Seminars

‘Seminars’ is a broad umbrella term used to refer to an oral academic genre that has been used to embrace both student-led, interactive lectures and expert-to-expert talks. The former type has received most attention and has focused attention on structure, metadiscourse, modifiers, multimodality, silence, interaction, academic culture and politeness, all from different strands. The other type of seminars, the expert-to-expert seminar, usually regarded as a research genre, remains understudied. While it shares similarities with other types of research-process genres like colloquia or conferences, it deploys distinctive features. Understood as a one-time specialised talk on ongoing research given by an expert visiting another university to an expert audience or to other colleagues within international research projects, expert seminars became research webinars (online seminars), particularly during the pandemic and subsequent years. Seminars are also studied along the axis of native and non-native speakers, where English is used as the medium of instruction in student seminars in jurisdictions where English is not the official language, or as the lingua franca in expert research discussions. Participants’ familiarity with the topic, language proficiency, audience, and purpose seem to shape both genres. This knowledge is expected to contribute to a deeper understanding of oral academic genres.