Visual communication in applied linguistics conference presentations

This chapter proposes an analysis of visual communication in academic conference presentations, where the visual mode appears to carry a particularly heavy functional load. Using a large corpus of PowerPoint slides projected during presentations at international applied linguistics conferences, the slides were analyzed to determine their visual typologies and rhetorical structure. The results highlight an array of visual modes (i.e., scriptural, graphical, figurative, numerical), displaying considerable variation in their distribution, while also largely following the traditional structure of written research articles. The study provides insights into how conference presenters blend verbal and visual modes to realize a coherent communicative event.