Engaging the Audience: Using Multimodal Strategies to Disseminate Science

Juan C. Palmer Silveira will talk about how science is now accessible to the public, thanks to new genres that are often used to democratize science. He will focus on one of these new genres, an international science talk competition called FameLab. It consists of 3-minute talks in English on scientific and/or technological topics. In this talk, he will focus on recordings from the 2020 and 2021 editions of the competition, when these talks were pre-recorded rather than live due to the pandemics. He will share his views on the existence of verbal and non-verbal features that may be intended to engage the audience and force them to respond to the presentation. As an ESP practitioner, he hopes that this research will generate new rhetorical tools to use in his daily teaching, but also with an understanding of how science is communicated in general and how scientists' discursive practices evolve.

Bio note:

Juan C. Palmer Silveira, PhD in English Philology, is a member of the research group GRAPE (Group for Research in Academic and Professional English) and works as an Associate Professor at Universitat Jaume I (Castelló, Spain), where he also coordinates the University Master in English Language for International Trade (ELIT), currently in its 20th edition. He has over thirty years of experience in teaching English as a foreign language, as well as reading and writing strategies in Spanish. His main research interests are in English for professional and academic purposes, having specialized in English for Business Communication. In recent times he has been working on Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), paying special attention to corporate communication online. He has published in relevant international journals (Comunicar, RELC, Ibérica, Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, The Reading Matrix, British Journal of Educational Technology) and in prestigious publishing houses (Peter Lang, Rodopi, Farleigh Dickinson, Routledge, John Benjamins, Narcea, Palgrave).