In the context of second language learning,there is a popular assumption that the
similarities between the mother tongue and the targetlanguage will lead to
facilitation and differences will cause interferences. This serves as a reasonable
background for the appearanceand steady development of contrastive analysis,
which examines a pair of languages withan aim to find their common as well as
distinctive features.
Although language is the basic human capability, it seems to be one of our most
complicated behaviours. In the modern life, it is the rapid growth in communication
technology that has created new media for language use. Therefore, analyzing
language is unsurprisingly paid much attention to not only by linguists but also by
people at large.
Language cannot be meaningfulwithout a social context, in which it is not only
regarded as a means of communication but also a vehicle of thought. Analyzing the
function and linguistic features used in a certain context is the task of a discipline:
discourse analysis. While types of discourse are universally similar, the function
and linguistic features of each discourse turn out to be different depending on each
language. This inspires the thesis author up for the contrastive study of discourse
properties between English and Vietnamese, and the chosen subject is news on
internet newspapers.