Creating a Framework for the Analysis of Academic Posters

Within ESP, much attention has been given to the ‘open genre network’ (Swales & Feak 2000: 8) of academic writing, which comprises the most public and visible research genres. In particular, researchers have investigated journal articles, abstracts, dissertations, and conference proposals; other genres, such as conference poster presentations, have instead received little if any attention. The aim of the present paper is to suggest an analytical framework capable of highlighting the communicative purposes, reader-oriented strategies, and visual-linguistic interaction employed in the multimodal genre of academic posters. Borrowing from Hyland’s (2000) theoretical approach to metadiscourse interpretation and from Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1998, 2001) visual analyses, a new framework is suggested and exemplified using an academic poster recently presented at an international conference of applied linguistics.