Conversation Analysis Of MA Thesis Defense Based On The Principle Of Goal-direction

Recently,researches on academic discourse gradually become a hot topic.But most researchers concern writing academic discourse,only a few studies concerns spoken academic discourse,let alone thesis defense.Therefore,this thesis adopted the qualitative analysis with the goal analysis model under the Principle of Goal-direction to analyze the MA thesis defense.The linguistic data was recorded and strictly transcribed into written forms by the author herself from MA thesis defense held in College of Foreign Languages and Literature,in a famous Normal University in Lanzhou,from the year 2015 to 2016,totally 35 thesis defenses.The purpose of this study is to describe and analyze the MA thesis defense conversation,and reveal the characteristics of thesis defense,so as to provide some guidance and advice for the teachers and students participating in the thesis defense,and help improve the efficiency and quality of the thesis defense.The Principle of Goal-direction was proposed by Professor Liao Meizhen(2005a),and the Principle of Goal-direction is used to analyze conversation from the perspective of goal.And MA thesis defense is goal-directed and the realization of goals through the process of thesis defense depends on the mutually joint efforts and activities.Teachers adopted different linguistic strategies and constructed different power to realize their own goals,and students also used different linguistic strategies and constructed different power to defense and to achieve their goals.Therefore,based on the Principle of Goal-direction and goal analysis model,this thesis adopted a descriptive and analytical way to exam the characteristics of thesis defense by analyzing the goal relation,goal realization strategy and goal and power in MA thesis defense.Chapter One the thesis introduces the research background,the purpose and significance,as well as the layout of the thesis.Chapter Two mainly reviews the researches on the thesis defense at home and abroad,and points out that most researches concern the problems and techniques of thesis defense,while the research about the thesis defense conversation is relatively fragmented and lagging behind.Chapter Three introduces the theoretical framework of the thesis,which is based on the Principle of Goal-direction,and the goal analysis model.Chapter Four introduces the methodology of the thesis,including the research questions,subjects,research method,data collection and analysis process of the present study.Chapter Five is the main body of this thesis.The author adopted the goal analysis model under the Principle of Goal-direction to analyze the thesis defense and interpret the results under the theoretical framework.We found that,firstly,in MA thesis defense,the major goal relations between teachers and students are convergent goal relation and conflicting goal relation.Because in MA thesis defense,both teachers and students hope the conversation can carry on smoothly and a potential goal of them is to make the student's thesis better,so the goal of two sides is convergent,and they are very cooperative.And compared with the two step interaction pattern,the three steps interaction pattern appears more frequently in convergent goal relation.However,in thesis defense,there are not only the simple questioning and responding,debating is the core part of the thesis defense,so teachers will give students a variety of challenges,and students will try their best to solve these challenges,so the goal relation between students and teachers will be conflicting.And compared with the lame interaction pattern,the repetition interaction pattern appears more frequently in conflicting goal relation.Secondly,in order to realize their goal of examining student's thesis writing ability and thesis defense performance,the linguistic strategies adopted by teachers mainly included requesting question,interrogative question,repetition,and interruption.While,the students mainly adopted prolixity,silence and pause to achieve their goal of passing through MA thesis defense smoothly.The adoption of linguistic strategies prolixity and pause shows that the students cooperate with the teachers and response the teachers' questions positively and actively,and it can leave a good impression on teachers.Silence can be regarded as admission of the mistake and adoption of advices when teachers point out student's mistake or give advice,but sometime it may make teacher unsatisfied,so pause is a safer and effective strategy to escape teacher's unsatisfactory.Finally,we found that in order to achieve their goals,the teachers constructed high institutional power,high personal power and equal power,whereas students constructed high personal power,equal power and low personal power.Chapter Six summarizes the whole research.This chapter also points out the application,limitation and advice for future research.This thesis not only manifests the goal-directness of MA thesis defense,but also justifies the applicability of the Principle of Goal–direction in MA thesis defense analysis,and provides a new theoretical perspective for the analysis of the MA thesis defense.Finally,more linguistic data should be collected for this research,and this research should adopt quantitative analysis based on the corpus.Besides,MA thesis defense can be analyzed from other perspectives,such as the theory of Relevance put forward by Dan.Sperber and Deirdre Wilson,and the theory of linguistic adaption inference proposed by Jef.Verschueren.Moreover,the more profound and objective analysis would made the results more convincing and persuasive.