Scientists and educators travel great distances, spend significant time, and dedicate substantial financial resources to present at conferences. This highlights the value placed on conference interactions. Despite the importance of conferences, very little has been studied about what is learned from the presentations and how presenters can…

The typical conference panel for the presentation of new work includes one or two people who have been designated as commentators or respondents and charged with reading the papers in advance and offering a critique. Normally what follows is a brief period for questions or comments from the audience. In this article, the author discusses…

Academic lectures show formal and informal characteristics. Alongside passages of rigorous scientific reasoning, conference English may therefore be expected to contain many features identified by earlier studies as characteristic of the conversational mode, reflecting the ongoing interaction between speaker and listener. To find out whether these…

One of the key means by which knowledge is disseminated in the academic discourse community is the spoken presentation of papers at an academic conference. In contrast to the written research article, the spoken presentation remains relatively under-researched from a linguistic perspective, limiting the knowledge available for explicating this…