Audioslide presentations as an appendant genre - key words, personal pronouns, stance and engagement

Abstract

Due to the competitiveness in academic settings and the convenience of technological platforms, several genres have been designed to promote research. The current research studies audioslide presentations, one of the novel academic appendant genres to promote its host genre, research articles. The corpus includes the spoken transcripts collected from oral presentations in the hard science domains and written by expert scholars. We aimed to identify the structure of the presentations, generate keywords used in the talks with reference to an academic spoken English corpus and a daily English speech corpus, and examine how authorial stance and audience engagement are shown in the presentations by employing personal pronouns. The results demonstrate that the speakers tend to highlight the existence of knowledge gaps and the research designs of the investigations, rather than emphasising the findings. Keywords are also used slightly differently compared to different reference corpora, namely, BNC and BASE. In addition, projecting self-presence is much more prevalent than engaging the audience, and the use of the personal pronouns was found to differ from the assumed knowledge in written texts. This poses the question of whether a promotional text as an appendant genre should be treated as its host genre with an implicit promotional voice.