Expressing gratitude by native speakers of english and vietnamese learners of english

Part A: Introduction

1. Rationale

Pragmatics plays a very important role in the process of language teaching

and learning because it draws the teacher’s attention to the development of

the learner’s communicative competence, which is now considered the goal

of the language teaching process. In the past few years, lots of cross￾cultural and some interlanguage studies in Vietnam have been conducted.

However, to date the act of expressing gratitude by native speakers of

English and Vietnamese learners of English has not been investigated

though it is a highly recurrent act in everyday conversation and it has,

together with thanking, important social values in English. Thus, this

research is carried out to fill the gap. This thesis is also believed to make a

contribution to the teaching and learning of speech acts in general and the

act of expressing gratitude in particular.

2. Aims of the study

. To uncover the ways English speakers formulate their gratitude

expressions and the ways Vietnamese learners express gratitude in English

in the contexts under study then identifying the differences between the two

populations.

3. Objectives of the study

. To uncover Vietnamese learners of English differ from native speakers of

English in their expressions of gratitude.

4. Scope of the study

The thesis focuses on the verbal expressions of gratitude to the exclusion of

non-verbal aspect including paralinguistic features, body language etc.

5. Organization of the study

The study is divided into 3 parts:

Part A: Introduction

Part B: Development

Chapter I: Literature Review

Chapter II: Methodology

Chapter III: Findings and discussions

Part C: Conclusions and implications

Part B: Development

Chapter I: Literature Review

1.1. Speech acts

This part introduces the notion of speech acts, the classification of speech

act, IFIDs, felicity conditions and expressing gratitude as a speech act.

According to Austin and Searle, when a speaker says something, he does

something at the same time. Searle (1969:24) states that language is part of

a theory of action and speech acts are those verbal actions like promising,

threatening, and requesting that one performs in speaking. Hymes (1972)

defines speech acts as the act we perform when we speak. Schmidt and

Richards (1985:342) states that speech act is “an utterance as a functional

unit in communication”. Yule (1996:47) claims that people perform action

via utterances and “actions performed via utterances are generally called

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