A Cross-Cultural Study Of Public Speaking

Intercultural communication is an inevitable part in today's economic globalization, and public speaking, is an important channel of disseminating information to the public, deserves special attention. Yet now there is great divergence between micro- and macro- studies of public speaking. Therefore, in this thesis the author integrates both intercultural communication and discourse analysis in studying the corpus of business speeches, and explores culture's influence on the process of speaker- discourse- listener, aiming at finding out feasible strategies for Chinese speakers when they are confronted with a foreign audience.After a close examination of 30 public speaking Chinese texts (10 with their English version) and 30 business speeches by North American speakers (NASs), the author has managed to explain the cultural reasons for the difference of discourses by Chinese speakers and North American speakers through qualitative and quantitative analyses. From Chapters 3 to 5, the author has compared speech texts by Chinese and North American speakers and verified respectively the following hypotheses: 1) Cultural difference in politeness strategies will affect the process of interpersonal identification in cross-cultural speech; 2) Cultural diversity in thinking patterns leads to difference in sentence organization: Chinese indirect/climaxing style and Western direct/anti-climaxing style; 3) There exist different inclinations of rhetorical strategies in the Chinese and North American cultures.The whole study follows the pyramid structure from lexis, sentence to discourse strategy. At every level, correspondent cultural dimensions and their influence on public speaking are explored in comparative studies of speech discourse and through an integrated approach of discourse analysis and IC studies.In this thesis, the author has examined the cultural aspect of the interaction of public speaking, but more studies are needed to be done on other aspects, like delivering skills and non-verbal communication, which play an important role in ensuring a real success of business speech in cross-cultural situations.