OAP 17

173

174 is effected by the presenter addressing her audience in a particularly didactic and genuinely inquisitive manner: Firstly, I would like to ask you a question about the language classes you’ve attended, perhaps from high-school. And the question is which way of teaching do you prefer? When the teacher explains the grammar rules and the vocabulary, and you have to learn them, or when you encounter a particular context or face a situation in your talking? So the first or the second one? Although this move could most naturally be seen as a technique to foster audience involvement or even encourage social collaboration, the dynamic and interactive nature of which becomes patent in the audience’s humming and buzzing that ensues after the multiply worded question, the attempt does not result in the desired outcome. It remains unclear if the silence, which sets in after a few scores of seconds, arises owing to the presenter’s lack of perseverance in more straightforwardly insisting on any definite replies from participants, or on account of the audience initial reticence. Therefore, in the absence of any distinctly audible answers from the audience, the presenter herself supplies a rejoinder, laying stress on the segment that points to a novelty: I think most people prefer the second one, but the author suggests that a third form is also very important.

Subsequently, the speaker provides a well-principled rationale for her question raising and moves on to draw attention to a relatively mild conflict underlying the dichotomy she is discussing: This question I asked is really about the explicit or the implicit knowledge. About this there has been a great amount of debate in a few years.

Some people say that explicit learning, so the conscious way of learning is much more useful than implicit learning. Although in the latter statement she does not put forward any critical or analytical assessment of a concrete theoretical issue, the mere act of simply capturing the essence of an otherwise intricate scholarly dispute could lead one

175 to recognise the presence of a relative-expert-like epistemic stance in these two utterances.

This explanatory approach is further carried on in the ensuing summary of the two main perspectives on learning outlined in the article, whereby the presenter further consolidates the epistemic stance she has previously adopted. This down-to-earth and pragmatically minded nature of the speaker’s rendering of the various theoretical strands is especially well observed in the plain wording she uses to paraphrase certain definitions: Noticing means that when you are faced with a form or structure, you can remember it if you’ve already encountered or seen it before.

In the upcoming summaries summing up the chief empirical orientation and the research setting of the project, the presenter retains the mainly explanatory and audience-tailored profile described above. At the same time, the speaker’s intention to lucidly segment these various summaries is also unambiguously indicated by means of transitional signals: And now comes the main question of this study; And now about the real research project. In explicating the research design, the presenter makes direct allusions to visual support tools. Contemporaneously with the precise and step-by-step account of the empirical measure undertaken by the researcher, the presenter makes sure to go beyond the level of simply replicating the stages of the project verbally and, apparently, regards the context as a good opportunity to furnish her audience with additional explanatory utterances, elucidating concepts she must deem to be crucial from the point of view of gaining a comprehensive understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of individual empirical decisions. This consistent interpretive attitude of the speaker contributes to strengthening her previously formulated epistemic stances, mostly projecting the image of the relative expert and occasionally showing signs of sliding back to the role of the relative novice: And I’d like to clarify what is instruction

176 and exposure. Instruction is when the teacher explains the most important grammatical structures. And exposure is, at least I think, when the students see the text but don’t get any help.

In the continuation of the description of the procedures employed by the researcher, the presenter draws attention to a novelty element in the design and develops her point in a direction that culminates in the formulation of an implication: It is interesting that these questions, all of the questions, items were referred to in the instruction, but not all of them were in the text that they had previously read. But some students indicated that they had seen the item. So this proves one very strong effect of instruction. Recognising noteworthy points in the design and generating conclusions by juxtaposing them with the results, however, is not regarded by the presenter as prerogative reserved for her only. Instead, she appears to invest conscious efforts into constructing an environment of social collaboration, by partly relinquishing her role as the dispenser of information and inviting participants to join her in the thinking process, as well as by extensive reliance on visual support: And in the two tables you can see the real results of the study. Well, not many things could be read, but maybe you can see that the items that were instructed were rated in a higher amount.

As for the interactive features occurring in OAP 17, on the whole, it may be noted that personal deictics are found throughout the talk without any noticeable pattern in their distribution. As opposed to first person singular and second person plural pronouns, the most prominent representatives of personal deictics in this presentation, it is fairly conspicuous that exponents of another type of interactive features, namely markers, tend to be concentrated in the discussion and conclusion sections of the talk.

Their interactive functions might be diverse. So is largely used for two purposes: to indicate movement to a logical corollary (So this means that noticing vocabulary is

177 easier even without instruction) and to generate a conclusion (So the effect of instruction is less higher after a time); well and thing convey a sense of uncertainty, underscoring the gradual and cumulative nature of the self-discovery process the audience has been invited to. Nevertheless, it appears feasible to suggest that, based on the location and the functions of these markers as discussed above, the use of single word markers could be tied to the presenter’s endeavour to achieve social collaboration.