The peer seminar, a spoken research process genre

The peer seminar, a spoken research processgenre

Marta Aguilar*

Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

Abstract

This study aims to report on another research process genre, namely the peer seminar.Work exists [English for Specific Purposes, 12 (1993) 23; 18 (1999) 63] which studies different

aspects of the seminar as understood in the Anglo-Saxon world (an expert-to-novice situationwith an asymmetrical status of participants) but little attention has been paid so far to this‘occluded genre’ (Swales, J. Academic writing. Intercultural and textual issues, 1996) withinthe academic world. Even though the peer seminar has mixed features from the lecture, the

written research article, and the conference presentation, several peculiarities have been iden-tified which seem to suggest a niche can be identified. Therefore, the peer seminar should beconsidered a research process genre in the scientific and academic community playing a role in

the informal dissemination of scientific research and knowledge.# 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Academic discourse; Academic genres; Seminars

1. Introduction

Most literature on spoken academic genres revolves around situations involving ahierarchical relationship between their participants. Examples of this can be foundin the lecture, the laboratory session, the discussion group, the advising session orthe seminar as understood in the Anglo-Saxon academic culture, i.e. the graduate orstudent-mentor seminar (Hartford & Bardovi-Hardig, 1992; Weissberg, 1993;Thompson, 1994; Basturkmen, 1999; Northcott, 2001). Among these genres, it isprobably the lecture that has received most attention during the past 20 years(Brown, 1978; Murphy & Candlin, 1979; Goffman, 1981; Coulthard & Mont-gomery, 1981). The engineering lecture discourse (Murphy & Candlin, 1979;

Journal of English for Academic Purposes

3 (2004) 55–72

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Goffman, 1981), the identification of styles of lecturing (Brown, 1978; Dudley-Evans& Johns, 1981; Brown & Bakhtar, 1983), as well as the study of the lecture withinsecond language classroom research and lecture comprehension (Gass & Madden,1985; Chaudron, 1988; Benson, 1994), have stood out as fields of interest. Morerecently, lectures have been investigated from different approaches; worth noting arethose examining the rhetorical and discourse structure (Flowerdew, 1994; Dudley-Evans, 1994; Young, 1994; Allison & Tauroza, 1995), certain genre features(Thompson 1994), structure-signalling devices (Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992; Han-sen, 1994; Dunkel & Davies, 1994), several attitudinal and interpersonal features(Rounds, 1987a, 1987b; Strodt-Lopez, 1991; Flowerdew, 1992), or cultural factorsand expectations of different kind (Flowerdew & Miller, 1995, 1996).On the other hand, research on spoken research process genres where participants

are peers has mainly focused on plenary lectures, poster sessions and slide talksbeing held in conferences or workshops (Dubois, 1980a, 1980b, 1981, 1984, 1985,1987; Shalom, 1993). However, little or no attention has been given to the peerseminar so far. The study of peer seminars can be interesting because informationabout the different stages in the development of science, as envisaged by Ziman(1974, in Dubois 1987) could be obtained. According to Ziman’s model, science is acorporate endeavour consisting of a first stage where data are derived in thelaboratory, a second one where data are published as information, and a last onewhere only that information that has withstood peer review survives as ‘science’.Talks in professional meetings or conferences, and many other communicationforms in the academic and scientific community, usually take place in an inter-mediate stage prior to the published journal article. Therefore, it is hoped that ananalysis of a genre like the peer seminar, reflecting and perpetuating the transfer,evolution, and construction of scientific knowledge, provides us with some insightinto the developmental process of science.Assuming that genres are communicative events and vehicles for the achievement

of purposes that are recognised by the members of a discourse community (Swales,1990), the peer seminar could certainly be regarded as another spoken genre in thescientific community because it seems to comply with the most basic of these con-siderations. I will try to map some singularities of the peer seminar and compare andcontrast it with other related academic genres in an attempt to shed some light onthe particular purpose and audience in peer seminars and to show that this con-tributes to portraying and characterising it in some way. Perhaps the peer seminarhas been paid relatively little attention, when compared to the written research arti-cle (RA) and the conference presentation, because it is a genre that academics andresearchers use less frequently to disseminate their work and because it rarelyappears in print. In this sense, a peer seminar could be regarded as an ‘occludedgenre’ (Swales, 1996). It is important to note that a peer seminar is not to be equatedwith a lecturer-student meeting or tutorial situation with an asymmetrical status ofparticipants, as it is in the Anglo-Saxon world. A peer seminar is not an expert-to-novice situation but an expert-to-expert event consisting of a talk or extendedmonologue that an invited speaker gives on a (highly) specialised topic. The invitedspeaker (seminar speaker), expert in a given field, addresses his oral presentation to

56 M. Aguilar / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 3 (2004) 55–72

a small peer audience comprising university professors, lecturers, and a few PhDstudents; i.e. scholars interested in a particular research area of the speciality. Thetopic of the seminar may be suggested by the host professor, but it is obviously thespeaker himself who decides. Typically, a seminar speaker can decide to explain hisongoing research informally, to explain the research work he has been performingduring his stay at a foreign (host) university, or simply to inform about the latestdevelopment or advance in the research work as carried out with his home universityteam.

2. Method

The corpus of data consists of four seminars belonging to the engineering dis-cipline, together with the information elicited from an informal interview with thespeakers either before or after the seminar took place. The four seminars were givenat the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, and were subse-quently taped and transcribed by this researcher, who also took notes of the mainideas highlighted by the speakers, of the type and number of attendants1, and of thetype of visual display the speaker was making use of.Connections were found to exist between a peer seminar and other spoken and

written lay professional communication, and the structure of the four seminars wasanalysed. In particular, special attention was paid to introductions, as a cursorylook indicated that they seemed to be a salient and distinguishing feature of semi-nars. To do so, Dubois’ study of conference slide talks (Dubois 1980a, 1980b, 1985,1987) and Swales’ move analysis (Swales, 1990)—more specifically, his CARS modelfor article introductions—were drawn upon. Dubois (1980a:151) proposed the fol-lowing maximal structure of biology conference slide presentations:

I. Introduction
(A)Listener orientation (B) Content orientation (optional nontechnical segment+technical segment)
II. Body (one or more episodes)
(A)Situation (B) Event (C)Commentary
III. Termination
(A)Content orientation (B) Listener orientation
In Dubois’ view, ‘listener orientation’ is a consequence of the real time and face-to-face situation and it includes: (i) acknowledging the chairman’s introduction, (ii)calling the audience to attention (‘Ladies and Gentlemen’) or addressing the

1 ‘Attendant’ is used as a convenient shorthand for people attending the seminar.

M. Aguilar / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 3 (2004) 55–72 57

projectionist (iii) informing listeners that questions can be answered at the end, and(iv) signalling that the presentation is over in the termination (silence or ‘Thankyou’).The seminars in this work are studied and contrasted with the structure proposed

by Dubois, as well as with Swales’ CARS model. We may recall that Swales’benchmark model is based on the assumption that in an introduction there are threeMoves, rhetorically realised by several steps or strategies:

Move 1 Establishing a territory
Move 2 Establishing a niche
-Step 1-claiming centrality and/or
-Step1A-counter-claiming, or -Step2-making topic generalisation and/or -Step 1B-indicating a gap, or -Step 3-reviewing items of previous research -Step 1C-question-raising, or
-Step 1D-continuing a tradition
Move 3 Occupying a niche
-Step 1A-outlining purposes, or
-Step 1B-announcing present research -Step 2-announcing principal findings -Step3-indicating RA structure
Additionally, the data were also analysed in terms of the type and quantity ofcertain metadiscursive items and chunks uttered by the seminar speakers. FollowingCrismore, Markkanen & Steffensen (1993) and Hyland (1999), metadiscursive itemswere divided in two types: textual metadiscourse (titling devices, frame markers,sequencers) and interpersonal metadiscourse (mainly hedges and attitudinal andevaluative commentary). The results of the analyses were contrasted with those ofanother rater. On those few occasions where differences occurred, agreement wassought and eventually found.The four seminar speakers were male, native English lecturers or professors well

known in their field, and with an average of 20 years of experience in teaching. Theyall came from British universities (Aberdeen, Sheffield, Lancaster and Southampton)and were visiting Barcelona because they had been invited by different departmentsat the UPC. Speaker 1 was a visiting professor from the University of Aberdeen whohad stayed in Barcelona for 6 months; he collaborated with the Department ofThermic Machines and Motors, and near the end of his stay he gave a talk toexplain the work he had been engaged in during his 6-month stay at the UPC. Twoof them (speakers 2 and 4) had been invited to give a talk, and stayed in Barcelonafor about 4 or 5 days. Finally, speaker 3 was going to participate in a conferencebeing held in Barcelona 2 days after and had been asked to give an additional talkoutside the conference. Their specialities or fields of research were varied but relatedto engineering: Thermic Machines and Motors in the case of Seminar 1, AppliedMathematics and Telematics in the case of Seminar 2, and Statistics and OperationResearch for Seminars 3 and 4. The number of experts attending the seminar wasalways quite small—it ranged from 8 to 15 people. The atmosphere was somewhatrelaxed, and the main organiser or person responsible for the invitation and theseminar always gave a short speech to introduce the speaker. Since host and guest


usually knew each other—they had met before more than once—the tone used waswarm and polite.

3. Results

An examination of the four seminars and the speakers’ views on the event (pres-sure, formality, expectations, etc.) yielded several results. More specifically, threegeneral properties of peer seminars were identified: (i) their informal, unofficialnature, (ii) their hybrid nature, and (iii) their pre-introductions.

3.1. Informal nature

A peer seminar could be taken to be an example of Bazerman’s informal dis-semination of science. Bazerman (1983) states that when scientific literature is com-municated formally it is published in journals, where a referee system and citationact as gatekeepers. If literature is disseminated informally, it is then disseminatedthrough organised networks of active members who get important information bymeans of accidental personal contacts. The circulation of drafts, ‘word of mouth’transmission through contacts and, it is here claimed, informal talks like peer semi-nars could fall within this second type of dissemination. The unofficial nature of peerseminars is particularly noticeable if they are contrasted with conference presenta-tions, slide talks or poster sessions. Peer seminars are usually isolated events whichdo not belong to any official professional meeting like a conference or a workshop.Three consequences arise from this fact. First, there is no scientific or organisercommittee performing the gatekeeping function; i.e. the abstract is not ‘filtered’ butsimply submitted to the academic host, who then attaches it to the announcement ofthe seminar sent to the university community. That may be the reason why, whenasked, the four speakers agreed that when they presented research in seminars theywere perfectly aware of the less weighty and official nature of a seminar. Second,seminar speakers do not have the same time pressure as conference speakers do. Theduration of the four seminars (75, 70, 85, and 55 min) illustrates this flexibility interms of time. Third, seminar speakers can be interrupted by any attendant and ashort dialogue or aside can be established at any time during the talk, as in theexample below:

(Seminar 4: 11) in other words, in Barcelona (2) it’s very famous (.) er, therewere epidemics, due to the soy seeds coming from the ships (.) and I’ll showyou, in fact (.) I have another diagram here, coming from a (.) serial of thecounts (2) er (.) and could see asthma emergency visits rising here in Barce-lona, from 86 to 89 (.) /. . ./ ((a person from the audience comments on theBarcelona case)) ((a second person adds further information)) Exactly (.) well(2) it’s not an epidemic in the medical sense, er (.) but it’s the epidemic in thesense of, er, the larger number of events which are not caused by air pollution,okay?


In conference presentations, questions and commentaries are usually made at theend.Closely related to this feature is audience composition. Among the attendants, we

find mostly scholars from the same speciality who have done no research on thespecific topic of the talk; only a minority may have worked in the same area or col-laborated with the speaker. Thus, attendants are members of the ‘invisible college’,but this ‘invisible college’ proves to be an amalgam of peers who could be classifiedinto peer non-experts (experts in the speciality but not in the specific topic) and peerexperts in both the speciality and topic. Additionally, every seminar is surroundedby its particular pressures and seminar speakers may have covert purposes apartfrom the ostensive ‘informal communication’ purpose. Sometimes a seminar speakermay feel under great pressure because of the presence of one or two highly renownedattendants (Seminar 4:1-I feel rather(.) daunted by all these experts, in time series).Sometimes a seminar speaker may feel strongly pressed because he is striving toreach or draw up a future agreement with the host research team by the end of hisstay at a foreign university. At other times, the preliminary results are presentedwith some reservation but with the hope that expert listeners detect any incon-sistency and that this contributes to the construction and re-construction of theresearch. The use of hedges and other evaluative metadiscourse in the examplebelow illustrates this:

(Seminar 1: 15) Er (8) one might wonder (3) why this is not being noted (.) well,I think it’s being noted, if I’ve read the literature correctly (.) not noted byothers (.) er, that there is this shift, most er, most of the literature references I’veseen, consider this transformation to be, an absolute value to rise ((Non-Per-ceptible))(.) in terms of glass transition (.) I think the answer is (.) because(.) (4)the range of the periods that are used (.) in Modulated DSC, is actually ratherlimited (2)

Whether it is external pressure or not, it is clear that speakers are presenting theirdata to the ‘invisible college’ in seminars as well as in conference presentations andso seminar speakers are expected to feel peer pressure. Whether the audience is madeup of experts in the topic or not, seminar speakers know that their research isexposed for the scrutiny of their audience. For these reasons, seminar speakers areclaimed to address their talk to a peer and rival audience. For these reasons, too,seminar speakers are claimed to try to be as relevant as possible when giving aseminar to this peer and rival audience.

3.2. Hybrid nature

Peer seminars seem to deploy a hybrid and flexible nature. They seem to have amixture of features from at least three different genres in the academic and scientificcommunity: the lecture, the conference presentation, and the written research article.In this sense, seminar speakers could be said to be equipped with a given genreknowledge (Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995) which they resort to when giving a


seminar. Such knowledge is not encapsulated rigid knowledge which scientists andengineering academics possess but rather a situated cognition or knowledge (Berken-kotter & Huckin, 1995) which they dynamically adapt to every situation. Sinceseminar speakers regularly lecture at their home university, their experience in lec-turing is expected to influence them. At the very least, they are expected to befamiliar with speaking before an audience and managing verbal and visual display.At the most, certain ‘know-how’ or scientific idiolect ranging from rhetorical orga-nisational patterns to linguistic and discourse devices is expected to help thesespeaking scientists. Some porosity has been identified between the three genres andthis is reflected in different ways.Firstly, the peer seminar shares certain didacticism with the lecture, given that the

speakers regularly lecture apart from investigating in their home university, andgiven that a lecture and a seminar essentially constitute transactional and expositorydiscourse with a varying degree of didacticism. Explanation and understanding areat the heart of teaching and learning, and these two concepts are present in seminarsand lectures. When explaining, redundancy goes hand in hand with clarity. AsBourdieu, Passeron, and de Saint Martin (1994: 5) argue, ‘‘teaching is at its mosteffective not when it succeeds in transmitting the greatest quantity of information inthe shortest time (and at the least cost), but rather when most of the informationconveyed by the teacher is received‘‘. Moreover, both a lecturer and a scientistspeaker are aware of the

(. . .) contradictory demands that pedagogical communication must satisfy,neither of which can be completely satisfied: first, to maximize the absolutequantity of information conveyed (which implies reducing repetition andredundancy to the minimum; second, to minimize loss of information (which,among other measures, may imply an increase in redundancy). (Bourdieu,Passeron, & Saint Martin, 1994: 6)

The speakers in both situations have to find a compromise between these twoopposing tendencies: redundancy, calculated repetition, and explicitness on the onehand, and conciseness or need for economy on the other. Additionally, in both casesnot only brevity but also a varied or graceful style can be certainly sacrificed in orderto secure comprehensibility and understandability, which is the main concern amongscientists and engineering lecturers (Brown & Bakhtar, 1983: 31). Both when lec-turing and giving a seminar, relevance and clarity usually override brevity; thisentails that scientists giving a seminar are likely to resort to certain metadiscursiveelements in order to explicitly signal the topic, structure, or scope of their talk.Below are some examples of metadiscourse at the beginning or end of the lecture/seminar and, at a different level, of commentary conveying a given attitude or opi-nion when having to cope with difficult situations. This is language expected to bepresent in both lecturers and seminar speakers’ genre knowledge:

-(Seminar 2: 1) Okay (.) I’ll be talking today on Backstepping (3): textualmarker


-(Seminar 4: 2) But I’m not actually going to talk about SID, today (.) we’regoing to talk about environmental epidemiology, the effect of air pollution onhealth (.) ‘cause the problem is quite similar (.) er this is what I’ve been doing((Non-Perceptible)) and we have some data from Barcelona (.) in a minute we’lltalk about that (.) but the background original problem was the, Sudden InfantDeath (3): textual m.

-(Seminar 1: 10)Er (2) And there’s the strange thing (.) if I can understand themcorrectly (.) er, they say that there is a phase angle /. . ./ Now (2) er, either it isincorrect (.) or, I don’t understand correctly what they done (2) but er (.) it’sclear they got a little bit confused, to my mind (3): interpersonal m.

Secondly, the peer seminar is partly indebted to the conference presentation andto the written RA in that they all use certain argumentation in order to persuasivelyaddress the talk to a peer audience. For example, if a seminar and a conferencepresentation are compared, both types of speakers share a similar aim: to publicisetheir work and gain their peers’ respect. In both cases, speakers have had to travel toa foreign university or research centre and may be even indirectly judged asspokesmen or representatives of the research carried out in their home university.When the same speakers give a talk to a local audience (e.g. their department col-leagues), they probably feel more relaxed and not so concerned about making amistake. Some of the seminars analysed are retrospective (i.e. devoted to verballysummarising and publicising one or several published research articles on a giventopic), and in this sense a peer seminar resembles a conference presentation. Onlysome external factors surrounding both speeches are going to differ: in seminars thetime constraint is not so important as in conferences, the number of participants issmaller (8–15 people), no written record (e.g. proceedings) is usually kept of theseminar and no referee system exists; as a result, a somewhat more relaxed and col-legial atmosphere is likely to exist in seminars. In brief, the conference presentationis more of an established genre whose conventions are fixed and known to insidemembers with experience in conference attendance and participation.Drawing on the continuum of lay professional biomedical communication as

envisioned by Dubois (1987: 539), one could perhaps compare seminars with ‘col-loquium talks’:

/� � �� /� � �� /� � �� /� � �� /� � �� /� � �� /
PlenaryLecture c
invitedolloquium

s
lide talk p re or post-sessioncolloquium talk s
posteression c

localolloquium m

labeeting

Seminars are not ‘local colloquia’ because seminars are not informal departmentaltalks given to colleagues. Peer seminars also differ from laboratory meetings in thatscientists may feel less pressed to present preliminary results among their universitycolleagues than they are when staying at a foreign university. Seminars cannot beparalleled to ‘invited colloquia’ either because they are not held within a formalprofessional meeting whose celebration has been publicised and spread to the


national/international community. The peer seminar host organiser usuallyannounces the seminar via an electronic mail sent to the faculty or university mem-bers. In some cases, seminars can be ‘pre-conference colloquia’, as for exampleseminar 3. Given that the British scientist (expert 3) was to participate in an inter-national conference taking place in Barcelona, a scientist from the UPC invited himto speak and organised the seminar ‘outside’ the conference. Seminar 3 was giventhe day before the conference began. Another difference found between seminarsand other genres in this continuum lies in their attempt to popularise content.Dubois (1985) found out that biomedical poster sessions and slide presentationsembody scientific popularisation at the highest level because scientists have to pre-sent their data and information in an understandable and interesting form so thatfully trained fellow scientists practising another speciality can follow their speech. Infact, other scholars (Huckin, 1987; Myers 1989) have sliced audience into a gen-eralised audience and a specialist audience, both of which are addressed at the sametime. In principle seminar speakers need not make such an important popularisationeffort because their audience belongs to the same speciality. However, the recipients’expert knowledge about the specific topic in particular may be very varied, andseminar speakers appear to be highly sensitised to their audience’s knowledge aboutthe topic in particular. They can even directly inquire about their audience’s exper-tise, as can be seen in the example below:

(Seminar 3: 2) Er (2) certainly, it would be useful for me to know (2) first of all(5) this is embarrassing for you (2) if I were to (3) ask you whether in terms of(.) Computer Simulation, Methods (.) as from your research (.) would youdescribe yourselves as experts?

A typical commentary seminar speakers make at the beginning is that since noteverybody among listeners is an expert in the topic, they are going to accommodatethe content so that a non-expert in the topic can understand the talk:

(Seminar 2: 1) Er (.) I I’d rather not go perhaps into too much detail (.) ‘causethere are lots of different types of knowledge

It is difficult to determine the extent to which such commentaries can be attributedto seminar speakers’ genre knowledge of conference presentations or to which extentthey are driven by a need to protect their face and their reputation against possiblecriticism from a peer expert. If expectations are lowered, speakers may feel lesspressed and therefore more secure.Finally, as active members of their community speakers are clearly acquainted

with the structure of the written research article (RA). Peer seminars seem to some-what adhere to the RA structure, which is not replicated but usually taken as anapproximate model. Thus, peer seminars deviate slightly from the Introduction–Methods–Results–Discussion (IMRD) structure pattern of the RA. For example,they do not usually explicitly signal the sections, except the Introduction andResults/Conclusions. Neither do they use the same terminology as in a written RA.


An analysis of the samples in this work reveals that speakers do not announce thatthe ‘Methods Section’ is about to be broached; instead, they seem to prefer the word‘Analysis’. Under this broader title, the Methods and Results–Discussion sectionsare usually subsumed. An analysis of the data shows that all speakers follow thefollowing general-specific-general pattern:

(1) description and review of analyses and results in the literature,
(2) discussion of the problems posed by existing methods in previous research, (3) presentation of their own analyses, (4) claim-making and conclusion(s).
Indeed, seminar speakers seem to place great emphasis on the identification ofdrawbacks/ problems in previous research. As can be seen, the frequent moves(Swales, 1990) appearing in the Results–Discussion and Conclusions sections(background information, statement of results, (un)expected results, reference toprevious research, explanation, exemplification, deduction/hypothesis, recommen-dation and further work) are more or less followed. Briefly, the findings of theexamination of seminars point to the fact that the IMRD pattern is flexibly adheredto and that seminar speakers sometimes go back and forth, like conference pre-sentation speakers (Shalom, 1993). Another instantiation of the hybrid nature ofseminars is to be found in an analysis of pre-introductions and introductions basedon Swales’ CARS model (1990). Swales’ cognitive moves are not replicated in any ofthe four seminar introductions but some of the moves in this model–in particularMove 3–are found in pre-introductions as can be seen in Table 1 and below inTable 3.

3.3. Pre-introductions and tone shift

Perhaps the most noticeable feature of seminars is that they are preceded by a pre-introduction. That is, a speaker-and listener-oriented warm-up metadiscursive por-tion is present before the real content-oriented introduction begins. This pre-intro-duction is uttered in a more casual and subjective tone than the rest of the talk. Thisone can sometimes be adopted by speakers at the end of seminars, thus forming asandwich like this:

Table 1

Moves in pre-introductions

CARS moves in pre-introductions

Seminar 1
Move 3, Step 1B
Seminar 2
Move 3, step 1A/B
Seminar 3
Move 3, step 1A/B
Seminar 4
Move 3, step 1B

WARM-UP/PRE-INTRODUCTION: subjective, personal tone (metadiscourse,largely of the interpersonal type)

BODY OF TALK: objective tone, impersonal style

CONCLUSION: a) slightly subjective tone (interpersonal metadiscourse), and/ or b)an impersonal closure with minimal textual metadiscourse.

Although occasional and brief switches to a more personal and subjective tonemay be found within the body of the talk, most examples of such casual tone havebeen found in the pre-introductions of all the seminars studied. In order to studytone shift in pre-introductions in more detail, it was found interesting to identify andanalyse the metadiscourse. It was found that the metadiscursive commentary in pre-introductions has the function of politely greeting the audience, warming up theatmosphere, relieving pressure, prefacing the topic and maybe giving a ‘human’touch. Once seminar speakers have thanked the Spanish host professor, they typi-cally resort to ‘ice-breaking’ interpersonal metadiscourse to project a human scien-tist persona. Next, they speak, make several asides, laugh or try to make theaudience laugh, inquire about the topic or expertise of the audience and, in a word,directly appeal and interact with the audience. Then speakers typically resort totextual metadiscourse to explain their purpose, scope, and aims (Move 3). A coupleof examples from seminars 1 and 2 are provided.The pre-introduction in Seminar 1 is basically a first-person narration by means of

which a certain collegial atmosphere is created. The subjective tone can be found inthe speaker’s informal narration of the problems he encountered before and duringhis research, or in the speaker’s referring to a colleague researcher in another uni-versity by her first name (Laura) and not her surname. In this pre-introduction, thespeaker opens his talk by giving some explanatory background into the reasons thatmotivated the research he is going to expound. He does so in the first person and byinformally narrating his problems surrounding the research, e.g. lack of money orreluctance from the manufacturer. After giving the title of the seminar, the speakerparenthetically delimits the scope of his talk and modestly anticipates the kind ofresult(s) obtained:

(Seminar 1: 1, pre-introduction) Thank you, Salvador (2) Er (4) to give (.) just alittle background er (.) before I came here in January, I (.) was, in contact withPerkin Elmer er, because I knew they were developing this dynamic DSC (.) erand suggested to them they might like to give me a DSC on which I could work(.) and they said no (.) er that, they preferred that I would buy it (.) Er I said Icouldn’t do that because I didn’t have any money (.) er but I suggested analternative (.) which er was (.) through Salvador (.) who contacted er, I think itwas Laura (.) in the Autonoma (2) she very kindly said we have a DSC (.) aDSC 7, on which they were prepared to err (.) incorporate the software for theDynamic DSC (.) and very kindly agreed that I could have, kind of use theequipment there, and Perkin Elmer said Well, Okay (.) then you can have theDynamic option (.) for, during the time you are here (.)


And this is the background to, how I am able to, have done this piece of work(3) So(.) er (3) well (.) Modulated Differential Scanning Calorimetry (.) Whatdoes it tell you? Er(2) I’m not sure I’m going to give you a definite answer(.) atthe end of this talk er (.) but I’ll give you amounts of sorts, anyway (2)

Near the end of the seminar, some attempt is made to project the persona of ahuman colleague scientist who has limitations and who is looking forward to holi-days like anybody else:

(Seminar 1: 18, end) Er (3) But there are a few things (.) er a couple of things, inparticular (.) that remain to be done I think (.) First of all (.) this is a long-termproject (.) to extend the analysis to a multi-parameter model, in a way that thememory effect, distribution and relaxation time are included (2) Er, at present(.) I think that would overload the memory of the computer that I’m using, so I((Non-Perceptible)) (2) but I think it’s something that would be useful to lookat (.) and (.) secondly (.) to extend the experimental, er (.) investigation (.) toinclude the effects of er, annealing (2) And as there are about two, two weeksleft, before holidays start (.) in the meantime, I’m not going to do all that much(3) ((audience laughs)) Okay (.) I’ll stop there

In the pre-introduction in Seminar 2, the speaker implicitly admits feeling testedby his peer colleagues, modestly specifies that his talk is not addressed to experts(probably the covert purpose of this delimitation is to avoid creating too highexpectations and to protect himself against criticism), 2 delimits aim and scope(Move 3), and offers his photocopies of published work. One might deduce from thisoffer that the speaker can lend his materials because, as an expert, he has specialisedin and published about the topic. The tone in the pre-introduction is courteous,topic-oriented, and personal.

(Seminar 2: 1, pre-introduction) Okay (.) I’ll be talking today on Backstepping(3) Er (3) I hope the talk is, scientifically precise (2) I’m also being tested today,as I speak in English (.) by the English expert in the front ((points to theresearcher))so I hope that’s going to be satisfying ((speaker laughs)) Er (.) WhatI’ll be talking about today (.) and continuing tmmorrow (.) is on Backstepping(2) Er (.) I’d rather not go perhaps into too much detail (.) ‘cause there are lotsof different types of knowledge ((addressing two people in the audience)) you’reboth working in the precise area, er (.) you might well be badly interested, but(.) I’ll try to get across the main points, er (.) as I approach the subject (.) Er (2)I’ve brought a lot of material (.) which I’ve given to Enric, as somebody askedonce to get some of my notes (.) you’ve got them (.) and also (.) published byPeter P, and various things (.) er, you may also contact me, to get the infor-mation (2)Er (.)What Backstepping is (.) er (2) is a method to promote /. . ./

2 The host professor told this researcher at the end of the talk that it had been a highly specific topic

addressed to experts.


When concluding, speaker 2 is completely impersonal and content-oriented,probably because he was invited to give a two-day seminar. Only textual meta-discourse announcing what he will talk about the following day is used.

(Seminar 2: 16, end) Er (.) well, I’ll stop there (.) Are there any questions, now(.) tomorrow I’ll go on, with how to parameterise a different form of, er, thestate transformation (2) Which in a sense it’s, is easier to use, in this context (.)and r, also, we’ll carry on, with this pre-discussion of this more complicated,Recursing (.) where, the ((Non-Perceptible)) this can be backward and forward(.) steps (.) it could be multiple steps (.) but, that will depend on a quickerprogramme.Table 2 summarises the results of the analysis of the length andtype of the metadiscourse found in pre-introductions.

As already said, seminar pre-introductions were also examined in terms of Swales’CARS model. None of the seminar pre-introductions strictly follows the CARSmodel, although the seminars analysed certainly turned out to have one or several ofthe Moves and steps, whether in pre-introductions or in introductions. For example,a significant finding points to the fact that neither Moves 1 nor 2 is used in pre-introductions. Move 1, Establishing the territory, is not used in the pre-introductionof seminars maybe because it can be a self-threatening act if you are addressing yourspeech to peers. Citing the landmarks in the literature or even one’s publications canbe felt to be a requirement in order to establish and occupy a niche, but Move 2(Establishing a niche) is not present in pre-introductions. Move 2 is found in the fourintroductions, once the research has been announced and the talk itself has begun inan impersonal and objective tone. The most important finding relates to the fact thatMove 3 Occupying a niche (Step 1, A/B) is used by the four seminar speakers in thepre-introductions. Half the seminar speakers use Move 3, Step 1A (outline purpose)and point to the expert speakers’ need to delimit the scope and aim of their talkalways in a downward trend, i.e. saying their talk is not addressed to experts. A finalobservation that can be made is that the seminar speakers rarely announce the

Table 2

Analysis of pre-introductions

Length of

pre-introductions

Type of metadiscourse

Seminar 1
216 words Interpersonal narration and 3 interpersonal items+
7 textual items (topic titling and framing)

Seminar 2
151 words 6 interpersonal items (feels tested, addresses audience) mixed
with 4 textual items

Seminar 3
660 words 30 long interpersonal items with 41 textual items
(several attempts of Move 3)

Seminar 4
108 words 5 interpersonal items (comment on audience’s expertise and
weather)+3 textual metadiscursive items to announce topic.


structure of their speech (Move 3, Step 3). In fact, only Speaker 4 explicitlyannounces the structure (verbally and with a transparency).It should be noted here that the pre-introductions that have been identified

resemble the ‘listener orientation’ or ritualised section as suggested by Dubois onlyto a certain extent. As said before, seminars are a somewhat more informal andunofficial event than conference slide talks and this results in two important differ-ences. The first is that Dubois’ ‘listener orientation’ is found in the seminar pre-introductions but is practically absent in seminar conclusions (Seminar 3:19-So,that’s all I have to say (4) So, nobody interrupted the talk). A second differencebetween the ‘listener orientation’ in biology slide talks and pre-introductions inseminars is that the latter tend to be longer and to accept a wider diversity ofmetadiscursive commentaries (see Table 2), other than the sentence-long listenerorientation chunk identified by Dubois in slide talks. Finally, Dubois’ description ofthe Body section (situation-event-commentary) was not found to exist in any of thefour seminars. As said above, the Body section of a seminar is reminiscent of theMethod–Results–Discussion sections and is presented as ‘Analysis’. Having saidthis, it remains to be seen whether such differences are ascribable to disciplinaryconventions or to genre effects, since it will be recalled that Dubois’ are biology talkswhereas the seminars of this study are all within engineering.In order to obtain a complete picture, it became necessary to study the introduc-

tions as well. Going back and forth, the existence of ‘mock’ moves or false starts,seems to be characteristic not only of pre-introductions but also of introductions.An examination of the introductions shows that they contain the three Moves, thatonly two speakers follow the order 1-2-3, and that they contain some brief digres-sions, reminiscent of the pre-introductions. Such asides or digressions are either afirst-person narration on the speaker’s problems, or questions/commentary addres-sed to the audience. Table 3 shows the results obtained from the analysis of thepre-introductions and introductions in terms of the CARS model.

4. Discussion

Several outstanding features of the peer seminar depicted may suggest that a nichehas been identified and that the peer seminar may constitute another research pro-cess genre in the scientific community. Its informal and flexible nature and its pre-fatory introductions set it apart from genres like the conference presentation, theslide talk, the written RA or the lecture, even though the peer seminar is permeatedwith some of the characteristics of these genres.The fact that the peer seminar is a spoken, informal research process genre may

account for its flexible and hybrid nature. Seminar speakers seem to feel the urge topreface their talk with some pre-introduction and to devote much time to delimitingand announcing the problem, the scope, and the interest of the topic. The speakers’knowledge about their audience’s degree of expertise in the specific topic exerts aconsiderable pressure and seems to motivate and trigger most of the interpersonalcommentary in pre-introductions. It is in pre-introductions where speakers typically


show their concern for the match or mismatch between the audience’s specificknowledge of the topic and the degree of specificity of their talk. Apart from being aconsequence of the real time and face-to-face situation, pre-introductions are alsothe result of the speakers’ need to convey relevant subject-matter and to do so theyhave to solve their uneasiness about their relationship with their audience. RA wri-ters are reportedly believed to have to cope with real and imaginary audiences.Seminar speakers, however, are not speaking to an ideal, future, or putative audi-ence as writers are, but to a real audience whose level of knowledge is uncertain tothem. Seminar speakers are therefore uncertain about the alignments and roles,which destabilises the relationship. Following Burgess’ (2002: 211) analysis of RAwriters, it is hypothesised that ‘‘the maintenance of relationship between participantsis always privileged over topic introduction’’; that is, if the relationship and theaudience configuration is known, the topic can be introduced early, but if this is notthe case, then speakers need to attend to the relationship with their audience andcope with this uneasiness. We can find instances substantiating this claim in everyseminar. The most obvious is to be found in Seminar 3, where in a long pre-intro-duction the speaker inquires about his audience’s level of expertise, and justifies,

Table 3

CARS analysis of pre-introductions and introductions

CARS moves
Summary of content and other
metadiscursive commentary

Seminar 1
Pre-Intro.: Move 3, Step 1B— First-person narration on problems with
equipment and manufacturers

Intro.:
Move 1, step 2 and 3
Move 3, step 1B

Move 2, step 1B—
Equipment broke down, which made him
re-direct his research
Move 3, step 1A
Seminar 2
Pre-Intro.: Move 3, steps 1A/B– First-person narration
Intro.:
Move 1, steps 1,2,3.— Audience asked about shared knowledge
Move 2, step 1A

Move 3, step 1B

Seminar 3
Pre-Intro.: Move 3, step 1A/B— Several acts (volume, speech rate,
apologies, etc)

Intro.:
Move 1, step 2, 3
Move 3, step 1B—
Audience addressed
Move 2, step 4—
Speaker apologises
Move 1, step 2, 3

Move 3, step 1B

Seminar 4
Pre-Intro.: Move 3, step 1B— Flattering audience expertise and joke
about weather

Intro.:
Move 1, step 1,2
Move 2, step 1B—
First-person narration justifying speaker’s
interest in the topic.
Move 3 step 1B
Move 3, step 3—
Visual material (transparency)

apologises and comments on the topic of his talk and transparencies. Other instan-ces include the use of some textual metadiscourse in the pre-introductions as a resultof the speakers’ need to mention the scope and purpose of their talk (Move 3, Step1). Some speakers (Seminars 2 and 3) decide that they are speaking to peer non-experts, which not only relieves pressure but also prevents their talk from fallingshort of their audience’s expectations. The speaker in seminar 1 uses a far moreindirect strategy and specifies that due to problems in the equipment he had tochange the purpose and topic of the research. He is therefore protecting his face, andthe claims of his research. A final and different example of the speaker’s need to mapthe audience’s level of expertise can also be found in Seminar 4, where the speakeracknowledges his audience’s expertise. By flattering his audience the speaker isindirectly protecting his face–and his claim.Seminars being slightly more informal than slide talks in conferences, seminar

speakers can adopt a more personal and casual tone and address their audience tocope with the question mark of audience configuration in terms of expertise. Asimilar conclusion could be reached regarding the tone shift identified. It is heresuggested that the nature of this informal tone reflects the speaker’s reactions to apeer and rival audience before whom he strives to behave and communicate withrelevance. Apart from reflecting the speakers’ urge to resolve the relationship withhis audience, the tone of such metadiscourse also signals the scientist’s personalresponse to the pressure of being examined by peers and to his need to publicise hiswork. A modest and colleague Knower persona appears and uses certain academicfacing techniques, like personalising and humanising his speech, creating lowexpectations, and delimiting the scope of the talk and the degree of expertiseinvolved. In brief, engineering academics giving a seminar seem to be somewhatpainstaking communicators because of the pressure of having a peer and rival audi-ence and because of their uneasiness about their relationship with their audience.Their expectations and fears are voiced mainly through the metadiscursive pre-introductions. On the whole, speaking engineers seem to be mainly content-orientedand succinct speakers who are more ‘of the telling job’ than of the ‘selling job’(Yakhontova, 2002: 217).

5. Conclusions

The findings of this study suggest that the peer seminar has to be taken intoconsideration as a genre in the scientific community, even though further work isnecessary to delineate the peer seminar in more detail. The seminar has mixedfeatures from the conference presentation, the lecture, and the written RA. It seemsto be a hybrid research genre, an ‘‘indefinite and transitional text’’ which couldalso be named an ‘intergenre’ (Yakhontova, 2002: 230). Similarly, the most obviousimplication is that scientists intending to become members of this communityshould be trained in order to be able to cope with such a spoken genre. Therefore,the need to communicate efficiently in a peer seminar should be catered for in thepedagogy.


6. Key to transcription conventions

Short pauses of 1 second are indicated: (.). Longer pauses are also indicated;e.g. (3) means it is a 3-minute pause. /. . ./ indicates that a chunk is missing. Otherrelevant information is given in double brackets (( )).

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Marta Aguilar is a lecturer of English for Science and Technology at the Universitat Politecica de Cata-

lunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain. Her research interests include academic and disciplinary discourses,

writing pedagogy, and the role of virtual environments in learner autonomy. She has recently completed

her PhD thesis entitled ‘Metadiscourse in two academic situations. A relevance-theoretic approach’.


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The peer seminar, a spoken research process genre

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