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Investigating the rhetorical structure of TED talks : a corpus based study
Author
Jiang, Jingxin
Supervisor
Hu, Guangwei
Abstract
As a new form of science popularization, TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) talks have achieved tremendous popularity with millions of views and comments on the Internet. However, little effort has been devoted to understanding the structural features of TED talks. Thus, informed by Swales’ genre analysis theory, this study set out to explore the move structure of TED talks and identify possible generic variations due to disciplinary and gender influences by analyzing a systematically constructed corpus.
Through stratified random sampling, 157 talks across four disciplines (Political Science, Education, Biological Science, Electrical Engineering) were selected for the corpus to represent two broad disciplinary groupings (soft and hard disciplines) and the two gender groups (female and male speakers). A prototypical ten-move protocol was identified, including three compulsory moves appearing in more than 95% of the TED talks (Idea Announcement, Elaboration, Termination) and seven optional moves occurring in 37%-67% of the TED talks (Listener Orientation, Speaker Presentation, Idea Orientation, Contextualization, Results Reporting, and Implication). The moves were configured in a great variety of sequences, and none of the configurations achieved a dominant status.
To explore cross-disciplinary variations, the differences in move frequency, length, and configuration between hard and soft disciplines were investigated through quantitative analysis. No statistically significant results were found for any of the ten moves. These results were attributed to the promotional nature and the communicative purpose of the TED talk genre, speakers’ awareness of the nature of their audience, and characteristics of the delivery mode. These factors collectively overrode disciplinary influences. No significant relationship was found between the move configuration and the two disciplinary groupings. This lack of relationship was explainable in terms of features of oral genres and recency of TED talks as a spoken genre.
By contrast, statistically significant gender-based variations were observed on four optional moves, i.e. Listener Orientation, Speaker Presentation, Contextualization and Implication. These differences were ascribed to the characteristics of online delivery platforms, women’s awareness of the indexical features of their discourse community and their socio-psychological tendencies such as their greater adherence to local communicative conventions, as well as their other-orientation, and sensitivity to others’ needs.
The findings produced by the present study can inform pedagogical practices, underscore the need to facilitate students’ listening comprehension with authentic presentations, equip them with the ability to understand and make public speeches, and make use of TED talks as teaching materials to inform the designer of a genre-based curriculum for teaching public speaking. The dissertation concludes by discussing the limitations of the present study and recommending directions for future research.
Through stratified random sampling, 157 talks across four disciplines (Political Science, Education, Biological Science, Electrical Engineering) were selected for the corpus to represent two broad disciplinary groupings (soft and hard disciplines) and the two gender groups (female and male speakers). A prototypical ten-move protocol was identified, including three compulsory moves appearing in more than 95% of the TED talks (Idea Announcement, Elaboration, Termination) and seven optional moves occurring in 37%-67% of the TED talks (Listener Orientation, Speaker Presentation, Idea Orientation, Contextualization, Results Reporting, and Implication). The moves were configured in a great variety of sequences, and none of the configurations achieved a dominant status.
To explore cross-disciplinary variations, the differences in move frequency, length, and configuration between hard and soft disciplines were investigated through quantitative analysis. No statistically significant results were found for any of the ten moves. These results were attributed to the promotional nature and the communicative purpose of the TED talk genre, speakers’ awareness of the nature of their audience, and characteristics of the delivery mode. These factors collectively overrode disciplinary influences. No significant relationship was found between the move configuration and the two disciplinary groupings. This lack of relationship was explainable in terms of features of oral genres and recency of TED talks as a spoken genre.
By contrast, statistically significant gender-based variations were observed on four optional moves, i.e. Listener Orientation, Speaker Presentation, Contextualization and Implication. These differences were ascribed to the characteristics of online delivery platforms, women’s awareness of the indexical features of their discourse community and their socio-psychological tendencies such as their greater adherence to local communicative conventions, as well as their other-orientation, and sensitivity to others’ needs.
The findings produced by the present study can inform pedagogical practices, underscore the need to facilitate students’ listening comprehension with authentic presentations, equip them with the ability to understand and make public speeches, and make use of TED talks as teaching materials to inform the designer of a genre-based curriculum for teaching public speaking. The dissertation concludes by discussing the limitations of the present study and recommending directions for future research.
Date Issued
2017
Call Number
PE1408 Jia
Date Submitted
2017