MA-Thesis: Cultural mistakes made by students from a high school in Kim Xuyen - Tuyen Quang: Realities and opinions

1.1 Rationale

Vietnam has been on the way of strong development and increased integration in all respects including the comprehensive and profound reform in education, especially in language teaching and learning. The active participation of Vietnam in regional and international associations and the recent adoption of market economy have stimulated the importance of English as an international language in the country (Le & Barnard, 2009). English language has attracted significant consideration from wide range of Vietnamese communities. Vietnamese government has stimulated a huge project of language teaching and learning called the National Foreign Language Projects with impressive determination to improve the English education in the nation wide scale till 2025

1.2 Aims of the study

Professor Hu Wenzhong (1999) thinks that the cultural mistakes is more serious than the language errors, because it is easy to cause emotional unpleasant between foreigners and Chinese. Therefore, how should we use language correctly and appropriately is an important part of the intercultural communicative competence

1.3 The research questions

What are common mistakes high school students make in initial turns of conversations?

What are the teachers’ and students’ opinions about whether those mistakes must be avoided in every context?

1.4 Scope of the study

This study focuses on investigating the mistakes occurring in the initial turns of conversations. As such, it mainly explores the mistakes related to greetings, addressing the interlocutors, or responding to those acts. Generally, initial turns can vividly reveal the impact of Vietnamese culture on the students’ performance of English. In this study, the researcher only concentrates on a group of students in a remote and mountainous area where there is a lack of a good English speaking environment. Thus, the findings might not be representative for all Vietnamese high school students

1.5 The significance of this study

Firstly, the study is conducted to find out some cultural mistakes which students have made when they communicate with foreigners. Hopefully, the findings of the study contribute theoretically and practically to the improvement of speaking process.