Professor Swales, this is a very resourceful presentation on genre and English for Academic Purposes. Please elaborate more on teaching materials and methodology in E.A.P.
Thanks for this interesting video. On whether the 20-minute-presentation-10-minute-Q&A conference presentation is one or two genres... do we have to choose? Both parts require different language use, different skills, have a different interactive dynamic, and so on as shown in the video. But the connection between the parts goes beyond just having the same location, topic, etc. On the level of organizing information, the skilled presenter might... - Briefly mention something but hope to expand on it in the Q&A - Make this explicit: _I don't have time to go into the details, but feel free to ask more about this in the Q&A_ - Make sure to mention something in their presentation knowing that not doing so would be attacked in the Q&A - Prepare answers for apparent weak points which can't be covered in the talk but may be brought up in Q&A - etc. In other words, the presenter organizes their presentation with a full sequence of talk-and-Q&A in mind. Individual participants themselves are construing the presentation both as a whole and as two separate parts with their own requirements, at the same time. More generally, I think we as speakers of a language often have both knowledge about a sequence as a whole, and knowledge specific to parts of the whole.
No we don’t have to choose, and it is a mistake to view either genre (or any genre) as a distinct, iron clad entity. There is fluidity and overlap. Genres are fluid and not mutually exclusive. However, is it useful as a matter of identifying functional performative elements to classify the speech and Q&A as two different genre entities? I would say yes.
I understand the broad notion of discourse analysts being lumpers, but I think we can make the case for splitters too. The discourse in the Q&A is distinct.
