Three-Minute Thesis Presentations: Engaging the Audience Through Multimodal Resources

Abstract

The growing movement towards the democratisation and sharing of scholarly knowledge is revolutionising science dissemination and giving rise to new genres (Luzón & Pérez-Llantada, 2019; Carter-Thomas & Rowley-Jolivet, 2020). One such genre is Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) presentations, through which doctoral students present disciplinary content based on their ongoing research to non-expert audiences. To effectively construct meaning through 3MT presentations, students should reflect on how to express content, organise discourse and establish interpersonal meaning. Against this backdrop, this study first presents a multimodal genre-based approach to teaching 3MT presentations. It then explores two 3MT presentations delivered by two doctoral students, examining the expression of textual and interpersonal meaning, as well as how the latter is conveyed multimodally. Findings show that trained students organise discourse into different rhetorical steps (Hu & Liu, 2018) and make use of a variety of interpersonal strategies to connect with the audience. Concerning multimodality, findings reveal an existing intersemiotic relationship between verbal and non-verbal modes to construct interpersonal meaning.