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.