Speech strategies and tactics used by participants in modern educational webinars

Abstract

The texts of modern educational webinars are analyzed in order to identify the main speech strategies and tactics used by their participants. It is noted that the genre of the educational webinar has recently acquired significant relevance due to the wide spread of the distance learning format. It was revealed that the speech strategies and tactics used by webinar speakers are focused on establishing close intellectual, emotional and psychological contact with webinar recipients. In this regard, the informing strategies, imperativeness and cooperation become the main speech strategies at webinars. For a webinar speaker, it is important to give the audience accurate and verified information, organize its perception and create an atmosphere of cooperation and joint activity at the webinar. Webinar participants use the argumentation strategies, positive presentation, self-presentation, gaining authority, “distance management”, comic impact, and others. Within the framework of the strategies used, the educational participants webinars resort to constructive speech tactics, such as the tactics of referring to the knowledge that the addressee has, the image tactics, the establishing speech contact tactics, the step-by-step explanation tactics, as well as the integration tactics, demonstrating openness and interest, useful information, appealing to authority, self-promotion, etc. Destructive strategies and tactics in the educational webinar genre construction are practically not involved.