| This thesis presents a case study of CNN's Larry King Live to explore the conversational structure of an English TV news interview from the perspective of conversational analysis (CA). The distinctive conversational structure of a TV news interview is revealed by exploring the degree of similarity / dissimilarity between the English TV news interview conversation and naturally-occurring conversations in terms of three conversation-structuring systems originally proposed by Sacks and his associates — the turn-taking, adjacency pair and overall organization systems.The present study discovers that the majority of turns in the TV news interview adhere to the rules of turn-taking system and adjacency pair system operating in naturally-occurring conversations, only with several exceptions of violation. But the overall organization in this TV news interview is significantly different from the organization in naturally-occurring conversations. So the TV news interview largely exhibits structures observed in naturally-occurring conversations. The differences between the TV news interview and naturally-occurring conversation are closely related to the specific institutional settings and roles and responsibilities of the host and guests.Furthermore, the findings of the study imply that English TV news interviews could be promising EFL learning materials, and discourse analysis is important for EFL learners' language learning, since awareness of discourse structure could facilitate their discourse competence.
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