“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.

KEYWORDS:

• Three Minute Thesis (3MT) presentation
• thesis abstract
• hype
• disciplinary variation
• academic persuasion

Acknowledgements

We truly appreciate the helpful editorial advice given by Dr Jean Mulder, and the constructive feedback by the two external reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available, with a list of the 80 3MT presentations and corresponding doctoral thesis abstracts available from the corresponding author, FKJ, upon request.

Notes

1 Introduction to 3MT competition on its official website: https://threeminutethesis.uq.edu.au/about.

2 Judging criteria of 3MT competition on its official website: https://threeminutethesis.uq.edu.au/resources/judging-criteria.

3 Accessed at http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/llwizard.html on 25 February 2020.

4 Hypes are bolded in the examples, with genre and the source of discipline marked in square brackets.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Research Project of Social Sciences in Jilin Province (2019 B163), the Grant for Young Researchers in Social Sciences by Jilin University (2019 FRLX04), the Research Project of Postgraduate Education by Jilin University (2021 JGZ09) and also by the Research Project of Humanities and Social Sciences administered by the Education Department of Jilin Province (JJKH20211252SK).

Notes on contributors

Feng (Kevin) Jiang

Feng (Kevin) Jiang is Kuang Yaming Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics in the School of Foreign Language Education at Jilin University, China and gained his PhD under the supervision of Professor Ken Hyland at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include disciplinary discourse, corpus studies and academic writing, and his publications have appeared in most major applied linguistics journals.

Xuyan Qiu

Xuyan (Christy) Qiu is currently an assistant professor in the Department of English and Communication at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include English for academic purposes and second language acquisition.