Speech Act Analysis of Educational Webinars

Abstract: Mediated by technology, delivered by professionals, and facilitated by moderators, webinars are any online sessions, workshops, and seminars streamed live, recorded, or pre-scheduled times and dates, to discuss a certain educational, business, scientific, or any topic. Webinars often receive a huge attendance or audience from many peers, laymen, or professionals. This paper investigates the use of speech acts in two educational webinars drawing on a pre-observation that presenters and moderators in webinars use pragmatic devices. The paper introduces and defines the research key terms; speech acts, webinars, and online discourse. Then, previous studies, research questions, data, methodology, and limits are presented. The analysis is limited to two American educational webinars. Following data selection, the analysis is conducted according to Searle’s (1975) theory of speech acts. The research finds that presenters and moderators in webinars used certain speech acts to express meanings, issue directions, direct sessions, react to the audience, share background demos, and switch topics. Moreover, the presenters and moderators in webinars use speech acts more than other linguistic devices because these forms can easily and clearly communicate meanings and feelings.