Managing the Transitions Between Talk and Silence in the Academic Monologue

Abstract

Analysis of the academic monologue shows that presenters do not talk nonstop for the duration of the presentation-they talk for a bit, pause, and then talk for a bit more. In other words, they divide their monologue into smaller "chunks" or sections of talk. The move from the end of a section of talk to the pause between sections is evident not only in terms of what presenters are saying (word choice, syntactic structure) and how they are saying it (intonation, prosody) but also in terms of what presenters are simultaneously doing as they talk. Although in some ways it is easier to show what is happening when things do not work, the following analysis shows what occurs when things do work, when the presentation is running smoothly. Previous research has examined the detail of monologic talk, and it has examined nonverbal interaction within everyday conversation and institutional talk, but no research has been carried out combining these two aspects with respect to the academic monologue, by looking at how presenters actually structure their monologic talk. In the following analysis I do just this-through an examination of both talk and action I show how presenters embody the shift from talk to silence within the academic monologue such that the structure of the presentation emerges. .