Telephone conversation openings in English and
Vietnamese (from a language - cultural
perspective)
Trần Thị Thanh Hương
Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ
Luận văn Thạc sĩ ngành: English Linguistics; Mã số: 60 22 15
Người hướng dẫn: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyễn Văn Độ
Năm bảo vệ: 2009 Abstract. The paper presents the results of a comparative study on how English and
Vietnamese speakers of different languages manage the opening of business and private
telephone calls. The communicative strategies speakers use in each language are analyzed
qualitatively and quantitatively, allowing a systematic comparison across cultures and languages.
The frame for comparative analysis is based on four fundamental moves that may be performed
in a telephone call opening: summons-answer, identification-recognition, greeting, how-are-you
sequence, (Schegloff, 1972, 1979, 1986; Hopper, 1992; Hatch, 1992). Implications are drawn for
cross-cultural research on interaction and for teaching English as a second language so that
Vietnamese learners of English would be able to open a phone call in an appropriate way.
Keywords. Kỹ năng nghe nói; Tiếng Anh; Hội thoại; Giao văn hóa; Tiếng Việt

Content
The beginning of conversations has received much attention in the fields of sociolinguistics,
pragmatics, and conversation analysis. Conversation analysis of telephone conversations is a
fairly well established area of investigation, beginning in the late 1960s with Schegloff

The telephone is the primary electronic medium for interpersonal communication and telephone
communication has an indispensable element of everyday life. Due to the lack of visual
communication, at least in the normal use of this medium, linguistic information is foreground.
Thus, telephone conversation is a challenge to anybody learning a foreign language and remains
a sensitive area in intercultural encounters, even for those who have mastered the basics of a
foreign language and culture.
Inexperience in dealing with live interactive telephone conversations in the target language can
also be a serious problem for some second language learners. They need opportunity to listen to,
interpret and sum up what they hear in a series of authentic recorded phone conversations. Their
listening can be greatly facilitated if they are exposed to authentic telephone conversations and
also taught the conversational structures and options as well as formulaic expressions.
Telephone call openings represent an ideal object of study for cross-cultural pragmatics research.
Since these social encounters are very specific and strongly constrained by technology, the range
of actions that can be performed in them is limited so that one can thus observe how different
cultures and languages vary in their realization of the same interactional routine. That is why this
paper chooses telephone conversation openings for the study.
2. Aims of the study
The study aims:
1) To find out standard formulas used in beginning telephone conversations among English and
Vietnamese speakers as suggested by Schegloff.
2) To discover how culture affects the ways English and Vietnamese start their telephone
conversations
3) To draw an implication in English teaching for Vietnamese students.
3. Scope of the study
I restrict my study on formal business telephone conversation openings and informal personal
ones which are used by people doing different jobs and at different ages.
4. Theoretical / practical significance of the study
In general, telephone conversation openings in both English and Vietnamese follow the same
routine as Schegloff suggested. However, there is slight difference between English and
Vietnamese. In English telephone openings there is higher formality, but Vietnamese language

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