Move analysis of Hungarian English majors’ academic oral presentations

Abstract

The academic oral presentation (AOP) is an important aspect of English majors’ academic training. Besides a sound knowledge of the field, the AOP requires complex linguistic, sociocultural, pragmatic and discourse competences in the foreign language, of which the present study focuses on discourse competences comprising the ability to create coherent texts complying with the discourse community’s genre-specific expectations. While the discourse structure of written academic genres has been widely researched based on Swales’s (1990) Move Structure Theory, interest in oral academic genres including the AOP, an important educational tool to foster the disciplinary socialisation of university students, has been more modest. The present study aims to contribute to this field by mapping out the move structure of the Introduction and Conclusion macrostructure components of Hungarian English majors’ AOPs. The analytical framework of the investigation is Chang and Huang’s (2015) move structure model, adapted for the investigation of TED talks, so it also provides an opportunity to compare the discourse structure of TED talks and that of AOPs. The results suggest that the Introduction components of the AOPs and TED talks tend to be similar both in terms of their move structure and the proportion of text devoted to them. However, the characteristic moves of the Conclusion and the implementation of moves both in the Introduction and Conclusion demonstrate several differences deriving from the differing context of the two lecture types and experience of speakers, which the study will discuss in detail.