Kinsella, Abigail (2025). Audience engagement strategies in a science popularisation podcast with a focus on Metadiscourse. University of Birmingham. M.A.
![[img]](http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//style/images/fileicons/text.png) |
Kinsella2025MAbyRes_Redacted.pdf
Text - Redacted Version Available under License All rights reserved. Download (1MB) |
Abstract
Scientific research has the potential to greatly impact the lives of ordinary people. It may inform decisions about the ways in which they live their lives. Primary outputs of this research into academic publications are often not useful for laypeople, both because the presentation of the information is too specialist or complicated, and because they contain sections such as methodologies which are extraneous to their goals of using the information in their everyday lives. Laypeople often rely, therefore, on popularisations of science to obtain the information, which are more linguistically and structurally suited to their needs. Within these popularisations, engagement strategies are vital for keeping audiences motivated to consume the content. The premise of this research is that science popularisation podcasts are a form suited to heightening audience engagement with scientific content. It investigates strategies of audience engagement in these podcasts quantitatively using a corpus analysis, in accordance with a metadiscourse framework. It also contextualises these findings by performing functional qualitative analyses. It finds novel uses of metadiscourse features to help to build audience engagement strategies, including non-typical organisational and guiding lexes and community-building language. Non-metadiscourse features also contribute to these strategies. It finally advocates for an audio-specific framework for metadiscourse, to allow for identification of extralinguistic and structural features, such as tone and repetition respectively.
| Type of Work: | Thesis (Masters by Research > M.A.) | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Award Type: | Masters by Research > M.A. | |||||||||
| Supervisor(s): |
|
|||||||||
| Licence: | All rights reserved | |||||||||
| College/Faculty: | Colleges > College of Arts & Law | |||||||||
| School or Department: | School of English, Drama and Creative Studies, Department of English Language and Linguistics | |||||||||
| Funders: | None/not applicable | |||||||||
| Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PE English | |||||||||
| URI: | http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/15834 |
Actions
 |
Request a Correction |
 |
View Item |
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year