“If people are going to listen to me for half an hour, they should like what they hear. If they like what they hear, they’ll carry away something from this presentation, right?” This is what a friend of mine said to me when I complemented her on an interesting choice of a presentation topic as we were gathering in class for our end-of-the semester graduate student presentations. Years later, the straightforward logic of what she had said made me realize that, in fact, it captures the very essence of the relationship between the purpose of an academic presentation and how we flesh it out with all the necessary ingredients to make it work for our listeners. From my perspective as a linguist, the most important ingredient of all is the language choices we make to achieve that purpose. The keywords here are language choices (rather than the language we use) to emphasize the importance of thinking consciously about the language of academic presentations so that the audience feels understood, included, and valued in the discourse.
The purpose of this book is to bring to the fore some under-researched linguistic features of academic presentations—more specifically, student academic presentations—by connecting their analysis to presenters’ attempts for listener accommodation. The features are lexical in nature (at a single word and collocational level) and, to my knowledge, have not been studied in the context of this particular type of oral academic discourse neither have they received much attention from speech accommodation perspective in that context. If we assume that an audience-centric approach to presentation design and delivery is central to the effectiveness of presentations—a claim that books and manuals on developing effective presentations strongly emphasize—then, we should also take a close look at the language that is used in real-life student presentations to see how this is accomplished. The analyses presented in this book are a step in this direction. Moreover, the survey of a number of published books and guides on academic presentations (see Chap. 2) revealed that the majority of the sources do not treat the language of presentations in any depth neither do they provide language-related recommendations or examples that are based on representative data sources. So, the findings from the analyses of the corpus of student academic presentations (SAP corpus) discussed in this book can be a stepping stone for more specific language recommendations that instructors and material designers can use to base their feedback and advice on, especially when addressing speech adjustments for audience accommodation purposes in students’ presentations. It should be mentioned here that the language of the presentations included in the SAP corpus is English and the presenters are novice graduate-level college students who are native speakers of English (a detailed description of the SAP corpus is presented later in this chapter). Thus, the findings are language specific (in this case, English-specific) and their interpretation is limited to Anglophone academic culture. Nonetheless, I would argue that their implications go beyond the specific context of the SAP corpus. For instance, they can be used for comparative purposes across other languages and academic cultures; they point to some practically useful lexical trends in student presentations that can be incorporated in class discussions and materials designed to develop students’ presentation skills, and they offer data-based evidence of the lexical composition of student presentations to a wide readership of researchers, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, teacher trainers, prospective and practicing teachers, and generally anyone wishing to keep up with this line of investigation.
This chapter begins with a discussion about the value of student academic presentations in higher education and offers a brief summary of the main benefits of the genre for degree-seeking college students. The benefits are discussed from a learning, professional, communication, and disciplinary point of view. I then make a connection between strong audience orientation, which many published manuals on giving successful presentations underscore, and the notion of audience accommodation as proposed by Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT)—a theory that offers one of the most comprehensive frameworks for the analysis of verbal behavior in terms of language adjustments speakers make to best accommodate their listeners in the discourse. This is followed by a brief description of the register perspective taken in the analysis of the SAP corpus and a description of its composition and situational characteristics. The last section gives an overview of the chapters included in the book.
The Value of Student Academic Presentations in Higher Education
Higher education culture, particularly in North America, is dominated by written assignments (Zareva 2012). However, there is growing realization among students, instructors, and employers alike that development of skills for giving effective presentations should begin early in students’ college education as those skills are essential to the training of future professionals (Chivers and Shoolbred 2007; Zareva 2009a, 2012, 2019a). Also, in the last couple of decades, there has been an increasing trend in presentations being used by employers for recruitment purposes, which confirms the value associated with the skill of displaying one’s professional and discipline-specific competence in an effective, appropriate, and acceptable way. This is probably one of the main reasons why, in recent years, many undergraduate programs in North America have started to include required coursework in academic communication that puts a special emphasis on honing students’ presentation skills. This long overdue emphasis on developing students’ presentational competence reveals not only an accent on this oral academic variety as an integral part of college students’ professionalization, but also well-deserved attention to the role it plays in various disciplinary and specialized contexts in which students participate long after they leave college. In essence, as Engleberg and Daly (2005) pointed out, the principles behind developing and delivering messages in one’s own life and the larger world apply to all communication contexts; hence, “learning the basic skills of presentation speaking provides a lifelong guide for becoming a more effective and ethical communicator” (p. xxi).
In addition to having disciplinary and professional value, academic presentations are increasingly used to encourage students to take charge of their own learning (Chivers and Shoolbred 2007). In reality, putting a presentation together is probably as effortful and demanding as writing a paper on the same topic, and it requires the mastery of a number of academic skills which are shared between academic speech and writing (Zareva 2009a). For example, it involves some skills actively used in academic writing such as analytical and critical thinking, organizational skills to arrange the logical flow of dense informational content, argument development skills, summary of main points, etc. which have to be put to use along with the mastery of a set of presentation design and delivery skills that come with challenges of their own. It appears, then, that requiring students to give academic presentations in content areas would not only enhance their learning of that content, but would also bring extra value to their learning experience. Not to forget that a presentation can also serve as another form of new knowledge dissemination and, in that, be an effective way of prompting peer learning of that knowledge.
Along the same lines, presentation assignments also have a great potential to increase students’ ability to evaluate research (Davis et al. 2012). F...