The Academic Presentation: Situated Talk in Action

Johanna Rendle-Short

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754645979
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351895248
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

How is the task of giving a presentation accomplished? In this insightful book Johanna Rendle-Short unpacks this seemingly simple task to show the complexity that underlies it. Examining the academic presentation as a case in point, she details how seminar presenters interact with the audience and objects around them to produce a coherent whole. Through detailed examination of talk-in-interaction the book throws light on one instance of talk as situated practice, demonstrating both the ordinariness of the academic presentation, and its intricate complexity. While audience members recognize that a seminar is underway, this book shows how this recognition comes about. The Academic Presentation will greatly interest scholars of talk and interaction analysis, situated talk, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The room starts to fill with people. Academics from around the university have gathered together to hear what today’s seminar presenter has to say on a particular topic. There is an excited air as people chatter, introductions are made, cups of coffee are carefully carried into the seminar room, and the presenter ensures that everything is ready to go. Slowly people find a seat and organise themselves as ‘an audience’. A shift is underway. Instead of being individuals ready to listen to a talk, they become a group, sitting in rows facing the front, orienting to the institutionality of the academic seminar. They know that as soon as the seminar begins, there will be a change in speaking rights. For the duration of the seminar presentation, turn-taking will be different, as the gathered individuals take on the role of listening audience.

The above scenario is a very familiar instance of institutional talk (Drew and Heritage, 1992) and is undoubtedly something that many readers have experienced. Yet the question arises as to how this familiar instance of institutional talk is ordered and accomplished. What is it that both seminar speakers and the audience do in orienting to the institutionality of the academic seminar?

The aim of this book is to examine the academic seminar presentation from the perspective of the listening audience. Using data collected from a series of academic seminars given by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Canberra, Australia, the analysis unpacks the detail of what it is that speakers actually do when talking to an audience. The analysis provides close examination of issues such as

• how do speakers show the structure of the talk?

• how do speakers show that they are engaged with the audience?

• what are speakers actually doing as they talk?

• how do speakers ensure that the audience continues to listen even when the speaker may not be actually talking for brief periods of time?

• how do speakers continue to show their engagement with the audience while simultaneously interacting with things such as computers, overhead slides or images?

• how do they encourage the audience to orient to such tools?

As audience members, we take so much for granted—we assume that speakers will attempt to engage with the audience, that they will structure their talk, that they will, for example, bring the audience along with them. The aim of the following analysis is to examine what happens when things go according to plan—to examine ‘the ordinary’ in everyday interaction. In other words, to focus on how the speakers manage the smooth transition from talk to a period of non-talk; how they simultaneously interact with the audience and tools; how they use overhead slides as a means of indicating that topic-talk is nearly complete and that the speaker will move into a different participation framework; and how they manage periods of nontalk such that audience members understand that there is more talk to come.

Previous research has examined the structure of monologic talk (e.g., Brown and Yule, 1983; Chafe, 1979; Coulthard and Montgomery, 1981; Goffman, 1981; Hinds, 1979). Research has also focussed on nonverbal interaction within everyday conversation and institutional talk (e.g., Goodwin, 1979, 1981; Heath, 1984; Kendon, 1967, 1990, 1992; Scheflen, 1972; Schegloff, 1998; Streeck and Knapp, 1992), but no research has been carried out combining these two aspects with respect to the academic presentation, by looking at how presenters actually interact with the audience and the objects around them (see, however, Roth and Lawless, 2002). The aim of this analysis is to show how, through examination of both the detail of the talk and concurrently occurring nonverbal activities, presenters co-ordinate talk and nonverbal actions to produce a coherent whole, that is, the academic presentation.

Standing up and giving a seminar may seem an easy task—the presenter simply stands up in front of a group of people and talks. However, the aim of this book is to unpack this seemingly simple task, to show the complexity that underlies it. When one examines the detail of what is actually occurring during a seminar presentation, it is astounding how much is happening. At any one moment, presenters are producing new words, making decisions as to how those words should be said, whether they should be said more quietly than previous words, faster, with prominence, or with added emphasis. Concurrently, presenters are interacting with the audience around them, as evidenced by where they are gazing, where they are standing, and what they are doing with their hands. They may also be interacting with a computer, overhead projector, or screen. Yet all of this occurs as a seamless stream of apparently effortless sound and action.

By focussing on ordinary speakers giving a talk to a group of people gathered to listen to the talk, this book throws light on one instance of talk as situated practice. It demonstrates on the one hand the ordinariness of the academic presentation; yet on the other hand it shows the intricate complexity of moment-by-moment talk as speakers do ‘being an academic seminar presenter’. We as audience members might recognise that a seminar is underway, but what this book aims to show is how this recognition comes about (cf. Heritage, 1984).

Talk-in-Interaction

Talk-in-Interaction or, as it is more commonly referred to, Conversation Analysis (CA) is the analytic framework within which this study is situated. Conversation Analysis describes and explicates ‘the competences that ordinary speakers use and rely on in participating in intelligible, socially organised conversation’ (Atkinson and Heritage, 1984:1). In other words, it is concerned with the detail of how people use talk and nonverbal actions to interact with each other and the world around them. CA acknowledges the importance of context in which a particular interaction takes place. As a result, all aspects of linguistic behaviour are relevant or significant, including lexical choice, prosody, phonology, as well as nonverbal information such as eye gaze, hand actions, and body position (Goodwin, 1996; Gumperz, 1982; Ochs, Jacoby and Gonzales, 1996).

One of the basic assumptions of CA is that interaction is structurally organised (Heritage, 1989:21). This means that talk is not simply a series of on-line utterances, full of features such as hesitations, slips and non-standard forms that are difficult to account for within a grammar of a language.¹ Rather, talk is highly structured and ordered. The role of the conversation analyst, through an examination of naturally occurring data, is to discover these underlying ‘rules’ or structure of talk, or, as Sacks put it, to understand and explicate the ‘technology of interaction’ (Sacks, 1984:413). The order that emerges from an examination of the talk, is therefore not simply the construct of the analyst, it is produced by the parties to the talk in situ. In any interaction, participants orient to that order, and it is this orientation to the orderly nature of the talk by participants themselves that is discernible by the CA analyst (Psathas, 1995:2).

The Seminar as an Instance of Institutional Talk

CA provides a useful point of departure for analysing particular instances of institutional talk, through an examination of how participants modify everyday conversation to meet the needs and requirements of their particular institution (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, 1974:729). As well as precisely specifying the differences between everyday conversation and the talk of a particular institution, the analyst needs to demonstrate that any differences are due to the institutional setting (Drew and Heritage, 1992:20). Schegloff (1992:111) argues that a connection has to be made between the fact that the talk is being conducted in a particular setting and how that setting affects the shape, form, trajectory, content or character of the interaction. The task of the analyst is to show how the institutional nature of the setting itself defines the way in which talk can occur, by examining how the form of the institution dictates the distribution of talk and the turn-taking mechanism. It is also necessary to examine the roles played by the participants, to show how they are oriented to the particular identities of the institutional setting. However, Schegloff (1992:117) warns that not everything in the setting is of the setting. Not all parties are oriented to the work setting and, even if they were, the setting may not directly contribute to the production of institutional talk.

The important point for the analyst is, therefore, to show the connection between the setting and the talk, and to realise that it is not the context that supplies the setting for the talk, but the participants who create the context (Schegloff, 1992:124). In the case of the academic seminar, although it would appear that the institutional setting of the seminar automatically provides the context for seminar talk, it is in fact the participants themselves who, by virtue of the way in which they organise the interaction, constantly reaffirm the fact that they are participating in a seminar. As a result, talk is organised in a special way. Turn-taking is suspended, and the speaking rights lie with the seminar presenter. This means that there is no potential next speaker. In other words, the seminar presenter has the right to speak for an extended length of time. In the seminars under discussion, this may be for up to an hour and a half.

Having said that, the seminar presenter has to accept the possibility that audience members may occasionally ‘interrupt’. Such ‘interruptions’ however, are only permitted if they meet certain requirements. Firstly, the person needs to bid for a turn. This is usually done nonverbally, by catching the gaze of the speaker, or by raising their hand. Secondly, there is a limitation as to what topics are allowable, in that only talk relevant to the topic at hand is acceptable. As a result, most audience talk relates to requests for clarification. Thirdly, bids for a turn at talk only occur at certain points in the seminar, generally, when presenters are pausing between two bits of topic-talk.²

By meeting these requirements, participants demonstrate their orientation to the task at hand. This orientation can be demonstrated in the following example, where there is a brief exchange between the presenter and a number of audience members.

Eg 1.1 [Mi:29]

1.	Pres:	»so as you can see (.) uhm (.) >without actually
2.		attempting to optimise it¿ around one and
3.		a half litres. which is half the volume
4.		of the bottle.< seems to be about right.
5.	Aud 1:	isn’t the critical thing there, not the displacement
6.		when you exhaust the water, but the velocity
7.		when you exhaust the water.
8.	Pres:	it’s probably (.) well I think what’s happening, is that (.)
9.		↓this is don’s theory¿. is that you’re consuming space
10.		for compressed air, which is eventually reducing the
11.		amount of energy that you can store in the system.
12.		and that’s limiting the performance.
13.	Aud 1:	yeah. but I mean, the thing that you want to measure, is
14.		not how far the rocket is gone
15.		when you run out of water=
16.	Pres:	=oh no. this is- this is the full flight. (.) this is flight
17.		from from zero time¿
18.	Aud 1:	oh okay.
19.	Pres:	all the way up¿ this is- this is 85 meters.
20.	Aud 1:	right.
21.	Pres:	and this is uhm eight seconds. sorry¿
22.	Aud 1:	okay.
23.	Aud 2: →	the revolutionary new step in rocket design that you
24.		want to take, is actually to set fire to the propeller.
25.		((laughter)) calculate the temperature at which the water
26.		you know ( ).
27.	Pres:	well there have been s s suggestions, instead of blowing it
28.		up with uhm with compressed gas, we actually again use
29.		acetyl oxygen trick, and we set fire to that mixture, inside
30.		the bottle, as a source of pressure¿ hh
31.	Aud 3: →	but I find these sort of things sort of deviate from
32.		the point. ((laughter)) the [idea is uh (water, air, ])
33.	Pres: →	[((new image)) °okay.° ]
34.		(3.0) ((more laughter))
35.	Pres: →	↑okay. the other thing you can do with the model,↓
36.		>i’ve got to hurry along, because i’m already over time,<
37.		uhm¿ is the effect of drag¿ ↑drag is terribly important.↓
38.		uhm¿ and you need to, even just by observation. this sort
39.		of bottle, is not as good as a bottle that’s got some sort
40.		of uhm (.) str (.) aerodynamic streamlining on the front.

The example shows an extended Question – Answer routine between Aud 1 (a member of the audience) and Pres (the presenter). Another member of the audience (Aud 2, line 23) makes a funny comment which is taken up and elaborated on by the presenter. It is at this point that the talk ceases to be seminar talk, because the talk is no longer on topic, and turn-taking reverts to being locally managed. However, such a shift away from ‘doing a seminar’ is accountable, and Aud 3 reminds the audience of such, by letting them know that they ‘deviate from the point’ (line 31). Following the reminder, the presenter closes off the interruption and returns to seminar talk. He closes off the interruption by putting a new image on the screen (line 33), saying a quiet ‘okay’, pausing until the audience settles (line 34), before launching into the next point with a further ‘okay’ said in a raised pitch voice (line 35).

This example clearly shows that it is the participants themselves who generate the context of being in a seminar, by accepting and ena...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Transcription Conventions
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Transcribing Video Data
• 3 The Presentation as Monologue
• 4 Doing the Academic Presentation
• 5 Showing Structure within the Academic Presentation
• 6 Doing Deixis
• 7 Interacting with Objects
• 8 Conclusion
• References
• Index