Multimodal analysis of academic posters by student writers across disciplines

Abstract

This dissertation examines the multimodal discourse of academic posters from three disciplines, namely, Chemistry, Speech & Hearing Sciences and Linguistics, in an attempt to unravel how writers from different disciplinary communities build their communicative purposes into the verbal and visual modes in their posters. The analytical framework adopted for this study builds upon the one proposed by D’Angelo(2010), which incorporates Hyland’s metadiscourse model (2005) and Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar paradigm (2006) for the verbal and visual analyses respectively, and supplements it with multimodal content analysis adapted from Jones’s (2007) model. Follow-up interviews with members of the discourse communities were also conducted to enhance the validity of the results. The findings reveal that there exist a wide range of differences in the use of metadiscourse markers (e.g. hedges, boosters, evidentials, code glosses) across the three group texts pertaining to disciplinary influences. There is also evidence that academics in different subjects value some of the same qualities in the texts necessitated either by the peculiar context of poster presentations (e.g. frame markers, engagement markers) or a need to maintain scientific formality (e.g. self-mentions). Visually, the concern for the context and ‘scientificness’ continue to exert great influences, rendering a myriad of visual manifestations (e.g. framing, modality) that are commonly shared across the data, whereas the cross-discipline discrepancy mainly narrows down to the image usage(functions and types).