A discourse analysis of Collective labour agreements In english and vietnamese

Abstract

Clearly, labour is man’s essential activity. In the process of working, the employees need to be protected from the employer’s ill-treatment, discrimination, and oppression. Therefore, a collective labour agreement (CLA) legally regulating rights and obligations of employees and employer is an indispensable procedure in the course of human resource management (HRM). What is more, for possibly potential disputes to be eliminated, producing a clear, precise, airtight, and unambiguous agreement is an absolutely important task. Accordingly, this thesis, based on the theories of discourse analysis, makes an investigation into the Collective Labour Agreements in English and Vietnamese (ECAs and VCAs) with an aim to find out the striking discourse features as well as the similarities and differences between them in terms of the layout, lexical choices, syntactic structures and cohesive devices. The standard forms of ECAs and VCAs that are frequently used by foreigners and Vietnamese people are explored. Especially, the thesis gives some suggestions for law and HRM activities as well as teaching and learning CLAs. Hopefully, the study can help law and HRM people, to some extent, in the awareness of the layout and the employment of typical lexical, grammatical features and cohesive devices in the creation of clarity, preciseness, and unambiguity of ECAs and VCAs to avoid possible disputes and strikes. In addition, it is hoped that the study can be of some help to teachers and students in the course of teaching and learning English and Vietnamese for specific purposes.