A Genre-Based Analysis Of The Public Speech

In the past two decades, applied linguists and language teachers, especially those in the field of ESP (English for Special Purpose) and EAP (English for academic purpose), have shown a great deal of interest in a genre-based approach to the analysis of written and spoken discourse in academic and professional settings. This approach is defined as ESP genre analysis (Hyon, 1996), which allows a far thicker description of functional varieties of written and spoken language than that offered by any other system of analysis (Bhatia, 1993). ESP genre analysis contributes to a better understanding of what actually constitutes the structures and linguistic features of a certain genre and to a clearer idea about the effects of other factors such as writer's language -using environment on these features.However, to our knowledge, despite previous studies carried out on the public speeches, such as: M.Ed (2002; Basic Public Speaking) explained the basic speech organization skill, Laskowski (1997; Speech Presentation as A Process) talked about how to prepare the public speeches, He Gaoda (2003; Practical English Speeches) elaborated the public speeches in terms of style, pattern, skill and structure, there have been few studies on the generic structure of the public speeches in the literature, even fewer on linguistic features realizing the moves and the strategies. This paper reports a study of the public speeches from the perspective of genre analysis.The present study undertakes an examination of the prepared speeches with the help of linguistic theories and statistic knowledge. This thesis takes up a corpus (40 pieces of prepared speeches in the "CCTV Cup" English Speaking Contest int the year 2002 and 2003) analysis based on the genre approach. It aims to work out the generic structure, allowable order and lexical-grammatical strategies employed by the authors of the speeches.Thirty second-year students majoring in English from Shaanxi Foreign Language School have been asked to identify the moves and the strategies for the purpose of reliability of the study. The intra-tater and the inter-rater had an agreement rate of 95%.The main results we have found from our study are:1. There are usually eight moves in the public speeches, they are Addressing or greeting the audience, Demonstrating the emotion of the speaker, Revealing the topic of the speech, Moving down the Funnel, Delivering the speech Focusing Statement, Filling the Bottle below the Funnel, Essence in the Bottle/Ending, Closing grabber.2. The generic structure potential of the public speech has been come up with.