A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF JOB APPLICATION LETTERS IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE

Abstract

A contrastive analysis of job application letters in English and Vietnamese is a study of how job application letter is structured and which linguistic features are typical in this genre. This analysis focuses on exploiting five aspects: the moves, lexical features, syntactic features, cohesive devices and politeness strategies and making comparison to find out the similarities and differences of these features between two languages. At the same time, the thesis suggests some implications and suggestions. Hopefully, the study can help English students and job seekers, to some extent, in the awareness of the moves and the employment of typical lexical, grammatical features and cohesive devices as well as some politeness strategies in creation of a winning and effective job application letters to avoid any unnecessary mistakes. 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.