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　　CHAPTER ONEINTRODUCTION
　　
　　1.1 Research Background
　　With the rapid development of globalization, English as a most importantcommunication language is learned everywhere, including China. One thing fromwhich we can see the importance of English is that nowadays, there are many Englishspeaking contests held in China, such as "CCTV Cup English Speaking Contest","21st Century Cup National English Speaking Competition" and so on. As an essentialpart of the competition, the impromptu speech is indispensable for examining thecontestants' oral English skills. As a comparatively new target, impromptu speecheshave drawn some attention of scholars, but most of them study impromptu speechesfrom a psychological or sociological perspective. Snideocr (1943) made a comparisonof the pitch and duration characteristics between impromptu speaking and oralreading. Bans (1992) found that the impromptu speech is a misused and underratedactivity in most public speaking classrooms. In china, most researches focus on thefollowing questions when doing research on impromptu speeches: what may lead tothe anxiety of the speakers and how can they overcome it? What strategies can theytake to give a better speech? These two points are either psychology-oriented ortraining strategy-oriented. They do give some constructive suggestions on how tomake a successful speech, but what is needed more is to investigate the speechlanguage from an internal way, that is, to analyze it linguistically. Nan Yanfeng (2009)analyzed the main features of thematic structures and frequencies of seven ThematicProgression Patterns. Huang Ting (2006) studied impromptu speeches from theperspective of genre analysis, trying to find out an ideal way of constructing effectiveimpromptu speeches.Metadiscourse has been a more and more popular topic in the academic circles. Ilhas been studied form different angles, among which the functional approach basedon Halliday's systemic functional linguistics plays a dominant role. Empiricalresearches on metadiscourse focus mainly on the spoken texts, especially academicdiscourse, and differences lying in different uses of people from different languagesand cultural backgrounds. One thing is that whether in spoken or written texts,metadiscourse is pervasive.The previous studies of impromptu speech abroad are mainly about itscharacteristics, application or differences between it and other types of oral English.And those at home are mainly about strategies and techniques from a macro way withseveral of them concerning its linguistic characteristics and interpersonal functions.On the basis of previous studies, this study therefore will make a study on impromptuspeeches under the framework of metadiscouse theory, with the hope to investigate itsdeep mechanism, based on a corpus of 60 impromptu speeches from "CCTV CupEnglish Speaking Contest" collected from the website.
　　
　　1.2   Objectives and Significance of the Study
　　Based on the previous studies of metadiscourse, the present corpus-based thesisuses Hyland's (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse and attempts to identifythe way speakers employ interactive metadiscourse and interactional metadiscourseresources respectively to engage the audience in their speeches and to realize theinterpersonal functions. In this thesis, both quantitative analysis and qualitativeanalysis will be adopted to show the Frequency and proportion of metadiscourseresourc本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。