Academic posters: A Textual and Visual Metadiscourse Analysis

This volume presents a cross-disciplinary analysis of academic poster presentations, taking into consideration the text and visuals that posters display depending on the discipline within which they are created. As the academic poster is a multimodal genre, different modal aspects have been taken into consideration when analysing it, a fact that has somehow complicated the genre analysis conducted, but has also stimulated the research work involved and, in the end, provided interesting results.
The analysis carried out here has highlighted significant cross-disciplinary differences in terms of word count, portrait/landscape orientation and layout of posters, as well as discipline and subdiscipline-specific patterns for what concerns the use of textual interactive and interactional metadiscourse resources and visual interactive resources.
The investigation has revealed what textual and visual metadiscourse resources are employed, where and why, and as a consequence, what textual and visual metadiscourse strategies should be adopted by poster authors depending on the practices and expectations of their academic community.

Larissa D’Angelo, PhD in Applied Linguistics (University of Reading), is a Lecturer of English at the University of Bergamo. Her main research interests deal with EAP and multimodal genres employed in academic discourse. She is an active member of the Research Centre on Languages for Specific Purposes (CERLIS) and has been involved in several national and international research projects.