Corpus-Based Move Analysis of TED Talks about Education

This present paper explores the rhetorical structure of some selected talks from TED conference under the topic of education to discuss the essential and optional moves applied in these talks. Based on the result the author tries to talk about the possibility of incorporating such instruction of oral presentation in academic genre in college English classroom. The study sets up a corpus of TED talks with the tag of education to tease out the shared structurefeatures and flexibility in them. The study identifies the essential and optional moves based on the frequency and occurrence. Meanwhile, the findings also indicate the importance of topic and conventions of TED conferences.