A Study Of Metadiscourse In CCTV Impromptu Speeches Of Chinese College Students

With more and more emphasis Chinese has laid on English learning, the research of it has drawn more and more attention. The value of English impromptu speeches as a criterion of English level, especially the level of spoken English, has been acknowledged by most English learners. This thesis aims to analyze Chinese college students’impromptu speeches from a new angle.As a comparatively new concept of discourse analysis, metadiscourse has become the focus of recent research. Metadiscourse is a type of language and pragmatic resources used to help writers or speakers to show their standpoint, and reflect the relationships between writers, text and readers. Many researches have been done to prove its importance in different genres, by people from different communities or in different cultural contexts. The present study uses Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse to collect and analyze the metadiscourse resources employed in the impromptu speeches through a quantitative as well as qualitative method. This study is designed firstly, to find out how the contestants use metadiscourse resources to organize a coherent and readable discourse, and how they engage with audience and establish an interpersonal interaction in between to achieve persuasiveness, which finally add to our former understanding of metadiscourse. Secondly, it aims at putting forward some suggestions on making a better impromptu speech for Chinese college students.The data for this study come from CCTV Cup English Speaking Contest-the impromptu speech round. After transforming the audio data into literal form, the present author uses the search function of Microsoft Word to find out all potential metadiscourse items, and then manually examines whether each of them is used here as a metadiscourse.The findings show that metadiscourse is frequently used in impromptu speeches with imbalanced proportions of each category. First, the proportion of interactional metadiscourse is much higher than that of interactive metadiscourse. This indicates that owing to the characteristics of impromptu speeches, while the discourse is coherent and understandable, it seems more important for the speaker to use more interactional metadiscourse to involve the audience, to clarify his/her stance and to enhance the persuasiveness. And finally, try to make them take the same ground with him.Secondly, in the subcategories, self-mentions are the most frequently used, followed by engagement markers and transitions. Self-mentions and engagement markers are used to help the speaker clarify his idea and to involve the audience, therefore interacting with them. Transitions help to show the internal connections of propositions and guide the audience through understanding.Furthermore, all the metadiscourse resources emphasize interpersonal potential. With the help of metadiscourse resources, speakers can offer a credible representation of themselves in speeches. They can also interact with audience by assessing their likely background knowledge, processing ability and by anticipating their expectations.