(LUẬN văn THẠC sĩ) a contrastive analysis of syntactic structures employed in describing trends in english and vietnamese business articles

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGUES POSTGRADUATE DEPARTMENT -*** Phạm thị hà trang A contrastive analysis of syntactic structures employed in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles (phân tích đối chiếu cấu trúc ngữ pháp dùng mô tả chiều h-ớng báo th-ơng mại tiếng anh tiếng việt) MA Minor thesis Major: Linguistics Code: 60.22.15 Hµ néi - 2009 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI COLLEGE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGUES POSTGRADUATE DEPARTMENT -*** Phạm thị hà trang A contrastive analysis of syntactic structures employed in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles (phân tích đối chiếu cấu trúc ngữ pháp dùng mô tả chiều h-ớng báo th-ơng mại tiếng anh tiếng viƯt) MA Minor thesis Major: Linguistics Code: 60.22.15 Supervisor: §inh Hải Yến, M.A Hà nội - 2009 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page PART I - INTRODUCTION Rationale of the study Aims of the study Scope of the study Methodology of the study Design of the study PART II - DEVELOPMENT Chapter 1: Literature Review 1.1 Contrastive Analysis and Transfer Theory 1.1.1 Contrastive Analysis 1.1.2 Language transfer and its influence on foreign language teaching and learning 1.2 Syntax and syntactic structures 1.2.1 Syntax 1.2.2 Syntactic structures 1.2.2.1 Definition 1.2.2.2 Categories 10 1.3 Journalistic register 15 1.4 Trend description in English and Vietnamese 17 Chapter 2: A contrastive analysis of syntactic structures used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles 2.1 An overview on the business and economic newspapers used in the contrastive analysis 19 2.1.1 The English business newspapers 20 2.1.2 The Vietnamese business newspapers 21 2.2 A contrastive analysis of syntactic structures used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles 22 2.2.1 Clause structures 22 2.2.1.1 Clause structures in general trend description 22 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com vii 2.2.1.2 Clause structures in terms of movements 29 2.2.1.3 Summary 33 2.2.2 Phrase structures 33 2.2.2.1 Verb phrase 33 2.2.2.2 Noun phrase 35 2.2.2.3 Prepositional phrase 36 2.2.2.4 Adjective phrase 37 2.2.2.5 Adverb phrase 38 2.2.2.6 Summary 39 2.3 Conclusion 39 Chapter 3: Implications and recommendations 3.1 For translation: difficulties in translating syntactic structures used in describing trends from English into Vietnamese and vice versa and some recommendations 40 3.2 For teaching students to describe charts and graphs in English 41 3.2.1 Students’ difficulties in describing trends, the causes and recommendations to improve the situations 41 3.2.2 Suggested exercises for practising to describe charts and graphs 43 PART III - CONCLUSION Review of the study 45 Conclusion 45 Suggestions for further research 46 References 47 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS A: Adverbial BW: Business Week C: Complement ĐT: Đầu T- FT: Financial Times O: Object S: Subject SGĐTTC: Sài Gòn Đầu T- Tài Chính TBKTSG: Thời Báo Kinh Tế Sài Gòn 10 TBKTVN: Thời Báo Kinh Tế Việt Nam 11 TE: The Economist 12 V: Verb 13 WSJ: Wall Street Journal TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com v LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Tables Table Clause patterns used in describing trends in American and British newspapers (p.26) Table Clause patterns used in describing trends in Northern and Southern Vietnamese newspapers (p.26) Table Verb phrase patterns used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles (p.33) Table Noun phrase patterns used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles (p.35) Table English premodifiers and Vietnamese postmodifiers in comparison (p.35) Table Prepositional phrase patterns used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles (p.36) Table Adjective phrase patterns used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles (p.38) Table Adverb phrase patterns used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles (p.38) Figures Figure Clause patterns used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business newspapers (p 23) Figure Clause patterns used in describing upward movement in English and Vietnamese newspapers (p 29) Figure Clause patterns used in describing downward movement in English and Vietnamese business newspapers (p.30) Figure Clause patterns used in describing stability in English and Vietnamese articles (p.32) TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com PART I - INTRODUCTION Rationale for the study As Heraclitus (540 BC – 480 BC), a Greek philosopher, once said ‘nothing endures but change’, the world we live in today is the world of changes and development – the world of trends It is therefore necessary to keep pace with the flow of life everyday by gathering changeable information about that world Here comes the indispensable role of mass media in general and newspapers in particular As Tom E Rolnicki, C Dow Tate and Sherri Taylor (2001) remark in their book Scholastic Journalism ‚Immediacy or timeliness is the most essential element of most news‛ (p.8), thus we are updated, thanks to newspapers, with latest news about stock markets, unemployment rate, trends of consumer spending or cases of bankruptcy somewhere in the world etc Given that English is an international language, there are a vast number of newspapers printed in English regardless of the countries of origin Together with famous newspapers in America or Britain like International Herald Tribute, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, The Guardian etc., we also have Business Standard from India, China Daily from China, Vietnam News from Vietnam, Business Day from South Africa and so on The domination of English as a common language of newspapers is greater and greater, which has gradually been eradicating our knowledge barriers As a teacher of Business English, it is compulsory for me to read English newspapers, magazines or journals regularly, especially business ones in order to keep me updated and help me understand more about journalistic register What is more, I can enrich my Business English vocabulary and expressions as well as exploit a potential source of teaching materials Consequently, my lessons can be more informative and lively In fact, one of my concerns while meditating English business articles is the structures used in describing trends The upward and downward movements appear to be more and more interesting as I take further steps into investigating them The syntactic structures seem to be varied with a great deal of significant organizations The flexible semantic features in English trend descriptions are worth being paid attention to as well There is a variety of words and expressions to denote the movements, which adds much color into a piece of news TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com In addition, the syntactic structures used in describing trends play an integral part during the course of my Business English teaching at Vietnam National University, College of Economics Course books like Business English, Market Leader or English for Business Communication contains activities such as writing reports, making presentations or describing charts or graphs, which requires my students a considerable knowledge in using such structures to produce correct and appropriate texts or utterances English business articles, to my mind, can serve as a fertile land to be cultivated for the sake of describing trends Teachers can employ business articles to design a lot of activities and exercises relating to describing changes for students as the way Peter Grundy (1993) does in his resource book Newspapers Finally, it is my curiosity to explore the differences and similarities between syntactic structures used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles For one thing, I could diagnose the difficulties my students may encounter when using such structures due to language transference Thus, remedies would be prescribed timely and properly For the other, I hope to apply some of the findings into improving the accuracy and appropriateness in translation works Aims of the study This research is directed to accomplish three goals: - To investigate the syntactic structures used in describing trends in English and in Vietnamese from the perspective of traditional grammar - To make a contrastive analysis between English and Vietnamese syntactic structures used in describing trends in business articles to deduce their differences and similarities - To propose some pedagogical implications for better teaching and learning of describing charts or graphs and some recommendations for more effective translation works Scope of the study Due to the constraint of time and effort, the study only investigates the English and Vietnamese syntactic structures on the levels of clauses and phrases TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com Also, as suggested in the title of the thesis, the object of the research is narrowed down to syntactic structures used in trend description in business news The trends are either concerned with specific statistics and figures or with general remarks about changes or tendency The resources of the analysis are English and Vietnamese business articles from business and economic newspapers Methodology of the study As the title of the thesis suggests, the study is aimed at comparing and contrasting the syntactic structures used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles; therefore, three methods namely descriptive, comparative and contrastive are employed By descriptive method, a systemic list of structures used to describe trends in business articles will be presented Their syntactic features will be shown explicitly Comparative and contrastive methods enable the author to discover the similarities and differences between structures used in describing trends in the two journalistic languages The basic process of the research is as follows Firstly, four English and four Vietnamese business and economics newspapers are chosen with two copies each Three articles are taken from each copy, so in total forty-eight articles are selected for the examination Then the samples are thoroughly analyzed, calculated in percentage and put into charts or tables in order to find out the prominent syntactic structures frequently used in describing trends in the two languages Next, English and Vietnamese syntactic structures are contrasted to highlight the similarities and differences between the two groups The findings of this process are finally applied into improving English-Vietnamese translation and teaching students how to describe charts and graphs effectively Design of the study The thesis is divided into three main parts namely Introduction, Development and Conclusion In the first part of the study, the author introduces the reasons for choosing the topic, the objectives to be obtained in conducting the research, the scope of the study, the methods employed to facilitate the realization of the paper and the design of the study TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com The second part, Development, is the focus of the thesis, to which most time and effort are devoted This part consists of three chapters In the first chapter, Literature Review, the writer presents the theoretical background knowledge about contrastive analysis, syntax and syntactic structures, journalistic register and trend description in books and newspapers These will serve as a springboard for the writer to dash into the exploration of the topic The next chapter, A contrastive analysis of syntactic structures used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles, studies the syntactic structures i.e clauses and phrases used to describe changes in English and Vietnamese business articles Similarities and differences are accordingly presented with a view to the data shown in charts and tables The last chapter, Implications and recommendations is a practical application one because the outcome of the contrastive analysis will be used to improve English Vietnamese translation of trend description as well as helping students how enhance their skills of describing charts and graphs in English Lastly, the Conclusion part includes a review of the study, some concluding remarks and suggestions for further research TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 34 Combinations 116 47,93 116 42,49 Total 242 100 273 100 Table Verb phrase patterns used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles The statistics in Table imply significant similarities between verb phrases in the two languages The Combinations category accounts for the biggest percentage number in both English and Vietnamese articles As a matter of fact, Head or Auxiliary + Head alone cannot convey sufficient information to the audience, especially when the changes in the business world today are definitely complicated The answer to effective information delivery comes with the combination of the time when the trend is prevalent (Auxiliary and Modifier), the way the trend works (Modifier) and its influence (O/C) The third category, Head+O/C also shows similar percentage numbers in English and Vietnamese with 23.96% and 24.54% respectively As far as differences are concerned, Auxiliary + Head accounts for only 2.93% in Vietnamese verb phrases and is the least frequently used structure It is important to notice that Vietnamese syntax has no concept of tense and aspect and therefore, no auxiliary However, auxiliaries can be replaced with particles preceding the head verb to indicate continuity (đều, cũng, vẫn, cứ, etc.), time relation (từng, ®·, võa, ®ang, sÏ etc.) and negation or affirmation (cã, kh«ng, ch-a, etc), so this patttern is still applied for the analysis of Vietnamese verb phrases The structure Head + Modifier shows the biggest gap when Vietnamese category has 7.41% more than its English counterpart As indicated in the last section, SVA is more frequently used in Vietnamese than in English; the adverbials play the role of modifiers The exclusive function and position of Vietnamese verb phrases mark the next difference Beside the role of predicates, the verb phrases in Vietnamese articles can play the role of the subject in a clause as illustrated in the following clause Example 18: Tăng giá mạnh cổ phiếu DN có thông tin tốt kết kinh doanh ngành (The share price of enterprises who have the positive information about business outcomes or industries increased the most significantly) TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 35 (Source: VN index vào thử thách, SGĐTTC, p.12, July 20, 2009) or stand independently as one clause (usually at the initial position) Example 19: Dự báo tháng tới, kim ngạch nhập tăng dần lên (Analysts have forecasted that in the next few months, the import turnover will increase gradually) (Source: Xuất ch-a hết khó khăn, TBKTSG, p.8, July 30, 2009) Dù b¸o is often met in the Vietnamese prediction about future trends while in English, a full clause is required, for instance, ‘the analysts forecast (that) , the economists predicts/ expects (that) 2.2.2.2 Noun phrase The distinction in English and Vietnamese noun phrase is far too remarkable As we can see in the table below, almost all patterns bear significant differences English newspapers Vietnamese newspapers No % No % Head 95 14,75 34 6,19 Premodifier + Head 375 58,22 56 10,20 Head + Postmodifier 39 6,05 331 60,29 Pre +Head + Post 135 20,96 128 23,31 Total 644 100 549 100 Table Noun phrase patterns used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles The Head, which is usually a noun (common or proper noun) or a pronoun, is used more often in English articles than in Vietnamese ones However, wilder differences are exposed in the second and the third category, Premodifier + Head and Head + Postmodifier The former pattern accounts for over 58% in English newspapers and over 10% in Vietnamese ones The latter is used about 10 times more in Vietnamese than that in English The reason for this TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 36 feature is down to the fundamental differences in the types and positions of premodifiers and postmodifiers in the two news languages It is evident that the premodifiers playing the role as adjectives such as demonstrative pronoun, ordinal, noun (phrase), adjective phrase and verbal phrase for the head noun in English work as postmodifiers in Vietnamese This difference is clearly indicated in the following table English premodifier(s) Demonstrative Vietnamese postmodifier(s) this number , that collapse Con số này, sụp đổ Second quarter, third year Quý thứ 2, năm thứ pronoun Ordinal Noun phrase, GE’s profit, credit crunch genitive Lỵi nhn cđa GE, khủng hoảng tài noun phrase Adjective phrase Slow growth, fast recovery Mức tăng tr-ởng chậm, hồi phục nhanh chóng Verbal phrase Soaring price, improved Giá tăng vọt, tỷ lệ tăng tr-ởng growth rate đ-ợc cải thiện Table English premodifiers and Vietnamese postmodifiers in comparison 2.2.2.3 Prepositional phrase English newspapers Vietnamese newspapers No % No % Place and direction 170 51,83 65 39,63 Time 69 21,04 77 46,95 Others 89 27,13 22 13,42 Total 328 100 164 100 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 37 Table Prepositional phrase patterns used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles Table shows that the percentage number of phrase indicating place and direction in English newspapers is much bigger than Vietnamese counterparts (51.83% vs 39.63%) while a reversion is found in time prepositional phrases with 21.04% in English and 46.95% in Vietnamese The former situation happens because, prepositions in Vietnamese sometimes never occur in the place of their English counterparts Example 20: Riêng giai đoạn từ tháng đến tháng 6, GDP n-ớc đà tăng 7,9%, cao hẳn số 6,1% quí I (Source: TQ tăng tr-ởng khó khăn, TBKTVN, p.15, July 18, 2009) Example 21: Cà phê giảm giá 500 đô la Mỹ/tấn, cao su giảm 42%, tiêu giảm 35% (Source: Khả tăng giá sốc khó xảy ra, TBKTSG, p.11, July 9, 2009) The latter case can be explained by the fact that some Vietnamese articles fell into overusing time phrases in an article In addition, it is unquestionable that prepositions and verbs in English articles are absolutely separated while in Vietnamese, there are overlapping cases when verbs and preposition have the same spelling such as lên, xuống, vào (khoảng), In tăng lên 30%, lên is a preposition, while in lên đến, lên is a verb, for example British English tends to preserve the preposition ‘by’ before an amount of increase or decrease for high formality in its news while American English tends to omit it BrE: Example 22: Warning of a ‚bloodbath‛, he said in June that shipping capacity would exceed the need of the market by between 50% and 70% in the near future (Source: Sea of troubles, TE, August 1, 2009) Example 23: Headline US consumer prices rose by 0.7 per cent (Source: Bull takes charge as appetite for risk improves, FT, p.16, July 16, 2009) AmE: TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 38 Example 24: They have seen their share prices sink 60% or more (Source: Charting course to gains in sea of joblessness, WSJ, p.M1, July 13, 2009) Example 25: Sales of existing homes rose 2.9% in April (Source: Glimmers of a housing turnaround, BW, p.10, June 8, 2009) However, when too many figures and numbers are mentioned, British English articles often turns to the ‘by’ omission choice Researching the section Money and Investing or Markets which mainly report the changes in stock markets in Financial Times newspapers reveals that almost 100% of this prepositional phrase omit ‘by’ 2.2.2.4 Adjective phrase English newspapers Vietnamese newspapers No % No % Head 119 86.23 46 58.97 Intensifier + Head 10 7.25 29 37.18 Head + Complement 3.62 3.85 2.9 0 138 100 78 100 Intensifier +Head + Complement Total Table Adjective phrase patterns used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles From the numbers in table 7, we can infer that adjective phrases in English articles tend to exist in the form of Head It is also true to Vietnamese articles though the percentage number in Vietnamese is 27.26% lower When it comes to the second class, Intensifier + Head, Vietnamese papers possess much higher percentage number, over 37% vs 7.25 in English ones An important feature in Vietnamese adjective intensifiers is they can occupy the position both before and after adjectives Examples are rÊt cao, kh¸ thÊp and cao h¬n, thÊp nhÊt Few TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 39 structures are recorded in the last two categories of both languages The combination of Intensifier, Head and Complement is even unavailable in Vietnamese articles 2.2.2.5 Adverb phrase In comparison with Adjective phrase, Adverb phrase are much less frequently used, with regard to their number of occurrence, 57 in English and 43 in Vietnamese English newspapers Vietnamese newspapers No % No % Head 52 91.23 28 65.12 Intensifier + Head 8.77 15 34.88 Total 57 100 43 100 Table Adverb phrase patterns used in describing trends in English and Vietnamese business articles Adverb phrases are mainly found in the form of head adverb rather than the second case In English, the disparity between the two categories is extremely great with the Head accounting for over 91% In Vietnamese, adverb intensifiers such as rÊt, kh¸, qu¸ etc are more frequently seen with 34.88% The high frequency of using adverb (and adjective) intensifiers may derive from our cultural habit of estimation 2.2.2.6 Summary This part has covered the similarities and differences among five classes of phrases namely Verb phrase, Noun phrase, Prepositional phrase, Adjective phrase and Adverb phrase The analysis was made on basis of the findings classified in five tables 2.3 Conclusion This chapter has provided a comprehensive view on syntactic structures used in trend description in English and Vietnamese business newspapers The two units of English and TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 40 Vietnamese syntactic structures i.e clause structures and phrase structures were investigated and analysis was implemented basing on the findings from the article scrutinization The deductions from statistics analysis will prove useful for recommendations and suggestions in the last chapter of the thesis CHAPTER 3: IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS The last chapter is devoted to clarifying some of the common problems and difficulties that emerge in some English - Vietnamese translations in Vietnamese business newspapers and during the process of writing about charts and graphs of Vietnamese learners Suggestions and recommendations will be supplied after each problem or difficulty for easy tracking Besides, some suggested exercises based on syntactic structures for trend description in business articles will be given for students’ practising to write about charts 3.1 For translation: difficulties in translating syntactic structures used in describing trends from English into Vietnamese and vice versa and some recommendations Vietnamese articles used in the research include translation versions of business articles in foreign newspapers They usually belong to International Economy section or International Stock News In light of the differences between English and Vietnamese structures, two main problems were found out First, there is some unnatural translation from English into Vietnamese due to the application of English structures into Vietnamese ones Typically, it is the translation of structure SVC with to be as the verb and an adjective or a past participle as the complement Động tăng tr-ởng ch-a ổn định (Growth motive has not been stable) Cách thức hồi phục không cân (Recovery methods are unbalanced) Sự hồi phục đà đ-ợc khẳng định (Recovery has been affirmed) (Trung Quốc tăng tr-ởng khó khăn, TBKTVN, p.15, July 18, 2009) TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 41 The redundancy of ‘lµ’ in the Vietnamese translations makes the clauses sound informal and awkward Thus, an advisable remedy for these ailing statements is to exclude ‘lµ’, transforming SVC into SC or use structure SVO, turning adjective phrases into noun phrases with appropriate verbs Second, there are more synonyms to denote trends in English, so it is rather demanding for Vietnamese authors to convey the complete meaning of English synonymous words or phrases From my observation, articles about stock news in Vietnamese with a high frequency of upward and downward movements not have many alternatives beside the verbs and nouns tăng, mức tăng, gia tăng increase, giảm, mức giảm, sơt gi¶m - decrease’ This fact makes the picture of ups and downs in Vietnamese seem less lively and colourful In this case, a suitable adverb or adjective such as nhanh, chậm, mạnh, nhẹ, đáng kể, đột biến to modify the movements will be the most powerful tool at hand Otherwise, Vietnamese translators can try to keep the translation as close to the original versions as possible though they might sound strange in Vietnamese Examples are ‘jump – nh¶y vät’, ‘fall – r¬i xng (møc)’, ‘plunge – tơt xng (møc), soar tăng vọt lên, rocket tăng chóng mặt 3.2 For teaching students to describe charts and graphs in English As mentioned in the Introduction part, describing charts and graphs in English is a must to my students of Economics They are exposed to this requirement frequently while reading their text books, reference books, or newspapers, doing tests and making presentations They must build the skills of recognizing prominent trends, making remarks and describing the trends properly Besides, students who would like to take part in the IELTS exams have to master this skill as describing charts or diagrams is a compulsory section During the course of my Business English teaching at College of Economics, I have been aware of several difficulties that my students face while learning how to describe charts and graphs The roots of the problems will be specified and recommendations for improvement will be offered in the following part Also, as newspapers can be used as an excellent source of materials, some types of exercises based on newspaper articles which require the use of syntactic structures in describing trends will be designed TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 42 3.2.1 Students’ difficulties in describing trends, the causes and recommendations to improve the situations In the first place, it seems to be a challenge for my students to diversify the structures used in their writing about charts They tend to use structure SVA for most cases When required to use SVO or SVC for a change, they are often confused and ask me for help Obviously, using SVA enables them to remark on the details they have noticed more easily Take the statement below as an example From June to August, the sales increased by 10% S V A The information is presented in a friendly order and students find it fairly easy to follow However, the two alternative ways below require them to practise a little more The next three months saw a 10% increase in sales S V O Co There is a 10% increase in sales over the next three months S V C (A) The solution for this situation is, in my opinion, asking learners to practice rewriting sentences without changing their original meaning (clues may be given beforehand) Also, they have troubles with making collocations, i.e between noun and adjective, verb and adverb What goes with what is not simple as it appears at the first glance Their safe solution is choosing a few common collocations such as ‘increase slightly, rise quickly, decrease significantly, fall sharply’ and stick to those all the time However, this may lead to repetition and boredom for the description In coping with this matter, teachers can give exercises for practice such as matching nouns with suitable adjectives, verbs with appropriate adverbs or using collocations to illustrate a graph with various trends The third problem is, due to their limited English competency, my students prefer to use simple sentences and clauses in describing the trends so a monotonous text is predictable The answer for this puzzle is instructing them to use alternative tools for further information such as with (‘the profits in the third quarter rose remarkably, with the return in August reaching $ 2m’), non-finite clauses (‘China’s GDP grew by 7.9% in the second quarter of this TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 43 year, having grown by 6.1% in the previous three month period’), relative clauses (‘the loss which mounted to $1m last year ’), modifiers (‘that growth gap of 8.5 percentage points’, punctuation such as commas, brackets to supplement data (‘Its exports also surged, by an annualised 53%, partly thanks to strong Chinese demand’) The next problem is their confusion in using time and direction prepositions like in, of, at, by In order to unravel their confusion, specific explanations about the function of each preposition should be provided first; then a number of drilling exercises (gap filling, multiple choices) will be given for practice Lastly, students often find it relatively hard to read general trends and major details in a graph quickly and properly Under this circumstance, teachers should introduce different charts or graphs with diversified movements to students or assign them to look for sample graphs in books and newspapers and learn to interpret the data with their partners 3.2.2 Suggested exercises for practising to describe charts and graphs Read an article to find out verbs used to describe trends and put them into three categories: upward movement, downward movement, stability/ fluctuation Note down on the tenses of the verbs (past, present, future) Find out the adverbs of degree and identify the verbs they complement Put the adverbs in order of intensity Look for adjectives used in trend description in an article and identify the nouns they complement Put the adjectives in order of intensity Match the adjectives in column A with their suitable nouns of movement in column B; the adverbs of degree in column C with their suitable verbs of movement in column D (These can be taken from newspapers or reference books) Find out the phrases to indicate movements and time in an English article Ask students to compare the items with their Vietnamese equivalents TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 44 Use the information in a text to draw a corresponding chart or graph Write down the name of the chart and the source Take a graph from the article and hide the words and phrases describing trends away from the text Ask students to fill the blanks with suitable words and phrases (For a lower level class, the words and phrases can be given but mixed up so that students have to consider their choices) Rewrite the sentences describing trends without changing the original meanings (Referring to the structures mentioned in the previous parts) Complete the sentences that describe trends in a chart with the given clues 10 Compare the differences and similarities between Vietnamese and English text describing trends 11 Pick a chart from a newspaper and ask students to read information from it (What is it about? What is the general trend? What are the prominent features? Where is the peak and the bottom?) Write about the chart in 150-180 words TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 45 PART III – CONCLUSION Review of the study On the whole, the study consists of three main parts, Introduction, Development and Conclusion It started with an introduction on the rationale, the aims, the scope, the methodology, and the design of the study Next, the development was facilitated with three chapters Chapter provided a theoretical background on contrastive analysis as a branch of linguistics, syntax and syntactic structures, journalistic style and trend description in books and newspapers Chapter illustrated the process of skimming business newspaper articles for sample structures and the actual contrastive analysis The last chapter discussed some problems in English – Vietnamese translations relating to trend description as well as some difficulties faced by students at College of Economics, VNU while learning to describe charts and graphs Suggestions and recommendations were enclosed after each problem and difficulty for easy following The final part of the thesis presented a review of the study, an overall conclusion and some suggestions for further research Conclusions The thesis has been successful, to some extent, in accomplishing the three goals stated at the start of the research The nature of syntax and syntactic structures in English and Vietnamese was revealed and two categories of syntactic structures i.e clause and phrase, which served as the criteria for the analysis were specified through an extensive investigation Many similarities and differences due to syntactic and cultural factors as well as writing styles between the two business news languages were exhibited in the biggest part of the thesis, the contrastive analysis in Chapter Accordingly, these inferences served as the ground for giving suggestions and recommendations in the last chapter in hope of improving English Vietnamese translations of trend structures to some extent and enhancing students’ skills of describing charts TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 46 Suggestions for further research Due to the time constraint and the limited scope of the thesis, some aspects of the topics have not been touched upon Examples are the syntactic structures in nonfinite and verbless clauses, which makes up of a considerable part in the articles The semantic features of the articles such as antonyms, metaphor, hyponymy used in describing trends also serve as a potential topic for further research The close of the thesis, therefore, is not an end but a start of a continuous process to explore the field embracing promising crops TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 47 REFERENCES Vietnamese DiÖp Quang Ban (1991), Ngữ pháp tiếng Việt (tập 1), Nxb Giáo Dục, Hà Nội Diệp Quang Ban (1992), Ngữ pháp tiếng Việt (tập 2), Nxb Giáo Dục, Hà Nội Vũ Quang Hào (2009), Ngôn ngữ báo chí, Nxb Thông Tấn, Hà Nội Trần Hữu Mạnh (2007), Ngôn ngữ học đối chiếu: Cú pháp tiếng Anh-tiếng Việt, Nxb Đại học Quốc Gia Hà Nội, Hà Nội Nguyễn Thị Thảo (2008), Tác phẩm báo chí đại c-ơng, Đề tài khoa học cấp viện, Học viện Báo chí Tuyên truyền, Hà Nội Lý Toàn Thắng (2003), Lý thuyết trật tự từ cú pháp, Nxb Đại Học Quốc Gia Hà Nội, Hà Nội Lê Quang Thiêm (2008), Nghiên cứu đối chiếu ngôn ngữ Hà Nội: Nxb Đại Học Quốc Gia Hà Nội Lê Hùng Tiến, Đỗ Minh Hoàng, Nguyễn Ph-ơng Trà (2006), Lý thuyết thực tiễn dịch thuật Anh-Việt: Một số vấn đề lý luận ph-ơng pháp bản, Đề tài nghiên cứu cấp Đại học Quốc Gia, Hà Nội Hoàng Văn Vân (2005), Nghiên cứu dịch thuật, Nxb Khoa Häc X· Héi, Hµ Néi English Alexander, L G et al (1975), English grammatical structure - 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