A Contrastive Study Of Rhetorical Structures In English Public Speeches By Chinese And American Students

With the development of our modern society, competition is a common phenomenon in our society. And the demands for talents have become stronger. Among them, the ability of public speaking is indispensable. At the same time national English speech contests are drawing attention from the society. Therefore, the instruction of English speech has become an increasingly important part of pedagogical contents. Consequently, how to improve teaching methods and how to guide students to present a speech in a native way become a big challenge to English teachers in China, especially in colleges and universities.This thesis contrastively studies the rhetorical relations of English speeches by Chinese and American college students, mainly based on the theoretical framework of "Rhetorical Structure Theory" which is proposed by William C Mann and Sandra A Thompson (1983,1986,1987), when they were engaged in the study of text generation. Since it was proposed, Rhetorical Structure Theory has been widely applied in linguistic studies, especially cross-culturally studies. The overall objective of the current study is to compare different rhetorical features of samples of English public speeches by Chinese and American students and decide whether specific differences can be attributed to linguistic and cultural environments.The total text corpus consists of 20 speeches and total 228 paragraphs. The steps of the actual analysis of the texts are as follows: first, each text's rhetorical relations are determined and all the tree diagrams are drawn, which reveal the texts' hierarchical structures according to the relation constraints. Then the features of the relations are compared. Through comparing the rhetorical relations that constitute speeches, the study is hoped to make a contribution to discourse analysis and attract attention to socio-cultural factors in English learning. Also, the research result is expected to help language instructors and learners raise the rhetorical awareness in public speaking.