MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

This topic belongs to the field of discourse analysis, object of study is ritualized discourse, which has a strict form of social organization with a set of rules, boundaries，and the social value connotation, as well as the ritual. So far the ritualized discourse has been studied in the range of some kinds of political discourse and part of the trial discourse, it is still unclear how to gain a social value connotation for usual expressions in educational discourse. Analyzing the 30 discourses of class meetings in China’s primary and secondary schools, the author of this paper attempts to explain how some kinds of social values have been formed, especially to characterize the process of authenticating some social values by discourse ritualization in education. Research focuses on formulations of ritual program of class meeting, speech acts of the meeting host. Formulations of ritual program of class meeting, such as “First, rise the flag. Stand up!” “Second, sing the team song!” “Sit down!” “Please applause!” “Then, please enjoy the skit; you will have a new understanding of our class. Let us applaud!” “Please enjoy poetry readings!” can be divided into two categories according to their functions: 1) discourse marker of ritual; 2) organizer of discourse. Meeting hosts mainly use tree kinds of speech act, 1) directives, such as “Let us praise our pioneer”; 2) representatives, such as “Our class has an industrious and brave environmental protection team, they stick to their posts every day… ”; 3) expressive, such as “What a touching story!” “Great!” In most instances, the propositional content of these speech acts includes a significance of evaluation.