Abstract : In recent times, science is becoming available to the public. In that sense, online genres have become a tool to democratise science. Among those new genres, one example is the international scientific talks competition called FameLab. It consists of 3-minute talks in English on scientific and/or technological subjects. Showing a positive attitude while delivering a message seems to be an important element in those presentations. Considering previous research on engagement, 3-minute talks and multimodality, we have analysed the 2020 FameLab talks since they were not delivered as live events but as pre-recorded ones due to the pandemics. Our purpose is to find out the existence of verbal and non-verbal features that may be intended to engage the audience, compelling them to react to the presentation. We think that it is looking at the multimodal combination of all those features how engagement features can be best comprehended. As ESP practitioners, we hope our research could bring new rhetorical tools to be applied in our teaching, but also the understanding of how science is communicated broadly and how scientists’ discursive practices evolve.
