Over the centuries, and increasingly in recent decades, oral communication has been the subject of a myriad of studies in different scientific-disciplinary areas. Several methodologies have often dealt with the same object using different, though similar, terms. In other words, for centuries we have been talking about speaking with different terms that sometimes cover overlapping areas. The main goal here is to establish the state of the art by describing the terms and studying the approaches that have been adopted through the centuries to describe oral communication: from the terms delivery to elocution up to pronunciation, from the British and American elocutionists’ theories to the most recent trends in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teaching and learning, the boundaries of oral communication are very difficult to define. This contribution will narrow the historical meaning of all these tentative approaches and their areas of application, in a double way: on the one hand the numerous terms and approaches will be clarified, on the other hand the long history underlying this rich field of research will be emphasised.

This paper surveys a sample corpus of grammars of English published in Britain in the first half of the 18th century. It aims to ascertain to what extent and how issues related to elocution (a synonym for pronunciation but also verbal delivery, an aspect of public speaking) and orality were recorded and described by grammarians before the rise of the elocutionary movement (c. 1760). Findings show that descriptions of pronunciation still hinged on categories and models provided by 16th-century vernacular grammars of Latin. Nevertheless, certain prescriptive indications (a preference for polite accents, references to and criticism/stigmatisation of regional or social variation), the use of teaching methods to contextualise pronunciation (lists of homophones and homographs such as those included in spelling books), and recommendations concerning how to use voice and gesture for effective oral communication foreshadow some of the themes and attitudes typical of late 18th-century elocutionists.

As pointed out by Mugglestone (2003), among others, accent started to be a British obsession in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the market for ‘proper speech’ flourished not only in the UK but also in the USA (see, for example, Algeo 2001; Beal 2004a; Hickey 2010). Together with orthoepists and elocutionists, actors were perceived as good models of ‘correct pronunciation’ which was a guarantee of reliability and success (Goring 2005; 2014). This paper argues that their experience on the stage favoured their profession as elocutionists. The qualitative analysis of the prefatorial materials of 18th-and 19th-century elocutionary manuals will show that actors/orthoepists had a primary role in the construction of the standard accent ideology and also in the making of American linguistic independence.

This article investigates the changes that oral financial genres have undergone since the 1990s when they began to be widely used by the global financial community. In more recent years, thanks to increasingly advanced digital technologies, there has been some shift towards using more multimedia and multimodal resources to communicate with financial stakeholders. The aim of this research was to explore this trend by means of a case study focusing on a large multinational company’s oral financial communications. Specifically, it compares a recent videocast strategy presentation with an earlier audio earnings conference call as a wellconsolidated but less semiotically rich oral financial genre. Like earnings conference calls, strategy presentations are voluntary forms of financial disclosure undertaken by companies to engage proactively with potential investors, but they are less widely adopted and more oriented towards impression and reputation management. The study found that, with respect to the earnings conference call, the videocast strategy presentation was characterised by a wider range of digital affordances and had a stronger rhetorical dimension both verbally (intensifying expressions) and non-verbally (visuals and co-speech gestures). The results are discussed in relation to best practices for companies and the training of aspiring corporate professionals.

Clear and appropriate oral communication is essential in military English, both in order to understand and convey highly specialised content within units, and to ensure safety and intelligence when dealing with civilians and other allied or hostile members of foreign military forces (Howard 2001; Footitt and Kelly 2012; Orna-Montesinos 2013). The importance of oral production has resulted not only in NATO research projects on language learning and speech technology, but also in the concrete goals outlined in the extensive descriptions of ‘floor’ and ‘ceiling’ can-do and cannotdo statements and the demanding NATO STANAG (Standardization Agreement) 6001 criteria. These are considered of essential importance and lie at the base of specialised courses aiming at preparing foreign service members for STANAG 6001 proficiency tests and international missions where oral comprehension and production are of paramount importance in completing tasks, promoting international collaboration and safeguarding lives. The present study will focus on oral communication education and production in the military community (Pate????an and Zechia 2018) and in military English courses by evaluating three widely used textbooks that were introduced after STANAG 6001’s standardising reform in 2000 in view of long-term international collaborations (Solak 2011; 2013) according to the listening and speaking requirements of STANAG levels 2 and 3. It will consider specific parameters, i.e. aims and approaches; methodology of the book; skills, activities and tasks; language type and content; cultural and social factors (Jodai 2012). To conclude, these findings will be discussed in relation to oral communication teaching within civilian ESP contexts.

Back in the 1980s the advent of the communicative approach in foreign language teaching and the accompanying switch of focus from the teacher to the learner raised the issue of the amount of teacher talk that should be used, arguing that it should be kept to a minimum. One key component of training courses based on Communicative Language Teaching (CLT was that teacher talking time (TTT) should be reduced to a minimum. Not surprisingly then, until recently, the attention given to teacher talk has been a much-neglected area in the literature and in teacher education. Nevertheless, teacher talk remains a key aspect of lessons where English is taught as a foreign language (EFL). Setting aside the range of listening materials available, the EFL teacher is in many instances the main model of English which students are exposed to throughout their time at secondary school. This paper postulates that effective teacher talk enhances the potential for real communication and therefore leads to better language acquisition. Indeed, in line with socio-cultural theory, the classroom is recognised as a genuine social environment which offers significant communicative potential close to outside-the-classroom interaction. It is therefore critical that the EFL teacher should be trained in and acquire the specialised linguistic competence needed to verbalise key classroom functions. Through the exploration of a 160,000-word corpus of native and non-native teacher talk, this paper looks at various linguistic features and procedures intended to enhance oral communication in the EFL classroom, with the aim of transferring such language to social situations outside the classroom. More generally, this paper makes it clear that, when delivered effectively, teacher talk largely contributes to better language acquisition.

This contribution investigates how disciplinary identities are made relevant in research presentations addressed to a multidisciplinary audience using English as an academic lingua franca. The analysis is based on a corpus of 176 presentations given by international research fellows within an EU-funded programme for postdoctoral studies. It draws on Membership Categorisation Analysis (Sacks 1992) and on the notion of ‘altercasting’ (Weinstein and Deutschberger 1963) in order to identify the primary functions of explicit mention of self and of audience members in conjunction with academic categories. The analysis reveals that selfcategorisation using ‘I’ involves explicit membershipping along the vertical axis of generalisation/specification and horizontal axis of contrast/cocategorisation (Bilmes 2009). Altercasting of the audience using ‘we’ (to co-categorise the speaker with part or with all of the audience) or ‘you’ (to address the whole audience or a part thereof) serves two main goals: a signalling preceding or upcoming talk as addressed to a specific audience segment; b) establishing interdisciplinary ties/networks. Results indicate that membership categorisation devices contribute to recipient-designing talk for a multidisciplinary audience by invoking both disciplinary definitions and boundaries and locally relevant “relational pairsµ (Sacks 1972b). A systematic use of such devices co-implicates the audience’s perspectives in what is being said and done, thus conferring an interactive dimension on what may at first glance appear a relatively monologic genre.

This case study explores the use of adverbial epistemic markers (AEMs, e.g. kind of), by Japanese learners of English (JLE), compared to that of native speakers of American English (NS). The primary purpose is to examine the role played by AEMs in different tasks in a speaking test taken by both JLE and NS. The findings show that both JLE and NS use more AEMs, which convey uncertainty, such as maybe, more than certainty, such as definitely, especially in a descriptive task designed to speculate on the situation depicted in the tests. In addition, it indicates that AEMs such as kind of are also used in dialogues to mitigate speakers’ opinions, which shows that JLE have pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge. However, NS employ this usage more frequently than JLE. This study therefore shows the importance the role of task effects has in assessing learner performance, as different linguistic resources will be more or less appropriate in different contexts.

Given the ever-increasing demand for audiovisual content on the Internet, more and more law firm websites have started to dedicate space to multimodal texts in which oral and visual communication substitutes the written word. This contribution aims to expand knowledge on the linguistic nature of a new audiovisual genre often embedded in law firm websites, i.e. attorneys’ video FAQs. In previous research, video FAQs in American law firm websites emerged as an innovative audiovisual genre of legal knowledge popularisation, through which attorneys answer a series of hypothetical questions potential clients may have on crucial points of law. By means of a corpus-assisted approach, this study quantitatively and qualitatively investigates the way in which person pro-forms (i.e. subject and object personal pronouns, possessive adjectives and pronouns) are exploited by attorneys to discursively construct different facets of identity so as to engage with the audience, guide their attention, and promote the credibility of the law firm.

Accents and dialects have been used in fictional representations, including telecinematic ones, as a way to mimic reality, but also to construct particular voices. According to Agha (2007: 213), representations of accents and dialects in classic novels were not ‘merely’ tools to portray the reality of social life in literature, but they were used to amplify and transform reality, and to construct memorable idiolects. The same reflection can be applied, even more aptly, to the domain of audiovisual products, in which the accented voice can also be heard and provides an immediate clue for character presentation. Keeping in mind recent multimodal explorations of aural and visual tracks in all their creative potentialities (Bosseaux 2015; Sánchez Mompeán 2017) and studies on the voice in films (for example Kozloff 1988), this contribution intends to investigate the role of dialect coaching in the construction of the accented voice in films and TV narratives. Our purpose is to describe the professional figure of the dialect coach and how his/her expertise helps actors create a plausible and natural speech pattern, an accent, a dialect, or also hone impressions of celebrities. Considering the virtual non-existence of studies on the subject in the linguistic domain, the article will make ample use of paratextual information such as interviews, reviews and other audiovisual or written testimonies relative to this key role and process.

Though less popular than in the US, podcast listening during the Covid-19 pandemic has increased in Europe. Yet, while being cooped up at home has apparently unlocked new opportunities for this innovative multimodal genre, little or no systematic investigation into podcasts’ use, other than in Education, has appeared to date, especially in those professional contexts where Covid-19’s impact is most significant. With these objectives in mind, the individual sequences of three marketing podcast/vodcast series were analysed multimodally using a metadiscursive approach that systematically connects basic functional units to macrolevel features characteristic of podcasts’ generic structure potential. The analysis accounts for deviations from generic expectations and reveals how the sociosemiotic affordances of visual, sound and other iconographic and indexical systems permeate a predominantly oral genre and how their systematic identification helps analysts make sense of the flow of discourse. The results also open up prospects for future research which could apply this methodology to other relatively unstructured, grassroots multimodal genres