Evaluation in discussion sessions of conference presentations: theorical foundations for a multimodal analysis

Discussions sessions have not received much attention within the genre of conference presentations. In this paper, we present the theoretical framework that underlies the approach followed to analyse the multimodal expression of evaluation. Then, an example of the application of the study has been considered necessary to understand it. Corpus linguistics provided the indications to collect the corpus, annotate it and find the appropriate software to digitalise the relevant information for the study. Secondly, genre studies and conversational analysis gave the clues to establish a structure in the linguistic expressions found in the discussion sessions of paper presentations. Thirdly, systemic functional linguistics and pragmatics provided the basis for an evaluative scheme that could be applied to the academic discourse of the corpus, considering its multimodal nature. Fourthly, the tools to systematically observe the non-verbal communication associated to evaluative language were found in multimodal discourse analysis studies. All together, the study of these variables led to an original study of discussion sessions, which deployed interesting results.This study was supported by Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (grant FFI201124269), Universitat Jaume I, GRAPE (Group for Research on Academic and Professional English, and UNIR Research (http://research.unir.net), Universidad Internacional de La Rioja, under the Research Support Strategy [2013–2015], Research Group EPEDIG (Educación Personalizada en la Era Digital)