The use of code glosses in three minute thesis presentations: A comprehensibility strategy

The Three Minute Thesis (3MT) is an academic competition that challenges graduate students to explain their research in 3 minutes to a non-specialist audience. While there have been a few studies examining rhetorical moves and interactional metadiscourse in 3MT presentations, studies focusing on features related to comprehensibility, a key competition requirement, have been lacking. This study examines how highly-specialised research is made comprehensible to non-specialist audiences through “code glosses”, communication strategies that function to facilitate understanding by reformulating, explaining, or elaborating on what has been said (Hyland, 2005). Analysing a corpus of 50 successful 3MT presentations in the electrical and computer engineering discipline, we found code glosses to be one of the most frequently used interactive metadiscourse types in the data. Significantly, Analogies and Definitions emerged as salient-enough features in our data that we added them as additional categories of code gloss, extending Hyland's (2007) two categories of Exemplifiers and Reformulators. Our analysis shows how examples, definitions, analogies, and reformulations are used in distinct ways in 3MT presentations to make the presented research accessible, coherent, and engaging to audiences. Our findings expand current understandings of code glosses, and extend the current knowledge on the 3MT genre by providing insights into its distinctive linguistic features vis-à-vis comprehensibility.