The present study is one of the first attempts undertaken to study English and Vietnamese news discourse on a contrastive basis. More specifically, it investigates the structure, the lexical and syntactic features of English and Vietnamese political news discourse. It is hoped that the results of the study may help the Vietnamese teacher and student to make better use of newspapers in the process of English language teaching and learning. In addition, it is hoped that the study may benefit the journalist, to some extent, because it is generally assumed that if the knowledge of news discourse structure, the linguistic features and the factors involved are professionally known and shared, this will facilitate news discourse production and comprehension. The study reveals two different strategies used by English and Vietnamese political news writers. English news writers predominantly employ the IP structure pattern whereas Vietnamese news writers employ BTN (Background-to-News). Lexically, English newspapers use more lively, vigorous language, metaphors, puns and hyperbole. In contrast, the occurrence of serious, formal language is a very pronounced feature of Vietnamese newspapers. This is the area where Vietnamese students of English often have difficulty, as is indicated by the survey. The greatest syntactic difference is sentence order, namely, English news stories often use S + V + (O) + (A) while their Vietnamese counterparts use A + S + V + (O) +. The other difference is that English news paragraphs are mostly single sentence paragraphs as disctinct from their multi-sentence Vietnamese ones. Chapter One is an introduction explaining the rationale, the methods, and the data for analysis, of the present study. Chapter Two is concerned with the theoretical background to the study. It deals with such concepts as cohesion, coherence, structure, relevance, text and discourse. Chapter Three provides a contrastive overview of English and Vietnamese newspapers, essentially in terms of ownership and the approach to news. Chapter Four examines the different structure patterns used by English and Vietnamese reporters and journalists. Chapter Five and Six study the different lexical and syntactic features of English and Vietnamese political news discourse, respectively. In chapter Seven, a comparison of English and Vietnamese political news discourse is given, which is based on the analyses presented in chapters Four, Five and Six. In addition, it presents the results of a survey of comprehension difficulty encountered by Vietnamese students studying English now at the University of Canberra, and looks at some discourse strategies involved in news discourse production and comprehension. The last chapter offers some implications for TEFL in Vietnam, which are based on the author's own experience and results of a survey. The author hopes that these implications may be of some help to the practising teacher as well as the student.