1 Introduction

Academic oral language is an important carrier for academic research and communication. Compared with academic written language, there is a gap in the breadth and depth of research, and domestic research is particularly insufficient. With the increasing role of oral communication in academic exchange, the necessity and feasibility of academic oral research have been enhanced. This study aims to comprehensively review the empirical literature on academic oral research at home and abroad in the past decade through a systematic review method. From four aspects: theoretical basis, research theme, research corpus, and research methods, we aim to grasp the current research status and look forward to future trends.

2 Research Design

This article introduces the publication volume, source journal distribution, theory, topics, corpus, and methodological characteristics of empirical research on academic oral communication at home and abroad in the past decade. Using a systematic literature review method, the literature is retrieved, included, analyzed, evaluated, and synthesized through a standardized process. Use NVivo 11 plus encoding and chi square goodness of fit test to compare the frequency differences in category usage. Foreign literature comes from the WoS SSCI database, while domestic literature comes from the CNKI CSSCI database. A total of 11782 articles were retrieved from 2015-2024. The literature screening criteria include journal articles, both Chinese and English, and spoken language materials in academic contexts, resulting in the inclusion of 135 valid articles. The literature coding is divided into three stages: preliminary coding framework development, trial coding, and formal coding. The Kappa consistency test coefficient is 0.89, indicating strong consistency.

3 Results and Discussion

Analyzed the publication trends, theoretical foundations, research topics, corpus categories, and research methods of academic oral research at home and abroad from 2015 to 2024. The number of journal articles shows a continuous increase in the popularity of academic oral research, with English journals dominating, especially those focusing on academic English research. The theoretical foundation presents diversification, with meta discourse theory being the most frequently used, followed by genre theory. Pragmatic modifiers, socio-cultural and multimodal theories are used equally frequently. The research topics mainly focus on communicative interaction and language teaching. Communicative interaction research focuses on how speakers promote interaction through discourse resources, while language teaching research focuses on teaching related knowledge, abilities, and strategies. Academic oral language materials include speeches, lectures, classroom discourse, and academic discussions, with English oral research dominating. The mixed research method is the most popular among research methods, followed by qualitative research method, and quantitative research method is the least. Domestic research often adopts a mixed research method, combining quantitative data and text analysis.

4 Summary and Prospect

This chapter summarizes the progress of academic oral research at home and abroad in the past decade, pointing out that the research has received significant attention and published articles. The theoretical applications are concentrated and diverse, and the research topics mainly involve communicative interaction and language teaching. The research corpus is mainly focused on English monologue style academic oral research, and the research method is mainly mixed research. Looking ahead to the future, suggestions are put forward to expand mainstream theories, open up interdisciplinary perspectives, explore multidimensional features of corpus, expand research fields, optimize existing methods, introduce emerging methods, attempt to adopt a diachronic perspective, and integrate multi-level analysis. At the same time, it is pointed out that domestic academic oral research is still in its infancy and has a gap with foreign countries, with broad development space. It is suggested that domestic researchers should focus on the local context and explore the path of academic oral research with their own characteristics.