本文是一篇英语语言学论文，笔者认为公开演讲应该使用简单的句法结构，不是很丰富的词汇，也不是很多高级词汇或很多衔接词。12项语言特征指标与公共演讲质量相关。
1 Introduction
1.1 Background
According to Lucas[1], public speaking is the process or act of performing a speech to alive audience, which is commonly understood as formal, face-to-face speaking by a singleperson to a group of listeners. The script of a public speech plays a vital role in a speaker’sperformance. Usually, the audience of public speeches is on site, while the readers of writingare not. Different communication ways and information processing methods of the recipientsdetermines different focuses of public speeches and writing. So, the linguistic features ofpublic speech scripts and conventional written texts may be different. When drafting a publicspeech, people sometimes forget that a public speech is primarily for listening rather thanreading, so the prepared speech may have unsatisfactory effects on the audience. Therefore, itis necessary to investigate the effect of the linguistic features on public speeches and find outthe special features of public speech script writing compared with the conventional writing forreading.
For many English as a foreign language (EFL) learners, good preparation is alwaysnecessary for a successful public speech, but how the linguistic features influence the publicspeech quality is still not clear. Analyzing the linguistic features of public speech scripts mayhelp explore how public speeches can have a better effect. Linguistic feature indices havebeen widely used in text stylistic analysis. The linguistic features can be quantitativelymeasured to differentiate registers and genres of the texts and to analyze the correlationbetween linguistic features and writing quality. Public speech is a special spoken language,and it has special features. Thanks to the recent development in computational techniques, thelinguistic feature indices of each speech script can be extracted.
What’s more, videos and scripts of public speeches are available. We collected 76TED-style public speech videos and their scripts from Public Speaking and Debating class.The public speech videos were collected in the classroom. The linguistic features of eachscript were extracted from the Coh-Metrix. The public speech quality was evaluated by apanel of three graders. Evaluating the effect of linguistic features on public speech qualitymay help speakers better prepare their public speech scripts. Thus, this study investigates theeffect of linguistic features indices on EFL learners’ speech quality. Based on definitions oflinguistic features in Coh-Metrix, this study investigates the effect of correlated factors onEFL learners’ public speech scores and compares them with relevant research results onwriting.
1.2 Research Questions
This study aims to explore the effect of linguistic feature indices on public speech quality.This study has three objectives which are to investigate the linguistic features of public speechscripts, to investigate the correlation between linguistic feature indices and the public speechquality scores, and to find out the effect of the significantly correlated factors on speechquality. This paper intends to answer the following three research questions:
1) What are the linguistic feature indices of public speech scripts?
2) What is the correlation between linguistic features and public speech quality?
3) What is the effect of the correlated factors on public speech quality?
Through the relationship between the linguistic features of public speech and thestudents’ public speech script scores, the findings are expected to have pedagogicalimplications for public speaking and speech writing.
This paper is divided into six chapters. Chapter One gives a brief introduction to theoverall background of this study and explains the reasons and foundations for studying therelationship between linguistic features and public speech quality. Chapter Two is a review ofsome basic terms and related studies on linguistic features and public spee
