Communicating disciplinary knowledge to a wide audience in 3MT presentations: How students engage with popularization of science

Abstract

3MT (Three-minute thesis) presentations, in which students communicate their theses to non-specialist audiences within three minutes, have emerged as an important academic genre, echoing current practices in scientific communication where researchers report their research work to a heterogeneous audience. Although increasing attention has been paid to 3MT presentations, we still lack sufficient knowledge of how presenters should communicate disciplinary knowledge to a wide audience. To address this gap, this corpus-based study investigates the rhetorical organization of moves (i.e. discoursal units serving various coherent communicative functions in text) in 80 3MT presentations from six disciplines. It is found that orientation, rationale, purpose, methods and results are five obligatory moves, among which the results move comprises more than one-fifth of the total length. The rationale and results moves are more often applied in hard sciences than in soft knowledge fields. The findings shed light on advanced academic literacy and how students communicate disciplinary knowledge to a wide audience.

Multimodal engagement strategies in science dissemination: A case study of TED talks and YouTube science videos

“…To that aim, they portray themselves as approachable people who share concerns with the audience, and even exploit their own personalities, smiling, joking and recounting details of their lives, which is in sharp contrast with traditional academic genres like the lecture. Similarly, Jiang and Qiu (2022) have also explored engagement in 3MTs presentations and the process to communicate disciplinary knowledge to wider audiences, and describe orientation, rationale, purpose, methods and results as the five moves that every presentation must have. Although disciplinary differences are found, these researchers argue that orienting the topic toward the audience's interests, and establishing common ground and connections between specialized knowledge and non-specialized audiences are key engaging strategies.…”

Verbal and visual resources in graphical abstracts: Analyzing patterns of knowledge presentation in digital genres

“…Since "multimodal research attends to the interplay between modes to look at the specific work of each mode and how each mode interacts with and contributes to the others in the multimodal ensemble" (Jewitt, 2013, p. 255), it is essential to unpack the meaning expressed by each mode for effective communication. Therefore, move analysis has been done on academic digital genres such as video abstracts (coccetta, 2021), video methods articles (Hafner, 2018) and Three-Minute Thesis presentations (Jiang & Qiu, 2022). These move analyses suggest the way that the generic structures of graphical abstracts can be examined to investigate the function of the verbal texts and the co-deployment between the moves in verbal text and visuals when realizing their communicative purposes.…”