Multimodal literacy in academic environments: PowerPoint as a motivational genre

This paper explores PowerPoint (PPT) as a leading genre in academic discourse, focussing on the implementation of student motivation boosting strategies. ICT nowadays plays an increasingly important role in pedagogy, by reinforcing the informative and persuasive impact of instructional materials through multimodal strategies including verbal and visual codes, as well as performative elements. A hybrid genre in academic oratory, PPT offers corporeality of knowledge, modularity and easily transmittable format, providing presentations with structure and facilitating ordering and summarizing operations. PPT can therefore be ranked among today’s epistemic machineries, whereby knowledge is construed by discourse. The paper analyses the semiotic and metadiscursive features of a corpus of presentations produced in various universities for both academic staff and students. Research questions explore how PPT can be used to motivate teachers and students, from both an ideational and interactional standpoint. An integrated analytical approach is employed, bridging multimodal and critical discourse analysis.