Speaker
Description
This study presents a genre analysis of Apple’s iPhone announcement videos from 2018 to 2024, with the goal of exploring the rhetorical moves, linguistic features, and multimodal elements that shape this influential corporate genre. Transcripts from official Apple presentations were analyzed using AntConc to identify frequent superlative adjectives, descriptive adjectives, and formulaic chunks. In addition, music and visual elements were examined to understand how these contribute to Apple’s branding and persuasive strategies.
Findings reveal consistent rhetorical patterns across the years, including the strategic use of evaluative language, high-impact visuals, and soundtrack transitions that guide audience engagement. The study also highlights the evolution of presentation formats—from in-person events to polished virtual productions—and shifts in content emphasis.
Drawing on these insights, the study discusses how such authentic, real-world texts can be used in language teaching to enhance genre awareness, discourse analysis, and communicative competence. Classroom applications are proposed to help students analyze and produce announcements by applying similar rhetorical and stylistic strategies in their own academic or professional contexts.
Biography
H Lu Ba Ayun is a Master’s graduate in English Language and a dedicated English teacher with over six years of ESL/EFL teaching experience. She has a strong aspiration to become a university lecturer and is passionate about promoting equity in education, particularly by empowering ethnic minority youth to pursue academic and professional paths in linguistics. In 2019, she was awarded the prestigious DARMASISWA Scholarship by the Indonesian government to study Indonesian language and culture at Universitas Gadjah Mada, an experience that broadened her intercultural awareness and deepened her commitment to multilingual education.
Most recently, she served as a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) at Michigan State University, where she taught Vietnamese and contributed actively to academic life and cultural exchange on and off campus. Her current interests include genre-based pedagogy, corpus-informed instruction, education policy, and the intersection between language and equity. In both teaching and research, Lu Ba is committed to bridging theory and practice in meaningful and accessible ways. Outside academia, she enjoys watching documentaries, traveling, and spending time with her family and friends.
