Apology 3
Apology 3
Apology 3
The study consists of five parts. The first part is the introduction of the study.
The second part will be the theoretical background of the definition of sympathy,
directness, indirectness and politeness will be reviewed. Methodological issue
will be discussed in the third part, describing the subjects, the instruments of the
study, the data collection procedure and the data analysis procedure. The next
part looks at the collected and analyzed data to get the findings. The last part of
the study will present the conclusion.
As mentioned earlier, statistic analysis and comparative analysis are the
main techniques used in the study. The data were analyzed by the following
procedure: First, the data were gathered and organized in tables so that it is
easier to be compared. Then the data from Vietnamese subjects were compared
with the data from the English subjects to identify the differences between these
two group’s sympathy expressing. Finally, the identified differences were
compared with the Vietnamese to determine if the differences were due to
pragmatic transfer from Vietnamese, more attention is paid to the part 2 of the
questionnaire which focuses on sympathy expressing in certain situations.
Interviews are conducted with some English native speakers so that the
researcher can understand more about the English sympathy expressing.
The data was collected from two groups of subjects: one group of
Vietnamese subjects and one group of English subjects. The Vietnamese
subjects are twenty in number: ten of them are students who are studying
English at a Foreign Language Center (upper intermediate level) and the others
are teachers of English from different parts of the country taking a master course
at National University of Hanoi who have already had experiences in teaching
English in Vietnamese. However, they have little chance to interact with native
speakers of English. The English subjects are only five in number. Three of them
are teachers at the Apollo centre, one is working for Bacninh water supplying and
sewage company where the researcher is living, and a professor at Högskolan
Dalarna University, Mrs. Christine Cox Eriksson.
The advantage is that they have just been working in Vietnam for a short
time (not more than two years), or never been to Vietnam so they have not been
affected by Vietnamese traditions and customs.
The next part deals with the way of expressing sympathy in English and
Vietnamese, which bases on the questionnaire to collect data from a number of
verified population of various different ages, gender, occupations....
4. Data analysis and findings