HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF ENGLISH CODE: 32 GRADUATION THESIS B.A DEGREE IN ENGLISH STUDY A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON MAKING INVITATION IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE FROM CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE Supervisor: M.A, Vũ Tuấn Anh Name of student: Nguyễn Việt Hưng Date of birth: 05/02/1996 Class: K21A2(2014-2018) Hanoi - 2018 DECLARATION A Comparative Study on Making Invitations in English and Vietnamese from Cross - Cultural Perspective I certify that no part of the above report has been copied or reproduced by me from any other’s work without acknowledgement and that the report is originally written by me under strict guidance of my supervisor Hanoi, 15 April, 2018 Student Supervisor signature signature Full name Full name ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, M.A Vu Tuan Anh for his enthusiastic and useful guidance, insightful comments, and encouragement without which my thesis would not have been completed My special thanks go to all my lecturers in Faculty of English, Hanoi Open University for their precious assistance, knowledge and enthusiasm I am grateful to all the participants for their enthusiastic participation in the thesis Especially, I am indebted to my classmates in K21A2, especially Nguyen Huu Chinh and Phan Xuan Nguyen, for their great support Last but not least, I would like to express my indebtedness to my family, especially my parents, brothers and sisters who have given me constant support and love during the completion of the thesis TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEGDEMENT PART A: INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………… 1 Rationale …………………………………………………………………………… Aims and objectives of the study …………………………………………………… 3 Scope of the study …………………………………………………………………… Research questions …………………………………………………………………… Methods of the study ………………………………………………………………… Design of the study ………………………………………………………………… PART B: DEVELOPMENT ………………………………………………………… CHAPTER ONE: LITERATURE REVIEW ………………………………………… 1.1 Politeness strategies ………………………………………………………………… 1.2 Generalization of speech acts …………………………………………………… 1.2.1 Definitions of speech acts ………………………………………………………… 1.2.2 Classification of speech acts …………………………………………………… 12 1.2.3 Direct and indirect speech acts ………………………………………………… 15 1.3 Invitations as speech acts ………………………………………………………… 16 1.4 Pragmatics and cross-cultural pragmatics ………………………………………… 17 CHAPTER TWO: MAKING INVITATION IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE……………………………………………………………………… 20 2.1 Categories of inviting in English and Vietnamese ……………………………… 20 2.1.1 Direct invitations in English and Vietnamese ………………………………… 21 2.1.2 Indirect invitations in English and Vietnamese ………………………………… 27 2.2 The similarities and differences in making invitations between English and Vietnamese …………………………………………………………………………… 34 CHAPTER THREE: APPLICATION FOR ENGLISH LEARNERS IN TRANSLATION …………………………………………………………………… 37 3.1 Cultural mistakes ………………………………………………………… 37 3.2 Solutions ………………………………………………………………… 39 PART C: CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………… 42 REFERENCES ……………………………………………………………………… 44 In English In Vietnamese Sources from internet PART A: INTRODUCTIONS Rationale There is no doubt that today mastering a language is very necessary because it can give learners important opportunities to communicate to study and work effectively abroad It is very difficult to master a foreign language because the enormous vocabulary and profound understanding in grammar are not enough From that view it is necessary for learners to understand the culture of the language that they want to master Let take English and Vietnamese as an example There are differences in the use of language between English and Vietnamese To learn a language means to learn the culture of the country where the language is spoken This can help learners to master this language as well as immerse in to the 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 with native speakers However, communication can fail to achieve as the misunderstanding of the country’s culture The good knowledge of the country’s culture can helps learners to interact well with the people in the native country where the language is widely spoken As a result, it is very difficult to combine culture and use cultural knowledge well in learning a language Each language 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 as politeness, and face, which are important to members in a particular culture, will certainly enable us to better comprehend the different ways of speaking by people from different cultures, thus helping eliminate ethnic stereotypes and misunderstandings Problems arise as language learners are not competent and fail to understand the cultural- social aspects of communication Take speech acts of invitation as an example Vietnamese saying goes: "khách đến nhà khơng trà bánh" (when guests come, either tea or cakes should be served) This saying highlights the importance of inviting in Vietnamese culture, where invitation speech acts make up a high proportion in daily interactions Inviting undoubtedly plays an important role in communication in all cultures Wall (1987) indicated that many of our daily social interactions involve making invitations and responding to them In daily social life, people are sometimes invited to go somewhere or to something on important occasions such as weddings, birthdays, and graduations, to small ones like movies, eating out, or vendors in the markets invite customers to buy their items 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) Invitations help to establish, maintain, reinforce and further strengthen social rapports Americans and Vietnamese share certain similarities in terms of making and responding to invitations in social interactions However, differences are undoubtedly numerous Many cases of making invitations are different in Vietnam and American Mastering how to make appropriate invitations which are suitable to a particular culture should be taken in considerations so as not to cause hurts, shocks, misunderstandings, and misinterpretations A frequently misunderstood area in American verbal interaction is that of extending, accepting, and refusing invitations (Levine & Adelman, 1982) Moreover, helping Vietnamese learners of English master and use invitation-making effectively is a must Aims and objectives of the study The thesis aims to find out the good ways to make invitations in Vietnamese and English native speakers In addition, this paper aims to find out the syntactic and cultural similarities and differences between spoken invitations in Vietnamese and English native speakers Scope of the study This paper focuses on how to make invitations in English and Vietnamese speakers This paper, moreover, aims to analyze the similarities and differences in making invitations in English and Vietnamese Research questions The research is aimed to answer the following to answer the following questions: How to make spoken invitations in the English culture? How to make spoken invitations in the Vietnamese culture? What are similarities and differences in making spoken invitations in making spoken in the Vietnamese and English cultures? 4.What are the implications of the similarities and differences in making spoken invitations in the English and Vietnamese to English learners? Methods of the study In carrying the research I have adopted such methods of study as descriptive methods, contrastive analysis, statistic techniques and observation 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 talks about Literature Review, Chapter 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 PART B: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER ONE: LITERATURE 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 the following: "(a) how languages express the social distance between speakers and their different role relationships, (b) "how face-work, that is, the attempt to establish, maintain, and save face during conversation, is carried out in a speech community" (Richards et al 1985, p.281) Languages differ in how they express politeness In English, phrases like It’s hot here I wonder if I could open the window? can be used to make a request more polite In other languages, the same effect can be expressed by a word or particle Politeness markers and the use of address forms convey differences between formal speech and colloquial speech 10 Invitations in forms of imperatives Invitations in forms of questions Invitations in (4) Do have a (23) Ông giáo hút forms of chocholate biscuit! thuốc imperative sentences (6) Let's go to our place for a beer Invitations in (9) Why don’t you (24) Ông Đoàn forms of Wh - come on holiday lâu không questions with us? thấy ông lại chơi? Invitations in (7) “Can you come (25) Con có muốn forms of Yes/No over and join us? uống cà questions phê không? Invitations in (16) You will come (26) Chiều lại forms of tag to have dinner with nhà chơi, questions us, won’t you? không? Under the theoretical background of inviting in English and Vietnamese, it can be asserted that both direct and indirect invitations in English and Vietnamese, though they are different in the number of categories, both have seven specific forms Basing on that, in the later part of the thesis, the data collected will be analyzed to see what is the choice of two groups of participants for each of the six situations 37 The review of literature dealt with so far holds an significant importance in terms of providing the solid theoretical background for as well as setting up the analytical framework for the data collection procedure in the coming part of thesis 38 2.2 The similarities and differences in making invitations between English and Vietnamese From the data analysis, a lot of similarities and differences can be seen in the ways of making invitations between Vietnamese and English participants Similarities The very first similarity shared by invitations made in both languages is that the performative verb invite and mời is used in some forms of inviting The verb invite occurs in the English data twenty one times and mời appears in Vietnamese data fifty times; however, they are are used in different forms In English data, the performative verb mainly appears in the form of performative sentence with subjects such as I would like to invite you to our party this weekend By contrast, the word mời is mostly used in the form of performative sentence without a subject such as Mời cô đến chung vui với lớp em! (Invite you to come and have fun with our class!) In order to reduce face-threatening, and to pay respect to the invitee, please in English, xin trân trọng, kính mời in Vietnamese were added, which appear in imperative forms or performative sentences provided by two groups of participants The following answers provided by English participants illustrate this: (S1) You look hungry, Let's eat some cakes, please! (S2) Are you hungry? Try these cakes, please! 39 or some answers provided by Vietnamese participants as follows: (S340) Kính mời thầy đến dự tiệc liên hoan với chúng em! (Respectfully invite teachers come to attend the party with our class) (S341) Thầy ơi, ơi! Lớp chúng em có tỗ chức buổi liên hoan nhỏ, em kính mời thầy đến dự lớp chúng em! (Dear teachers, our class is going to have a party, we respectfully invite you to attend it with us) The ways English and Vietnamese native speakers conduct invitation-making speech act are both affected by three variables: social distance (intimacy), power relations (social status or age) between the speaker and the hearer, and impositions (threats to each other's negative face) Differences Beside all common features discussed above, there are various dissimilarities in making invitations in English and Vietnamese First, from results of survey questionnaires, it is apparent that direct inviting in Vietnamese employs more structures than that of English namely invitations in form of performative sentence with or without a subject, declarative sentences, and imperatives, while Vietnamese indirect invitations goes around just performative sentence with subject, and imperatives 40 In terms of directness and indirectness, through survey statistics, Vietnamese tends to be more direct when extending invitations As a matter of fact, the proportion of direct forms chosen by Vietnamese participants are quite larger than those of English ones namely in situation 1, 4, and The difference is due to indirect invitations in English can cause face-threatening to the hearer In some cases appeared in the answers of English participants, elliptical yes/no questions are used in situation such as Have a drink here? or This table?, but they not appear in Vietnamese participants' answers 41 CHAPTER THREE: APPLICATION FOR ENGLISH LEARNERS IN TRANSLATION As I mentioned before, in this paper I concentrate on comparative study in making invitation in English and Vietnamese in term of cross-cultural perspectives so in this part I would like to focus on some problem related to the effect of culture in translation and the solution to have good translation 3.1 Cultural mistakes It is controversial that culture effects strongly on studying a foreign language, especially in translation Cultural mistakes that students make frequently are linked to social contexts, status and relationship between the inviters and the invitees Firstly, in term of social context, learners using English in communication tend to make invitation structures in wrong ways because of their English lack The contexts of invitation are usually social events including birthday parties, wedding parties, farewells, ceremonies, anniversaries… In this occasion, they tend to make invitation in formal or informal ways For students, especially students learning to become translators, often make this mistake because they usually not understand exactly the context of the source language As the result, the readers cannot have a full meaning of the text In formal event, inviter use formal invitations but sometimes they are not understand formally so the translators transfer them in to informal ways: Eg: Take a seat for a moment! (formal) Tôi lấy làm hân hạnh mời anh lại chơi (Khải Hưng,1988) 42 (I honoredly invite you to come here play) Mời bác ngồi lại chơi chút (formal) Ngồi chơi chút (informal) Secondly, social status is another problem impacting on translation of students For instances, the speaker invites a woman that he or she does not know to enjoy a cake, but they have the same in power and they not know each other The Vietnamese prefer to use invitations in form yes/no questions Vietnamese people tend to invite directly However, invitations in English cannot illustrate as clearly about social status as those in Vietnamese Eg: Do you want to have a cake? I have some cake Would you like to try one? Chị ăn chút đi! ( Sister, let eat something!) Cô ơi, cô ăn chút đi! (Aunt, eat a little bit) In the first two sentences, they are English invitations in English so the social status is pointed out, if the Vietnamese are the readers, they cannot understand the status Therefore, it is very necessary for translators to understand the context and the social position of the inviters and invitees to translate well Thirdly, to have good translation, the translators have to understand the relationship between the inviters and invitees If the translators understand correctly the relationship between the inviters and invitees, they can make invitations correctly in formal or informal ways 43 For example, the relationship between the inviter and invitee is friendship, the translators must use informal invitation In contrast, if the inviter is younger than the invitee, the invitation must use informal invitation In contrast, if the inviter is younger than the invitee, the invitation should be more formal with formal signals including would you like, would you mind, please… To sum up, if the learners want to translate correctly a sources language into target language, they need to enrich their cultural knowledge as much as possible 3.2 Solutions It is obvious that a translator should be aware of the importance of the culture during translation in general and the similarities in making invitation in English and Vietnamese in particular They should distinguish and highlight the forms of invitations used in formal and informal ways Thanks to this, student can get clearly the functions of each kind of invitations in communication Addition to this, students should search the habit in making invitation of the British especially their effect of culture in daily life to have deep knowledge of invitation ways to use them effectively in ways to use them effectively in daily interactions It can help student more confidents should find as many communicative opportunities as possible to use effectively their knowledge as well as skills As mentioned in the former part, perceiving the similarities and differences about invitation- making speech act is a must in terms of helping teachers design tasks for students Under some aspects of contrastive view into making invitations both in 44 English and Vietnamese, the study is about to discuss some implications for Vietnamese learners of English It is, first, essential for teachers to make students aware of cultural similarities and differences of making invitations in Vietnamese culture and the cultures where the target language is spoken Teacher should distinguish and highlight which forms of invitations, in other words, when and they are used in informal situations as well as formal ones Through that, students can get to know clearly the functions of this speech act in order to use it effectively in daily interactions It drives the students to be more confident when they make and keep the conversations with other people, especially those who come from English speaking countries This is important because teachers themselves are making every effort to qualify our students for using English for communication Teachers, secondly, should provide their students any input that is necessary for students to enrich their understandings on the way invitations made both languages as well as to enhance students' language and communicative competence The input can be provided in various ways For example, modern technology in language teaching today offers a great help for teachers to provide students with many sources of invitations such as Internet, television, videos, and many others From that teachers can provide students with many options for choosing suitable conversations that are close to real life situations These are quite different to what are presented in the textbooks in order to bring authentic materials into the classroom Last but not least, teachers should also provide their students with as many as communicative opportunities as possible Teachers should transform the class into a small society, or a neighborhood or an office where students can practice some activities as role play or mapped dialogue These activities can stimulate students' enthusiasm, creativity in making invitations in English 45 PART C: CONCLUSION Invitations plays important role in daily life and in language They are not only useful language device for good conversations but also valuable material for research and study of the culture They can change every day but always reflect the culture of each country in its ways which is interested to find out Making invitation is an exciting aspect to look at and the information obtained is good to know for both study and internet’s sake Invitations are present in all countries and all languages so it is very necessary to study about them A person who know the best ways to make invitation always have good conversation, thank to this he/she can have good impression from other people In contrast, people who are not good at making invitations can get difficulties in getting on well with foreigners In addition, studying about “the similarities and differences” in making invitation between English and Vietnamese people can help learners understand clearly the cultural features of each country Thank to this, English learners can improve their cultural knowledge as well as essential skills in communicating to English natives The more I consulted reference materials, the more interesting issue turned out Due to the limited time and frame and my modest knowledge of culture and language, that some invitations and linguistic views were not covered is inevitable Anyways, I try my modest knowledge of culture and language, that some invitations and linguistic views were not covered is inevitable Anyways, I try my best to as much as possible to convey readers at least the over view of similarities and differences in making spoken invitation in English and Vietnamese people After contrasting and comparing many invitation, analyzing related concerns, I hold on 46 hope that somehow my paper could be a helpful and informative material for learning and translation Furthermore, through my paper I wish to look for an interesting way to help English learners find out their interest in learning way to help English learners find out their interest in English as well as find out good ways to make invitations to have effective conversations 47 REFERENCES In English Brown, P & Levinson, S.C (1987) Politeness: Some universals in language usage Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Eelen, G (2001) A critique of politeness theories Manchester: St Jerome Austin, J.L (1962) How to Do Things with Words Oxford: Oxford University Press Hornby (2003) Oxford Advanced Leaner’s Dictionary Oxford University Press Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary Retrieved April, 15, Leech, G (1983) Principles of Pragmatics New York: Longman Richard J C., Platt J., Webber H (1992) Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics Oxford: Longman Tillitt, B., & Bruder, N.B (1999) Speaking naturally USA: Cambridge University Press Wall, A P (1987) Say it naturally New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers 10 Wierzbicka A (1991) Cross-cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter 11 Yule, G (1996) Pragmatics Oxford: Oxford University Press 12 Cobuild, C (2001) English grammar (T.Y Nguyen, Trans.) 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