A new format of the rhetoric of university lecturing

Abstract

This article is meant to highlight the latest changes in the phonostylistic format of the genre of university lecturing. The focus is on the rhetorically diverse nature of intellective communication in the present-day multicultural English-speaking community. Our material shows that the manifestations of the innovative tendencies in American public speaking (and scientific discourse at large) are not numerous in British academic English. Not infrequently they are ousted by the linguocultural stereotypes, as well as aesthetic and ethical principles of scientific communication established in their own linguistic community. It is only in the opening and the closing part of the lecture, as well as in all kind of illustrative or explanatory digressions in its Main Body, that the American influence can be more or less clearly observed. More often than not, typically British English manner of exposition, such as understatement or hedging, comes to the fore and plays the major part in the transfer to the new, friendly and unbuttoned mode of the genre of lecturing. There are all kind of prosodic transformations in the main part of the lecture, which enable the speaker to accommodate and satisfy the tastes and demands of the new generation of university audience. This, however, is by no means to the detriment of the scientific message or information, which any lecture by definition, as it were, is designed to impart. It transpires that the well-established requirements of the prosodic and rhetorical minimums, which Russian anglicists have so far adhered to, should also be replenished, reorganized and renovated with respect to the new requisites for scientific communication in the English-speaking world. The methodology of the learner-oriented English language acquisition, however, should remain undisturbed, and the traditional stereotypes of the genre of lecturing should be reckoned with to fit the ethics of academic discourse in this country.