This study which focused on speech acts of invitation, was conducted in the hope of finding out the similarities and differences between how invitations are made in English and Vietnamese by the people who are speaking these two languages under the light of contrastive analysis and cross-cultural perspective. Data used for analysis in this study were mainly collected through survey questionnaires, Through analysis of forms of inviting provided by two groups of participants, it was deduced that native speakers of English and Vietnamese are quite different in making invitations under three social variables: social distance, relative power, and threats to each other’s negative face. One of the prominent results from data analysis is that Vietnamese invitations are more diverse in terms of structural diversity, and Vietnamese speakers are more direct in extending invitations in comparison to English ones. Once, similarities and differences have been identified, implications on teaching this speech were made.