ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to shed further light on the use of PowerPoint (PPT) in conference presentations in the field of the humanities, in particular, in applied linguistics, by exploring the visual dimension of the conference presenter's talk. It provides a brief overview of the literature on the conference presentation genre. The data used for the study comprise 56 PPT presentations, each 20 minutes in length, given at three international applied linguistics conferences held at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy by native and non-native speakers between 2009 and 2012. The conferences covered different themes combining two complementary strands of linguistic investigation, corpus analysis and discourse analysis, to research language variation in English, in both quantitative and qualitative terms. This study has highlighted how visual communication in applied linguistics conference presentations is manifested through a multiplicity of visual typologies that act together synergetically.
