Greeting in English and Vietnamese - Essay

When we study foreign language, we try to our best to be good at as many skills as possible. However, a person who are talented on, for example, four skills in English it does not mean that he or she communicates well. Therefore, we want to improve speaking or listening skill, we should also improve your knowledge about social linguistic. In addition to, in the study of Blum- Kulka with his colleagues (1989), Kasper (1995) and others author, they think that indirect illocutionary is used much more than direct illocutionary in day life. Furthermore, Gumperz (1982) different cultures have different communication. Differences in culture are easy to lead failure in communicating and greeting belongs to this case.   It also presents feature of each culture, each peoles. However, different cultures have different greeting. According to Vietnamese the greeting plays important role, as we usually hear that: “Lời chào cao hơn mâm cỗ” or “Dao năng liếc năng sắc, người năng chào năng quen”. It means that Vietnamese are extremely serious in greeting. According to Lê QuangThiêm, the greeting- performative- presents not only feature of language but also culture, custom. Moreover, in Vietnam, the greeting is used for measuring human’s quality. From all above reasons, we carry out contrasting greeting in Vietnamese and in English in order to find out similarities and differences between two languages. On the other hand, we can understand more about applying pragmatics in teaching and learning language. Therefore, in this paper there are four parts: introducing seven common situations in communication, contrasting similarirties and differences in greeting between two languages, analyzing the differences about the topic communication between them, and at last applying in teaching- learning.