LINGUO-STYLISTIC FEATURES OF ENGLISH PRESENTATION DISCOURSE AT INTERNATIONAL ELT CONFERENCES

Abstract

Modern Ukrainian teachers of English as a foreign language have various opportunities for professional development. One of the options is participating in international teacher conferences organized by IATEFL, TESOL, International House, Cambridge University Press etc. Some of these events have already taken place in Ukraine. Still, not all the teachers are ready to present at a conference or even attend their colleagues’ sessions. The most common reasons are insufficient language command, poor presentation skills and fear of public speaking. These problems have to be solved while future teachers are still studying at university, namely by teaching philology master’s students to present methodological information in English and to take into account the peculiarities of the international context.

The article aims to analyze the English presentation discourse at international ELT conferences and define its linguistic and stylistic properties, which will later be taught to the abovementioned master’s students. The topic has been underrepresented in the existing literature so far: there are only works related to more general topics, such as English presentation discourse and English discourse of international scientific conferences. To achieve the aim, a literature review was conducted first, which was then complemented by an analysis of more than 500 abstracts from 13 conference programs (attached in the appendices) and listening to 10 talks at different international ELT conferences. For better variety, the selection criteria for the conferences included a span of three years (2017-2020), different sizes (from 20 to more than 800 speakers) and different organizations: Cambridge University Press (the UK), IATEFL (the UK), IATEFL Ukraine, InnovateELT (Spain), International House Barcelona (Spain), TESOL (the USA).

As a result, it became clear that the genre of English ELT presentation uses the same rhetorical devices as any other presentation, except for the rarer use of humor and irony. Regarding the linguistic features, it was established that they depend on the format of presentation (six of which were defined in this paper) and generally comply with the discourse of English scientific conferences, except for a more frequent use of semi-fixed expressions (a feature of international conferences) and ELT terminology (a feature of ELT conferences), which could further be divided into ELT terminology itself and linguistic terminology.