Multimodal Interaction In Leaderless Group Discussion

Job interview is the beginning of a person’s career and plays a very important role in the process of finding a satisfying job he/she wants.Recently,the common methods of job interview evaluation mainly include structured interview and leaderless group discussion interview.The former aims at examining the interviewees’ language ability but ignores the overall quality of the interviewees.While the latter focuses on exploring the interviewees’ overall quality.With the development of society,more and more enterprises and institutions attach more importance to the inspection of the comprehensive quality of employees.Therefore,the advantage of leaderless group discussion interview which aims at inspecting the comprehensive quality of the interviewees gradually becomes prominent.Leaderless group discussion interview adopts the scenario simulation method to conduct a group interview for candidates.Whether the candidates are competent to the job or not is judged by the interviewers through the observation of candidates’ reaction to crisis,emergence,and cooperation with others in a given situation.Such an interviewing method plays an important role in nowadays’ interview and assessment.It is a key evaluation method for companies or institutions to select talents.Therefore,it is very important for interviewees to master the skills and methods of leaderless group discussion interview.In view of this,based on multimodal interaction theory,this thesis investigates the interviewees’ linguistic modality,non-linguistic modality and the coordination between linguistic modality and non-linguistic modality in the interviewing process,aiming to provide some suggestions for candidates who will participate in the leaderless group discussion interview.As linguistic and non-linguistic modalities are important modal resources which are used to convey information in the interviewing process,both of them are the focus of interviewing assessment.This thesis takes the recording video of leaderless group discussion interview for selecting civil servant by Zhong Gong Education as the research object.It focuses on the use of linguistic modal resources and non-linguistic modal resources during the interviewing process.It mainly takes advantage of multimodal analyzing software of ELAN and divides the video into several parts to help analyzing the interview,so as to explore the interviewee’s use of multimodal resources and how these modal resources work together to make the interviewees perform better.The findings of this study are shown as follows:(1)At the linguistic level,first of all,in the interviewing process,candidates mainly use declarative sentences in self-statement stage,accompanied by interrogative sentences,imperative sentences and exclamation sentences in the discussion stage.In this way,conversation turn can move forward successfully,and the interviewees can stress their key points by changing the use of sentence pattern.Secondly,prosody is an important mean to help candidates emphasize key contents and maintain conversation.Proper use of prosody strategies can enable interviewers to focus on what an interviewee is talking about.Finally,conversation turn is an important means of cohesion in the discussion part of the interview.In addition,turn-taking can also help the speaker to get the leader role in a group.(2)At the non-linguistic level,first of all,hand gesture is an important modal resource to assist the speaker in conveying information.It is a physical behavior spontaneously accompanied by the interviewee when he/she is speaking,and it plays a key role in attracting people’s attention.Secondly,body posture is the embodiment of the interviewees’ overall appearance,and is a direct modal resource that conveys the interviewees’ overall performance.Finally,facial expression is also one of the modalities observed by the examiner,and it is an effective mean to convey the overall mental state of the interviewee.(3)The coordination between linguistic and non-linguistic modalities can better convey communicative information and enhance the interviewees’ overall performance and competitiveness.