Speaking in front of the class: a multi-dimensional comparison of university student public speech and university language

Abstract

This study explores the language variation in university student public speech across two academic disciplines: business administration and education. A corpus of university student public speech, made up of 102 classroom presentations (approximately 215,000 words), was designed, constructed and analysed using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Using multi-dimensional analysis, the co-occurrence of linguistic variables was functionally interpreted in order to compare university student public speech to other university registers. University student public speech was compared on four dimensions of variation previously found in university language. Significant differences were found for discipline and task on each of the four dimensions of variation. University student public speech scored extremely high on dimension 1, which describes an oral-literate continuum. In fact, these student presentations were more ‘oral’ than any university register previously studied. Another interesting finding was that the university student public speech texts exhibited positive features associated with teacher-centred stance. This differs from previous work, where positive scores were strongly associated only with instructor-controlled registers. The paper concludes with a discussion of disciplinary and task-related differences seen across the dimensions, which became critical in the interpretation of variation in university student public speech.