مطالب

The study analyzed a corpus of 40 emails of requests composed by Vietnamese students to their university lecturers. The study purpose was to identify politeness strategies composed by Vietnamese students using Brown and Levinson’s model and Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper’s framework as guidelines. To obtain the results, a discourse analysis was implemented. The AnConc software was used as a research tool for the study. 40 emails from 80 students were collected and divided into three types of requestive emails: assistance, confirmation and consideration, and recommendation for data analysis. Syntactical and lexical modifiers were examined and politeness markers were identified manually by the assistance of the AnConc software. The results indicated that Vietnamese students often used status-stating, deferent and solidary politeness strategies to approach their professors for personal requests. While using these three strategies, the target students had to use syntactical and lexical devices such as modals, interrogatives, please, and hedges as speech acts or supportive moves to gain their requestive purposes. The study also identified a common pattern that Vietnamese students liked to use the email corpus in the direction of salutation, self-introduction, requests, reasons for request, and thank compliments. The study has pedagogical implications for language teachers and learners; e.g. email writing should be taught to students, especially ESP students as these students do not know the format and the appropriate language they should use in email composition. Language students should also pay attention to the correct formal form and cultural differences when composing requestive emails delivered to their professors.

This study aimed at determining the effect of cathodal Transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation (c-tDCS) of Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) on learning simple volleyball serves. This semi-experimental study was performed as pre-test and post-test with a control group. Thirty male volleyball players with an average age of 14±0.50 years were selected through purposeful sampling based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. The participants were randomly assigned to experimental (n=15) and control (n=15) groups. During eight consecutive sessions, the left DLPFC of participants was stimulated for 10 min using sham and real c-tDCS of 1.5 mA before each session. The participants then performed 35 simple volleyball serves. Absolute error and total variability of participants' performance in pre-test, in the first, third and eighth sessions were recorded. Data analysis by repeated-measures showed that there was a significant difference between absolute error (F=14.597, P = 0.001) and total variability (F=17.523, P = 0.001) of experimental and control group performance. ANCOVA showed that absolute error and total variability of the experimental group performance was respectively (P = 0.013 and P = 0.018) in the first session, (P = 0.021 and P = 0.007) in the third session and (P = 0.001 and P = 0.001) in the eighth session, which were significantly higher than that in the control group. Thus, it seems that c-tDCS of DLPFC is associated with reduced declarative memory activity in the cognitive stage leading to a negative impact on serve learning in beginner volleyball learners.