English and Vietnamese noun phrases Running head: english and vietnamese noun phrase

However, numerals and articles cannot occur in the same Vietnamese noun phrase. Therefore, the expression below is ungrammatical in Vietnamese

* Các ba con gà

Teaching implications:

From what I have discussed so far, I would like to suggest some teaching implications for teaching as well as studying English as a second language.

As we know, students tend to translate their target language based on knowledge of their mother tongue. Here, because of differences in hierarchical relationships, word order, and co-occurrence restrictions between English and Vietnamese noun phrases, it’s easy for students to make mistakes when translating from English to Vietnamese and vice verse.

Firstly, they tend to put the wrong order of constituents in a noun phrase. For example, the Vietnamese expression “một quyển sách quý” may be translated into English like this “a book precious”. Therefore, as teachers we should give enough explanation of negative transfers in word order between the two languages or we give some funny expressions like “beautiful girl” “handsome boy” and distinguish them with “cô gái đẹp” and “chàng trai dễ thương”, respectively so that students may have some impressions of this grammar point.

Secondly, the occurrence of English nouns and determiners is obligatory, whereas that of Vietnamese is optional. Therefore, Vietnamese students tend to produce nouns alone, without any determiners or sometimes, they cannot find the equivalent determiners in Vietnamese. For instance, there is a slight difference between the articles “các” and “những”- “các” can only occur in contexts that denote definite noun phrases while “những” can only occur in contexts that denote indefinite ones. As a result, students tend to miss “the” when translating the expression “Các quyển sách quý” into English

“precious books” instead of “the precious books”. Therefore it’s necessary for us to pay more attention to teaching determiners especially articles

Last but not least, some restrictions on co- occurrence of constituents may result in wrong translations. For example, articles or demonstratives and possessives can co- occur in Vietnamese, we can say “những con mèo của tôi” but it will be ill-performed in English to say “the my cats”. It’s our responsibilities to design some exercises such as multiple choice, filling the blank which help students overcome these negative transfers or even organize some games to motivate mind students’

Conclusion:

To sum up, noun phrases as well as other phrases play an important role in mastering any language. Without noun phrase, there would have no agents, no patients, and no recipients. Almost every language has noun phrases but they have different properties in different language. In general there are some similarities in the internal and external English and Vietnamese noun phrase. However, there are still some important differences between them. A contrastive analysis between English and Vietnamese is necessary and interesting for teaching and studying. I hope that this paper, to a certain extent, will provide language teachers some ideas for their teaching of noun phrases.

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