The Deployment of the Language of Evaluation in English and Vietnamese Spoken Discourse

Abstract

This thesis aims to examine differences in the deployment of Appraisal resources, focusing on Attitude and Graduation, by Vietnamese graduate students in Australia when participating in Vietnamese and English semi-casual oral discussions of popular topics relating to their experience living and studying in Australia as well as their opinions about their professional standing in Vietnam. The study employed the Appraisal framework developed by Martin and White (2005) and other authors as the coding scheme and the UAM Corpus Tool developed by Michael O'Donnell (2008) as a computerised linguistics annotation tool. The study found that the deployment of Attitude and Graduation resources by the Vietnamese students in the two corpora differed slightly in terms of the proportions of Attitude and Graduation deployed, but remarkably in the range of realisations of Attitude and Graduation.