A Comparative Analysis Of English Speeches Made By Chinese Speaker And English- Language Speaker From Multimodal Discourse Perspective Through ELAN

Multimodal discourse is the phenomenon of applying visual sense, auditory sense and other senses to communication by virtue of multi-semiotic recourses or means such as image, colors, voices, and actions. Although researches concerned with this topic began in the 1990s in the international linguistic field, multimodality is an inherent phenomenon in human life. Nowadays, with the development of information technology and expanding of communicative modes, the communicative approaches and platforms have been increasingly enlarged. Thus, scholars from different fields pay attention to this topic. Although researches in the linguistic world appear comparatively late in China, they cover the aspect of hyper text, films, corpus construction, English teaching and so on.Based on Norris’multimodal interaction framework, this study made a comparison under different context between the mode application and distribution in the process of speech-making in two sample speeches from the CCTV English Public Speaking Contest and TED Public Speaking through ELAN analysis. Then, through the mode relation framework from Zhang Delu’s research, this study explored the differences of mode relation between the two speeches as exposed by ELAN. The results indicated that the multimodal ability of the two speakers were running neck and neck, but due to the restriction of organization pattern and competition rules in the Chinese speech, the speech from China showed less mode participation and less balanced mode distribution. On the other hand, the audiences in the TED Public Speaking acted more actively in the speech process with interactive participation in the speech. In the last, the study showed the application and distribution of different modes were crucial to the construction of mode relations.Through the comparative ELAN analysis of the two speeches, this study concluded that the organization form and competition rules had a close relation with the demonstration of speaker’s multimodal ability, and it also revealed that the competition organizer should be more conscious of the audience status and get them involved in the speech and let them experience the pleasure of English communication and idea spreading.