A contrastive analysis of English and
Vietnamese resignation letters in terms of
discourse structure

Nguyễn Thùy Dương

Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ
Luận văn ThS. Chuyên ngành: English Linguistics; Mã số: 60 22 15
Người hướng dẫn: Dr. Do Thi Thanh Ha
Năm bảo vệ: 2013 Keywords: Phân tích diễn ngôn; Đơn thư từ chức; Tiếng Anh; Tiếng Việt; Ngôn ngữ

Content
PART A – INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale:
A Business Letter, the most popular and the most widely written type of letter, is used to
serve as a means of communication written for various commercial purposes. These purposes
can be a business deal, complaint, warning, notice, invitation, declaration, information, apology
and various other corporate matters. There are many types of business letters such as Application
Letter, Acceptance Letter, Demand Letter, Letter of Complaint, Resignation Letter, Sales Letters,
etc. Among these types of letters, the Letter of Resignation may receive the least notice because
people often think that when they leave their jobs they have nothing to do with their old
company and old employer. However, a good resignation letter can help the employee maintain a
positive relationship with his/ her old boss, and pave the way for him or her to move on. In
addition, the employee might need a reference from the previous employer. These show that
knowing how to write a good resignation letter is very important. Nevertheless, it seems that no
researchers concern this kind of letter in English and Vietnamese. Hence, in order to help people
have better understanding of resignation letters and see the similarities and differences in writing
style of English and Vietnamese resignation letters, this study focuses on comparing and

Chapter 3 – Analysis of Discourse Structure in English and Vietnamese Resignation Letters
In this chapter, the author analyzes discourse structures in English and Vietnamese
resignation letters in detail.
Chapter 4 – Comparing and Contrasting Discourse Structure of English and Vietnamese
Resignation Letters
The similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese resignation letters in
terms of discourse structures are pointed out in this chapter.
Part C – Conclusion
In this part, the author gives some recommendations for writing a good resignation
letters, points out some limitations of the study, and gives suggestions for further study.
References
Appendixes

REFERENCES
Vietnamese:
1. Diệp Quang Ban. (1999), Văn bản và liên kết trong tiếng Việt, NXB GD, Hà Nội.
2. Nguyễn Hòa. (2003), Phân tích diễn ngôn: Một số vấn đề lý luận và phương pháp. NXB Đại
học Quốc gia Hà Nội, Hà Nội.
3. Trần Ngọc Thêm. (1985), Hệ thống liên kết văn bản tiếng Việt, NXB ĐH và THCN, Hà Nội.

English:
1. Austin, J. H. (1962), How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2. Bhatia, V. (1993), Analyzing genre: Language use in professional settings, London: Longman.
3. Biber, D., Connor, U. and Upton, T. (2007), Discourse on the Move: Using Corpus Analysis to
Describe Discourse Structure, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
4. Brett, P. (1994), “A genre analysis of the results section of sociology articles”, English for
Specific Purposes, 13(1), 47–59.
5. Brown, G. and Yule, G. (1983), Discourse Analysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6. Brown, R. (2004), “Self-composed: rhetoric in psychology personal statements”, Written
Communication, 21(3), 242–260.

24. Widdowson, H. G. (1984), Exploration in Applied Linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.

Websites:
1. http://ayya.vn/mau-don-xin-nghi-viec-mau-don-xin-nghi-viec-viet-tay-hay/
2. http://jobsearch.about.com/od/sampleresignationletters/a/resignsamples.htm
3. http://luatminhgia.vn/Mau-don-xin-nghi-viec-newsview-237-701.aspx
4. http://www.hrlink.vn/diendan/index.php?showtopic=1797
5. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/paragraph