Speaker
Description
In this increasingly integrated world, commercial and tourism activities across country-boundaries have flourished at an unprecedented level, which requires more intercultural understanding for successful communication. The field of intercultural communication has been of interest to linguists for recent decades considering the interwoven relationship between language and culture. However, the number of studies on these topics is still low, especially those using the corpus linguistics approach. This study attempts to investigate the expectations and cultural orientations reflected in the written reviews by English-speaking travellers from the UK, the US and Australian to Vietnam, in comparison with local Vietnamese people. To achieve the research purpose, two comparable corpora of travellers’ hotel reviews extracted from the website Tripadvisor were built, one is in Vietnamese language that acts as the base to compare with English language corpus (including three English varieties, British, American and Australian English). In terms of methods, both quantitative and qualitative analysis are used with the support of various functions of the SketchEngine software. In the end, the study finds out key concerned semantic topics and significant cultural orientations between Vietnamese and English-speaking travellers, which are related to the concept of low context/ high context (Hall, 1976), masculinity/ femininity, individualism/ collectivism, uncertainty avoidance and short-term/ long-term orientation (Hofstede, 1980).
Key words: Traveller’s reviews, expectations, cultural orientations, language patterns, Vietnamese, English
Biography
Trinh Thuy Ngan is an English teacher/IELTS trainer with nearly 10 years of experience. She holds a Master's degree in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at University College Dublin, Ireland, and has gained other professional qualifications like CELTA, TESOL and TKT. She is the founder of "IELTS for Better Vietnam" project where she trains IELTS and soft skills for Vietnamese students. Simultaneously, she has recently nominated as the Director of Foreign Language Centre of Van Hien University. Her research interests are intercultural communication in language teaching, English for academic purposes, corpus linguistics and curriculum development.
