From Student to Professional: How Differences Between Spoken and Written Academic Discourse Shape Rhetorical Maturity

Introduction: Spoken and written academic discourse in the university context serves not only communicative but also formative functions. Through mastering both modalities, future professionals learn how to present knowledge within their disciplinary fields. However, differences between spoken and written forms of academic discourse are rarely addressed as a pedagogically significant issue. These distinctions are especially underexplored in local educational contexts, where systematic training in multimodal academic communication is often lacking.

Purpose: This study aims to identify rhetorical and structural differences between spoken and written forms of academic discourse in a professionally-oriented university environment and to explore how these differences can be used to improve the preparation of students, doctoral candidates, and university instructors.

Materials and Methods: The corpus for this research consisted of 60 texts: 30 spoken (recordings of academic presentations) and 30 written (published academic articles), collected from respondents representing four academic and professional domains - law, information technology, education, and biomedicine. The study employed methods of corpus annotation, discourse analysis, and frequency-based statistics. The analysis focused on five key parameters: cohesion, authorial stance, nominalization, rhetorical structure, and audience-directed communication strategies.

Results: The findings reveal stable modality-based distinctions: spoken discourse is marked by greater authorial explicitness, direct engagement strategies, and a prevalence of verbal constructions, while written discourse is characterized by a higher degree of nominalization, conceptual density, and formalized rhetorical presentation. These differences are further accentuated across educational levels: instructors demonstrate the highest degree of rhetorical awareness, while students show the least. Doctoral candidates occupy a transitional position and require specific pedagogical support.

Conclusion: Spoken and written academic discourse shape different dimensions of professional competence. Effective academic training should take into account the modality-specific nature of discourse and include integrated instructional formats that foster rhetorical adaptability and genre awareness in both spoken and written forms of academic communication.

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