A Contrastive Rhetoric Study Of English Contest Speeches Of Chinese And American College Students

Public speaking has long been regarded as the origin of western rhetoric. Even to this day, modern rhetoric is still closely related to oratory, the art of public speaking. The essence of western rhetoric is persuasion, of which the core is uncertainty. However, contrastive studies on public speeches are scarce, not to mention detailed contrastive rhetoric studies on that matter. The only literature that can be referred to is the contrastive rhetoric studies on composition writings, the static texts, between different cultural groups. Do different groups of English users apply different rhetorical strategies and structures in their public speaking speeches? Do they voice their thought and state the theme by following different patterns? If there are differences, do they merely arise from cultural imprint or are there other causes like developmental factors? These inquiries are all to be answered. This research is an attempt to compare and contrast the rhetorical structure and strategies employed by two groups of language users in their English public speeches, one of them Chinese college students, and the other American. Twenty contest speeches are selected from each group. These sample speeches are contrasted by way of quantitative descriptive contrastive rhetoric analysis: the data are quantified and contrasted; the results are then analyzed and compared with those found in the previous composition contrastive rhetoric analyses. In this way, differences in the speech structure and rhetorical strategies employed by the two language user groups are found out. The contrastive rhetoric studies are carried out in terms of four major sets of terium comparationis: the structural organization of the speech, the reasoning methods used in the speech, the rhetorical strategies employed at the beginning and ending of the speech, and the rhetorical devices in the speech. The study bears results through detailed contrastive rhetoric analysis of the data: it is found that the rhetorical preferences of the two language user groups show greatest differences in the use of the reasoning methods, followed by the structural organization of the speech and the rhetorical strategies employed at the beginning and ending of the speech; while their employing of the rhetorical devices in the speech appears to share more in common than differences. The study implies that there are still gaps and differences between the American native English speakers and the Chinese English learners in their rhetorical preferences and habit. If the Chinese student speech makers could grasp the essence of English rhetoric and understand the differences between the Chinese and the English languages, they could produce speeches that are on an even level that of their counterpart. Through comparing and contrasting the contest speeches of the Chinese and American college students, this thesis fulfills its role as a piece of pioneering work in filling the genre blank of contrastive rhetoric study on public speaking speeches and providing both theoretical and practical insight for further contrastive rhetoric studies and public speaking studies.