In the present paper, address forms are chosen to investigate because of several reasons. Firstly, they are integral part of language use, they open speech acts and set thetone for the interchanges that follow, they establish the relative power and distance of speaker and hearer (Wood, L. A. and Kroger, R. O. (1991). Secondly, because of the strong influence of Confucianism, hierarchy is taken seriously in Vietnamese society. This character is reflected in address forms of Vietnamese. Therefore, address forms are one of the most important elements of politeness in communication in Vietnamese.

Systematic research on address forms began with the study of Brown and Gilman (1960). Since then many other studies have investigated address terms in several languages. The results illustrate that address systems are various across languages and cultures (Brown, R. and Ford, M. (1961); Kroger, R. O. , Wood, L. A. and Kim, (1984); Braun, F (1988); Warren, J. (2006). The address system in Vietnamese has been examined by several studies. It is described as a complex system with the extension of kinship terms and is impacted by a hierarchical society based on age, social status and gender. The forms of address in Vietnamese have been investigated from the aspect of lexical, grammar as well as semantics (Thompson, 1987; Nguyen, 1996). It is also being studied in the relationship with culture, pragmatics and in the second language acquisition environment (Cao, 2001; Nguyen, 2004; Tran, 2013).

This study addresses the following three research questions:

1. How do German learners of Vietnamese use address forms in Vietnamese?

2. How do their performances of Vietnamese address forms coincide with or differ from native speakers?

3. Does the learners’ language proficiency affect their performances of Vietnamese address forms?

Participants

40 German learners of Vietnamese at low-and high- proficiency levels and 40 native Vietnamese speakers participated in this study.

Three instruments were applied in this study, which are:

• The Discourse Completion Task (DCT)

• Questionnaire

• Interview

Results

The results show that proficiency level has an influence on how the German learners selected address forms in Vietnamese. Overall, the high proficiency group showed a closer tendency towards native speaker norms in the use of address forms than the low proficiency group.

In most case, the high proficiency group’s performances of using address forms were similar to that of the native speaker.

However, there are some differences between those learners and the native speakers’ use of address forms. For example, in scenario 4, greet a neighbor, 50% of learners did not use self-reference form (“cháu”). It can be considered impolite in Vietnamese culture.

As expected, the repertoire of address forms of the low proficiency group is not close to native speakers’ norms and has a clear distance with the high proficiency group. One of their most common mistake is the use of pronoun “tôi” (for example, scenario 2 and 4 in the previous slides). The results from the interview can give some explanations for this phenomenon. They think “tôi” can be use in most cases; or they do not know which address form to choose, so they choose “tôi” for safety reason.

The study also suggests some implications for Vietnamese instruction.

In future study, we intend to develop a system of specific awareness exercises for teaching address forms in Vietnamese and apply them in real classes to evaluate the effectiveness.