The Reconceptualization of Academic Discourse as a Professional Practice in the Digital Age: A Critical Genre Analysis of TED Talks

Abstract

This paper explores how academic discourse is reconceptualized as a professional practice via the web-mediated genre of TED talks (Technology, Entertainment and Design), popularizing speeches delivered by experts in fi elds that range from the 'hard' disciplines to the social sciences and the humanities. More precisely, this study compares two corpora of academic spoken discourse, i.e., a corpus of transcribed TED talks given by academics (TED_ac) and a corpus of university lecture transcripts (MICASE_lect) drawn from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) to understand how academics' communicative purposes differ in these two settings. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Critical Genre Analysis (Bhatia 2012) and Discourse Analysis (Goffman 1981;Fairclough 1989;Pennycook 1994;De Fina 1995;Benwell/Stokoe 2006;De Fina 2006), the present study sets out to investigate ways in which academics make use of language on the TED stage to achieve their "private intentions" as professionals (Bhatia 2012), e.g., building up their identity as experts as well as promoting their research and scholarship, rather than training a group of novices in their discipline or merely informing mass audiences. To this end, consideration is given to the distribution of fi rst and second person pronouns in the two pragmatic contexts under investigation. Special emphasis is placed on referents and discourse functions of the pronoun we, which is signifi cantly more frequent in TED_ac than in MICASE_lect. Despite its language-centered approach, this study has a marked sociological intent, as it casts light on an instance of academic discourse seen as an example of "professional practice" embedded in the wider context of a "professional culture" (Bhatia 2012).

Genre‐specific persuasion in oral presentations: Adaptation to the audience through multimodal persuasive strategies

“…The clue is to introduce your topic, explain why you care deeply about it and convince the audience that they should care too. Results of later studies (Caliendo, 2014;Scotto di Carlo, 2014;Compagnone, 2015) have corroborated these views. For example, a comparative study by Scotto di Carlo (2014) has shown how persuasive appeals through ethos, pathos and logos are remarkably different in a TED talk and a conference presentation dealing with the same topic and delivered by the same speaker.…”

“…Within research dissemination talks, TED talks have received increasing attention. Caliendo (2014) and Compagnone (2015) acknowledge their multimodal nature noting that this genre combines different semiotic modes (i.e. spoken, written, video and audio).…”

Disseminating knowledge: A discourse analysis of terrorism in TED talks

“…The impersonal authoritative references, together with the use of war metaphor, highlights political communicative purpose of TED talks (cf. Compagnone, 2015 ) and make them a less likely academic-style genre, where self-mention contributes to speakers’ construction of texts and acceptance of ideas.…”

A critical genre analysis of MD&A discourse in corporate annual reports

“…It further states that the professional practice, interdiscursivity and multi-perspectives are the core of CGA, making its framework clearer and more easily applied. In recent years, CGA theory has attracted increasing attention in research on professional discourse, for example, business discourse (Lung, 2017; Yeung, 2013), institutional discourse (Fage-Butler, 2015; Levina and Orlikowski, 2009; Svenonius, 2013), social network discourse (Motta-Roth and Marcuzzo, 2010) and academic discourse (Compagnone, 2015), among others. With the contribution made by CGA research so far, this study tries to expand the application of CGA in the analysis of MD&A, an under-investigated discourse, in order to better understand its interdiscursivity, the nature and function of discursive practices of business professionals.…”