New research genres and English prosody: an exploratory analysis of academic English intonation in Video Methods Articles in experimental biology

Abstract

The digital multimedia environment where research communication develops nowadays has important consequences for EAP course design (Perez-Llantada 2016), since speaking and visuals are ever more decisive for communicative success (Crawford-Camiciottoli and Fortanet-Gomez 2015). However, intonation manuals have remained virtually unchanged for decades, reflecting a time of limited access to actual academic intonation in use. To countervail this situation, we draw on Hafner‘s (2018) multimodal analysis of experimental biology Video Methods Articles by examining the intonation used in an exploratory corpus of the Researcher‘s Introduction section, identified as the most hybrid in generic nature. Our analysis suggests that traditional Hallidayan intonation explained in handbooks like Hewings (2007) and Brazil (1994) fails to capture phenomena observed in our corpus. These intonational phenomena (mostly deviations from traditional tonicity) have been found to be consistent with genre- specific factors like communicative purpose and move structure. Consequently, a broader revision of academic intonation materials is proposed.