Discussion sessions of conference paper presentations are spontaneous and unpredictable, in contrast to the lectures that precede them. These can be challenging for presenters, mainly for novice ones. This study considers the multimodal nature of spoken discourse to explore presenters expression of evaluation and foreground the role of kinesics and paralanguage that co-occur with the linguistic utterances. The theoretical framework is embedded in techniques of genre and discourse analysis, including the theoretical orientations of systemic functional linguistics, conversation...