elusive. Often definitions are too wide, like J. Rotondo and M. Rotondo’s (2002) visual and aural event that can provide information, help to understand, gain agreement or motivate. Other authors like McCarthy and Hatcher (2002) are not sufficiently concrete and simply provide a list of situations in which presentations may occur. Probably one of the clearest definitions is that of Ellis and Johnson (1994) who describe “a pre-planned, prepared and structured talk” (p. 222) which may which may inform or persuade. Yet, even this seems to be too general and can easily encompass academic and scientific presentations, as well as political speeches and business talks. In view of Yates and Orlikowski’s (2007) description of how PowerPoint printouts and electronic files are used, it is clear that new forms of presentations are emerging where the speaker need not be present at the same time and place as the audience, or in fact might not even have any type of role apart from designing the slides. In other cases, the slides are designed by teams of colleagues and are read by the audience members at their convenience.
Then there is also the issue of the diversity of the types of presentations. Some rely heavily on flashy visuals, some have no visuals at all. Some are performed standing up, others sitting at a desk or table. Some are read out while others involve the audience and resemble dialogues, workshops or seminars. The aims can also vary from selling, and informing to motivating and pitching, though most authors do agree on the fact that the purpose of most presentations is of a persuasive nature.
what distinguishes business presentations from other types of presentations and also place the genre within the wider perspective of communication and social interaction. In order to do this, it will be necessary to have a multidisciplinary approach drawing on the fields of discourse and genre analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics language skills teaching, pedagogy and stylistics. The overall approach of the Ph.D. research is exploratory (Creswell, 2003), inductive (Maykut & Morehouse, 1994) and heuristic (Selinger &
Shohamy, 1989). This means that it does not attempt to either substantiate or refute a particular hypothesis. It endeavours, instead, to define and describe the genre of business presentations.
This study has three basic aims:
1) THEORETICAL: to create a theoretical model that is capable of explaining, describing and analysing business presentations;
2) EMPIRICAL: to apply the theoretical model as an analytical instrument in empirical research on a corpus of business presentations in order to justify the validity and reliability of the model and describe the genre of business presentations in terms of the context, the communicative purpose, the participants, the choices of content structure and the communicative strategies employed by the speaker;
3) PEDAGOGICAL: to provide theoretical and empirical research foundations for instruction and training in this particular branch of ESP.
The first of these aims will entail mostly theoretical research to devise, validate and revealingly pilot and improve an analytical framework, coding system or instrument which will be capable of capturing the characteristics of presentations. The second aim will involve predominantly empirical research, i.e. video recording presentations, transcribing
and then analysing them using the previously developed instrument in order to describe this genre. The third goal is pedagogical and will necessitate applying the instrument for classroom research in order to gain a better understanding of how Presentation Skills are taught and to attempt to enrich the instruction based on the theoretical framework.
The study has the potential to yield exceptionally useful results, since few of the textbooks on Presentation Skills previously reviewed are rooted in research. In most cases, the authors have compiled the materials based on their own experience in presenting or teaching this communication skill. It is unclear whether such instructional resources are transferable and accessible to other presenters and circumstances, and it is even uncertain that they accurately reflect the features of the discourse of presentations. Through analysing the presentations’ genre and mapping out its distinct characteristics, this research will hopefully describe, illustrate and explain the traits of a form of communication that has so far been neglected academically, even though it is being used ever more frequently in all walks of life.
Knowing more about the genre and how it is taught and learnt can also help to assess the appropriateness of the teaching materials for Presentation Skills courses and the results of the empirical and theoretical research aims to produce valuable supplementary materials for instruction in this field of ESP. It may also give insights into the extent to which the outcome of the teaching process, i.e. the simulated student presentations performed at the end of many such courses bare resemblance to real presentations given by professionals. It is essential to establish whether the reduced models of reality practiced in the classroom match the business reality. Further advantages of the research can be seen in the opportunity to find out what makes one presentation more successful than another by comparing the features of presentations which are given higher and lower grades by
co-assessors. It is obviously not enough to teach what presentations are and how to hold presentations, but students also need instruction in how to make their talks more effective.
Teaching students to give a particular type of presentation is not enough. They need to acquire a transferable skill which would enable them to apply what has been learnt in many different circumstances, which can be done by taking into consideration all the genre components.
Another potential benefit of the research stems from the development of the model.
This analytical framework can be used not only to describe business presentations and presentations in general, but to examine the presentations of a particular presenter, build a speaker profile of the person based on the results of the analysis and then offer the individual specific advice on changes that could be made to better achieve the desired effect. Such consulting services would be especially valuable for in-service training at companies and for professional presenters.
2 THE INTENTIONALITY MODEL OF BUSINESS PRESENTATIONS