Study Of Native-native TV Talk-show And Native-nonnative TV Talk-show In Terms Of Feedback

The present study conducts a comparative study of native-native TV Talk-show and native-nonnative TV Talk-show in terms of feedback. The study follows Clancy to classify feedback into the following five types: Backchannel, Resumptive Opener, Repetition, Reactive Expression and Collaborative Finishes. The data used in this study are all made up of transcripts of 16 programs of"Yang Lan One on One"broadcasted on Shanghai Oriental Cable TV, of which half are conversations between Yang and Chinese, and another half are conversations broadcasted in English between Yang and foreigners.The quantitative and qualitative analyses are adopted to explore the following questions: (1)Whether there are any differences between native-native TV Talk-show and native-nonnative TV Talk-show in terms of feedback? (2)In which aspects they differ from each other? (3) Why they differ from each other? Amount of speech for each data was measured in terms of the total number of words uttered within certain period of time. The result shows that (1) there are many differences between the two kinds of programs in terms of feedback, and the differences are as follows: The feedback uttered by participants in English interview is almost one third of those in Chinese program;Resumptive Openers used by English interviews are more than that by Chinese interviews. Chinese interviews use repetitions almost three times of those used English interviews;Gap between Chinese interview and English interview in term of Collaborative Finish use is the biggest of all;Proportion of each type of feedback different from each other; Statistic result also shows that most Chinese feedbacks and English feedbacks both occur at TRP only with little difference in proportion. (2) In the process of data-coding, the author is aware of that there is a phenomenon which the previous researchers have never mentioned. The author found that different types of feedback often occur together, thus combination of different types of feedback appear. The author thinks that such combinations of different types can also be regarded as a special type of feedback. In addition, what should be mentioned is that this type can only be found in Chinese interviews.The significance of the present study is as follows: The contrastive study concerning about feedback in native-native interview and native-nonnative interview of the same program, will help better understanding and appreciation of this TV program. In the next place, the findings in the present study can give people insight into how to communicate with people from different cultural background, especially useful for Chinese people when they communicate with English-spoken people. Last but not the least, the current study complements the finding of previous research and contributes to the research literature of TV talk show as well as feedback in conversation.