論 文Classroom Teaching Language Revisited:
Use of “Lexical Bundles”

Harumi KIMURA

要

旨『教室英語』を学ぶための音声教材（聴解訓練用教材）は，実際の『教室英語』をどれほど忠実に再現しているのだろうか。現実の『教室英語』との間にずれはないのであろうか。この問いに答えるため，ひとつの中級者向け教材と，ミシガン大学のMICASEというデータベースに置かれている実際の『教室英語』をコーパスとして利用し，Biber et al.（2004）
による語句，語法の研究の分析手法と機能的分類を用いて，その差異を考察する。使用頻度を用いたこの分析手法を用いて検討すると，特に「心的態度」を表す表現においての差異がはなはだしいことがわかる。つまり，実際には多用される「心的態度」を表す表現が，教材ではほとんど使われていない。これは，教室英語が教材で描写されている以上に，話し手である教師と聞き手である学習者とのコミュニケーションとしての側面を強く示していることを表すと共に，聴解訓練用教材の『教室英語』
が，実は，書き言葉を単に朗読しただけにすぎないものである事を示唆している。また，『教室英語』では，談話の展開を示す標識も多用されるが，逆に教材では，過度に使用されていることもわかった。特にこの2点を踏まえ，『教室英語』学習用音声教材のあり方を再検討する。
キーワード: Academic lecture

講義

classroom teaching language

教室英語English for speciﬁc purposes

特殊目的のための英語― 23 ―

愛知大学

言語と文化

No. 13English for academic purposes

教育目的のための英語

stance expressions

心的態度を表す表現

corpusコーパス

MICASE

ミシガン大学コーパス

textbook material

教材

chunk

語句のまとまりdiscourse marker

談話標識Introduction
This paper examines the use of “lexical bundles” in textbook lecture materials. Lexicalbundles are “word forms that often co-occur in longer sequences” (Biber et al., 1999, p. 989).
They are not idiomatic or structurally complete, but the sequences are “building
blocks” (Biber et al., 1999, p.991) in discourse and are so common and recurrent that
language learners and teachers should pay much attention to them. On the other hand,
they are too ordinary for language researchers to take notice of. They are mostly left
unobserved and to be investigated. In this paper previous research on phraseology ofauthentic academic lectures is ﬁrst examined. Although researchers seem to agree that
overt discourse signals are useful listening cues which guide students in the classroom
teaching discourse, their definitions of the term vary and they talk about different
things form different points of view. Corpus-based analysis of “textbook” classroom
teaching speech is meaningful in studying whether the three types of lexical bundles inreal academic talks, i.e. “stance expressions,” “discourse organizers” and “referential
expressions,”1 (Biber et al., 2004) are also found in textbook materials and show the same
distributions. Or to be more speciﬁc, it is important to know whether those building
blocks are accurately represented in teaching materials as in the real classroom
language. Otherwise, textbooks would not show the nature of classroom teaching fromthe following three points of view: Use of lexical items, structural patterns in use, andsteps and moves of discourse in this particular register. Frequency measure is used touncover the actual language use in the register. It is examined whether or not theteaching materials as models of authentic classroom language reﬂect the real nature of
the classroom teaching.

― 24 ―

Classroom Teaching Language Revisited: Use of “Lexical Bundles”

Previous Research on Academic Lectures
Lecture comprehension is diﬃcult and challenging to both L1 and L2 listeners. Rost
(2002) writes, “For example, understanding a three-minute segment of an academic

lecture is considered to be more challenging than understanding a three-minute story”(pp. 128-129). Olsen and Huckin (1990) also say that L2 students are not successful ingetting the contents of the lecture even though they know all the words in it.
One of the language resources that listeners can rely on is the use of discourse
markers. They are used to show the organization and relationships of the moves andsteps the speaker takes in the talking. Chaudron and Richards (1986) propose thedistinction between macro-markers and micro-markers. “Today Iʼm going to talkabout . . . .” is an example of the former while

,

,

and

belong to thelatter. The researchers show that the macro-markers help learners get the gist of theteaching content while micro-markers are not of much help. However, Flowerdew andTauroza (1995) say that they also play an important role in comprehension.
Swales and Malczewski (2001) give a diﬀerent concept,

and usedifferent categorization although they also conduct a corpus-based analysis. Theirapproach is distinct from the one taken here in that they pay more attention to suchsingle words as,

and the last one,, is analyzed part of macro-markers in Chaudron and Richards (1986).

By using the term,,and. The ﬁrst three are categorized as micro-markers, Swales and Malczewski (2001) donʼt refer to thesequences of words but single word occurrences and they depend on perceptual
salience to choose the specific, conspicuous markers in the discourse. Here it isimportant to make it clear again that the lexical bundles which are examined andexplored in Biber et al. (2004) are not perceptually salient at all. Rather, they are too
common to be noticed. Another feature of Swales and Malczewski (2001) is that theirwork is for description, not for explanation of the described and depicted facts.

Our Corpora
Two different sets of data are examined. One small corpus is the collection oftranscriptions of 12 different lecture materials for listening comprehension. All arefrom “Contemporary Topics 1,” which is for pre-intermediate learners of English as an― 25 ―

愛知大学

言語と文化

No. 13

L2. The topics vary from science to humanity lectures (Appendix 1). The other corpus is
the accumulation of 12 diﬀerent classroom lecture transcripts chosen from MICASE(Appendix 2) at random. The database at MICASE has not only lectures but also

discussions, workshops, dissertation defenses and others but they are excluded fromthe present corpus. It is clear that there are some inevitable limitations on thisresearch. First, these two corpora are different in size because each one of thematerials in the textbook is intentionally short and about ﬁve to six minutes long, andthe authentic university lectures in MICASE are mostly about 60‒110 minutes long.
Second, the two corpora are too small to observe regularities in the kinds anddistributions of longer lexical bundles although this is what we need to know to look
into the real nature of everyday academic talks. Third, the topics of the lectures in thetwo corpora are not correlated. We could have chosen the same 12 topics as the
textbook materials from MICASE, but such eﬀorts might not be meaningful since we
may have to take into account some other factors such as the characteristics of thelanguage the speakers use, the size of the audience and more in order to obtain an
overall, general picture of what academic lectures are like.

Hypotheses
As we have seen above, researchers agree that overt discourse markers are helpfulcues for understanding the content of the lectures. Textbook lectures will contain as
many markers as the actual academic talks do (Hypothesis 1). They will also include thesame types of “stance” and “referential” expressions which were found to be common
among classroom teaching in Biber et al. (2004) (Hypothesis 2). If the textbook materials
really reflect actual use of these expressions, there will be some variety, but not asmuch as in the real spoken academic discourse because textbooks must show someusual patterns for the learners and there should be some simpliﬁcation or modiﬁcationin textbooks. (Hypothesis 3)

Procedure
We use the list of “lexical bundles,” which are put into three different functional
categories in Biber et al. (2004). We also observe “new discourse ﬂags” in Swales and― 26 ―

Classroom Teaching Language Revisited: Use of “Lexical Bundles”

Malczewski (2001). We compare the two corpora in terms of frequency of each
expression referred to in these two sources.

Findings
MICASE/144366
word countx/1000

Textbook/9270
word countx/1000stance expression

152

1.053

1

0.108

discourse organizers

109

0.755

12

1.294

referential expressions

272

1.884

13

1.402

Table 1Graph 1

The most striking diﬀerence is observed in occurrence of “stance expressions.” “Stance
expressions” are the ones the speaker makes use of in order to refer to personal
attitudes or views of both the speakers and the hearers and also those which indicate
modality and epistemic stances (See Appendix 3 for details). Table 1 and Graph 1 showthat those stance bundles are ten times less frequent in the textbook than in MICASEtranscripts. In actual classroom teaching, they are so abundant and have a variety (Alsoshown in Appendix 3), but there is only one count in textbook materials, i.e. “if you wantto.” It is likely that teachers show their stance much more frequently and take into
account the views and perspectives on the part of the audience. In other words, the― 27 ―

愛知大学

言語と文化

No. 13stance expressions are underrepresented in teaching materials. To put it diﬀerently, inauthentic classroom teachers try to talk to their students and eﬀectively communicate
with them while teaching. They also make eﬀorts to be sincere to the students. This isseen in the use of modality expressions. It is safe to say that real classroom teaching is
not just information-giving but also community-building. Simply put, in classroom welearn together.
Another important diﬀerence appears in the frequency of “discourse organizers.”
Much research has been previously done on them and they are salient in discourse. It
seems that they are easy to ﬁnd not just for listeners but for researchers. They show up
almost twice as much in textbook lectures. They are overrepresented in learningmaterials because of the attention by the researchers. However, the instances aside,
the expression “on the other hand” counts six times out of twelve, which is quite
unusual. There might be a bias in the use of this single expression. Is it more
appropriate to use some other expressions with the same functions in some cases?
There should be some modiﬁcation or simpliﬁcation in teaching materials, but at thesame time learners must be exposed to other expressions with similar functions
because this is what learning is about.
“Referential expressions” are found slightly less in textbook lectures. We can seethat one of the reasons is that textbook materials are a lot shorter than the actual
teaching. Referential function of all the expressions is less necessary in shorter
discourse.
MICASE/144366
word countx/1000

Textbook/9270
word countx/1000let me

39

0.27

2

0.215

letʼs

103

0.713

41

4.423

okay/OK

606

4.198

14

1.51

now

489

3.387

36

3.883

so

1623

11.242104

11.219You guys

20

0.139

0

0

folks

3

0.02

0

0

Table 2― 28 ―

Classroom Teaching Language Revisited: Use of “Lexical Bundles”

Graph 2

Table 2 and Graph 2 show the occurrence of new discourse ﬂags. Although instances
of

and
,

and

are reversed and we cannot explain the phenomena, others, i.e.
show almost the same distributions.

is used in many diﬀerent ways,

and some have specific discourse function but not all. We have to count all theoccurrences of the expressions in this study.

Conclusion
As we have seen above, stance expressions are common in classroom teaching andthey are not appropriately represented in learning materials. They are actually
underused in the textbook. We can say that teachers are more personally involved incommunication with students. Actually, less-skillful students often confess and/or
complain that listening comprehension materials of academic lectures are very diﬃcult.
We assumed that academic content and organization of lectures are the source of the
difficulty. However, this small research shows the possibility that the fewer use of
stance expressions might be one of the reasons they find textbook lectures hard tofollow and understand. It is possible that textbook materials regrettably tend to be justthe presentation of the organized idea or ideas. In other words, textbook lectures forlistening comprehension are more like academic prose, which use less stance
expressions than classroom teaching.
On the other hand, discourse signals or markers are somewhat overused in the
textbook probably because of the attention researchers have paid so far. Though― 29 ―

愛知大学

言語と文化

No. 13textbook writers may try to oﬀer materials that learners will ﬁnd accessible, overuse of
discourse signals may do more harm than good.
We also noted that the prevalent research practice that focuses just on the smaller
sets of perceptually salient linguistic items or features and that depends on intuition ofexperts is not enough to ﬁnd and explain actual patterns in natural language use.

Limitations of the Present Research and for Further Studies
There are grave limitations in this research. The limitations will be sure to lead us to
the further possible inquiry. First of all, the textbook corpus is too small. “Contemporary
Topics” is a series of lecture materials and has three levels. The other two levels ofmaterials and other textbook lectures should be explored in the same manner.
Second, I didnʼt refer to the subsets of lexical bundles. The functions of these
longer ﬁxed expressions should be investigated more properly by careful examinationof the subcategories, the frequency and the usages both taken into account.
Third, here the functional categories of lexical bundles are used without reviewing:
The validity and theoretical base of those functions and groupings are not inspected atall. If this line of examination of actual usages of those expressions is to be pursued,
the legitimacy should be argued.
Fourth, it is necessary to learn more about simplification and modification inlearning materials, both in general and of listening comprehension materials inparticular. Learning materials must be accessible to learners, but at the same time they
have to reflect actual use of the language. For example, proponents of extensive
reading often mention that graded readers should be well written: Just to be simple is
not right. Can we apply the same criteria to listening? What do we mean when we saythat textbook lectures are simpliﬁed

good for the teaching purposes? We have todeﬁne what the meaningful simpliﬁcation for language learners should and could be
like. We could also think about whether the modiﬁcation for reading is the same asthat for listening because listening is less safe for beginning learners because of the realtime nature and may induce more anxiety.
Given the outcomes and the shortcomings of the present study, more researchshould be done to examine the nature of classroom teaching and the equivalentteaching materials. Corpus-based approach will be one of the most promising ways to― 30 ―

Classroom Teaching Language Revisited: Use of “Lexical Bundles”

perform further study on ordinary, less conspicuous ﬁxed expressions to learn about
patterns and chunks in language use, both in particular registers and in general in
human languages.

Note
1 We do not look into the fourth group, “special conversational functions” here.

References
Biber D., Johansson S., Leech G., Conrad, S., & Finegan E. (1999).
London: Longman.
Biber D., Conrad, S., & Cortes, V. (2004). If you loot at . . . . : Lexical bundles in university teaching
and textbooks.

,(3), 2004, 371‒405.

Chaudron, C., & Richards, J. C. (1986). The eﬀect of discourse markers on the comprehension of
lectures.

, (2), 113‒127.

Flowerdew, L., & Taurosa, S. (1995). The eﬀect of discourse markers on second language lecture
comprehension.

,, 435‒458.

Olsen, J. A., & Huckin, T. N. (1990). Point-driven understanding in engineering lecture
comprehension.

, , 33‒47.

Rost, M. (2002).

London: Longman.

Solorzano, H., & Frazier, L. (2002).
New York: Pearson Education.
Swales, J. M., & Malczewski, B. (2001). Discourse management and New-Episode Flags in NICASE.
In J. M. Swales & R. C. Simpson (Eds.)(pp. 145‒164). Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

― 31 ―

愛知大学

言語と文化

No. 13

Appendix 1
Lectures from MICASE
Title of the Lecture

word countNobel Laureate Physics Lecture14835

Statistics in Social Sciences Lecture

16438

Womenʼs Studies Guest Lecture

10107

Intro Anthropology Lecture

11549

Race and Human Evolution Lecture

11211

Literature and Social Change Lecture

10069

Principles in Sociology Lecture

12219

Intro to Groundwater Hydrology Lecture

14008

Labor Economics Lecture

12391

Historical Linguistics Lecture

12935

Graduate Cellular Biotechnology Lecture

13324

Graduate Population Ecology Lecture

5280
144366

Appendix 2
Lectures from“ Contemporary Topics 1”
Happiness

Title

Word Count680

New Kinds of Food

790

Public Art

754

Journey to Antarctica

729

Violence on Television

770

Too Told to Learn?

807

Are We Alone?

691

Do the Right Thing

830

Good Nightʼs Sleep

991

Negotiating for Success

628

Risking It

760

The Electronic Brain

840
9270

― 32 ―

Classroom Teaching Language Revisited: Use of “Lexical Bundles”

Appendix 3
Subcategories among Lexical Bundles
I. STANCE EXPRESSIONS
A. Epistemic stance

MICASE Textbook

Personal:

I donʼt know if

11

I donʼt know how

86

I donʼt know what

I donʼt know I

5

and I donʼt know

5

I think it was

and I think that2

I donʼt think so

1

you know what I
I thought it was1

well I donʼt know

1

I donʼt know whether
I donʼt know why

3

oh I donʼt know

Impersonal:

are more likely to2

the fact that the

348

B. Attitudinal/Modality stanceB1) desire

Personal:

if you want to

9

I donʼt want to

6

do you want toyou want to go

1

do you want awhat do you wantB2) obligation/directive
Personal:

I want you to7

you donʼt have to

12

you have to be

6

you look at the4

you donʼt want toyou have to do

5

you might want to― 33 ―

1

愛知大学

言語と文化

No. 13you need to know

1going to have to4and you have to

4

you want me to1

do you want me

1

Impersonal:

it is important to
it is necessary toB3) Intention/prediction
Personal:

6Iʼm not going to

weʼre going to do1

weʼre going to have
and weʼre going to1

what weʼre going to1

I was going to

1

are we going to2

are you going toImpersonal:itʼs going to be1

are going to be1

is going to be

6

going to be a1going to be the1

not going to be

going to have a

B4) ability

Personal:

to be able to16

to come up with

4

Impersonal:

can be used to

it is possible to1

104

Total I.

II. DISCOURSE ORGANIZERS
A. Topic introduction/focus
what do you think

7

take a look at

2

if you look at
if you have aif we look at

9

1

14

3

2

― 34 ―

Classroom Teaching Language Revisited: Use of “Lexical Bundles”

going to talk about2

to look at the4

to go ahead andI want to do

6

want to do is3

what I want to1

2

want to talk about

1

you know if you

6

a little bit about

12

2

I would like toin this chapter we
I/Iʼll tell you what

have a look at

1

1

73

6

letʼs have a look

do you know what
B. Topic elaboration/clariﬁcation
has to do with4

I mean you know

5

to do with the3

you know I mean

4

nothing to do with5

on the other hand

10know what I mean

3

as well as the2

was going to say

what do you mean

36

Total II.

6

6

III. REFERENTIAL EXPRESSIONS
A. Identiﬁcation/focus
thatʼs one of the8and this is the7and this is a7

is one of the9

was one of the5

one of the things

16

one of the most3

and one of the9those of you who

9of the things that1487

― 35 ―

1

3

4

愛知大学

言語と文化

B. Imprecision

No. 13or something like that7

and things like that1and stuﬀ like that

4
12

C. Speciﬁcation of attributes
C1) Quantity speciﬁcation
thereʼs a lot of

6

1

and a lot of

9

1

have a lot of

6

a lot of people

7

a lot of the2

how many of you

5

in a lot of2

the rest of the

1
1
2

8

a little bit of13

a lot of times

4

a little bit more

12

than or equal togreater than or equal
per cent of theC2) Tangible framing attributes
the size of the1

in the form of

C3) Intangible framing attributes
the nature of the2

in terms of the13

on the basis of

6

in the case of

56

as a result ofin the absence of3

the way in which

the extent to which1in the presence of3

113

D. Time/place/text reference
D1) Place reference3

the united states andin the united states

11of the united states

D2) Time referenceat the same time9

― 36 ―

72

Classroom Teaching Language Revisited: Use of “Lexical Bundles”

at the time of

D3) Text deixis

shown in ﬁgure N

as shown in ﬁgureD4) Multi-functional reference
the end of the16

the beginning of thethe top of the3

at the end of

15

3

in the middle of60

Total III.

IV. SPECIAL CONVERSATIONAL FUNCTIONS
A. Politeness7

thank you very much

B. Simple inquiry

what are you doing

C. Reporting

I said to him/her

Total IV.

― 37 ―

2