| Keywords [eng] |
stance, engagement, 3MT, spoken academic discourse, cross-disciplinary study, autoriaus pozicijos raiška, santykio su klausytoju kūrimas, trijų minučių disertacijos, sakytinis akademinis diskursas, skirtingų disciplinų tyrimas |
| Abstract [eng] |
As more studies of spoken academic English discourse have begun to appear, scholars are rapidly exploring the vast number of different and very interesting spoken discourse genres. 3MT (Three Minute Thesis) presentations are a competitive spoken academic English genre where PhD students present their research to non-specialist audiences in only up to 180 seconds. As a highly original and standardised genre, 3MT has been receiving more and more attention in recent years and it is the object of this study. Most previous research focuses on winning presentations that were given by native English speakers. In this paper, however, using Hyland’s (2005) stance and engagement framework, I analyse 30 3MT presentations from University of Bologna’s competitions, subdivided into three science fields: social sciences & humanities (SH), physical sciences & engineering (PE) and life sciences (LS). The self-compiled corpus was gathered by transcribing and manually analysing all presentations for stance and engagement markers. The finding of this study show that both stance and engagement were important aspects of 3MT presentations analysed. Stance markers were used at similar frequencies among the science fields, showing that building an authorial persona and carefully crafting an argument were similarly important in all three fields. Engagement markers, which are important in establishing a more personal connection with the audience while gripping their attention, were found significantly more often in presentations in social sciences & humanities and physical sciences & engineering, showing that these scholars tended to focus not only on how they build their authorial stance but on how they accommodate their listeners as well. Among the individual stance and engagement markers, the use of hedges and boosters showed that life sciences’ presentations were characteristic of building a both carefully phrased and authoritative argument, especially when dealing with more sensitive topics. The use of questions and hearer mention further showed that speakers in social sciences & humanities, as a softer field, tended to be more dialogic in nature and relied more in the academic community to approve and support their claims. The stance and engagement markers that occurred infrequently perhaps did so because of the very concise nature of 3MT presentations’ genre and indicated that the presenters have to carefully craft their speeches, balancing between having to explain complex issues and having to do that very quickly to a non-specialist audience. |
