ABSTRACT
The study of English speaking skill has attracted much attention in recent
research of second language acquisition. In details, one of the most concerned
topics is the interference of native culture on mastering rhetorical patterns of the
target language. Therefore, the research focused on the influences of some
Vietnamese cultural dimensions on freshmen’s study of English speaking skill at
FELTE, ULIS, VNU. The crucial objective of the study was to investigate factors in
Vietnamese culture which put impacts on students’ study of English speaking skill,
figure out the levels of influences of those dimensions and suggest some
pedagogical implications. The researcher chose first - year students at FELTE as
participants for the study. Thanks to their supports, survey questionnaire and class
observation were applied as research instruments. It can be concluded three
significant findings from the data analysis. There are four main influential
categories called Subjectivity – Objectivity, Directness – Indirectness, Accuracy –
Inaccuracy, Redundancy – Economicality. Of four dimensions, Redundancy –
Economicality category is the most influential one revealing through freshmen’s
speaking activities in class, whereas, Directness – Indirectness has the least impact.
Basing on some major findings, the author points out some implications for
teaching and learning English speaking skill to improve the situation. The results,
discussion as well as implications are expected to partially contribute to the current
research on second spoken language in Vietnam to create favorable condition for
learners of English in the process of acquiring L2.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements i
Abstract ii
List of figures and tables vii
List of abbreviations viii
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1
1.1. Statement of the problem and the rationale of the study 1

2.3.3.2. The use of genitive indicators……………………………………………20
2.3.4. Redundancy – Economicality…………………………………………… 21
iii
2.3.4.1. Redundancy………………………………………………………………21
2.3.4.2. Economicality………………………………………………………….…23
CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 25
3.1. Participants 25
3.2. Data collection instruments 25
3.2.1. Survey questionnaire………………………………………………………25
3.2.2. Class observation………………………………………………………….25
3.3. Data collection procedure………………………………………………… 26
3.4. Data analysis procedure ……………………………………………………29
CHAPTER 4: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 31
4.1. Findings 31
4.1.1. Research question 1 31
4.1.2. Research question 2 42
CHAPTER 5: RECOMMENDATIONS………………………………………47
5.1. Second culture acquisition in L2 teaching and learning 47
5.1.1. Second culture acquisition in L2 teaching and learning in general…… 47
5.1.2. Second culture acquisition in second language in speaking learning…….49
process in particular
5.2. Teacher’s role in teaching the target language culture to students………….49
iv
5.3. The teaching of English language speaking in classrooms 50
5.3.1. Reminding students of the differences between L1 and L2 51
5.3.2. Integrating all language skills 51
CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION 53
6.1. Summary of findings 53
6.2. Limitations of the study 53
6.3. Suggestions for further studies 54

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION
1. 1. Statement of the problem and rationale of the study
To any nation all over the world, culture and language have always been
inextricably linked. According to Nguyen (2009), language is the product of the
culture and is considered “the window to culture”. Language is arguably the most
important component of culture because much of the rest of it is normally
transmitted orally. It is impossible to understand the subtle nuances and deep
meanings of another culture without knowing its language well. On one hand,
culture seems so inclusive, it permeates almost every aspect of human life including
languages. On the other hand, when human need to share a culture, they
communicate through language. Together with approaching the foreign or second
language, learners also steadily adapt to its cultural environment. Needless to say,
cultural factors have put great impact on not only the mother tongue but also foreign
languages of people belonging to that culture. The interference of native culture has
been seen plainly on both spoken and written form of the second language.
Moreover, the situation in written discourse shares no similarity with the one in
speaking. It seems quite hard to train learners the way of thinking and speaking like
native speakers. Nevertheless, it does not mean that learners can speak in any way
they like without paying attention to standards in English speaking. In fact, those
who studying foreign language should be aware of some Vietnamese influential
factors which have influence on learning English and try to avoid negative cultural
influences.
The above analysis of the close relationship between the native culture and spoken
second language has highly encouraged the researcher to conduct the field work. To
some extent, the interference of Vietnamese culture has still extended their
influences on freshmen’s study of English speaking skill. In other words, those
dimensions may limit student’s ability to acquire the second language
comprehensively. As a result, the researcher made a decision to work on this study
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in the hope of gaining insights into some Vietnamese negative cultural factors

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As for teachers, they stand a golden chance to reevaluate the function of
Vietnamese cultural dimensions in spoken English. The researcher does hope that
they can take advantage of some implications in order to enhance student’s
speaking competence in English.
1.4. Scope of the study
The study focuses on recognizing some Vietnamese cultural dimensions on
freshmen's study of English speaking skill at Faculty of English Language Teacher
Education at ULIS. Four potential factors named Subjectivity – Objectivity,
Directness – Indirectness, Accuracy – Inaccuracy, Redundancy – Economicality
will be carefully explained in this study.
In terms of research instrument, the scope of investigation is restricted to first –
year students’ speaking activity in class. The researcher does not choose one
particular kind of speaking activity due to the fact that some categories mentioned in
the following Literature Review may extend their influences to all speaking activities
that they had learned. Therefore, the author decides to cover all class speaking
activities of first-year students.
1.5. Organization
The rest of paper includes five chapters as follows:
Chapter 2 (Literature review) provides the background of the study, including
definition of key concepts which are the notion of culture, cross-cultural
communication in general as well as the relationship between culture and language,
the interferences of native culture to L2 speaking. Finally, an over view of some
potential influences of Vietnamese cultural dimensions on English speaking skill
will be investigated.
Chapter 3 (Methodology) describes the participants and instruments of the
study, as well as the procedure employed to carry out the research
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Chapter 4 (Data analysis and discussion) presents, analyzes and discusses
the findings that the researcher found out from the data collected according to two

In another aspect, Hofstede (1980, pp. 21-23) defines culture as “the
collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group
from another”, which is passed from generation to generation, it is changing all the
time because each generation adds something of its own before passing it on. It is
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usual that one’s culture is taken for granted and assumed to be correct because it is
the only one, or at least the first, to be learned.
In Vietnam, Nguyen Quang, PhD also mentions this issue. From his
perspective, “culture is something which was and has been created through the
history of human development. Culture is not statistic and is always changing. The
beliefs and values we hold now are not completely the same as those held in the pre
- historics of medieval times, or 100 years ago” (Nguyen Quang, 2001).
All in all, the definition that is the most suitable for this scope of study is
cited by Levin and Alderman: “culture is a shared background (for example,
national, ethnic, religious) resulting from a common language and communication
style, customs, beliefs, attitudes, and values”. Culture in this context does not refer
to art, music, literature, food, clothing style, and so on. In fact, it refers to the
informal and often hidden patterns of human interactions, expressions and
viewpoints that people in one culture share. The hidden nature of culture has been
compared to an iceberg, most of which is hidden underwater. Like the iceberg,
much of the influence of culture on an individual cannot be seen. The part of culture
that is exposed is not always that which creates cross-cultural difficulties; the
hidden aspects of culture have significant effects on behavior and on interactions
with others.
2.1.2. Language and culture
2.1.2.1. Language and culture in general
In terms of investigating features of cross-cultural communication as well as
acquiring the L2, it is really vital to mention the relationship between language and
culture at first
Language and culture are inseparably entwined. However, there are some

why language becomes one of the main tools mankind uses to interact and to
express ideas, emotions, knowledge, memories and values.
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As can be seen from the above analysis, language and culture cannot exist
without each other. It is no use doing research on culture without considering its
language. These two factors combine to form a living organism. If we compare the
society to a swimming pool, language is a swimming skill and culture is the water.
When both are present, people swim well (communicate successfully). They swim
confidently and rapidly when they are familiar with the water (eg. within their
native culture), but cautiously and slowly when it is unfamiliar to them (within a
foreign culture)
2.1.2.2. Language and culture in language acquisitions
Linguists and anthropologists have long recognized that the forms and uses
of a given language reflect the cultural values of the society in which the language
is spoken. (Krasner, 1999) draws an important conclusion that “linguistic
competence alone is not enough for learners of a language to be competent in that
language”. In another paper, Robinson – Stuart and Nocon (1996) emphasize the
importance of second culture acquisitions in language learning by claiming that
language learners need to be aware, for example, of the culturally appropriate ways
to address people, express gratitude, make requests, and agree or disagree with
someone. They should know that behaviors and intonation patterns that are
appropriate in their own speech community may be perceived differently by
members of the target language speech community. They have to understand that, in
order for communication to be successful, language use must be associated with
other culturally appropriate behavior.
In many regards, culture is taught implicitly, imbedded in the linguistic
forms that students are learning. To make students aware of the cultural features
reflected in the language, teachers can make those cultural features an explicit topic
of discussion in relation to the linguistic forms being studied. That viewpoint shares
the same idea with Politzer (1959): “As language teachers we must be interested in

Figure 1: Nguyen Quang’s diagram of components of communication (Nguyen
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Quang, 2001:9)
As described in the chart, two kinds of communication are verbal and non-
verbal communication. Whereas verbal communication includes intralaguage, non-
verbal communication contains paralanguage and extralanguage. It should be noted
that spoken communication is a branch of intralanguage as verbal communication.
Indeed, the same idea has been shared by Stewart and Angelo (1980) when they
showed a simple table about types of communication. Nevertheless, spoken words
also belong to non – verbal communication in terms of paralanguage
In a nutshell, spoken communication, or spoken word, is one of many
“process of sharing meaning through verbal and non – verbal behavior” (Nguyen
Quang, 1998a)
2.2.3.1. Verbal communication
Verbal communication is about language, both written and spoken. Verbal
communication refers to the form of communication in which message is
transmitted verbally; communication is done by word of mouth and a piece of
writing. Therefore, many people assume that “verbal communication” refers to the
term “communicating using words” which inevitably means using a language - a
system which governs the use of agreed sounds or other symbols in order to
exchange information.
2.2.3.2. Non – verbal communication
Like verbal communication, people use non – verbal to share meaning with
others. And there are many ways to define this term. In the first place, Knapp and
Hall (2006) specify the three major components of nonverbal communication, the
communication environment, the communicators’ paralinguistic characteristics
and the nonverbal behaviors such as body movements and positions. Indeed,
Burgoon, Buller, and Woodall (1989) point out that nonverbal communication is the
unspoken dialogue which involves the messages conveyed beyond the words.
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5. Self – abasement and self – assertion
6. Abstractness – Concreteness
7. Sentimentality – Rationality
8. Hierarchy – Equality
9. Introversion – Extroversion
10.Deduction – Induction
11.Group orientation - Individual orientation
12.High context – Low context
13.Redundancy – Economicality
14.Staticality – Dynamicality
These categories exist in every language. However, the aim of this study is to
investigate some Vietnamese cultural dimensions which extend their influences on
freshmen’s study of English speaking skill. Therefore, the author will go in details
in some categories as follow:
1. Subjectivity – Objectivity
2. Directness – Indirectness
3. Accuracy – Inaccuracy
4. Redundancy – Economicality
2.3.1. Subjectivity – Objectivity
Each nation possesses typical viewpoints of the ego, nature and society.
Generally, there are two ways of recognizing the relationship between the ego and
the other involving of both humans and things among different cultures. The first
one called objectivity which is completely unbiased statement. To be more specific,
it is not touched by the speaker’s previous experiences or tastes. The second one
called subjective which is a statement that has been colored by the character of the
speaker or writer. It often has a basis in reality, but reflects the perspective through
with the speaker views reality. Furthermore, the understanding of these two
perceptions will be much clearer in the following notions
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Subjectivity is the communicative way in which people consider the ego as a

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position of the speaker or writer. “Đây là lần đầu tiên tôi đến (arrive)/ ra (go to)/
xuống (go down)/ lên (go up) Hà Nội”
Actually, in Vietnamese, there is no preposition which is similar to preposition
“to” in English. The verb “đến” (reach, arrive at) is used instead as the following
examples:
• Tôi không có thời giờ đi (đến) bưu điện
I don’t have time to go to the post-office
2.3.1.1.2. Locative prepositions
According to Do & Dao (2006), the Anglicist are not always conscious about
the position of “ego” when looking at its direction of movement. They consider
“ego” an “object” existing in the space and pay more attention to the destination of
movement.
Figure 2: The analysis of the “ego” position by the Anglicist
On the contrary, in Vietnam, people tend to consider the position of the
speakers basing on the subjectivity in Vietnamese culture. It can be explained
that the use of prepositions of location in Vietnam is dependent on cultural
factors. Preposition “vào” (into) illustrates that the speaker is in a larger and
brighter space and going to get into a smaller and darker one. The same thing
can be said about “trong” (in).
We can sum up the use of pairs of these prepositions as follow:
Vào

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Down/To
Up/To

To
Out/To
In/To

difficulties when communicating with people in Vietnam.
Indeed, the passive voice in Vietnamese is often known through the way people use
“bị” and “được”. In details, this is the distinction in the speaker or writer’ attitudes
toward the issue mentioned in the utterance. While “bị” points out the negative
attitudes or the unpleasant events, “được” indicates the good luck or positive
attitudes. For examples, the sentence “I got mark 8 in Math” can be translated into
Vietnamese in two ways basing on two different attitudes:
• Tôi được điểm 8 môn Toán (over the speaker’s expectation)
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Ngoài Trong
• Tôi bị điểm 8 môn Toán (under the speaker’s expectation )
It is another important issue that triggers many obstacles for Vietnamese
learners in mastering English as a L2. Hence, learners of English should pay a lot
attention to this matter to avoid unexpected consequences.
2.3.2. Directness – Indirectness
The second cross – cultural category that may have significant effects on
spoken English is Directness – Indirectness. In order to communicate effectively
across culture, people need to understand the cultural thought pattern behind the
language of communication. The fact is that these thought patterns influence the
way native speakers of a language will express themselves. Moreover, they will also
put impact on how native speakers expect to hear the information presented.
Indeed, when the speaker and the listener have different cultural thought patterns,
there is an increasing likelihood for miscommunication and cross cultural conflict.
However, by mimicking the communication style of the listener, the speaker is
affirming the listener’s values in this area.
In Kaplan’s study of 700 essays of foreign students in the United States, he
proposes four discourse structures that contrast with English linearity. These
dissimilarities can be seen clearly through the following diagram. It should not be
taken as an absolute but as a guide for developing cultural competence in cross
cultural communication, as both a speaker and a listener.