"From the classroom to the stage: a contrastive analysis of university lectures and TED talks"

Web genres play a pivotal role in the recontextualization and reconceptualization of expert discourse. To meet the expectations of lay users, not only do new media (re)adapt specialized contents, they also enable the experts to (re)shape their identities to fulfill their communicative purposes. This paper focuses on TED talks, speech events spread all over the world via the Web, through which experts in their field disseminate knowledge from different domains (e.g. science, technology, design, global issues). TED talks share features with many ‘satellite’ genres (e.g. TV documentary, conference presentation, research article), the university lecture being perhaps the closest one at different levels. In both genres, an expert aims at conveying some specialized contents to an audience of (semi) lay people. Focusing on the process of recontextualization of academic discourse, this paper sets out to investigate if and to what extent the language used in university lectures changes when the context shifts from the classroom to the new pragmatic framework of TED talks. This study is based on a contrastive analysis: a corpus of TED talks delivered by academics is compared to a sub corpus of university lectures drawn from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). Qualitative analysis will be combined with corpus-assisted one in order to investigate (dis)similarities between the two genres.