Academic and non-academic conference presentations – are they the same genre? Five case studies. (original) (raw)

Academic and non-academic conference presentations – are they the same genre? Five case studies.

To date, little research has been conducted on conference presentation (CP) introductions with the aim of analysing their moves, especially as far as non academic CP's are concerned. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, no study has ever focused on the non-academic context - apart from numerous public speaking handbooks, which, however, do not apply any scientific method of analysis. Therefore this study sets out to investigate non-academic CP introductions in order to determine whether they coincide with the genre of the academic CP introduction. Such a study will hopefully prove valuable not only in the field of genre analysis, but also in the field of interpreting studies. Since it is possible to determine a move model from the structure of every genre, I will set out to do this for the non-academic CP introduction as well, thus providing the interpreter with a series of speech acts a speaker can reasonably be expected to carry out. Chapter 2 of this dissertation begins with an overview of the literature on the academic CP as a genre from many different perspectives. Then the focus shifts to the introductory section of different academic written and oral genres, in particular to those studies which lead to the definition of their moves and which, therefore, will be useful in the analysis of the structure of non-academic CP introductions. Chapter 3 focuses on the non-academic CP. First, the concept of discourse community is explored in terms of both academic and non-academic discourse, with the aim of achieving a better understanding of the differences between the two as well as of the latter alone. Then a definition of the non-academic CP introduction as a genre will be developed on the basis of Swales’ (1990) criteria and Hasan’s (Halliday and Hasan 1989) notion of ‘context’, in order to determine whether academic and non-academic CP introductions belong to the same genre or not. After the theoretical framework set in the first part of the dissertation, five case studies will be analysed in Chapter 4. Five non-academic presentations were selected and their introductions were transcribed. To these I have applied Rowley-Jolivet and Carter-Thomas’ (2005) move model of academic CP introductions in order to determine whether their model can be applied to non-academic CP introductions as well. The data retrieved is analysed to let new moves emerge, too, so that a move model for non-academic CP introductions can be identified. The usefulness of this model for further and more in-depth studies is mentioned at the end of the chapter In the last chapter a suggestion is made about the application of move models to 11 interpreting studies, in particular as far as simultaneous interpretation is concerned. To be brief, since move models describe the structure shared by the texts of a given genre, they could be used by interpreters to predict the structure of the text they are going to interpret.