“These findings are very astonishing”: hyping of disciplinary research in 3MT presentations and thesis abstracts

Abstract

The changing landscape of scientific communication raises new academic contexts in which research postgraduate students are exposed to diversified forms of interaction and a less predictable audience. Against this backdrop Three Minute Thesis (3MT) presentations have emerged, although we have not yet developed sufficient knowledge about how students present their research work to diverse audiences. In this study, we compared 80 students’ hyping practice of using promotional language to embellish or exaggerate aspects of the same research in 3MT presentations and thesis abstracts to explore how they understand their disciplinary knowledge and its connection with different audiences, and how they adapt their discourse accordingly. Our findings show that students hyped more frequently in 3MT presentations, relying on adverbial affective markers and attending to the broad research area. In thesis abstracts, conversely, boosting hypes were mainly used, especially verb resources, to comment on certainty of knowledge claims and promote the research methods used in the doctoral research. We see the divergency as a likely consequence of different communicative purposes between the two genres, and the different academic status and power asymmetry between students and the audience of each genre. In addition, disciplinarity was noted. Students in the hard sciences made more use of hypes in their 3MT presentations than their peers in the soft sciences and were inclined to promote both broad and specific research areas and embellish the primacy attached to their research. This disciplinary hyping practice is perhaps related to the conceptual abstractness of scientific knowledge and its opaque connection with common wisdom and public interest. Therefore, this study reveals not only that hypes mark a speaker’s orientation to what and who is addressed, but also that students modulate academic persuasion to balance their promotion of results and claims against the discoursal expectations and knowledge bases of different audiences.