Academic English: Oral and Written Communication

Academic English

Academic English refers to the oral, written, auditory, and visual proficiency required to learn and communicate effectively in schools and academic programs, where English is used as a vehicular language.

Academic English is usually formal in tone, it has an advanced vocabulary and impersonal style. We avoid contractions or shortened forms of verbs. We avoid personal pronouns. We may use passive forms and academic vocabulary.

• EFL - English as a Foreign Language (in England)
• ESL - English as a Secondary Language (in Spain)
• ELF - English Lingua Franca
• EMI - English as a Medium of Instruction

Understanding Genres in Academic English

A genre is a class of communicative events, the members of which share a communicative purpose. John Swales is a father of the analysis of academic genres. Exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style, content, and intended audience.

• Oral, written -> production, expression
• Auditory, visual -> comprehension

Written Genres

Written genres are visual, permanent, highly structured, and contain written paralinguistic features (e.g., size, highlighting).

Oral Genres

Oral genres are auditory and visual, ephemeral, semi-structured, and contain paralinguistic features (e.g., pronunciation, volume, speed, tone, stress, intonation) plus written paralinguistic features. They represent your personality.

Components of Oral Genres

• Speaker
• Audience

Interpersonal connection: Audience's involvement.

Motivation is a theoretical construct used to explain behavior. It gives the reason for people's actions, desires, and needs.

Examples: A personal question, an anecdote, an interesting image, a short video or object, shocking statistics.

Multimodality and Oral Communication

Multimodality is a representation and communication of meaning through a multiplicity of modes (visual, writing, verbal or speech, gestures, etc.).

Oral communication is the process of expressing information or ideas by word of mouth.

We communicate:

• Verbally:

1. Spoken
2. Written

Non-verbally:

3. Non-verbal materials (images, graphs, videos)
4. Body language

Systemic Functional Linguistic Perspective (SFL)

It is an approach to linguistics that considers language as a social semiotic system.

• Concise conceptual information
• Organizational textual features
• Inclusive interpersonal features