Study On Language Skills Of Talk Shows Given By Oprah And Chen Luyu

TV talk program is a simple form of daily conversation presented to others through media. The speakers include the host, the guest and the audience. The topics mainly focus on social phenomena, politics, emotion and personal life, which are no lack of fashion, and deeply rooted in people's minds. Therefore, this type of program has widely been spread and warmly accepted and welcome almost all the world. Talk show as a TV program first appeared in American media in the 1950s and is called "talk show" in western countries, and also translated delicately into Chinese "脱口秀". Nowadays TV talk show has become a unique type of American TV program for half-a-century, which keeps high ratings and gains more popularity. In China, though TV talk show has a short history, it still has been developing quickly and has become one of the excellent programs step by step. Having learnt from West, the Chinese hostess combines its own cultural background, fully considers the taste of the audience and offers TV talk show in China, which shows the unique style of the Orient.The data selected in this paper are drawn from Chinese and American TV talk shows: A Date with Luyu and Oprah Winfrey Show, and the date are transcribed in accordance with the system of the conversational transcription. The paper aims to make a comparative analysis of language skills from conversation analysis and cultural perspective between Chen Luyu and Oprah Winfrey and mainly intends to probe into two questions:1. The similarities: the paper intends to analyze the language skills of the hosts from localstructure of the conversation. The analysis is concentrated on the three aspects: how to control the turns in dialogues, how to complete a question-answer structure, and how to take proper measures to repair the wrong utterances in the process of the interview.2. The differences: due to the differences of the cultures between China and America, thelanguage features of the hosts are also restricted by the different cultural contexts. The main purpose of this part is to compare the differences that include the choices of the topics, the hosting style and pragmatic strategies of the discourse in Chinese and American cultural contexts.The paper attempts to analyze the language skills of the hosts from the new view point—the perspective of conversation analysis and the differences of Chinese and American cultures. The researcher made a comparative study of language skills in A Date with Luyu and Oprah Winfrey Show from the two perspectives in order to offer new insights into the appreciation and understanding of the audience and make Chinese TV talk show more personalized and authentic.