Apresentações orais de trabalhos científicos na especialidade de pneumologia

Abstract

This study aims at analysing 30 oral presentations in English in the medical specialty of pneumology. The corpus was analysed with four main objectives: a) to identify differences and similarities regarding the rethorical organization of those oral presentations in comparison with research articles in the medical area; b) to identify the rethorical organization of the oral presentations; c) to identify obligatory and optional moves of the oral presentations; d) to investigate the lexicogrammatical choices that emphasize the interpersonal aspects in each move of the oral presentations and relate these choices to the roles assigned to the presenter and the audience in the interaction as well as the presenter' s evaluation in relation to his involvement with the message, through the system of mood and modality. The theoretical background lays on Genre Analysis (Swales, 1990, 1992) and on the Systemic-Functional Grammar (Halliday, 1994). Results concerning the sections Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results and Discussion, showed that the rhetorical organization of the oral presentations is similar to that of research articles in the medical area, with differences specially in the Introduction section and at the end of Discussion section. The differences found emphasize the oral aspects of the oral presentations, suggesting that they are samples of a genre with mixed characteristics, that is, with characteristics of the spoken language as well as the written language. ln the interpersonal perspective, the results showed that the pronominal fo1ms (I, we and you) are the preferred ones to characterize presenter and audience, indicating that the interaction is more interpersonal in relation to the presenter and his team, but not in relation to the audience. Concerning the presenter's evaluation and presenter's involvement with the message, results showed that the modals that accompany the pronominal forms (I, we and you) as well mood adjuncts of the corpus, occur more frequently in moves that belong to the Results section and the Discussion section These results corroborate previous studies on research articles by Swales (1990) and Salager-Meyer (1994) which indicate that those sections are marked by modality. The study presented here hopes to have made an original contribution to the study of genres and to the ESP approach in that it provided results that may aid the preparation of material concerning oral comprehension and speaking to ESP teaching and learning. The study also presents possible limitations and further research, as well as suggestions for pedagogical applications of the findings