Conferencing and Presentation English for Young Academics

This book discusses and demonstrates the types of English discourse used at academic conferences and offers guidance to prospective conference participants from multiple perspectives. It is a combination of research taken from numerous academic conferences attended and observations made by the author, based on well-established research methods in applied linguistics, as well as a guidebook aimed at students, ESP teachers, and young academics and professionals wishing to upgrade their skills to participate fruitfully in, and contribute to, academic conferences. It offers academic novices and non-native speakers of English in particular much that is new and practical, far beyond the realm of simple ‘presentation tips’. It addresses various topics, such as chairing discussions, poster management, discussion sessions, the TED phenomenon, workshops, and the emerging field of English as a lingua franca. The style alternates between the accessible and practical, and the analysis of the linguistic categories underpinning the discourse: genre analysis, the nature of the specialist discourse community, features of academic spoken discourse, and the presentation as multimodal narrative are all explored. The book includes authentic samples of model speech discourse throughout, along with questions and exercises for deliberation or practice in each chapter.

Michael Guest is an Associate Professor of English at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Miyazaki, Japan, where he has lived and worked for over 20 years. His academic interests include medical English discourse, presentation skills, testing, discourse analysis, English as a lingua franca, Asian Englishes, classroom methodologies, and culture in second language acquisition. He is the author of a number of textbooks and guidebooks, one novel, over 60 academic papers on applied linguistics and English education, and is an award-winning speaker who has presented papers and led seminars and workshops on over 200 occasions in nearly 20 countries.