'The floor is now open for discussion': Questioning in Q&A sessions in academic presentations by professionals and students

Abstract

Many university courses include oral presentations as a course component for educational and assessment purposes, which typically comprise question-answer (Q&A) sessions of varying lengths. While there are abundant resources on presentation skills online and offline, guidelines on handling the Q&A session are relatively insufficient. Moreover, many of these guidelines tend to be based mainly on ‘professional wisdom’ and general observations. They seldom take into consideration that interaction is complex and dynamic and that there are many factors influencing one’s communication behavior. From an academic perspective, the Q&A session can be considered as a different genre of discourse from the paper presentation and is worth investigation in its own right. It involves impromptu interaction between the speaker and the audience, often mediated by the chair, and therefore poses a greater challenge to the speaker and the audience. However, the literature focusing on the Q&A session in presentations is very limited. This paper aims to fill the gap by investigating the discourse of questioning and answering during the Q&A sessions in academic presentations. This paper draws on video recordings of academic presentations given by professionals and students in the field of health sciences. By employing conversation analysis as a main analytic tool, this paper particularly focuses on linguistic forms and interactional features of questioning by professionals and by students. Our data shows that the questions in professional presentations are usually more carefully designed and tend to be constructed in a less direct and more mitigated form than those in student presentations. Compared to professionals, students seem to be less competent in handling relational aspects involved in staging questions. This paper has pedagogical implications and contributes to meeting a need for the teaching of questioning to be research-informed.