Research Specifications

The key communicative feature that all successful business entrepreneurs have in common is their keen presentation skills, and their ability to express ideas in a compelling and influential way. Their success is extremely dependent on their ability to structure the thoughts, connect with people, and influence the actions. Companies and organizations often utilize business presentations as a means for selling an idea or product or to motivate the audience. The present study aimed to understand the role played by language in shaping the spoken genre within business presentations. Thirty business TED presentations as authentic oral data were analysed in order to determine whether they were built based on shared principles or not, and to identify the ways the generic features of business presentations were linguistically realized. The method was descriptive and the analysis were based on Swale’s genre theory. The corpus data was interpreted in terms of discursive, professional and social practices to link the local text level to much broader layers of context. This was of note from a theoretical perspective because it explored what was meant by ‘practice’ and how it was applied to the context of presentations as genre. The results indicated that the moves were highly structured and conventionalized with constraints in terms of intent, positioning, form and functional value. The present practice-based research can inform business language teaching and corporate training by determining what core communication skills business practitioners require to be successful. The focus on contextualizing communication practices can make a hallmark of business discourse research.