A contrastive genre analysis of rhetorical moves in Korean and Indonesian TED Talk videos

Abstract

Oral presentation skills play a crucial role in academic contexts, as they reflect one’s understanding of a topic and demonstrate the advanced communication competencies required across disciplines. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks serve as a medium for disseminating knowledge while exemplifying effective academic presentation practices. Although previous studies have applied move analysis to unpack TED Talk presentations descriptively, empirical evidence on how language differences influence communicative purposes and content presentation remains underexplored. This study aims to identify and compare rhetorical moves in Korean and Indonesian TED Talks, focusing on their occurrence, salience, and rhetorical patterns. Employing a corpus-based contrastive genre analysis, this study analyzed 20 TED Talk videos (10 Korean and 10 Indonesian), using a manual coding procedure based on the move analysis framework proposed by Chang and Huang (2015). The contrastive analysis was informed by Connor’s (2011) Intercultural Rhetoric (IR) framework to reveal similarities and differences in rhetorical moves and the linguistic resources used to realize each move. The findings indicate that Topic Introduction, Topic Development, and Acknowledgments/gratitude were obligatory moves in both languages. Similarities also appear at the Step-level, where engaging the audience in meta-level discussion, outlining structure, establishing authority, showing stance, and offering an explanation were relatively infrequent in both corpora. Korean speakers, however, prefer to greet the audience before kicking off their presentation and to make generalizations or offer speculation in their concluding remarks. Conversely, these communicative purposes were less prominent in the Indonesian corpus, where speakers typically begin their presentations by establishing the context of the topic. These findings suggest that language and cultural conventions affect the rhetorical structures and linguistic realization in communicating the purposes of TED Talk presentations. This study suggests potential applications of contrastive genre analysis in academic speaking classrooms by exploring predetermined, curated teaching materials aimed at enhancing students’ genre awareness and academic presentation skills.