A Pragmatic Reading Of Obama's Speeches On Education

Reading is an important way for people to learn about the outside world and get information. With the explosion of knowledge and technology, the role of reading has become more and more prominent. An effective reading is not a process for readers to receive information passively, but it is a process that readers communicate with texts actively. Through pragmatic reading, successful readers can find out the context of the texts and other factors which influence the generation of the meaning.The research focuses on the development of a new mode of pragmatic reading, because most of the previous studies on reading treat reading as a process of identifying and decoding message or a process of readers'using schema knowledge in their mind to verifying and revising it. However, effective reading is not just that simple. Reading is not only related to readers, but also closely connected with the writer and the context. The traditional reading methods, with the different focus on reading, can not guide the readers to read successfully from a comparatively systematic and comprehensive perspective. Verschueren's "pragmatic perspective" (2000), in our study, provides a systematic and comprehensive perspective to pragmatics. The perspective on pragmatics holds that it's more scientific and complete to take pragmatics as a perspective on language generation and use rather than a branch of linguistics or an interdisplinary. This perspective integrates language use with cultural, social and psychological factors, and the focal point is the adaptation process. The adaptation theory takes linguistic--choice and linguistic adaptation as its foundational and theoretical framework, and explores the psychological mechanism and language generation mechanism when people use language, and reveals the nature of language use. The three properties of language: variability, negotiability and adaptability, enable language users to make continuous choice. Besides, Verschueren claims that there are four angles of investigation:contextual correlates of adaptation, structural objects of adaptation, dynamics of adaptation and salience of the adaptation process. Adaptation Theory is taken as a systematic and comprehensive pragmatic theory. It has strong explanatory and inclusive capacity for exploring the process of language use.Thus in light of the possibility of using the entirety and comprehensiveness of adaptation theory in conducting a successful reading process, the researcher tries to analyze the reading of Obama's speeches based on adaptational reading perspective. The practical significance of the study is to find out the dynamic adaptational reading process in order to guide readers to read texts effectively.For the methodology, it adopts two of Obama's speeches on education as data to analyze the English speech reading from the adaptational reading perspective. The present study can be divided into five chapters:Chapter one is the general introduction of the study. It includes its background, rationale, research methodology and an outline. The research is deemed important theoretically and practically.Chapter two explores the previous studies on reading methods as a review from the historical perspective. It concludes that the previous reading methods were lacking in guiding people to get enough information from reading a text.Chapter three investigates into the theoretical framework of the present study, based on the Adaptation Theory, namely, the application of the theory into reading English texts from phonetic level through syntactic level to discourse level and pragmatic level.Chapter four is the analysis of Obama's speeches at every level of language structure. In so doing, the effectiveness of the dynamic adaptational reading has been discovered.Chapter five is a summary, including the major findings. Besides, limitations and suggestions for the further study are also included.The study indicates that delivering speech is a process that the speaker adapts to the audience. During such a process, the speaker applies certain language structures to make his or her language more persuasive and more inspiring in order to realize his or her communicative proposes, which shows that the reader should take all the factors in the context to reach an effective reading rather than simply decode the text literally. The findings of the present study are valuable for readers to understand and appreciate texts more comprehensively.