The Study Of Metadiscourse In Impromptu Speech By Chinese Students In Fltrp Cup English Speaking Contest

Since much attention has been paid to the English study by Chinese people, linguistic researchers are also crazy into it. The English impromptu speech, which belongs to a kind of high-level spoken English test, has been acknowledged by most English learners. The study aims to do some analysis of college students' impromptu speeches from a new angle.As a comparatively new concept of discourse analysis, metadiscourse has been a heated researching topic in recent study. Metadiscourse includes three aspects: writers' standpoint, the linguistic relationship among writers, texts and readers, and pragmatic resources. The present study uses Hyland's(2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse to collect and analyze the medtadiscourse materials of college students' impromptu speeches through quantitative and qualitative methods. On one hand, the study shows how metadiscourse helps the contestants to compose a coherent and readable discourse, and engage with the audience and establish the interpersonal interaction with them to achieve persuasiveness. Through this way, the former understanding metadiscourse can be added. On the other hand, it aims to give some practical and based suggestions on making impromptu speech for Chinese college students.The materials for study come from the impromptu speech round of FLTRP Cup English Speaking Contest. The author collected the materials from the books, and then typed them into Microsoft Word and used searching function to search the words relating to metadiscourse resources and examined one by one to make sure whether they are used as metadiscourse devices.The results of study show that metadiscourse is frequently used and also distributes in each subcategory with imbalanced proportion. From two aspects of interactional metadiscourse and interactive metadiscourse, the proportion of former one is much higher than the latter. Due to the characteristics of English impromptu speeches, the discourses equip with coherent and easily understandable features. The speaker basically uses the interactive metadiscourse to involve audience to express his or her views and strengthen the persuasiveness. Finally, the speaker tries his or her best effort to make audience take the same stance with her.In the subcategories, self-mentions, engagement markers and transitions are the most widely used. Self-mentions and engagement markers are used to show that the speaker's standpoint and also involve the audience. Consequently, interaction will be reached between the speaker and the audience. Transitions show the internal connections of perspectives and give some helps to the audience to understand his or her intentions.Finally according to the findings of qualitative analysis, all the metadiscourse resources put much emphasis on the interpersonal potential. With the help of metadiscourse, the speaker assesses the audience's response and expectation. Then he or she interacts with audience through judging their background knowledge and comprehensive abilities.