A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF TELEPHONE CONVERSATIONS IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE BY HOTEL RECEPTIONISTS

Abstract

The language of the telephone conversations by hotel receptionists is very special one which has its own characteristics that make it different from other genres of language. This study aims at conducting a discourse analysis of telephone conversations in English and Vietnamese. The descriptive and contrastive methods are employed to give a detailed description of some typical discourse features and to point out the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese telephone conversations in terms of layout structures, lexical choices, and syntactic structures. The findings of this study are presented based on a survey of 50 samples in English and 50 samples in Vietnamese which are taken from well- known textbooks, tapes and recorded telephone conversations at the hotel. The findings put forward implications for receptionists, language teachers and learners alike.