La regulación transcripcional de KlHEM

Oral undergraduate presentations represent one of the genres which have not received extensive attention within EAP in comparison to research on written genres. This is despite the fact that undergraduates’ engagement in this genre is often seen as an essential part of students’ development in higher education as they are expected to

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search for information and use their presentations to provide evidence of their developing knowledge and growing experience. Available research on speaking skill has pointed out some significant issues which are relevant to this thesis. Considerable attention, for instance, has been devoted to examining the value of a native-like accent in specialized language teaching. Early approaches considered a native-like accent as the norm that learners should be taught and encouraged to follow. Having a non-native accent was believed to disadvantage learners, hinder their engagement with their surroundings and question their ability to assume the cultural and symbolic capital needed for successful engagement with language learning (Kubota and Chiang, 2013).

Concerns with learners’ inability to attain a native-like accent have been usually associated with investigations of English-speaking contexts. These views came under attack in later approaches with studies beginning to point out that absence of a native- like accent does not necessarily hinder learners’ engagement with using the language. The significance attached to developing a native-like accent among learners was

questioned because of the increasing awareness among scholars that it is more likely for second language learners to use the language with non-native speakers. For these users, developing their competence as language users was more important and relevant than a native-like accent (Feak, 2013). Learners’ practical needs came to be appreciated as the major drive to assess the value of a speaker’s accent and its effect on speakers’ use of the language and interaction with others.

Competence came to be associated with the functional uses of language that allow learners to communicate efficiently with others in different environments regardless of their accent (Barrett & Liu, 2016; Mauranen, Hynninen, & Ranta, 2010). As a result, learners were encouraged to focus on their communication needs rather than to attempt to develop and adopt the standards of a native speaker who may not even be available in their context as in this thesis (Charles, 2007). An example appears in Lima’s (2016) quantitatively-driven examination of the relationship between Chinese learners’ foreign accent and comprehensibility in oral presentations within an American academic setting. Her study points out that not only there was no correlation between presenters’ accent and comprehensibility, but also that accent had no considerable effect on how Chinese speakers were assessed by their Chinese and non-Chinese audience.

In terms of learners’ level of education, available research on English language learners’ oral presentations is mostly concerned with advanced levels of proficiency within formal settings such as academic and conference presentations (e.g., Kim, 2006;

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Kmalvand, 2015; Kunioshi, Noguchi, Hayashi & Tojo, 2012; Morton, 2009; Rowley- Jolivet, 2002). Studies on oral presentations have covered a variety of topics, such as analysis of linguistic features (e.g., Fernández-Polo, 2014; Kao & Wang, 2014; Zareva, 2011a, 2016), investigation of differences between presenters’ performance in L1 and L2 (Hincks, 2010), apprenticeship into oral academic discourses (Morita, 2000; Zappa- Hollman, 2007), the relation between written discourse and talk (Webber, 2005), needed skills and difficulties in academic listening and speaking (Kim, 2006), comparing

between native and non-native presenters (Rowley-Jolivet, 2002), investigating multimodal literacy and numeracy practices among international students (Alyousef, 2013), comprehensibility and liveliness in non-native student oral presentations and analysis of moves (Kunioshi et al., 2012). Less attention is devoted to younger and less advanced L2 speakers. Gwee and Toh-Heng (2015), for example, examine high school students’ engagement with video review of their oral presentations in formal and informal settings.

Many of the available studies on oral presentations have been concerned with second/foreign language speakers operating within contexts in which English is used as a lingua franca “which is with an international study body for an international audience” (Barrett & Liu, 2016, p. 1252). Other studies have also begun to examine this genre in other contexts. For example, Brown and Adamson (2014) explore the perspectives and expectations of a group of Japanese faculty in English-medium content classes in a Japanese university. They highlight the effects of local academic norms on EAP classroom practices within a variety of activities, including oral presentations. In Taiwan, Chou (2011) examines learning strategies used by French major college students while engaging with group and individual oral presentations, and the effect of these strategies on the development of speaking skills among these learners.

Baumgarten (2016) adopts a longitudinal study design that examines the use of multiword sequences among second language users in their oral presentations. In addition to using quantitative surveys, the author relies on qualitative interviews and a socially grounded perspective on second language learning to examine learners’ habits of language use and socialization patterns.

In relation to examination of multimodal meaning making, there is currently an acknowledged limited availability of data on students’ multimodal texts in higher levels of education (Levy & Kimber, 2009; Matusiak, 2013) with few studies examining the multimodal nature of texts within oral presentations. For example, Rowley-Jolivet

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(2002) examines the use of visuals in conference presentations to support comprehension and compares these visuals to the published proceedings of the

conference in order to assess their use in these two different genres. Tardy (2005) traces the expression of disciplinary knowledge and individuality among multilingual graduate student writers in an American university through vocabulary, structures, visuals and colour choices while highlighting the opportunities that coordinating PowerPoint slides with talk provides for presenters that may not be available in written genres. Zareva (2011b) also examines what novice international graduate student presenters consider to be effective PowerPoint slides and compares their views with expert views in relation to organization, style and typography as essential elements of design. Morell (2015) examines the use of verbal, written, non-verbal materials and body language in

multimodal academic discourse of oral presentations. This examination aims to explore how effective communication can be enhanced among multilingual academics using English as a Lingua Franca. Zhao and Van Leeuwen (2013) investigate the effect of using PowerPoint as a semiotic technology in cultural studies lectures and their pedagogic effects. Zhao, Djonov and Van Leeuwen (2014) adopt a multimodal social semiotic approach to understand the relation between semiotic technology and its use through close examination of slideshows, PowerPoint as a software and PowerPoint- supported presentations.

Current investigations attempting to examine multimodal meaning making in oral presentations tend to remain faithful to the prevalent EAP traditions of textual analysis, focusing on texts as stand-alone products with minimum investigations of the situated nature of their production. Despite the potentially pedagogic benefits associated with textual analysis, we need to support this type of analysis with thorough

examination of how these texts come to existence. Available studies, however, tend to overlook the importance of highlighting the sign-makers’, i.e. learners’ perspectives and experiences in how they engage with their presentations. This tendency has led to a considerable gap in our understanding of the multimodal practices that learners draw upon to participate in this activity and the multimodal nature of academic presentations, especially in scientific disciplines in which meaning making is classically

acknowledged to utilize different modal choices (Kress et al., 2001).

Within ESP/EAP traditions, the practices underlying multimodal meaning making are often inferred from texts rather than through empirical in-depth investigations (Prior, 2013). There are many reasons that have led to this status in

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relation to the limited range of research on oral academic presentations as an

independent genre. Methodological issues are especially challenging. We cannot ignore the difficulty associated with video/audio-recording and transcribing spoken genres and the complexity involved in managing the data involved in this type of investigation (Hyland, 2009). Furthermore, researching practices that surround literacy requires ethnographic methodologies that may not be acceptable or accessible in some contexts, especially where literacy is associated with a skill-based understanding of reading and writing without acknowledging the use of other semiotic means or recognizing its situated nature and implications on the learners. In addition, ethnographic methods may not be seen as appropriate or acceptable within hard-to-reach contexts in which cultural and religious sensitivities shape people’s engagement with their daily lives, including educational practices. These issues are relevant to this study and will be discussed in the next chapter as I describe the methodological choices taken to answer the research questions in this thesis.