Luận án Phân tích hình ảnh Việt Nam qua blogs của các bloggers du lịch người Anh theo cách tiếp cận đa phương thức

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY TRẦN THỊ HIẾU THUỶ BRITISH TRAVEL BLOGGERS’ PORTRAYAL OF VIETNAM: A MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS (Phân tích hình ảnh Việt Nam qua blogs của các bloggers du lịch người Anh theo cách tiếp cận đa phương thức) MAJOR: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS CODE: 9220201 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics HÀ NỘI, 2022 (13) 146.44 tailor  (14) 134.57 dong  (15) 130.26 delta  (16) 124.47 lantern  (17) 120.45 lush  (18) 79.03 spectacular  (19) 78.41 trek  (20) 76.84 temple  (21) 71.81 puppet  (22) 71.54 hike  (23) 61.68 cruise  (24) 57.90 delicious  (25) 50.60 bicycle  (26) 50.46 cafe  MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY TRẦN THỊ HIẾU THUỶ BRITISH TRAVEL BLOGGERS’ PORTRAYAL OF VIETNAM: A MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS (Phân tích hình ảnh Việt Nam qua blogs của các bloggers du lịch người Anh theo cách tiếp cận đa phương thức) MAJOR: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS CODE: 9220201 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics SUPERVISORS: ASSOC. PROF. DR. LÂM QUANG ĐÔNG HÀ NỘI, 2022 STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP The thesis entitled “British travel bloggers’ portrayal of Vietnam: A multimodal analysis” has been submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. I, the undersigned, hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis, and I have fully acknowledged and referenced the ideas and work of others, whether published or unpublished, in my thesis. The thesis does not contain work extracted from a thesis, dissertation or research paper previously presented for another degree or diploma at this or any other university. Signature TRẦN THỊ HIẾU THUỶ ABSTRACT This dissertation reports a case study on British travel bloggers’ appraisal of Vietnam as a tourism destination projected in their textual and visual accounts of touring the country. The study lent itself to two Halliday’s SFL extensions for interpersonal metafunction, which are the Appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005) and Grammar of Visual Design (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). Based on them, it developed a multimodal conceptual framework to translate interactive qualities encoded in evaluative adjectives and still images into domains of tourist gaze and corresponding appreciation values, the interrelation of which formulated a portrayal of Vietnam and indicated the sociolinguistic perspectives of tourism discourse. The case study was approached qualitatively, adopting for itself the social constructivism paradigm and taking a social semiotic multimodal perspective. It employed content analysis strategy to treat a collection of multimodal data from 10 travel blog posts about Vietnam. Findings from the study show that Vietnam is generally portrayed as a destination of identity and diversity. The country provides tourists with unique experience of destinations, culinary and local lifestyle while at the same time being cost-competitive. Authenticity and strangerhood were two prominent sociolinguistic perspectives as featured in these blog posts, which indicates that tourists may look for and be attracted by what is authentically Vietnamese and what is different from their home culture. The findings also underline the co-contribution of the linguistic sign, in this case evaluative adjectives, and the visual sign, in this case still images, as interpersonal meaning-making resources. To describe the destination image, still images served as evidence for the credibility of the bloggers’ narration and advice. To express sociolinguistic perspectives, still images supported the linguistic realisations of authenticity and strangerhood, and in some cases delivered an even stronger message than words. Not only does the study present a source of feedback from international travellers to tourism practice in Vietnam and suggest authentic materials for tourism translation training and English language learning, but it also provides insights into the multimodal analysis of tourism discourse which remains an under-researched area in Vietnam. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to many people whose kind support and assistance has made this study possible. First and foremost, I am greatly indebted to my supervisor, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Lam Quang Dong. He is the one who transformed me from a teaching practitioner to a brave novice researcher who are ready to accept challenge and overcome it. He taught me the first lesson in Linguistics and orientated me to the field of multimodality research. His critical comments and attention to details helped me improve this dissertation at every step. He has always been extremely patient and encouraging throughout my PhD journey. This endeavour would not have been possible without his guidance and support. I am grateful to Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ho Ngoc Trung, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hoang Tuyet Minh, Dr Huynh Anh Tuan, Assoc. Prof. Dr Le Hung Tien, Prof. Hoang Van Van and Prof. Nguyen Quang who generously provided me with orientation and advice on my dissertation. Their great erudition and wisdom as well as their academic achievements have fuelled me to try harder on my way to the completion of this dissertation. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr Le Phuong Thao for her expertise, warm-heartedness and unconditional support, without which I might have travelled a much longer way to accomplishment. My special thanks go to Faculty of English and Hanoi Open University for providing a supportive environment and making my time here most enjoyable; and to my PhD student colleagues, who have endured this challenging yet rewarding PhD journey with me. Finally, I could not have taken this journey without my husband who has stood by me through my travails and supported the family during most of my graduate studies, and my beloved family members with their understanding and encouragement. This dissertation has been an outcome of their love and sacrifice. TABLE OF CONTENTS APPENDIX 4 – COLLECTION OF PHOTOS 225 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Abbreviations of appreciation values: + Positive appreciation - Negative appreciation comp “appreciation: composition” reac “appreciation: reaction” qual quality imp impact val “appreciation: valuation” Other abbreviations: POS Part of Speech SFL Systemic Functional Linguistics LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES TABLES Table 2.1: Approaches to evaluation (Martin & White, 2005, p.39) 20 Table 2.2: Interactive meaning (adapted from Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996) 30 Table 2.3: Linguistic realisation of Metafunctions 66 Table 2.4: Appraisal, in relation to lexicogrammar and phonology 66 (adapted from Martin & White, 2005, p.35) 66 Table 2.5: Sub-types of appreciation (Martin & White, 2005, pp.56-57) 68 Table 3.1: Summary of word and photo counts 94 Table 3.2: Sample analysis of appreciation (Tran, 2018) 104 Table 4.1: The title photos of the blog posts 114 Table 4.2: List of keywords from the database 117 Table 4.3: Photo distribution, by bloggers 120 Table 4.4: Where did the bloggers go in Vietnam? 122 Table 4.5: Number of words and still images, by bloggers 125 Table 4.6: Appreciation values – Places 127 Table 4.7: Analysis of the “Cathedral” photo 132 Table 4.8: Analysis of the “Citadel” photo 133 Table 4.9: More examples of place photos 134 Table 4.10: Analysis of the “Heading down Cu Chi Tunnel” photo 137 Table 4.11: Analysis of the “On Ha Long cruise” photo 138 Table 4.12: More examples of activities photos 139 Table 4.13: Appreciation values - Food 142 Table 4.14: Analysis of “Pho in Hanoi” photo 145 Table 4.15: Analysis of “My first Vietnamese ice coffee” photo 147 Table 4.16: Collection of food photos 148 Table 4.17: Appreciation values - Traffic 151 Table 4.18: Examples of photos of the locals in activities 153 Table 4.19: Examples of photos of the locals in activities 155 Table 4.20: Examples of accommodation photos 159 Table 4.21: Most frequently used evaluative adjectives, by domains 161 Table 5.1: Examples of adjectivals for places’ authenticity 167 Table 5.2: Authenticity in “bridge” photo 169 Table 5.3: Authenticity in “food” photo 171 Table 5.4: Examples of adjectivals for positive strangerhood 176 Table 5.5: Strangerhood in “War Museum” photo 179 Table 5.6: Strangerhood in the “street vendor” photo 180 Table 5.7: Examples of adjectivals for positive strangerhood 183 Table 5.8: Strangerhood in “Hoa Lo Prison” photo 185 Table 5.9: Strangerhood in “traffic” photo 188 FIGURES Figure 2.1: Types of process. (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004, p.172) 17 Figure 2.2: An overview of appraisal resources (Martin & White, 2005, p.38) 21 Figure 2.3: Theme and Information Systems in the clause 23 Figure 2.4: The metafunctions of a visual design (charted from Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) 25 Figure 2.5: Vector and tree structure (Kress & van Leewen, 2006, p.42) 26 Figure 2.6: Distance zones (charted from Hall, 1966, pp.110-120) 31 Figure 2.7: The dimensions of visual space (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006, p.197) 36 Figure 2.8: Google search results for “edit photo trip” 45 Figure 2.9: A generic description of travel blogs 51 Figure 2.10: Contact – Example analysis of visual offers 70 Figure 2.11: Attitude – Example analysis of Subjectivity/ Objectivity 73 (Retrieved from https://vietnam.travel/drinks-vietnam-infographics ) 73 Figure 2.12: A multimodal framework to study travel blogs 74 Figure 3.1: Four worldviews (Creswell & Creswell, 2018) 81 Figure 3.2: Steps to collect multimodal data 91 Figure 3.3: Findings from Stage 1 - Pilot study 97 Figure 3.4: Procedure of data collection and analysis 101 Figure 3.5: Sub-types of Appreciation (Martin & White, 2005, p. 56) 103 Figure 3.6: Example analysis of represented participants 106 Figure 3.7. Realizations of interactive properties (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) 107 Figure 3.8: Example analysis of Interactive meanings 107 Figure 3.10: The analytical framework of the study 109 Figure 4.1: 50 most frequent words/ phrases in the database 118 Figure 4.2: Percentages of words/phrases by themes 119 Figure 4.3: Photo distribution, by themes 121 Figure 4.4: Construction of [beautiful] 129 Figure 4.5: Construction of [chaotic] 130 Figure 4.6: Construction of [amazing] 130 Figure 4.7: Construction of [spectacular] 131 Figure 4.8: Construction of [delicious] 143 Figure 4.6 (reposted from 4.1.2.2): Construction of [amazing] 143 Figure 4.7 (reposted from 4.1.2.2): Construction of [spectacular] 144 Figure 4.9: Construction of [cheap] 144 Figure 4.10: Construction of [crazy] 151 Figure 4.11: Construction of [clean] 158 Figure 5.1: Construction of [local] 168 Figure 5.2: Examples of construction of [cheap] 177 Figure 5.3: Construction of [different] 178 CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1. RATIONALE This research work posited itself in the theoretical world of tourism discourse study, taking multimodality as its analytical approach with an attempt to decode the tourist gaze at Vietnam from the linguistic and visual meaning-making resources in travel blog posts. It was inspired practically by the growing importance of positive reviews on social media to the development of tourism industry in Vietnam. Traditionally, tourism studies have been influenced by positivist and post-positivist paradigms, focusing on economic aspects and being based on quantitative research methods (Jennings, 2009, as cited in Francesconi, 2014, p.7). Recently, tourism studies have been relocated in social sciences and environmental sciences, with a focus on social interactions in tourism discourse. The analysis may be approached from several other dimensions, seeing how tourism discourse spells out the relations between tourism and persuasion (Bruthiaux, 2000; Beeton, Weeler & Ham, 2005), tourism and the consumption of place (Snepenger, 2007; Yui, 2008; Urry, 2010), tourism and national identity (Palmer, 1999; Pretes, 2003), tourism and the destination image (Calzati, 2013; Denti, 2015), and the tourist gaze at the destination (Francesconi, 2014; Denti, 2015; and Zhang & Hitchcock, 2017). The overwhelming subjects of tourism discourse study are the language use in conventional tourism materials, such as advertisement and promotion webpage of the destinations. On the other hand, travel blogs, a modern genre of tourism discourse, are often treated as an object for discussion in a study rather than the subject of the study itself. When travel blogs are approached linguistically, mostly they function as data for studying the tourist gaze and destination image. The increasing popularity of travel blogs, which often take the form of “autodiegetic narratives” (Calzati, 2012, p.2), has indicated that the source of data on offer to linguistic study is becoming richer and richer. It is obvious that travel blogs afford both verbal and visual narration. Bloggers now hold a dynamic role in communicating the meanings they build through an integration of tourist texts, images and videos in their posts. The more embedded medial factors like images and videos are in travel blog posts, the more easily they signify the bloggers’ gaze and construct a corresponding destination image, which may ultimately leave an impact on “the reader’s travel choice and decision-making process” (Cachiani, 2014, p.196, as cited in Denti, 2015, p.49). The co-occurrence of visual and linguistic signs, methodologically, requires approaching travel blogs multimodally so that analysis can be done on both meaning-making resources. Besides, unlike conventional tourism promotion media, travel blogs have gained the reputation of being a useful source of travel information for frequent internet users who trusted their reviews, trip photos and advice (Pabel & Prideaux, 2015; Kassegn & Sahil, 2020). The implication is that the gaze placed by the bloggers on a destination and the destination image shaped by their experience of exposure to the destination are authentic and not distorted for marketing purposes like the one in tourism promotional materials. Therefore, there is room left to investigate into how the bloggers, by using a combination text and visuals on their travel blogs, have portrayed the destinations and explicitly or implicitly encouraged/ discouraged the travel decisions of their readers. This room for research may be even larger in the case of destinations being Asian countries, such as Vietnam, which are often thought of as an exotic and mysterious land by travellers-to-be from countries of Western cultures. The practical motivation for this current research lies in the fact that tourism plays an essential role in the economic structure of Vietnam and so, understanding how Vietnam is portrayed and appreciated as a tourism destination by travel bloggers may assist the promotion of Vietnam travel. The statistics by Word Tourism and Travel Council (2021) has shown that after two years of COVID-19 pandemic, the tourism sector has suffered great losses with its contribution to global GDP plunging by nearly half compared to the 10.4% of world GDP in the year 2019. Employment destruction occurred, and 62 million tourism-related jobs have been lost. While the 2021 has seen subtle improvements, estimates for tourism in the years to come are hard to make because of its dependence on how the pandemic is going to evolve. Yet, stakeholders in tourism are working hard on adaptive solutions to recover the industry. Particularly in the case of Vietnam which was honoured twice with the World Travel Award as Asia’s leading destination (in 2018 and 2021), the country has been chosen by an increasing number of international tourists as a destination for their leisure pursuits and discovery of Asian cultures. This is a good signal for Vietnam since the country has identified tourism to be a key in its strategic development scheme. Specifically, in Decision No 147/QĐ-Ttg signed on 22 January 2020, the general objectives to Vietnam tourism are: By 2025, Vietnam will become an attractive destination, striving to be among the top three countries in tourism development in Southeast Asia and top 50 countries with the world's leading tourism competitiveness, of which all 14 criteria will have been strengthened in line with the sustainable development requirement. By 2030, tourism will have become a spearhead and sustainable economic sector. Vietnam will have become a particularly attractive destination, in top 30 countries with the world's leading tourism competitiveness, meeting sustainable development goals. (https://english.luatvietnam.vn/decision-no-147-qd-ttg-on-approving-the-strategy-of-tourism-development-for-vietnam-by-2030-180149-Doc1.html) To realize such objectives, it is important that tourism policy makers as well as travel agencies be proactive about the growth and preservation of their industry. Over the tough years of the Covid-19 pandemic, the importance of maintaining prospective travellers’ interest in the country has been emphasised. This has been realised through a number of efforts, for example, to encourage digital transformation in tourism sector so as to get ready for restarting safe tourism activities, and possibly, spread words-of-web that recount positive tourism experience in Vietnam. Many questions are therefore posed, for instance, is there a consistent picture of Vietnam in online travel reviews? In discussions about Vietnam tourism on travel blogs, are the appreciations positive or negative? Is it true that the visuals posted on travel blogs about Vietnam can contribute to the creation of such a portrayal of Vietnam? And do the posts on travel blogs show an inclination for authenticity and strangeness, or do the play nature and the cultural/ ideology clash that the travellers experienced during their Vietnam trips make more sense? The fact that more and more people are blogging about, responding to and sharing travel-related contents about Vietnam indicates that such blog posts can provide rich information to construct a portrayal of Viet Nam and offer valuable data for linguistic study. However, as for Vietnam, there have not been any linguistics studies to date in either Vietnamese or English on travel blogs in general, and few research works have focused on how the country is depicted in the content of posts by international bloggers in particular. Given that the concept of multimodal analysis is relatively new in linguistics and the number of travel blogs being analysed multimodally for tourist gaze and an Asian destination image is still modest, a research work conducted in this direction can offer new insights into the issue. Therefore, the current study entitled “BRITISH TRAVEL BLOGGERS’ PORTRAYAL OF VIETNAM: A MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS” was conducted to fill in the current research gap in terms of subjects for study, research methods and the data base for research and hopefully provide further insights into travel blogs as a genre of tourism discourse while contributing practically to the development of tourism and tourism English training in Vietnam. 1.2. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES The study aims to investigate into British travel bloggers’ gaze at Vietnam as a tourism destination which rooted from their experience of touring the country from a multimodal perspective. In order to achieve the overall aims, the following objectives were set out for the study: + to construct a portrayal of Viet Nam based on the gaze and the appreciation of the gazed of the British bloggers by decoding the linguistic signs and visuals on the travel blog posts; + to grade the level to which the four sociolinguistic perspectives of tourism discourse are reflected in the linguistic and visual signs of the British travel blog posts. 1.3. RESEARCH QUESTIONS With the aforementioned aims and objectives, the study soug