories of feeling, namely

Affect, Judgment and Appreciation, as presented in the following Figure 2.2

(Liu, 2013, p 42, based on Martin & White, 2005)

Un/Happiness

In/Security AFFECT

Dis/Satisfaction Dis/Inclination

Propriety Social Sanction

Veracity ATTITUDE

APPRECIATION

Composition Valuation

Figure 2 2 Sub-systems of Attitude

(Liu, 2013, p 42, based on Martin & White, 2005)

Liu (2013) states that there are two important characteristics particular

to the Attitude system deserves bringing up Attitude values can be positive or negative and explicit/inscribed or implicit/invoked For instance, “awesome”

is a kind of positive affect while “frightened” refers to the feeling of insecurity, and therefore coded as negative Under the Appraisal coding

practice, positive and negative values are normally indicated by “+” and “-”

respectively An implicit expression refers to the inscription of Attitude values

not through the use of explicit attitude lexis For example, “She is a beautiful

girl” is an Explicit Judgment, while we cannot easily tell the evaluative meaning encoded in the sentence “He spends 100 pounds per day” In the

latter example, for a thrifty person, it may connote a negative reading of alavish way of living.

Martin & White (2005) claim that one way to think about Judgement and Appreciation is to see them as institutionalized feelings, which take us out

of our everyday common-sense world into the uncommon sense worlds of

shared community values In detail, Judgment refers to feelings in the realm

of proposals about behavior - how we should behave or not while

Appreciation considers feelings as propositions about the value of things what they are worth or not An outline of this orientation to Affect at the heart

-of institutionalized feelings is presented in Figure 2.3

ethics/morality (rules and regulations)

feeling institutionalized as proposals

Figure 2 3 Judgment and Appreciation as Institutionalized Affect

(Martin & White, 2005, p 45)

2.1.4.1 Affect

Affect is one of the three subtypes of Attitude along with Judgment and Appreciation Affect is concerned with emotions involved in “registering positive and negative feelings: do we feel happy or sad, confident or anxious, interested or bored?” (Martin & White, 2005, p 42).

According to Martin & White (2005, p 46), Affect can be realized by

quality, mental and behavioral processes, modal adjuncts, and

nominalizations These realizations can be viewed in Table 2.1

Table 2 1 Grammatical realizations of Affect

(Martin & White, 2005, p 46)

realizations

affect as ‘quality’

-describing participants Epithet a sad captain

- attributed to participants Attribute the captain was sad

- manner of processes Circumstance the captain left sadly affect as ‘process’ his departure upset him

- affective mental Process he missed them

– affective behavioural the captain wept

affect as ‘comment’ Modal Adjunct sadly, he had to go

- desiderative

affect as ‘nominalizations’ Subject, Object joy, sadness, sorrow

Martin & White (2005) divide Affect resources into four main sets

which are Un/Happiness, In/Security, Dis/Satisfaction and Dis/Inclination.

- Un/Happiness variable covers emotions concerned with “affairs of the heart” - sadness, hate, happiness and love The Un/Happiness set of meanings involves the moods of feeling happy or sad For example, cry, wail, dislike, hate, miserable, rejoice, love, like, cheerful, and so on.

- In/Security variable covers our feelings of peace and anxiety in

relation to our environments, including the people sharing them with us For

instance, restless, anxious, shaking, confident, assure, delegate, proclaim, commit,

and so on

- Dis/Satisfaction deals with our feelings of achievement and frustration

in relation to the activities in which we are engaged, including our roles as both

participants and spectators Take the following cases as examples: fidget,

yawn, caution, scold, castigate, attentive, busy, industrious, and so on.

- Dis/Inclination is concerned with how the speaker is inclined or disinclined to something; for example, tremble, fearful, wary, shudder, suggest, demand, miss, and so on.

Moreover, the Affect value can be classified into Authorial Affect

(author‟s own emotions) and Non-Authorial Affect (the characters‟

emotions in the text) According to White (2015 b), in terms of Authorial Affect, the speaker/writer strongly foregrounds his/her subjective presence in the communicative process In other words, Authorial Affect deals with the

writer/speaker indicating how they have responded emotionally to the people,

things, happenings or situations being evaluated Regarding Non-Authorial Affect, White (2015 b) states that it is the case where it is not the author‟s

emotions which are described but those of other human individuals or groups

As a result, he/she makes use of the second and third person to offerevaluations on others‟ emotions

The following section is devoted to the description of another sub-type

of Affect called Judgment, which is utilized to evaluate people‟s behavior and

actions

2.1.4.2 Judgment

Martin & White (2005, p 42) claim that Judgment deals with attitudes

towards behavior, which we admire or criticize, praise or condemn Phrased

in another way, with Judgment we move into the territory of meaning

construing our attitudes to people and their behavior In other words,

Judgment is concerned with resources for assessing behavior according to various normative principles Moreover, Judgment serves to evaluate human

behavior positively and negatively in terms of that participant‟s acts ordispositions

White (2015 b) states that Judgment may hold a variety of realizations such as Adverbials; for examples, honestly, fairly, cleverly, stupidly, …; Attributes and epithets which can be realized in the following instances: a skillful dancer, he is shy, she is confident, don’t be rude,…; Nominals like a genius, a criminal, a lair, …and Verbs such as lie, cheat, trust, deceive,…).

According to Martin & White (2005), Judgment is divided into two

broad categories, namely Social Esteem and Social Sanction.

Social Esteem assesses people‟s conduct from the perspectives of

social ethics and the standard of appropriateness It is a semantic system

which refers to one‟s emotional responses or reactions Social Esteem tends to

be policed in the oral culture, through chat, gossip, jokes and stories ofvarious kinds - with humor often having a critical role to play (Eggins &

Slade 1997) In the opinion of Martin & White (2005), Social Esteem has to

handle with Judgment of Normality (how unusual someone is), Judgment

of Capacity (how capable someone is) and Judgment of Tenacity (how

resolute someone is) Meanwhile, Social Sanction is defined by Martin &

White (2005) in the sense that is often codified in writing, as edicts, decrees,rules, regulations and laws about how to behave with penalties and

punishments as levers against those not complying with the code Social Sanction assesses people conduct based on legal or religious rules It is

composed of two kinds, namely Judgment of Veracity (how truthful someone is) and Judgment of Propriety (how ethical someone is).

Table 2.2 provides a detailed description of the sub-types of the

Judgment with the examples provided.

Table 2 2 The system of Judgment

(Source: Martin and White, 2005)

- celebrated, unsung,… retrograde,…

- powerful, robust, - mild, weak, whimpy,… vigorous,… - unsound, sick, cripped,

- sound, healthy, fit, … …

CAPACITY - adult, mature, - immature, childish,

(how capable?) ESTEEM - witty, humorous, droll, - dull, dreary, grave, …

… - slow, stupid, thick, …

- balanced, together, sane, …

- plucky, brave, heroic, - timid, cowardly, gutless,

- truthful, honest, - dishonest, deceitful,

SANCTION (how honest?) - frank, candid, direct, … - blunt, blabbermouth, …

- discrete, tactful, …

Types of Judgment Positive Negative

- good, moral, ethical, … - bad, immoral, evil, …

- law abiding, fair, just, - corrupt, unfair, unjust,

PROPRIETY - sensitive, kind, caring, - insensitive, mean, cruel,

reproach?) - unassuming, modest, - rude, discourteous,

Martin and White (2005, p 36) state that Appreciation looks at

resources for construing the value of things, including natural phenomena andsemiosis (as either product or process) Vo Duy Duc (2011, p 31) also gives

the definitions for the term He claims that Appreciation is not always

concerned with the evaluation of things, but in many instances, it deals with

the aesthetic evaluation of humans Appreciation is defined as “the assessment of artifacts, entities, happenings, and states of affairs by reference

to aesthetics and other systems of social valuation” (White, 2015 a, p 2).

Martin & White (2005) affirms Appreciation is composed of three

sub-types: Reaction (emotional impact of something on the reader or listener),

Composition (the texture of something) and Valuation (social value of

something) Table 2.3 gives a deep insight into the categories of Appreciation

along with examples

Table 2 3 Categories of Appreciation

- arresting, - dull, boring, tedious, captivating, …

engaging,… - dry, ascetic, uninviting,

exciting, moving, … - flat, predictable,

- lively, dramatic, monotonous, …

…

- balanced, - unbalanced, harmonious, unified, discordant, irregular, …

COMPLEXITY - lucid, clear, - arcane, unclear, …

precise, … - plain, monolithic,

- rich, detailed, … simplistic, …

- significant, deep, - fake, conservative,

SIGNIFICANCE lasting, essential, forgettable,

unique, innovative, unmemorable, bogus, …

- valuable, - worthless, useless,

It can be seen that Reaction deals with emotional impact on the readers

or listeners and consists of two sub-types, namely Impact and Quality.

Impact involves the evaluated entity (whether the object grabs our attention); meanwhile, Quality is centered on the evaluator‟s response (whether we like the object) In addition, Composition, which is related to our perception, is

utilized to evaluate a product or process about its configuration According to

Martin & White (2005), Composition is classified into two smaller resources

which are Balance (whether the phenomenon hang together) and Complexity

(whether it is hard to follow the phenomena or not) Regarding Valuation,

Ngo & Unsworth (2015) categorize it into two sub-types, namely

Significance (whether the phenomena is important) and Benefit (whether the

phenomena is beneficial)

The next parts deal with the other resources of Appraisal, namely

Engagement and Graduation However, they are considered as secondary

points due to their insignificance to the thesis; as a result, a brief description

of the aspects is presented

2.2 Application of Appraisal Theory in discourse analysis

In the light of Appraisal Theory, a productive theoretical framework, a

lot of scientific investigations have been conducted in different discourses likeEnglish literary works, news discourse, academic and narrative discourse

By drawing Appraisal Theory as an analytical framework, Painter

(2003) tracked the development of two children‟s resources for expressingemotional, moral and other evaluations, examined the interplay of implicit(evoked) and explicit (inscribed) attitudinal construal in mother-child talk,

and explores the role of Attitude in language development generally It was concluded that expressions of Affect are „gradable‟ even in their pre-lexical forms and that the differentiation of Affect into the „institutionalized‟ forms of

Judgment and Appreciation may involve semiotic moves that encourage

reflective awareness of the meaning system itself

Xiaolin Liu (2010) attempted to apply the Appraisal Theory to the

analysis and teaching of college English reading, with the hope of finding anew way of teaching college English reading, which will be helpful to solvethe problems in the process of teaching English reading in China The results

of the study indicate that the application of Appraisal Theory to the teaching

of college English reading is immensely helpful for students in their reading

comprehension With the help of Appraisal analysis, students can have a

better understanding of the reading materials And this indicates that the

Appraisal Theory can be used as an important strategy to develop their critical ability Appraisal Theory can provide the Chinese English teachers with a

new perspective to teach reading in English

Another significant study is that Xinghua Liu & Thompson (2009)contrasted Attitude choices of a Chinese undergraduate writing an Englishand a Chinese essay In this study, the Chinese text was found to have feweraffect and judgment items to avoid direct ethical or moral evaluations anddisclosure of personal emotions for either face-saving or self-protection,which, as the researchers suggested, reflected a Chinese practice of languageand rhetoric to achieve social harmony

Xinghua Liu (2013) continued to contribute to the Appraisal Theory‟s

research by carrying out a case study that investigated the use of evaluativelanguage between the high- and low-rated English argumentative essays bytwo Chinese university EFL students The study found that the high-ratedessay successfully employed appraisal values to foreground authorial voiceand position readers The study suggests that more attention should be given

to the teaching of EFL/ESL writing from an interpersonal perspective and

proposes the necessity of explaining EFL/ESL students‟ use of evaluativelanguage from both linguistic and socio-cultural perspectives

An Attitudinal analysis of the novel Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

was carried out by Hadidi & Mohammadbagheri-Parvin (2015) The wholenovel was analyzed discursively, linguistically, and stylistically through one

of the subsystems of Appraisal, namely Attitude It was found that Attitudinal resources were distributed in the expected order of Appreciation, Judgment, Affect, and that Attitude was stylistically indicative of and worked in line with

character and context within the novel in question

In line with that study, Pascual & Unger (2010) conducted a research

about Appraisal in research genres The findings of the study showed that most proposals are highly Heteroglossic, and the Engagement resources are

mainly employed which suggests that the authors tend to invite rather thanchallenge their colleagues' views This may be interpreted as an attempt toaddress a potentially varied audience

Li (2016) applied the Appraisal Theory as a framework to analyze

several English song discourses Through analysis of characteristics of the

division of Attitudinal resources in the English discourse it aims to find

language feature in the English song discourse with the aim of helping readersunderstand the emotion expressed by the author and how significant theattitude meaning was in building interpersonal relations between the authorand readers

In terms of business English, Vo Duy Duc (2011) compared andcontrasted the stylistic, structural and ideological properties of English andVietnamese business news reporting by applying the framework of the

Appraisal Theory developed by Martin and White (2005) as an analytical tool.

The study dealt with investigating whether the business hard news reporting

of the two languages shared the same system of voices or not The findings ofthe study showed that the English and Vietnamese business texts generallyexperienced the similar structure – and that these news stories basicallyoperated with the same reporter voice However, the two languages reflectedconsiderable differences in the representation of the key social groups interms of the ideologies embedded in the two languages.

Additionally, Appraisal Theory was also applied to examine the social

attitudes in news reports towards an important event Nguyen Thi Thu Hien(2016) carried out a research to uncover the social attitudes in news reportstowards President Obama‟s visit to Vietnam The research claimed that

Appraisal Theory could be applied as a potent tool for Vietnamese language

discourse analysis to reveal numerous aspects of sentiment comprising theappraisers, appraisal‟s objects, the prejudice of the appraisers and of thewriters The results show that the appraisers expressed their attitudes aboutfive objects of appraisal differently Most of the viewpoints showed positivefeelings, emotions or judgments In addition, the appraisers tend to expresstheir own emotions and evaluate Obama‟s visit- related entities instead of thepeople‟s behavior The findings also showed that the appraisers were prone to

a safe stance either by avoiding expressing their opinions

Numerous masters‟ theses were conducted to investigate the

Attitudinal resources in the light of the Appraisal Theory There were a wide

variety of discourses employed, ranging from English advertising slogans(Nguyen Thi Minh Ngan (2017)), judges‟ comments (Nguyen Thanh Tri(2018), Le Huu Loc, (2019)), English advertisements of product (Pham ThiThuy Ngoc (2017)), love song lyrics (Nguyen Thi Ngan (2018)) to filmreviews (Vo Thuy Trieu (2019), Phan Thi Thanh Hoa (2017))

From the previous studies, it can be seen that there has been a wide

In summary, Chapter 2 presents an overview of the Appraisal Theory as

the guiding theoretical framework for the study Three groups of evaluation

resources, namely Engagement, Attitude and Gradation are discussed.

However, since the research concentrates on appraisers‟ attitude, only

Attitude was analyzed in this study A detailed description of the three types: Affect, Judgment and Appreciation is also provided Moreover, a brief review of the previous studies applying Appraisal Theory is presented to point

sub-out the gap for research

CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

3.1 Research Design

This study was carried out with the combination of both qualitative andquantitative approaches The qualitative approach was employed to analyzeand describe the attitudinal resources via news reports in English as well asVietnamese After that, the quantitative approach helped investigate the

frequency of occurrence of Affect, Judgment, Appreciation and their sub-types

in the reports The quantitative analysis played an important role in castinglight on the question of how frequently the attitudinal resources weredicovered

Additionally, the analytic and synthetic techniques were utilizedharmoniously for the scrutinization process The analytic practice assisted inpinpointing and separating certain aspects to concentrate The syntheticpractice was applied to consider the interdependence of these elemental parts

With the aim of reaching the target of the study, it was impossible toput a single method in use As a result, apart from the aforementionedapproaches, descriptive, inductive, comparative and contrast methods werealso applied The descriptive method came to the aid of giving a precise

description in terms of Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation Then, inductive

method proved helpful in synthesizing the outcome and drew a conclusion.Comparative and contrast techniques assisted in the similarities and

discrepancies regarding the Attitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese

news reports on plastic straws

3.2 Data Collection

Ten English and ten Vietnamese news reports on plastic straws were

collected from online national newspapers such as Thanhnien, Tuoitre,

Vietnamnet, TuanVietnam, and Vnexpress as well as online international newspapers like Nationalgeographic, Theguardian, Globalnews, and Reuters The length of the reports fluctuated from 799 words to 1815 words and the news reports served the analysis of the evaluative language The reports met some standards of lexical meaning and grammatical structures English news reports on plastic straws were listed as follows

1.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/banning-plastic-straws-will-not-be enough-fight-clean-oceans

2. california-people-with-disabilities

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/25/plastic-straw-ban-3. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/19/trump-plastic-straws

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/style/plastic-straw-alternatives

5. https://www.nps.gov/articles/straw-free

6. out-plastic-straws-as-opposition-to-them-grows

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-starbucks-straws/starbucks-to-phase-7.https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/22/opinions/plastic-straws-ban-opinion

8. fish-now-there-s-growing

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/plastic-straws-clog-ocean-hurt-9. but-they-are-part-of-a-huge-problem

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/plastic-straws-are-little-10. straws-and-bags-no-more-canada-aims-to-clean-up-its-act

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-canada-plastics/plastic-The following websites were about Vietnamese news reports on plastic

straws

1. phong-trao

https://vnexpress.net/khong-dung-ly-ong-hut-nhua-y-nghia-hay-chay-theo-2. nhung-co-thuc-su-vi-moi-truong

https://phapluat.tuoitrethudo.com.vn/ong-hut-giay-tot-hon-ong-hut-nhua-3. ban-nghi

https://tuoitre.vn/ong-hut-co-tui-giay-co-bao-ve-moi-truong-nhieu-nhu-4. https://tuoitre.vn/31-quan-ca-phe-o-da-nang-noi-khong-voi-do-nhua

5. that-su-cua-hanh-tinh-nay

http://khampha.vn/khoa-hoc-cong-nghe/ong-hut-nhua-co-phai-la-ke-thu-6. milo-bua-sang-khuyen-khich-thoi-quen-tieu-dung-xanh

The system of Attitude in Appraisal Theory was applied as the

theoretical framework for the procedures of data analysis The collected datawere encoded manually from E1 to E321 concerning English news reports

and from V1 to V317 regarding Vietnamese news reports The Attitudinal resources (Affect, Judgment, Appreciation and their sub-categories) were

analyzed and classified in the twenty news reports Additionally, quantitativemethods were utilized to uncover the frequency of their occurrence anddisclose the choice of language of evaluation in the reports, thereby

identifying the similarities and differences of Attitudinal resources in EPSNRs

and VPSNRs

3.4 Research procedures

There were specific steps followed by the author, presented as follows:

- collecting ten English news reports and ten Vietnamese news reports onplastic straws from online national and international newspapers and groupingthem into categories: English news reports on plastic straws and Vietnamese newsreports on plastic straws;

- encoding EPSNRs from E1 to E321 and VPSNRs from V1 to V317;

- analyzing the Attitudinal resources in the corpus of VPSNRs and EPSNRs;

- giving out the frequencies / percentage of occurrence of the resources;

- carrying out a contrastive analysis to uncover the similarities and differences

in terms of the language of evaluation in both languages;

- evaluating and discussing the comparison results to indicate research

findings;

- putting forwards implications for teaching and learning English;

- suggesting further studies

3.5 Reliability and validity in the research

The reliability was secured because Appraisal Theory by Martin and

White (2005) was chosen as the fundamental framework for this study.Moreover, the data were gathered from reliable and approved websites such

as Thanhnien, Tuoitre, Vietnamnet, TuanVietnam, Vnexpress,Nationalgeographic, Theguardian, Globalnews, and Reuters

In terms of validity, the data met the necessary standard criteria Thedata for the research proved its originality since they had not been utilized inany research regarding Attitudinal resources

CHAPTER 4 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS

This chapter deals with the results of the Attitudinal resources utilized

in 10 English plastic straws news reports (EPSNRs) and 10 Vietnamese

plastic straws news reports (VPSNRs) in terms of Affect, Judgement and Appreciation and sub-categories of each system Moreover, the study aims at uncovering the similarities and differences of how Attitudinal resources are

employed via evaluative language by Vietnamese and English reporters toconvey their messages as well as express their attitudes in newspapers

4.1 The overall usage of the Attitude resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs

The investigation into the 20 news reports grouped into the two corpora

(10 for English and 10 for Vietnamese) shows that Attitudinal resources are

employed in both EPSNRs and VPSNRs Table 4.1 gives an overview of the

distribution of the Attitudinal values in EPSNRs and VPSNRs.

Table 4 1 Attitude sub-types in EPSNRs and VPSNRs

As can be seen in Table 4.1, the findings reveal that there are totally

321 Attitudinal values in EPSNRs and 317 ones in VPSNRs; moreover, all the three subtypes of Attitude including Affect, Judgement and Appreciation are detected It is remarkable that Appreciation is uncovered to be most widely used in this genre of the two languages More specifically, Appreciation

resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs make up a higher proportion than the

others, with 42.7% and 57.7% respectively, which shows that Appreciation

resources are strongly favored by English as well as Vietnamese writers Inother words, the writers in both languages tend to focus on evaluating thesituation of using plastic straws and their properties Moreover, while English

writers pay more attention to Judgment than Vietnamese writers with the rate

of 29% in EPSNRs and 17.1% in VPSNRs, the number of Affect instances in

EPSNRs is slightly higher than that in VPSNRs Detailedly, the percentage of

Affect employed in EPSNRs is 28.3 % while that in VPSNRs is 25.2% The following are examples of the three Attitudinal resources including Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation found in English and Vietnamese.

In terms of Affect, English and Vietnamese data show the similarities in

applying these resources to express the emotions or feelings of companies orpeople about straws, which can be found obviously in [V294]

[V294] Nhân chuyến công tác tại Đà Nẵng, tôi ghé vào quán cà phê trên đường

Ông Ích Khiêm Tôi ấn tượng nhất [+Aff-Sat] việc sử dụng ống hút tre.

It can be seen that ấn tượng nhất in [V294] is utilized to express the

writer‟s support towards bamboo straws

Regarding Judgment, both English and Vietnamese writers incline to

apply Judgment to express the efforts which are made in the struggle againstplastic straws The point can be made clearer in [E297] and [V252]

[E297] More and more restaurants are trying [+Judg-Cap] to stop

using plastic straws.

[V252] Nắm bắt xu hướng đó, nhiều doanh nghiệp đã nỗ lực [+Judg-Cap] đầu

tư nghiên cứu nhằm giới thiệu những sản phẩm ống hút đảm bảo yếu tố “xanh”

và “sạch”, xây dựng thương hiệu xanh gắn liền với phát triển bền vững.

It can be seen that the word trying is applied to indicate the attempts of the restaurants to give up plastic straws Besides, via the phrase nỗ lực, the

Vietnamese writer is prone to show the efforts which some businesses have

made to introduce environmentally friendly straws to meet the social demand.

As for Appreciation, in both EPSNRs and VPSNRs, the similarities can be

found to show the properties of plastic straws and difficulty consumers aswell as entrepreneurs encounter in the process of solving the problem, which

may be observed in [E200], [E205] and [V295].

[E200] Even for those consumers who recycle plastic items, a straw is so small [-App-Val]

[E205] So it’s really challenging [-App-Comp] in our existing sortation

system to be able to sort it out.

[V295] Mấy trăm triệu cái ống hút này được sản xuất bằng nhựa hỗn tạp,

kích thước nhỏ [-App-Val]

In the aforementioned examples [E200] and [V295], the size of thestraws is considered one of the most serious troubles, which can be seen via

the words small and nhỏ Besides, challenging in [E205] indicates the

obstacle which straws pose on the sortation system

To sum up, English and Vietnamese writers are most likely to apply

Appreciation in their reports, which indicates that both groups of writers tend

to evaluate things and phenomenon However, some differences emerge in the

frequency of occurrences in utilizing Affect and Judgment Judgment is

employed in EPSNRs almost twice as much as in VPSNRs; meanwhile

Vietnamese writers tend to use Affect in their writing rather than Judgment A

more detailed discussion of each sub-type in EPSNRs and VPSNRs in terms

of their frequency of occurrence is presented in the following sections

4.2 Affect resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs

4.2.1 Sub-types of Affect resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs

Martin & White (2005, pp 48-51) states that Affect is classified into four sub-types including Un/Happiness, Dis/Inclination, In/Security, and Dis/ Satisfaction Un/Happiness set of meanings involves the moods happiness