A Conversational And Rhetorical Analysis Of Job Interviews

This thesis analyzes the utterances that occur in job interviews through conversational analysis and rhetorical analysis. Since job interviews are by nature a type of conversation and responses by interviewees are by nature persuasion or rhetoric, a combination of conversational analysis and rhetorical theory is expected to offer new insight into the understanding and preparation for job interviews.Researchers show that conversations in job interviews are different from ordinary conversations. Such conversation is institutional discourse whose chief characteristic is systematic turn-taking and conversational sequence.The study reveals that the conversations between interviewers and interviewees are mainly adjacency pairs: initial moves-responses. In interviews, there are mainly two types of initial moves: non-question initial moves and question-initial moves. They can also be called the informatives and the elicitations. The previous ones can be divided into reports, assessments, and expressives. The latter ones are composed of WH-questions, yes-no questions, and alternative questions. The major purposes of these initial moves can be considered as information-checking, opinion seeking and clarification. Thus interviewees should not only respond, but also explain more.The responses given by interviewees can also be called the process of persuasion. All the reactions done by interviewees is part of persuasion to show"I am suitable for the job". To some extent, persuasion is rhetoric. Thus Aristotle's rhetorical theory is applied to investigate the responses of interviewees. The study explores persuasive strategies, that is three appeals used by interviewees: rational appeal which emphasizes the logical reasoning, emotional appeal which arouses emotional factors of interviewers in the process of persuasion, and ethical appeal which lays stress on persuaders'characters.This paper is divided into six chapters. Chapter one is an overall introduction which introduces reasons for choosing this topic, the significance of this research, research questions, and the scope of the study .Chapter two is the literature review and theoretical framework. In this chapter previous researches on job interviews are reviewed. This chapter also offers theoretical framework of the present study based on an overview of conversational analysis and rhetorical analysis.Chapter three is the methodology, presenting the process of subject selection, data collection and research method.Chapter four concerns the first research question, describing the initial moves initiated by interviewers, including question-initial moves and non-question-initial moves concerning conversational analysis.Chapter five centers on the various persuasive strategies used by interviewees. Some of the strategies have some connection with patterns of initial moves while others may not. The purpose of this chapter is to classify the persuasive strategies provided by job hunters mainly on the base of Aristotelian rhetoric theory.Chapter six is a brief summary. This study is intended to contribute to the research literature of interviews study, and also to offer some useful suggestions to applicants for a vacancy, and is also expected to give guidance to interviewers to arrange an interview more scientifically and systematically.