Questions And Their Response Strategies In Job Interviews: A Case Study

The present study is an attempt to tackle the linguistic aspect of job interviews and adopts, essentially speaking, a qualitative approach of discourse analysis in a case study investigating the interpretation of speech acts of questions asked by the interviewer and the response strategies accordingly employed by interviewees applying for the same job. Within the theoretical framework which draws on insights of the Speech Act Theory, the Ethnography of Communication and the approach of Generic Structure Potential with modification the author investigates into related aspects concerning the distribution of different types of questions across generic structure components of the discourse and the context of job interviews to account for the interpretation of speech acts of the questions and the response strategies employed by the interviewees to different types of questions.The present paper reveals that there are asymmetric distributions of different types of questions across generic structure components of the discourse and that different types of questions in different generic structure components enact different speech acts. The interpretation of the speech acts of these questions entails different response strategies. It also summarizes certain patterns of response strategies for the interviewees' reference. It concludes that the employment of appropriate strategies results from an awareness of the context and the generic structure of job interview which is a prerequisite for a correct interpretation of the speech acts of the questions.Since the present study is a case study which examines only one type of job interviews, the conclusions of it only represents the feature of job interviews of the same or similar type. Further improvement and supplementation are needed for the apparent fact that there are numerous types of job interviews which, in a sense, can not be exhausted.