Oral presentation at international engineering conferences: Effects of the local on the global

Based on preliminary observation of international engineering conference presentations in East Asia and Europe, a comparative, two-stage investigation of the effect of delivery style on audience comprehension was undertaken. The current paper reports on the first stage, which involves measuring presenter´s 1) bodily degree of orientation to audience and 2) proportion of spoken words that are additional to the printed slide text of the presentation. Data were gathered at two East Asian international engineering research conferences, and at two European venues of similar conferences. Findings indicate that there is no significant difference in body orientation to audience in any of the venues, but that European conferences produced more text per slide on average than the East Asian conferences. Words spoken extraneous to the slide text varied more between conferences on the same continent than the difference in averages for this value between continents. Results suggest that body orientation to audience is uniform, but considerable variation occurs among conferences and among presenters in regard to speech that is extraneous to the slide text.