A Contrastive Genre Analysis Of English Speeches By Chinese And American College Students From The Socio-psychological Perspective

Public speaking has rich tradition in western and Chinese civilization. In modernglobalized world, people from different cultural background are more connected witheach other. The intercultural communication between Chinese and westerners happensmore frequently than before. Public speaking as an important means of spreadingideas and exerting influence on social members is regarded as an essential form ofcommunication. Organizations and institutions are holding English speech contestannually. Chinese students have more chances to participate in international speakingcontest as well. The focus of previous researches on public speaking is rhetoricaldevices or discourse pattern. The intercultural genre studies on public speaking arescarce. Previous genre analysis researches in sales promotion genre, academic papersshow that genre analysis can help reveal the communicative purposes and thesocio-psychological factors behind the writing mechanism in a certain genre. Thepresent study investigates the schematic structure and persuasive strategies in Englishcontest speeches by Chinese and American college students through conductingcontrastive genre analysis of the two groups of data. The theoretical framework ofChinese socio-psychological principles in communication is adopted to explain thedetected differences in moves and strategies.The research data includes forty persuasive speeches selected from speakingcontests for college students. There’re twenty speeches from Chinese students andtwenty from American students. We conducted genre analysis of the sample speechscripts to identify their moves and strategies. Through detailed examination of themoves and strategies, we find some divergences of Chinese and American students’speeches in move structure and strategy using. Chinese students’ contest speechescontain two more moves than American counterpart. They are greeting the audienceand displaying the feeling of speaker. The communicative function of these twomoves is showing respect and establishing bond with the judges and audience. As to strategy using, Chinese students prefer to choose emotional appeal, extendedexamples, and prestige testimony; while American students are more skillful in usingstatistics, expert testimony. Continuing our analysis on the socio-psychologicalperspective, Chinese style of communication belongs to high power distance, highcontext and affective communication and American style of communication arecategorized into low power distance, low context and instrumental one. Under thecultural influence, Chinese EFL students’ speeches are implicit, general andrelationship-oriented and American student’ speeches are direct, concise andinformation-oriented.By the contrastive genre analysis of Chinese and American students’ Englishspeeches and further analysis on the socio-psychological level, we hope to providesome practical insights on English public speaking teaching and shed some light onstudying the second language writing beyond merely textual level.