Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet

Visual discourse in scientific conference papers A genre-based study

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of visual communication in a spoken research genre, the scientific conference paper. To this end, the study analyses the 2048 visuals projected during 90 papers given at five international conferences in three fields (geology, medicine, and physics), in order to bring out the recurrent features of the visual dimension. The visuals are first classified into a four-part typology specific to the conference paper genre. Analysis of the functions fulfilled by the visual channel reveals a wide range of meaning-making strategies which are exploited to structure the discourse and express logical relations. These strategies highlight the visual knowledge shared by conference participants and play an important role in facilitating communication between NS and NNS researchers in the international conference situation.

Different Visions, Different Visuals: a Social Semiotic Analysis of Field-Specific Visual Composition in Scientific Conference Presentations

This study proposes a social semiotic analysis of visual communication in a scientific research genre, the conference presentation. It focuses on the spatial and temporal visual resources available in this genre to create texture and cohesion, and examines how logical relations, discourse structure and rhetorical claims are expressed visually in this particular communicative context. By comparing how three different scientific disciplines – geology, medicine and physics – exploit these resources in field-specific ways, it shows that visual communication in science is deeply embedded in disciplinary practice and varies in response to the type of data investigated, the methodology and epistemology of each field. The data used for the study and recorded on video film comprise over 2000 visuals (slides and transparencies) projected during 90 presentations given at international scientific conferences.

Oralising text slides in scientific conference presentations: A multimodal corpus analysis

This chapter aims to help researchers bridge the gap between the written and oral presentation of their work by providing a corpus-based analysis of the respective functions and linguistic features of text slides and the accompanying spoken commentary in scientific presentations. Drawing on several hours of videofilmed presentations at international conferences, the corpus comprises all the text slides in the data, and the speaker’s commentary given at these points in the talks. The commentary and the projected text form two synchronous parallel discourses, with similar field content, but markedly different linguistic realizations and roles. The comparison between the written and spoken subsets is conducted in the framework of systemic functional linguistics, focusing on grammatical metaphor and the three metafunctions. Keywords: scientific conference presentations; multimodal corpus; spoken and written science; grammatical metaphor; metafunctions

Citation Practices of Expert French Writers of English: Issues of Attribution and Stance

In research articles (RAs), reporting the results and claims of other authors is a crucial skill as it both demonstrates the writers’ familiarity with the literature of the field and allows them to position their own findings and conclusions within the existing body of research, thus creating space to promote their work. Using citations effectively, however, demands considerable linguistic and rhetorical expertise. While several studies have shown that citation causes problems for novice researchers, the specific linguistic problems of expert non-English-speaking researchers have been little investigated. We hypothesize that their problems are unlikely to be the same as those of novices and that cultural and language factors may interfere when citing in a foreign language. To test this hypothesis, we collected a corpus comprising three subsets of articles: 40 pre-publication uncorrected draft manuscripts written in English by expert French researchers in engineering, science and computational linguistics; a comparable corpus of 40 published RAs by native English researchers in the same disciplines; and 40 published RAs written in French by French researchers. The drafts were first examined to detect potential problems with citation; we then checked whether these problems also occurred in the English RAs; if not, this was considered to indicate that it might be a problem specific to French researchers writing in English. The French RAs were then analysed to see which problems could be attributed to the influence of the French language or French citation conventions. The concordancer AntConc 3.2.1. was used for quantitative searches in the corpus. The results revealed that four features related to issues of attribution and stance were particularly problematic for the expert French writers: the use of reporting verbs, of according to, of the would-conditional, and concessive if-clauses. The French writers of English used reporting that-clauses far less than the English writers, and with a more restricted range of verbs, a profile of use reflecting that of the French RA subset. The other three problems relate to the different spectrum of values that the English expressions and their French equivalents can take: according to and selon express different degrees of writer commitment to the cited source; the French conditional is widely used to express lack of commitment or distance, a value that is not directly transposable into the English would-conditional; si-clauses are frequently used to express concession, unlike if-clauses. French writers of English tended to import all these features specific to French into their English drafts, resulting in many cases of ambiguity as to the writer’s position towards the cited source. This cross-linguistic study shows that citing in English is far from straightforward for writers of other languages, and that citation practices are neither language- nor culture-free. The influence of the writer’s native language and of French academic citing conventions can be clearly perceived in the citing structures and strategies adopted, often leading to a lack of clarity in this respect and thus significantly weakening the strength of the argument.

Web 2.0

ИСПОЛЬЗОВАНИЕ ИНСТРУМЕНТОВ WEB 2.0 В ПРОЦЕССЕ ОБУЧЕНИЯ ПЕРЕВОДУ Использование инструментов Web 2.0 в процессе обучения переводу становится привычным и обыденным благодаря современным мобильным средствам связи и свободному доступу к интернету. Информационные технологии позволяют более эффективно и интенсивно проводить обучение переводу, способствуют формированию языковой и коммуникативной компетенций, открывают широкие возможности для раскрытия творческого потенциала и языковых способностей учащихся. Адрес статьи: www.gramota.net/materials/2/2013/9-2/44.html