Chinese And American College Students' English Speeches: A Perspective Of Genre Analysis

With the development in discourse analysis, genre analysis of the non-literary works has become an important area. As an effective approach, genre analysis, with its fundamental purpose to study the communicative purposes and the strategies adopted, aims to explain the writing mechanism of a certain genre in a deeper sense, explore the hidden social and psychological factors, and reveal the norms of generic structuring and the special ways to achieve communicative background. Communicative purposes determine the generic structure which in turn determines the content and the language use.As a specific language use, English public speeches have received much attention from scholars in linguistics, especially the rhetoricians. However, traditional researches on English public speeches are carried out mainly in terms of the stylistic features and rhetorical devices and so on. Rare studies are conducted from the perspective of genre analysis. The present study makes a contrastive analysis of English public speeches by Chinese and American college students from a generic point of view in attempt to find the differences in macro-generic structures and micro-linguistic features, and explore the reasons behind in the hope that it can offer greater insights into further researches in speech writing and speech analysis.Therefore, a collection of 60 speech samples is gathered from English speech competitions held in China and America respectively. Among them, thirty pieces of the Chinese speech material are chosen from the "21st Century Cup" National English Speaking Contest; and the remaining thirty pieces are collected from the nation-wide collegiate English speaking contests in America over the years. The present study is carried out at both macro and micro level. At the macro level, by using for reference Bhatia's model of move-strategy analysis, the author makes a genre analysis of the two sample groups of data respectively. The result shows that the selected samples actually have the identifiable moves. Meanwhile, several different strategies are utilized to recognize these moves. Prepared speeches by Chinese and American college students belong to the same genre, aiming at persuasion, sharing a lot in common in generic structures, both including five obligatory moves. However, in different social cultural background, the speakers in two countries show some divergences in the choice of strategies and in the percentage of strategies in the three obligatory moves. As for the micro-linguistic features, many differences exist in lexical choices, syntactical sentences and rhetorical devices. In addition, the reasons for the differences are analyzed in terms of the cultural background, rhetorical traditions and the language competence.