Evaluation in Discussion Sessions of Conference Paper Presentations

Discussion sessions of conference paper presentations are spontaneous and unpredictable in contrast to the lectures that precede them. These can be challenging for presenters mainly for novice ones. This study considers the multimodal nature of spoken discourse to explore presenter's expression of evaluation and foreground the role of kinesics and paralanguage that co-occur with the linguistic utterances. The theoretical framework is embedded in techniques of genre and discourse analysis including the theoretical orientations of systemic functional linguistics conversation analysis pragmatics and multimodal discourse analysis. A multilayer annotation tool allows the identification of the linguistic and multimodal evaluation that articulates the rhetoric of the interaction. This book is the embryo for new lines of research on academic spoken discourse analysis where traditionally the focus of the study has been limited to verbatim transcriptions; but also on multimodal analysis research to date narrowed to conversation analysis. The results and the methodology presented will find a pedagogical application in EAP courses.