A Comparative Generic Analysis of Visual Types and Characteristics of Applied Linguistics conference Power Point Slides

As an integral componet of discourse competence and professional expertise، generic competence is intervowen with the concept of multi-litracies، which in turn highlights the role of technology and multimodality. Conefernce PowerPoint presentations are among the research-process genres، which rely substantially on the textual and visual generic competences of discourse community members. In spite of their significant role for the membership in a community of practice، they are underexplored even in the «English for Specific/ Academic Purposes» tradition of genre analysis، where static versus dynamic nature of genres has been a controversial issue. The present genereic study utilized a typology of visuals along with a framework for description and explanation of their characteristics and features to analyze more than 400 conference slides by two groups of non-native applied linguists (a representative of soft scientists) in light of the definition of genre، its functions، and the influence of Microsoft software on its features. Apart from highlighting the importance of visuals and the dominance of scriptuals in soft sciences، the reported similarities and differences between the two groups and the obtained patterns revealed that PowerPoint presentation can be considered a genre، which would manifest a variety of identity expressions. Moreover، in the absence of disoursal and metadiscoursal elements، many slide characteristics and features can fulfill their fuctions. Sheding some light on the undeniable role of the software and its implications for methods of reasoning and argumentation، genre integrity، and definition of metadiscourse and genre along with some applied suggestions are among the main aims of the study.