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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/219016 |
| Date | January 1990 |
| Creators | Hoa, Nguyen, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Education |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Nguyen Hoa |
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