Shirley Carter-Thomas, Elizabeth Rowley-Jolivet. Analysing the scientific conference presentation (CP), a methodological overview of a multimodal genre. ASp – La revue du GERAS, 2003, 39-40, pp.59-72. ⟨10.4000/asp.1295⟩.

This article will consider three different approaches to a genre analysis of the conference presentation (CP) in science. We highlight some of the research problems involved in such an investigation and discuss the advantages and limitations of the three methods in furthering our understanding of this important spoken academic genre. The first approach is based on a microscopic view of the discourse and focuses on certain recurrent syntactic features of the CP that are pragmatically motivated by the communicative context. The second approach is more macroscopic, and discusses the feasibility of using move analysis as means to exploring the rhetorical organisation of the introduction section of the CP. However as neither of these approaches addresses the vital multimodal nature of the CP, we therefore underline in the third part some of the important features involved in a multimodal analysis.