Importance marking in EMI lectures: A comparative study

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

In this presentation we focus on how lecturers mark important information in their lectures. Being able to identify important information is fundamental to the learning process (Benson, 1989, p. 437), and the different levels of information in a lecture may be highlighted through a careful choice of language, including explicit macro markers (Chaudron & Richards, 1986; Allison & Tauroza, 1995; Jung, 2003; Titsworth & Kiewra, 2004). Previous research has focussed particularly on importance markers in native speaking (NS) lecturer discourse (e.g. Crawford Camiciottoli 2004; Deroey & Taverniers 2011, 2012; Deroey 2012, 2014, 2015). Our study expands this research to compare the use of lexicogrammatical importance markers in both NS and non-native speaker (NNS) lectures. A specially compiled corpus of about 365,000 words of Physical Science lectures was used in our study, featuring a balanced number of words from lectures in Italy (Johnson & Picciuolo, 2020; Picciuolo & Johnson, 2020) as well as in New Zealand, the UK and Malaysia (‘Engineering Lecture Corpus’ ). A qualitative analysis was done to annotate all instances of markers evaluating the importance of lecture content. These included verb, adjective or noun phrases containing an evaluation of importance. Assessment-related expressions were also marked. 378 separate instances were identified. More delicate analysis of the importance-marking phrases was done, with distributions and variations in frequent patterns identified in both NS and NNS lectures. While Verb phrases were found to be the most frequent in both NS and NNS lectures (62%), there was variation in the type of Verb patterns according to NS and NNS, as well as in verb choice. In general, though importance markers were distributed evenly over NS (=191) and NNS (=187) lectures, NS showed more variety than NNS in the type of pattern used, with adjective, metanoun and assessment-related expressions as well as idiomatic expressions figuring more frequently than in NNS, although there were significant differences also within the NS and NNS sub-corpora themselves. Whether these findings show that NNS are more aware of the risks of misunderstanding among their international student audiences (House, 2003; Mauranen, 2006), and thus use a smaller variety of less ambiguous importance markers, or that NNS have fewer language resources to draw on in the first place, awareness-raising among EMI lecturers is vital when preparing teacher training materials, given the expansion of ELF in international academic contexts where both lecturers and students are non-native speakers. References Allison, D., & Tauroza S. (1995). 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