III. Project Work

Prepare to give a presentation of the interview samples to your choice.

• try and revise the model samples for study and analysis (A, B) as a preliminary exercise;

• practise over the two communicative roles (CR₁ CR₂) in isolation. They are functionally and verbally different;

• focus on the pitch patterns, rhythm, pausation and voice volume. The dichotomy ‘interviewer - interviewee’ has its phonostylistic specification;

• try and take into account the rhetoric strategy of this kind of intercourse and the social factors that regulate the use of prosodic means;

• remember to use body language, namely eye contact, countenance and your posture;

• use the assessment form to evaluate each other’s presentation techniques. If possible record your performance and use the recording for feedback.

			excellent
		good
	fair
poor

• articulation

• pitch patterns

• rhythm

• rate

• volume

Sample A

Interview with Carl Sagan

A = Announcer

BH = Brian Hayes

CS = Dr Carl Sagan

A: This is an interview that Dr Carl Sagan gave to the LBC (London Broadcasting Company). The interviewer is Brian Hayes.

BH: ‘We've examined the universe in space, and seen that we live on a mote of dust, circling a humdrum star, in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy. There's been — much argument recently, especially in Califor­nia, about Man's origin. Was Darwin right? Do the creationists have a point? Why should we still be arguing about it?

CS: Because er ... Darwin is again disquieting. Er ... many people who feel that there should be something special and central about human beings are unhappy about the quite compelling evidence that we are just another animal connected by many powerful lines of evidence, in an evolutionary sense, to the great apes and monkeys and the other primates. Um and er . . . they’re made unhappy by this. But I think it’s so much more elevating to find that we are deeply connected with all the other living things on the Earth, than to imagine that there’s something particularly special.

BH: The creationists, though, also now seem to be – and I don’t know how it stands up, but – putting forward what they claim to be a scientific argument for a creation as it was told in the erm … Old Testament.

CS: Er … they have claimed to do that, but when you look closely it turns out that er … nothing of the sort is being done, and their ideas are utterly bankrupt.

BH: If it didn’t begin when the creationists say the universe began, when and how did it?

CS: Well, ‘When?’ is one question and 'How?' is quite another question. Er . . .there seems to be er . . . very strong, although perhaps not absolutely compelling evidence, that the universe is expanding, the more distant galax­ies are running away from us er . . . faster than the nearby galaxies, and if we run this cosmic movie backwards, we find that some fifteen thousand million years ago, all the matter in the universe, and all the energy, was confined to an extremely small volume, you can imagine the galaxies touching. That event is called the Big Bang. If that is the sort of universe we live in, then there's no need to understand a creation, since it was always here. There's no beginning.

BH: And is it because the human mind can't cope with that concept that we're constantly trying to find a beginning?

CS: Perhaps, but we also can't со ... cope with the concept of a creation, because I know of no plausible explanation of how that happened. There is a standard explanation, which is 'God did it', but er . . . it seems to me that logic requires that we take the next step and ask 'Where did God come from?', and somehow the theologians all blanch at that er . . . at that question, and say 'God was always here'. Well, that's fine, but why not save a step and simply say that the universe was always here?

Sample B