Disciplinary cultures in academic posters. A textual and visual metadiscourse analysis

Numerous studies have, over the years, confirmed that academic discourses have unique features revolving around the concept of ‘community’ (Hartley 2006; Hyland 1998, 2001, 2004; Swales 2004; Thompson 2001), revealing that authors belonging to different disciplinary fields display different writing techniques and are urged early on in their academic career to conform to discipline-specific conventions and genre-specific rules. Continuing a cross-disciplinary research on the academic poster genre (D’Angelo 2016), I seek here to highlight significant differences regarding word count, the layout of posters, as well as discipline-specific patterns concerning the use of textual interactive and interactional metadiscourse resources and visual interactive resources. The framework of analysis, drawn in part from Kress (2010) and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2001, 2002, 2006) visual analyses, will be applied to academic posters produced within the disciplines of Applied Linguistics, Medicine, Economics, Biology and Geography. The results widen the current knowledge on academic posters by mapping which textual and visual metadiscourse strategies are employed where and why, and as a consequence, which textual and visual metadiscourse strategies should be well known to poster authors, depending on their academic community.