Contrastive Genre Analysis Of Pubic Speeches By Native And Nonnative Speakers Of English

Throughout the history of civilization, people have extensively used publicspeaking as a means of communication, which can range from causal dialogues toserious inaugural speeches of presidents, from classroom discussion to academicforums or from debates to political diplomatic negotiations. Speech, like all othermodes of communication, has become an extremely important social activity, whichavails us in realizing specific communicative purposes, including giving information,delivering persuasion or simply, creating entertainment. In modern times, whenmutual understanding and cooperation have become far more important, publicspeaking is more widely and frequently practiced. In the field of school education inChina, English speech organization and strategies have constituted an increasinglyimportant part of pedagogical contents in addition to listening, writing and reading.That's why public English speech contests are receiving more and more attentionfrom the society. Consequently, how to improve teaching methods, how to adjustteaching contents and how to guide students to present a speech in a native wayposeabigchallengeto EnglishteachersinChina,especiallyincollegesanduniversities.Inevitably, speeches will be diversified in accordance with speech presenters'specific communicative purposes. Meanwhile, those presenters tend to differ witheach other in their application of speech macrostructures and microstructures. In thispaper, speech macrostructures specifically refer to schematic patterns in therealizationofEnglishpublicspeechesasonesinglegenreandspeechmicrostructures,on the other hand, are associated with communicative strategies in achievingeffectiveness in English public speeches, such as clarity, vividness, appropriatenessand so forth. In other words, although schematic structures (moves or steps) areimportant or even play decisive role in the fabrication of a genre, stylistic features,such as lexical choices, discourse markers and rhetorical devices cannot be ignoredsince these elements can reflect features of the genre from various perspectives.However, differences are bound to exist betweenpublic speeches given by native andnonnative speakers of English concerning those issues, such as application ofschematic structures and choices of communicative strategies, since one cannotseparate a language from his native cultural norms of speakingregardless of levels ofproficiency in language learning. Thus, a contrastive genre analysis on public...