Engagement and strategic alignment in academic talks across languages and disciplines

Abstract Engagement strategies in academic talks highlight how speakers position and manage their target audience, facilitating the effective communication of their academic stances. The present study investigates engagement strategies in academic talks delivered in L1 Mandarin Chinese and two varieties of English: L1 English and English as a lingua franca (ELF). Three corpora comprising 90 academic talks in the humanities and social sciences serve as the basis for analysis. The overarching findings underscore the prominence of hearer-mentions as the predominant form of engagement markers, with L1 English speakers notably favouring the combined use of hearer-mentions and directives to foster engagement with their audience. In comparison, L1 Mandarin speakers exhibit a proclivity towards using questions and directives as primary tactics for audience management and ELF scholars frequently incorporate knowledge appeals into their academic talks, while the use of personal-asides remains relatively infrequent. Moreover, the disciplinary nuances suggest that the choice of engagement markers may be influenced by specific disciplinary conventions and linguacultural variations. The findings not only contribute to a comparative analysis of academic spoken performance across diverse linguistic backgrounds and disciplines, but are also of potential interest to inform future speech training by adjusting and applying these strategies in communication.