Explaining science to the non-specialist online audience: A multimodal genre analysis of TED talk videos

Abstract

Digital technologies have impacted scientific communication by facilitating developments in forms of expression for scientific genres and contributing to a diversified audience. Recently, a range of digital scientific genres that target not only specialists but also the non-specialist audience have emerged, requiring authors to recontextualize scientific knowledge effectively to meet the needs of a wider audience. One such genre is the TED talk video where scientists deliver speeches to audiences with diverse backgrounds. For such a digital-multimodal genre, language becomes just one element of the assemblage of multimodal semiotic resources that are exploited to explain science, and other semiotic resources are drawn upon in text construction. The present study explores how scientific knolwedge is explained to the non-specialist online audience through the use of generic and multimodal resources in TED talk videos. Adopting theoretical and analytical toolkits from the ESP framework of genre analysis and multimodal analysis, the study investigated twenty-eight TED talk videos on biology created from 2003 to 2018, interviews with insider informants, and community texts that explain the genre. Genre analysis of TED talks reveals that one communicative purpose of TED talks is to explain knowledge to a broad audience and that a rhetorical move named Developing the topic is adopted to achieve this purpose. Multimodal analysis reveals three types of visuals used to realize the move: figurative, graphical, and scriptural. Two types of visual-verbal configurations are also found: concurrence and complementarity. The findings show that visuals are significantly foregrounded when explaining science in TED talk videos. The study suggests that the TED talk video, a web-mediated genre originating from live TED talks, has developed the characteristics associated with the digital form.