VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST GRADUATE STUDIES KIỀU THỊ LỆ INVESTIGATING THE GENERIC STRUCTURE POTENTIAL OF ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE BLOG POSTS IN CONTENT MARKETING IN THE LIGHT OF SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS (SFL) (Khảo sát tiềm năng cấu trúc thể loại của các nhật ký cá nhân quảng cáo trong tiếp thị nội dung tiếng Anh và tiếng Việt theo quan điểm chức năng hệ thống) MASTER’S THESIS PROGRAM I Major: English Linguistics Code: 8220201.01 Hanoi – 2019 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST GRADUATE STUDIES KIỀU THỊ LỆ INVESTIGATING THE GENERIC STRUCTURE POTENTIAL OF ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE BLOG POSTS IN CONTENT MARKETING IN THE LIGHT OF SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS (SFL) (Khảo sát tiềm năng cấu trúc thể loại của các nhật ký cá nhân quảng cáo trong tiếp thị nội dung tiếng Anh và tiếng Việt theo quan điểm chức năng hệ thống) MASTER’S THESIS PROGRAM I Major: English Linguistics Code: 8220201. Nguyễn Thị Minh Tâm Hanoi - 2019 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com DECLARATION OF WORK I do solemnly and sincerely declare that: (1) I am the sole author/writer of this work; (2) This work is original; (3) Any use of any work in which copyright exists was done by way of fair dealing and for permitted purposes and any excerpt or extract from, or reference to or reproduction of any copyright work has been disclosed expressly and sufficiently and the title of the work and its authorship have been acknowledged in this Work; (4) I do not have any actual knowledge nor do I ought reasonably to know that the making of this work constitutes an infringement of any copyright work; (5) I hereby assign all and every rights in the copyright to this work to the University of Languages and International Studies (ULIS), who henceforth shall be owner of the copyright in this work and that any reproduction or use in any form or by any means whatsoever is prohibited without the written consent of ULIS having been first had and obtained; (6) I am fully aware that if in the course of making this work I have infringed any copyright whether intentionally or otherwise, I may be subject to legal action or any other action as may be determined by ULIS. Date: June 22nd, 2019 Candidate‘s Signature Kiều Thị Lệ i LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ABSTRACT Blog posts have been widely considered to be an effective tool in content marketing as they not only get the products exposed to the customers but also provoke reasonable and appealing motives for them to click buy. Among various types of blog posts, instructional blog post is the most popular type since they can create demand and bring many values to customers.
Instructional blog posts provide insights and directly address readers‘ problems or concerns. This study aims at finding the Generic Structure Potential (GSP) of English and Vietnamese instructional blog posts, based on the framework of Hasan (1985). The corpus consists of ten English and ten Vietnamese blog posts which were collected from blogs whose views per month surpass 150,000. Moreover, this research also seeks to find the similarities and differences between the two categories.
The analysis reveals that 36 types of potential elements might occur in the instructional blog posts. Based on the obligatory, optional and iterative elements found in the data, the GSP of English and Vietnamese instructional blog posts is proposed. In conclusion, While English instructional blog posts accomplish the mission of advertising, instructing and increasing leads; Vietnamese posts serve the purpose of instructing and increasing traffic to the page. The result of the study can be employed to evaluate the necessity and reasonability of the elements in the instructional blog posts and propose the most efficient factors to compose successful instructional blog posts.
Key words: generic structure potential (GSP), blog post, content marketing ii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This is a great pleasure for me to thank the people who had some contribution in the process of completing the present study. I wish to say thanks to all the staff in the Faculty of Postgraduate, University of Languages and International Studies, especially doctor Huynh Anh Tuan, the dean of our faculty that made this research possible and gave me the chance and the trust to work on this area of research despite the obstacles. I‘m grateful to my dear supervisor professor Dr. Nguyen Thi Minh Tam for all her valuable guidance and encouragement.
She always supported me with valuable suggestions and positive criticism. I‘m thankful for all the help and the flexibility she had with me despite being busy. I have a great joy thanking my dear friend Vu Thi Thu Huong who has been very generous in her friendship with me. I wish to show my gratitude to her for introducing this field of study to me and helping me to learn it.
Thank you for all the academic and moral support during the years of our friendship. My deepest gratitude goes to my dearest mother for all the love and sacrifices to grow me up. Thank you for being patient with me in my down times and tolerating my absence at home as well as encouraging me to pursue all my dreams since my childhood. iii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION OF WORK.
iii TABLE OF CONTENTS. iv LIST OF TABLES. vi LIST OF FIGURES. vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION.
Rationale of the study. Aims and objectives of the study. Scope of the study. The significance of the study.
Structure of the thesis. 3 CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND REVIEW OF LITERATURE. Generic Structure Potential (GSP) in SFL. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).
Genre and genre analysis in SFL. Macrostructure analysis and GSP. Blog posts as a special kind of genre. Overview about content marketing and blogging.
Internet/ web Genres. The data corpus. 31 iv LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Methods of the study.
Data analyzing procedure. 33 CHAPTER 4: RESULT AND DISCUSSION. Generic structure potential of instructional blog posts in English. Generic structure potential of instructional blog posts in Vietnamese.
Discussions: Answers to the research questions. Answer to RQ1: What is the generic structure potential of instructional blog posts in English?. RQ2: What is the generic structure potential of instructional blog posts in Vietnamese?. Answer to RQ3: What are the similarities and differences between instructional blog posts in English and Vietnamese in terms of generic structure potential?.
Limitations and suggestions for further studies. II v LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF TABLES Table 1. The data corpus. Newly found elements.
Occurrences and Frequencies of the elements. Average number of the elements. Number of obligatory, optional and reiterative elements. GSP of instructional blog posts in English.
GSP of instructional blog posts in Vietnamese. English and Vietnamese blog posts GSP in comparison. 65 vi LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Categorization of genre (Knapp & Watkins, 1994, p.
Swales‘ (1990) model of research article genre. Instructional blog post sample. 23 vii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION This introductory section presents a broad outline of this thesis regarding the rationale of study, research objectives, research methodology, scope of study, importance of the research article and structure of the study. Rationale of the study In recent years, more interest is placed on advertising and marketing as tools to bring value and attract target audiences.
People do not simply use advertisements to introduce and describe their products but to draw audience‘s attraction and enhance their loyalty. The challenge here is to create a text that bridges the gap between the intended audiences and the writer, or particularly the target customers and the copy writers. The text which is not able to make the intended relationship within a specific discourse community will not be capable of engaging the readers as insiders and cannot be comprehensible enough within that specific genre. However, this aim is satisfied by recognizing the textual variations within specific genres and to see how texts resemble or vary in accordance with their discourse organizations and the linguistic features applied.
Many materials and writings about how to write an effective blog are tremendously accessible on the internet, but to the best of my knowledge, little has been done on the specific structure of a blog, the factors that make it successful, and the factors that bore the readers. Given such a gap, this study attempts to investigate generic structure and typical features of blogs to see whether there is the a specific formula for a successful blog post and how a blog is written to attract target audiences, boost customers‘ loyalty and finally create more traffic for the products or services. The results can have good implications for the members of this discourse community such as copywriters and blog writers as well as advertisers. 1 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.
Aims and objectives of the study The study aims to explore the generic structure potential (GSP) of a type of content marketing blog posts – instructional blog posts - in English and Vietnamese. In order to reach this aim, three objectives are set out as below: + to explore the generic structure potential of instructional blog posts in English; + to explore the generic structure potential of instructional blog posts in Vietnamese; + to identify the similarities and differences between the generic structure potential of instructional blog posts in English and Vietnamese. With such objectives, the study attempts to seek the answers to the three research questions below: RQ1: What is the generic structure potential of instructional blog posts in English? RQ2: What is the generic structure potential of instructional blog posts in Vietnamese? RQ3: What are the similarities and differences between instructional blog posts in English and Vietnamese in terms of generic structure potential? 3. Research methodology This study deploys the Systemic Functional theory of language to analyze the distinctive rhetorical structures and to find the Generic Structure Potential (GSP) (Hasan 1989) that is inherent in the instructional blog posts.
Halliday and Hasan (1989) hold that the notion distinguishing any text from non-text is its textual unity. The textual unity of any written or spoken text primarily is categorized into two essential features: unity of structure (macro level) and unity of texture (micro level). However, the main purpose of this research is to analyze the generic structure, not the component of each element, only the macro level is put under focus. 2 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.
Scope of the study This research focuses on analyzing the instructional blog posts which are a popular and widely recognized type of blog posts. They are also highly employed as an effective content marketing blog as they can subtly generate demand and encourage customer to click buy. The study was premised on theory of genre analysis, proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1985). The aim of this study is to discover the data‘s generic structure potential (GSP) and discover the obligatory structure used to differentiate a particular genre from any others.
The data is categorized according to language uses and origin, which are English and Vietnamese. Macro-structure analysis is performed on the blog posts to draw the conclusion about GSP of each group. The significance of the study This study purports to ascertain the generic structure potential of blog posts in English and Vietnamese.