Stance and engagement in 3MT presentations: How students communicate disciplinary knowledge to a wide audience

3MT presentations have emerged as an important academic genre, helping graduate students to present disciplinary knowledge to wide audiences. While previous research has investigated the structuring of presentations, little is known about the rhetorical features students employ to persuade their diverse listenership. In this study, we draw on Hyland’s (2005) stance and engagement framework to explore how the popularisation of scientific knowledge has influenced the ways presenters interact with their audiences. Based on a 3MT corpus of 80 presentations from six disciplines, the results show that stance markers are more often used than listener engagement markers, while explicit mentions of self and listeners are the most common features. Additionally, presenters in the hard sciences, compared to those in soft-knowledge fields, make more use of the interactional features, but rhetorical questions are more frequently used in the soft knowledge fields. Therefore, we see this nuanced use of stance and engagement as related to the rhetorical contexts of register, genre and disciplinary propositional content. Pedagogical implications raised include developing students’ ability in the popularisation of science and their raising their awareness of disciplinary knowledge and its social relevance.