The language of oral presentations given by PhD researchers in an EAP class: level of performance and disciplinary differences

[摘要] This thesis explores PhD-researcher oral presentations (OPs) in five studies on engagement and clarification strategies in a parallel corpus of 88 OP transcription-essay pairs (n=128228 tokens). Corpus and statistical significance procedures identify features that discriminate among researchers’ levels of oral achievement and disciplines: gestural-verbal deixis, audience and impersonal identity projection, code glosses, and transformations of written into oral content. Features analyses include distribution across the levels and disciplines subcorpora, recurrent patterns, discourse functions, and pragmatic appropriacy and grammatical variety. The studies reveal that levels differ in the way that presenters mark stance authorship, anticipate the audience need for help, and vary their strategies grammatically. Disciplinary differences re-present the ways in which disciplines (re)produce knowledge. Hard-fields focus on research methods and outcomes is observed in interaction with images, academic identity projection, and technical terms explanation. Soft-field OPs focus on interpretations is observed in opinions towards existing knowledge and use of folk examples. Language choices also reflect the non-expert character of the audience. This thesis contributes to the study of oral academic genres by demonstrating the importance of multimodal, across modes, non-deficiency analyses; confirming disciplinary differences; and proposing ways of understanding levels of achievement based on pragmatic success rather than grammatical accuracy.

[发布机构] University:University of Birmingham;Department:School of English, Drama, American & Canadian Studies, Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics

[关键词] P Language and Literature;P Philology. Linguistics