A critical discourse analysis on abstracts of education journal articles in english and vietnamese

Abstract

This thesis was done in an effort to investigate the critical discourse features of abstracts in education journal articles in English and Vietnamese. The research was carried out in the hope to clarify the language features of education discourse in English and in Vietnamese; find out similarities and differences of textual description in terms of vocabulary analysis, grammar analysis and textual structure between English and Vietnamese education journal articles. A combination of research methods was used for this thesis such as descriptive method, qualitative and quantitative method, and contrastive analysis method. As regards the data for the research, a total of 200 abstracts in education journal articles in English and Vietnamese were collected from 2 reliable websites. The results show that English and Vietnamese EJAs abstracts share some similarities in experiential, relational and textual values; vocabulary use to signify opposite ideology; strategies of grammatical structure use to reflect the surrounding world like transitivity with two main processes material and relational; passive/ active structures; limited use of cohesive devices to produce text coherence. Some differences in the light of functional grammar analysis include mode of use; prioritized topics; lexical use strategies to realize the experiential, relational and textual values. These can be specified as number of antonyms/ synonyms to reflect ideology, vocabulary to set up interpersonal relations, metaphors. The findings of this thesis have served as a foundation for the researcher to put forward some implications for the teaching and learning of writing. In addition, this thesis can be used as a reference for teachers, learners or those who are interested in journal articles and can provide them with a better understanding in the different perspective of discourse analysis