Recently, it has been recognized that it is not possible to becomeproficient in a foreign language without being aware of its socio-cultural factors andcomparing the language with the native language to avoid communication problemsand culture shock. It has also been observed that many English students impose theirculture when using this problem in real-life communication. Sometimes, non-nativeEnglish speakers wonder why the expressions and sentences they use in certainsituations offend British people. There are many research works on requests, but theybelong only to intra-linguistics or mono-linguistics. In this article, I refer to ways ofmaking requests that focus on some specific elements on the basis of politenesstheory, which are directness and indirectness and similarities and differences inmaking a request between English and Vietnamese languages.