Popularizing Science in the Digital Era: A Multimodal Genre Perspective on TED Talk Videos, by Sichen Xia

Scientific popularization in the modern era has been a riveting research topic, especially in the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) studies (e.g., Wingrove, 2017;Liu & Chen, 2019;Xia, 2023).The research focus of most of such studies, however, has often been laid on the popularization process of science from the perspective of written genres and specialized communication (Hafner & Miller, 2019).As noted by a plethora of scholars, new communication channels such as online videos (e.g., Erviti & Stengler, 2016) have made it necessary to examine new scientific genres that transcend the boundaries of academic institutions and resolve knowledge/power asymmetries.In other words, research attention should be shifted to aspects of scientific communication such as how multimodal resources, afforded by modern technologies, are utilized by specialists, and how science is communicated or disseminated to lay people especially in a digitally mediated context.Xia Sichen's recent work, entitled Popularizing Science in the Digital Era: A Multimodal Genre Perspective on TED Talk Videos, is a timely response to the above research gap and makes significant contributions to the field of ESP studies from the perspective of multimodality.Chapter 1 of the book serves as an introduction, describing the general research background and aims of the work.As noted by the author, communicating with a non-specialist audience constitutes an important part of a scientist's communicative competence and the popularization of science.Unfortunately, this has often been overlooked by many specialists.In light of such research deficiency, this study aims to investigate how specialized knowledge is communicated between specialists and nonspecialists in the current digital era, and also how ESP researchers can investigate such professional practice from a multimodal perspective.To fulfill the aim of the study, chapter 2 first examines the differences in lexical resources, syntactic structure and discursive features between