A discourse analysis on fairy tales in english and vietnamese

Abstract

Based on the theories of Discourse Analysis, this study makes an investigation into the English Fairy Tales (EFTs) and Vietnamese Fairy Tales (VFTs) in an attempt do discover some typical discourse features and then find out the similarities and differences between English fairy tales and Vietnamese fairy tales in terms of their scheme, lexical choices, syntactic structures and cohesive devices. In addition, the findings of this study are clearly presented based on a survey of 10 fairy tales in English and another 10 ones on Vietnamese which are taken form fairy tales collected by Joseph Jacobs - The Father of English Fairy Tales and Nguyễn Đổng Chi - The Teller of Vietnamese fairy tales. It is hoped that the results of this study will really provide some practical applications for teaching and learning English.