Attitude and Engagement Markers in Student Presentations

Speakers use some interactional resources to convey their emotions or reactions to the prepositional content and attempt to build personal relationships with the listeners. Two of these resources are attitude and engagement markers. These two markers are used to express speakers’ attitude to preposition and to build relationships with listeners, respectively. This study aimed to analyze the use of attitude and engagement markers in native English student presentations. To this end, eleven student presentations were extracted from MiCASE corpus and analyzed for the use of attitude and engagement markers using Hyland (2005) taxonomy. The results showed that students try more to engage the listeners and build relations with listeners to take their attentions to 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.