Rhetorical moves in teachers’ PowerPoint presentations: variation across disciplines and school stages

Abstract

This study examines the rhetorical characteristics of teachers' PowerPoint presentations, a commonly used yet underexplored genre in school language, across school stages (primary-secondary) and between disciplines. Although there have been empirical studies on the linguistic characteristics of other genres, such as textbooks, PowerPoint presentations have received very little attention despite their widespread use in educational settings. Using Swalesian genre analysis, the present study uncovered six moves and 37 steps in a corpus of 240 PowerPoint presentations, which were selected in a principled manner out of a corpus of school language, across an important phase of education, namely the transition from primary to secondary school. The findings revealed significant variations in the rhetorical structures of PowerPoint presentations across disciplines and school stages. One of the key findings was that secondary school presentations, which became more multifunctional, featured ‘introducing the context’ less while featuring other steps that sought students' contributions more than those of primary schools, highlighting the increase in comprehension demands for students. Our moves/steps framework for the PowerPoint presentations makes the rhetorical characteristics of PowerPoint presentations visible to teachers and trainers and has the potential to ease possible comprehension challenges of students across the school stages.

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