A study of interviewer’s discourse used on “the andrew marr show” and “dân hỏi bộ trưởng trả lời”

Abstract

This study aims at investigating the typical features of interviewers’ discourses in two programs “The Andrew Marr Show” (TAMS) and “Dân Hỏi Bộ Trưởng Trả Lời” (DHBTTL) to find out the similarities and differences between them in terms of layout features, lexical choices, syntactic structures and cohesive devices. On that basis, some implications for teaching English to Vietnamese learners, especially journalism students are also suggested. The findings reveal that both programs are the same in terms of general layout features with three main parts including opening, body and closing section; however, the opening and closing sections in each program are constituted by different patterns. Relating to lexical choices, TAMS and DHBTTL are similar in that interviewers in both programs make use of intensifiers and evaluative adjectives to emphasize and comment on the things or events that are mentioned during the interview to make it more vivid and attractive to the audience. With regard to syntactic features, interviewers attempt to employ various sentence types, sentences in passive and sentences with relative clause to structure their statements so that they are interesting, convincing and understandable to the viewers. In order to maintain the links between sentences, cohesive devices are also paid attention to by interviewers with two broad categories of grammatical and lexical cohesion. It is remarkable that the use of grammatical cohesion is more dominant than the use of lexical cohesion.