The Contrastive Study Of The Text Pattern Between American And Chinese College Students' English Public Speeches

The contrastive study of the text pattern is an important field of Contrastive Linguistics, which is carried out on the macro-structure level of the text. Its purpose is to explore the hidden reasons of language differences by contrastively analyzing the text pattern of different languages. At present, most of the researches that can be found are focused on static written texts, whereas, the study of dynamic oral speeches remains untouched for a long time. As a typical oral genre, public speeches not only enjoy a long history in the West, but also attract more and more Chinese English learners'interest. Therefore, based on the theory of the text pattern, the thesis ventures to employ forty English public speeches of American and Chinese college students (twenty for each) as the corpus, attempts to find out the differences between the text pattern of American and Chinese college students'speeches and tends to discuss causes of these differences as well. Furthermore, findings of the study are supposed to be applied in the teaching of college English writing.The sample speeches are contrasted by way of quantitative descriptive contrastive analysis: the data is qualified and contrasted; the result is then analyzed. In this way, differences in the text pattern and its ways of realization employed by the two groups of language users are found out. To contrast the different text patterns, three most widely adopted text patters are demonstrated first, and then the sample speeches are categorized accordingly, and through the contrastive analysis of the amount of employment of the above three patterns, the preference of the text pattern using in English public speeches by the two groups of language users are detected. And the way of realization of the text pattern, i.e., the rhetoric strategies are investigated thereafter. The study shows that problem-solution pattern is most frequently used by both of the two groups, more than 50% of speakers choose problem-solution pattern. Moreover, the contrastive study of rhetoric strategies employed to realize the problem-solution shows that the two groups of speakers have different tendency in choosing rhetoric strategies, from explicit to implicit, the differences exist in the preference of using these rhetoric strategies are, the reasoning method in the argument part, the way of discussing problems in the beginning part, and the type of conclusion in the ending part. Finally, the above contrastive analysis leads to the implication that there are still gaps and differences between the American native English speaker and the Chinese English learner in their English text pattern employment. Provided the Chinese student could grasp the essence of English text pattern and understand the differences between the Chinese and the English languages, they could produce works that are on an even level of that of their counterparts.The significance of the study lies in that it ventures to contrastively analyze the text patterns between English public speeches of American and Chinese college students, which provide the text pattern analysis a new field. The whole thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter 1 is Introduction, raising the topic, pointing out the purpose and significance of the study, putting forward research questions, and introducing research methods and the organization of the whole thesis.Chapter 2 is Literature Review, focusing on the studies of the text pattern at home and abroad and the studies of public speeches at home and abroad as well.Chapter 3 is Theoretical Framework, focusing on the systemic-functional grammar, clause relation theory and text pattern theory.Chapter 4 is a Contrastive Analysis of Text Patterns between American and Chinese College Students'English Public Speeches. It contrastively analyzes the text pattern and its rhetoric strategies which are employed to realize the text pattern of the two groups of corpus, and discusses the causes of the differences which are found in the contrastive study as well.Chapter 5 is Implications and Suggestions of College English Writing Teaching. It is necessary to raise students'awareness of culture and thought pattern differences, and teaching of college English writing is supposed to carry out in a text-pattern perspective. Chapter 6 is Conclusion, summing up the contents of the whole thesis, giving answers to the questions raised in Chapter 1. And it points out the limitations of the study, and gives suggestions for further research.