Realization of Attitude and Engagement Markers in Students’ Presentations

Speakers use some interactional resources to convey their feelings or feedbacks to the prepositional content and attempt to build personal relationships with the listeners. Two of these resources are attitude and engagement markers and are used to express speakers’ attitudes to preposition and to build relationships with listeners, respectively. This study intended to analyze the use of attitude and engagement markers in native English student presentations. To this end, eleven student presentations were extracted from the MiCASE corpus and analyzed to ascertain the use of attitude and engagement markers using Hyland (2005) taxonomy. The results showed that students try more to engage listeners and build relationships with them to ensure they are attentive and follow the presentations. The most common engagement markers were “you” and “see”. These two markers engage speakers and listeners in an explicit manner. Attitude markers received less attention compared with engagement markers; the most common attitude marker found in the presentations was “interesting”. The results of this study could be included in instructions on how students should use interactive resources such as engagement and attitude markers in their presentations.