Interpersonal Meaning Of Impromptu Speech

Public speech is an important means of transmitting message, expressing attitude and opinions. From the perspective of speech content, public speech can be divided into political speech, academic speech, military speech etc; and from the angle of preparation time, public speech can be divided into prepared speech and impromptu speech. Since English learning becomes popular in China, various sorts of English speaking contests are prevalent, among which the most attention focused one is CCTV Cup National English Speaking Contest sponsored by CCTV and Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. The contest is composed of three parts, namely, prepared speech, impromptu speech and questions. Interesting enough, impromptu speech is the very part that can reveal an English speaker's comprehensive skills, and it takes up the most proportion of the marking (40%). As for impromptu speech, some scholars have studied its genre types while some others on its thematic structure, but there appear few studies on the interpersonal meaning of impromptu speech in English speaking contest.Interpersonal function refers to the fact that we use language to interact with other people, to establish and maintain relations, to influence their behavior, to express viewpoint on things in the world, and to elicit or change others'opinions. But for a long time, scholars only focus on two ways of realizing interpersonal meaning—mood and modality. It was not complemented and improved until 1990s by Appraisal System developed by Martin and White. Appraisal Theory is also called Appraisal System, which concentrates on the writer's or speaker's positive or negative attitude to persons, places, entities, events, phenomena and the ways in which the writer or speaker conveys his or her attitudes and positions(Wang Zhenhua, 2001). After the theory is put forward, it is widely used to analyze literary, academic, media and other kinds of texts and helps readers to understand the position, viewpoint and attitude of the writer or speaker. In this thesis, Appraisal Theory is taken as the theoretical framework and will be used to analyze the impromptu speech in CCTV Cup National Speech Contest from the year 2006 to 2008, aiming at exploring the distribution of the appraisal resources and the application of different evaluative devices to interpret how the speakers build social relations with listeners to facilitate their understanding of the speaker's intentions. The research findings of the present study show that appraisal resources are massively applied in the corpus, but their distribution differs a lot: engagement holds the most proportion (49.2%), graduation much less (33.11%) and attitude the least (17.69%). These differences are mainly related to the fact that the constants are required to be as objective, polite and interactional as possible in impromptu speech. The research findings can shed some pedagogical light on the college English teaching of speaking, reading, and writing in China, and they can thus be recommended to be applied in English teaching in future.