Conclusion

problem of “stepping out of the role”. The speaker, unfortunately, did not take the simulation very seriously. The content and nature of Dan’s and Nina’s speeches made them more akin to advisory or info sessions, as opposed to business presentations with a commercial end. The speech act statistics of the three presentations indicate a much lower frequency of positive cooperative acts, only 49 (17.7%), as opposed to a total of 39 territorial strategies (14.1%), mostly used by Nina. In a combined longer time of 37 minutes, the overall speech act count was also noticeably lower, just 276, due to the very excessive lengths of individual acts in Dan’s presentation and the short time of Zack’s.

This would indicate that the lower graded presenters are much more likely to be concerned with negative face strategies, maintaining their personal space, their “freedom of action and freedom from imposition” (Brown & Levinson, 1978, p. 61) than the approval of the audience, as is the case with the higher graded ones. On the whole, though, these talks are less interactional than the ones with higher marks and are therefore highly monologic.

being considered more successful. Conversely, the lower graded presentations had poorly fulfilled or undefined commercial communicative purposes. This finding is supported by Swales’ (1990) claim that the “communicative purpose is a privileged criterion” (p. 58).

Despite the interesting findings, the study has several limitations. The most important one is the small sample of data. That fact that only six presentations are included in the research means that the conclusions drawn cannot be generalised and they apply primarily to this particular sample of data. Unfortunately, since the analytical process is so labour-intensive and time-consuming, it was impossible to include a larger sample of presentations. On the other hand, the depth of the analysis yields fruitful details and examples that could be used as a basis for productive comparison both within this small sample, but also with other data sources in the future.

Another limitation stems from the student’s freedom to choose their presentation topics. Two out of the three higher graded presentations were sales presentations. It appears that this type of presentation, with its obvious communicative and commercial purpose, is easier for students to identify, emulate and contextualise. Certainly, there seem to be enough examples of sales presentations readily available on TV, in supermarkets, shopping centres and even in the home. Students’ attempts to deal with other types of business presentations, promotion of services and market research report, proved to be somewhat less successful, perhaps due to insufficient exposure to these genres. Yet the restaurant progress report, as an internal company presentation, turned out to be rather successful. The students’ choice of topic has been addressed since this study was carried out and now they receive presentation situations to select from (Appendix H). This issue is discussed in more detail in the study relating to how Presentation Skills are taught.

Finally, even though the detailed analysis is set against the co-assessors’ specific marks for each criterion, the links between the findings and the higher grades should only be tentative until they are supported by the interviews with the instructors concerning the reasons for their marks.

Despite the limitations, the results of the study can prove to be useful in drawing up more comprehensive guidelines for instruction on the context and rationale of business presentations. The identification of a clear communicative purpose with which the presenter might attain commercial gain ought to be highlighted, especially in pre-service Presentation Skills courses, where the students are not yet so familiar with the background of presentations. Greater emphasis on and coverage of the communicative event itself and the features of the genre could also be given in the process of compiling Presentation Skills instruction materials and writing textbooks. As mentioned in the introduction, few of these include topics on contextualisation and the communicative purpose of presentations, opting instead for the more technical aspects. Of course, the technicalities of presentations are important, but focusing only on them might lead to students routinely going through the motions of a presentation, without actually communicating effectively.

In terms of the additional purpose of testing the Intentionality Model at this particular phase of development, there were two interesting findings. First, with the help of this framework it is possible to analyse how well the contextual and content features of presentations are matched. The small sample of this study means the results are not generalisable, but the research does prove that the analytical system works and that it can be applied to a wider sample of data. Apart from looking at the frequencies of speech acts, the analysis also provides useful qualitative indications in relation to the communicative purpose of the event, the roles of the participants and the extent to which these elements

are clearly reflected in the content. Second, the very long speech acts in one of the presentations necessitated the need to further develop the definition of a speech act. Up to the beginning of 2006, when this study was carried out, all the segmentation of the speech acts was done intuitively. The disparity in the length of the speech acts in Dan’s presentation raised the question whether the acts could truly display such a divergence in the number of words, or whether it was the researcher’s intuitive segmentation that had contributed to the result. In order to address this question, in the later finalisation stages of designing the model, a more detailed investigation into the various definitions of speech acts was carried out and the intuitive segmentation of several researchers was compared in order to come up with the current definition of a speech act as a simple proposition. With the use of this clearer definition and delimitation of a speech act, the findings of this study were double checked, and indeed Dan’s acts are considerably longer than the average ones. This might be the result of the student’s intelligent improvisation during the presentation to cover up the fact that he simply was not prepared.

Another shortcoming of the model at this stage was the labelling of the speech acts.

Sometimes a unit seemed to fit into two categories at the same time, and it was difficult to decide whether to code the act as belonging to one or the other of the groups. This problem had to be addressed, and just as with the segmentation, clearer guidelines needed to be provided for the researcher. According to Askehave (1999), a genre might have several communicative purposes, so one might easily suppose that on the micro level a single utterance might have several illocutions. The dilemma as to which of the illocutions should be coded could be resolved by advising that the most specific label should always have priority in choice. For example, if the coder is hesitating between

“stating time” (for the completion of a project) or “warning” (of a deadline), the more

specific “warning” label should be selected. When making this choice, the implications of the act for the audience should also be taken into account. Whether an act’s outcome is desirable for the audience, for example, could determine whether it is labelled as a cooperative suggestion or a territorial threat. This idea is based on Searle’s (1969) necessary and sufficient conditions and constitutive rules of speech acts.

A further problem with the analytical system was the series of notes accompanying each analysis. These notes were intended to keep track of any interesting speech act patterns observed by the researcher as well as any possible coding dilemmas. These notes were very useful for a time, especially to test the types of coding hesitations and problems that are experienced when the analytical system is applied. This let to several improvements later on. However, when it came to the “interesting speech act patterns”, it was difficult at times to assess exactly how these illocutionary clusters are related to the communicative purpose and the context of the presentation. The analysis of the patterns needed to become more systematic according to a developed scheme and not dependent purely on the researcher’s ability to identify “interesting” patterns. This systematic method of looking at illocutionary clusters was developed based on the notion of super-ordinate and subsuper-ordinate speech acts (van Dijk, 1977b) and Ferrara’s (1985) ideas on ritualised speech act sequences operating on a more global level. Thereby, a hierarchy of speech act subordination could be mapped out for each presentation, culminating at the top, macro level in the communicative purpose of the event. This led to the development of the hierarchy of intentionality which was later supplemented with mid-level acts, smaller than the communicative purpose, but larger than the minimal speech acts. The coding of this level was provided by Bhatia’s (1993) moves of promotional genre.

7 THREE-PHASE LONGITUDINAL STUDY