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.
