Dieser Band betrachtet akademisches Schreiben in verschiedenen
Sprachen aus unterschiedlichen Per... more Dieser Band betrachtet akademisches Schreiben in verschiedenen Sprachen aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven, um die Lehre wissenschaftlichen Schreibens in mehrsprachigen Umgebungen zu bereichern. Das Buch enthält Studien zur Schreibpraxis mehrsprachiger Schreibender, sprachvergleichende Untersuchungen wissenschaftlicher Texte und diskutiert innovative Ansätze zur Lehre mehrsprachigen Schreibens an der Universität. Zusätzlich bietet der Band eine gute Übersicht zum aktuellen Stand mehrsprachiger wissenschaftlicher Schreibforschung an und diskutiert bestehende Anforderungen an zukünftige Forschung. Die Beiträge in diesem Band sind auf Deutsch, Englisch und Französisch.
This paper examines literature reviews in 12 master’s dissertations written in German, English an... more This paper examines literature reviews in 12 master’s dissertations written in German, English and French. Specifically, we analysed the discourse structure of 155 paragraphs to assess the extent to which students manage to write a coherent review combining literature reports with their own ‘voice’. The study was motivated by the design of a multilingual academic writing course at the University of Luxembourg Language Centre. The analysis distinguished three main discourse elements, nl. report, discussion and text orientation. The data reveal considerable variation in the frequency with which these combine to form different paragraph types. However, in all three languages, report discourse uses the same quotation and reformulation strategies and tends to employ ‘list’ structures with few cohesive links. Discussion elements are generally not elaborated and the writer’s voice is weak. Text organization uses the same linguistic strategies and is mainly used to orientate readers rather than to summarize or signal transitions. Pedagogical implications for multilingual academic writing courses are discussed.
This paper examines 25 lecture listening coursebooks for their representativeness of ‘real’ lectu... more This paper examines 25 lecture listening coursebooks for their representativeness of ‘real’ lectures with a view to helping EAP practitioners make informed decisions about materials selection and development. The aspects of representativeness examined are language, lecture authenticity and research-informedness. The representativeness of language was assessed by comparing signposts of important points with those retrieved from a corpus of 160 authentic lectures. Lecture authenticity in terms of source, delivery and length was established by examining the audiovisual materials, transcripts and information provided by authors. Whether materials were research-informed was determined by noting references to lecture and listening research. Results suggest that current lecture listening materials tend not to reflect the language and lectures students are likely to encounter on their degree programmes. Moreover, materials are typically not (systematically) informed by listening and lecture discourse research. These findings highlight the need for EAP practitioners to approach published materials critically and supplement or modify them in ways that would better serve students. The paper concludes with recommendations on how this could be done.
Proceedings of the 2015 BALEAP Conference. EAP in a rapidly changing landscape: issues, challenges and solutions, 2017
Introduction
It has often been noted that EAP listening textbooks do not provide a realistic mode... more Introduction It has often been noted that EAP listening textbooks do not provide a realistic model of lectures (e.g. Alexander, Argent, & Spencer, 2008; Field, 2011; Flowerdew & Miller, 1997; Nesi, 2001; Salehzadeh, 2013; Thompson, 2003). Issues include the use of short and scripted texts, artificially slow and clear speech, and unusually frequent and explicit structuring. While we need to balance authenticity with pedagogical appropriateness, it stands to reason that ‘exposing students only to simplified lecture texts certainly does students a disservice’ (Salehzadeh, 2013, p. xix). This paper explores the correspondence between the language in published EAP lecture listening courses and authentic lecture discourse. Specifically, it compares signposts of important lecture points attested in a large lecture corpus with those in listening courses. Although importance marking is but one feature of lecture discourse, identifying key points is a vital listening skill and issues with the representation of discourse structuring in lectures have already been noted: EAP lectures are said to be comparatively coherent and explicit (Flowerdew & Miller, 1997) as well as more heavily and carefully signalled (Flowerdew & Miller, 1997; Thompson, 2003) with more transparent phrases (Field, 2011). Importance markers are here defined as ‘lexicogrammatical devices that overtly mark the importance, relevance, or significance of points that are presented verbally or visually’ (Deroey, 2015, p. 52). Crucially, they organize discourse while also evaluating it (cf. Crawford Camiciottoli, 2007). Hence, signposts without evaluative force such as enumerators (e.g. ‘firstly’, ‘the next point is’) were not included, nor were instances where entities in the real world were evaluated (e.g. ‘an important philosopher’) instead of the lecturer’s discourse (e.g. ‘an important point’). Readers will be aware that authenticity is multi-faceted concept, of which text authenticity is but one aspect (cf. Widdowson, 1998). Here I have simply defined authentic lectures as those delivered on degree courses and not adapted for language learning purposes (cf. Basturkmen, 2010). I should point out, however, that even these lectures cannot provide our students with a totally authentic listening experience as they are removed from the original context and may not be fully representative of lectures in their disciplines and institutions (MacDonald, Badger & White, 2000). In what follows I provide an overview of the corpus and listening courses used for this study and compare importance markers in the two. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications.
Drawing on the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) lecture corpus, this paper presents an ove... more Drawing on the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) lecture corpus, this paper presents an overview of how lecturers mark important and less important discourse lexicogrammatically. Such markers of (lesser) relevance (e.g. the point is, remember; anyway, not go into) combine discourse organization with evaluation and can help students discern the relative importance of points, thus aiding comprehension, note-taking and retention. However, until the research reported here was undertaken little was known about this metadiscursive feature of lecture discourse and markers found in the existing educational literature and EAP materials seemed based on intuitions rather than corpus linguistic evidence. This methodological approach used for this research departs from a close reading of 40 lectures to identify candidate markers which were then retrieved from the whole corpus and in the case of relevance markers also supplemented with other approaches yielding further markers. The resulting relevance markers were mainly classified into lexicogrammatical verb, noun, adjective and adverb patterns, while the markers of lesser relevance were classified pragmatically as indications of message status, topic treatment, lecturer knowledge, and assessment and as attention –and note-taking directives. The account of relevance marking will be of use to EAP practitioners, may interest lecturer trainers, and can provide input for experimental educational research. Furthermore, the paper offers insights into the use of discourse markers such as the thing is, anyway, I don’t know and et cetera and at a more general level illuminates the linguistic phenomenon of relevance marking. Finally, I illustrate the importance of corpus linguistic research - the prevalent markers not being the ones which may intuitively come to mind - and touch upon some difficulties pertaining to assigning discourse functions based on an examination of transcripts only.
Omdat de universiteit steeds internationaler wordt, is doceren in het Engels een “must”. Maar dat... more Omdat de universiteit steeds internationaler wordt, is doceren in het Engels een “must”. Maar dat is niet zo eenvoudig als het lijkt. Hoe zorg je er bijvoorbeeld voor dat studenten hoofd- van bijzaken kunnen onderscheiden?
De internationalisering van het hoger onderwijs gaat vaak gepaard met de invoering van het Engels... more De internationalisering van het hoger onderwijs gaat vaak gepaard met de invoering van het Engels als onderwijstaal. Hoe effectief het doceren en leren in deze vreemde taal verloopt, staat nog niet vast. Wél is al gebleken dat zowel docenten als studenten hierbij problemen ondervinden. Een duidelijk gestructureerd college helpt studenten bij het begrijpen en notities nemen en compenseert deels de soms minder duidelijke communicatie door de docent. Een belangrijke soort structurele aanduidingen zijn verbale signalen van het relatieve belang van bepaalde punten in het collegediscours. De taalkundige studie van authentieke colleges laat ons toe na te gaan hoe dit gebeurt.
Om inzicht te verwerven in hoe het onderscheid tussen belangrijke en minder belangrijke punten door moedertaalsprekers van het Engels wordt gesignaleerd identificeerde ik ‘belangrijkheidsmarkeerders’ in Britse colleges. De resultaten kunnen verwerkt worden in handboeken en cursussen academisch Engels en laten ons toe niet-moedertaalsprekers gerichter te trainen in het herkennen en produceren van dergelijke structuuraanduidingen. De studie onthult een enorme verscheidenheid aan belangrijkheidsmarkeerders die vaak ook weinig expliciet zijn en toont dat onze intuïtie over het taalgebruik in een specifiek genre zoals het college niet noodzakelijk strookt met het reële taalgebruik.
This paper provides a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical markers of important lecture po... more This paper provides a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical markers of important lecture points and proposes a classification in terms of their interactive and textual orientation. The importance markers were extracted from the British Academic Spoken English corpus using corpus-driven and corpus-based methods. The classification is based on the markers’ constituents and cotext. Most markers are interactively oriented towards the content (e.g. the point is) or listeners (e.g. you should remember) rather than the speaker (e.g. I should stress) or speaker and listeners jointly (e.g. I want you to notice). Many content-oriented markers also have secondary listener orientation (e.g. these are the things to take home). As regards their textual orientation, markers typically occur before the highlighted point. The analysis aims to reveal how the realizations of this metadiscursive feature reflect key characteristics of the lecture genre and suggests factors which may affect the efficacy of importance marking. The findings are useful for lecture listening and note-taking courses, lecturer training, and educational research assessing the efficacy of such discourse organizational cues.
This paper explores the lexicogrammatical marking of less relevant or less important points in le... more This paper explores the lexicogrammatical marking of less relevant or less important points in lecture discourse. The attested markers of lesser relevance derive from a close reading of 40 lectures from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus and their use is documented with evidence from the whole BASE corpus of 160 lectures. Five basic types of markers were found, viz. markers of message status (e.g. irrelevant), topic treatment (e.g. briefly), lecturer knowledge (e.g. not know), assessment (e.g. not learn), and attention and note-taking (e.g. ignore). Most markers denote partial relevance rather than irrelevance and typically require interpretation using contextual information. Some markers also have interpersonal functions. Our findings provide valuable input for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses aimed at improving lecture delivery, note-taking and comprehension, for subject lecturer training and for educational research. Since the study also addresses a gap in the literature on relevance marking, the results should also interest analysts of academic discourse specifically and spoken discourse generally.
This paper presents a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical devices which highlight importa... more This paper presents a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical devices which highlight important or relevant points in lectures. Despite the established usefulness of discourse organizational cues for lecture comprehension and note-taking, very little is known about the marking of relevance in this genre. The current overview of lexicogrammatical relevance markers combines a qualitative and quantitative investigation of 160 lectures from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. These markers could mostly be classified according to their main element into adjective, noun, verb and adverb patterns. Verb patterns were the most common, followed by noun patterns. The verb pattern V clause (e.g. remember slavery had already been legally abolished) and the noun pattern MN v-link (e.g. the point is) are the predominant types of relevance markers. The discrepancy between the prevalent markers and what may be thought of as prototypical or included in EAP textbooks as relevance markers also demonstrates the need for corpus linguistic research. Implications for EAP course design, teaching English for lecturing purposes, and educational research are discussed
This paper reports findings from a study on the discourse functions of basic wh-clefts such as wh... more This paper reports findings from a study on the discourse functions of basic wh-clefts such as what our brains do is complicated information processing in 160 lectures drawn from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. Like much linguistic research on this academic genre, the investigation is motivated by the need to gain a better understanding of language use in lectures to aid effective English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course design. To this end, the composition of the wh-clauses was analysed for its main constituents (subjects, verb phrases and modality) and the clefts were grouped according to their apparent main function and subfunction within the lecture discourse. The results show that basic wh-clefts mostly serve to highlight aspects of content information and there was also disciplinary variation in their use. Implications for EAP course design are discussed.
Despite the importance of lectures in higher education, relatively little is known about lecture ... more Despite the importance of lectures in higher education, relatively little is known about lecture discourse. To contribute to our understanding of this genre, this paper presents a comprehensive overview of lecture functions, i.e. what lecturers use language for. The functional overview is based on a qualitative analysis of lectures from the British Academic Spoken English Corpus and findings from existing research. Six main functions were identified: informing, elaborating, evaluating, organizing discourse, interacting and managing the class. This functional analysis of the lecture genre should be of interest to both genre analysts in the field of academic discourse and English for Academic Purposes practitioners.
Dieser Band betrachtet akademisches Schreiben in verschiedenen
Sprachen aus unterschiedlichen Per... more Dieser Band betrachtet akademisches Schreiben in verschiedenen Sprachen aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven, um die Lehre wissenschaftlichen Schreibens in mehrsprachigen Umgebungen zu bereichern. Das Buch enthält Studien zur Schreibpraxis mehrsprachiger Schreibender, sprachvergleichende Untersuchungen wissenschaftlicher Texte und diskutiert innovative Ansätze zur Lehre mehrsprachigen Schreibens an der Universität. Zusätzlich bietet der Band eine gute Übersicht zum aktuellen Stand mehrsprachiger wissenschaftlicher Schreibforschung an und diskutiert bestehende Anforderungen an zukünftige Forschung. Die Beiträge in diesem Band sind auf Deutsch, Englisch und Französisch.
This paper examines literature reviews in 12 master’s dissertations written in German, English an... more This paper examines literature reviews in 12 master’s dissertations written in German, English and French. Specifically, we analysed the discourse structure of 155 paragraphs to assess the extent to which students manage to write a coherent review combining literature reports with their own ‘voice’. The study was motivated by the design of a multilingual academic writing course at the University of Luxembourg Language Centre. The analysis distinguished three main discourse elements, nl. report, discussion and text orientation. The data reveal considerable variation in the frequency with which these combine to form different paragraph types. However, in all three languages, report discourse uses the same quotation and reformulation strategies and tends to employ ‘list’ structures with few cohesive links. Discussion elements are generally not elaborated and the writer’s voice is weak. Text organization uses the same linguistic strategies and is mainly used to orientate readers rather than to summarize or signal transitions. Pedagogical implications for multilingual academic writing courses are discussed.
This paper examines 25 lecture listening coursebooks for their representativeness of ‘real’ lectu... more This paper examines 25 lecture listening coursebooks for their representativeness of ‘real’ lectures with a view to helping EAP practitioners make informed decisions about materials selection and development. The aspects of representativeness examined are language, lecture authenticity and research-informedness. The representativeness of language was assessed by comparing signposts of important points with those retrieved from a corpus of 160 authentic lectures. Lecture authenticity in terms of source, delivery and length was established by examining the audiovisual materials, transcripts and information provided by authors. Whether materials were research-informed was determined by noting references to lecture and listening research. Results suggest that current lecture listening materials tend not to reflect the language and lectures students are likely to encounter on their degree programmes. Moreover, materials are typically not (systematically) informed by listening and lecture discourse research. These findings highlight the need for EAP practitioners to approach published materials critically and supplement or modify them in ways that would better serve students. The paper concludes with recommendations on how this could be done.
Proceedings of the 2015 BALEAP Conference. EAP in a rapidly changing landscape: issues, challenges and solutions, 2017
Introduction
It has often been noted that EAP listening textbooks do not provide a realistic mode... more Introduction It has often been noted that EAP listening textbooks do not provide a realistic model of lectures (e.g. Alexander, Argent, & Spencer, 2008; Field, 2011; Flowerdew & Miller, 1997; Nesi, 2001; Salehzadeh, 2013; Thompson, 2003). Issues include the use of short and scripted texts, artificially slow and clear speech, and unusually frequent and explicit structuring. While we need to balance authenticity with pedagogical appropriateness, it stands to reason that ‘exposing students only to simplified lecture texts certainly does students a disservice’ (Salehzadeh, 2013, p. xix). This paper explores the correspondence between the language in published EAP lecture listening courses and authentic lecture discourse. Specifically, it compares signposts of important lecture points attested in a large lecture corpus with those in listening courses. Although importance marking is but one feature of lecture discourse, identifying key points is a vital listening skill and issues with the representation of discourse structuring in lectures have already been noted: EAP lectures are said to be comparatively coherent and explicit (Flowerdew & Miller, 1997) as well as more heavily and carefully signalled (Flowerdew & Miller, 1997; Thompson, 2003) with more transparent phrases (Field, 2011). Importance markers are here defined as ‘lexicogrammatical devices that overtly mark the importance, relevance, or significance of points that are presented verbally or visually’ (Deroey, 2015, p. 52). Crucially, they organize discourse while also evaluating it (cf. Crawford Camiciottoli, 2007). Hence, signposts without evaluative force such as enumerators (e.g. ‘firstly’, ‘the next point is’) were not included, nor were instances where entities in the real world were evaluated (e.g. ‘an important philosopher’) instead of the lecturer’s discourse (e.g. ‘an important point’). Readers will be aware that authenticity is multi-faceted concept, of which text authenticity is but one aspect (cf. Widdowson, 1998). Here I have simply defined authentic lectures as those delivered on degree courses and not adapted for language learning purposes (cf. Basturkmen, 2010). I should point out, however, that even these lectures cannot provide our students with a totally authentic listening experience as they are removed from the original context and may not be fully representative of lectures in their disciplines and institutions (MacDonald, Badger & White, 2000). In what follows I provide an overview of the corpus and listening courses used for this study and compare importance markers in the two. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications.
Drawing on the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) lecture corpus, this paper presents an ove... more Drawing on the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) lecture corpus, this paper presents an overview of how lecturers mark important and less important discourse lexicogrammatically. Such markers of (lesser) relevance (e.g. the point is, remember; anyway, not go into) combine discourse organization with evaluation and can help students discern the relative importance of points, thus aiding comprehension, note-taking and retention. However, until the research reported here was undertaken little was known about this metadiscursive feature of lecture discourse and markers found in the existing educational literature and EAP materials seemed based on intuitions rather than corpus linguistic evidence. This methodological approach used for this research departs from a close reading of 40 lectures to identify candidate markers which were then retrieved from the whole corpus and in the case of relevance markers also supplemented with other approaches yielding further markers. The resulting relevance markers were mainly classified into lexicogrammatical verb, noun, adjective and adverb patterns, while the markers of lesser relevance were classified pragmatically as indications of message status, topic treatment, lecturer knowledge, and assessment and as attention –and note-taking directives. The account of relevance marking will be of use to EAP practitioners, may interest lecturer trainers, and can provide input for experimental educational research. Furthermore, the paper offers insights into the use of discourse markers such as the thing is, anyway, I don’t know and et cetera and at a more general level illuminates the linguistic phenomenon of relevance marking. Finally, I illustrate the importance of corpus linguistic research - the prevalent markers not being the ones which may intuitively come to mind - and touch upon some difficulties pertaining to assigning discourse functions based on an examination of transcripts only.
Omdat de universiteit steeds internationaler wordt, is doceren in het Engels een “must”. Maar dat... more Omdat de universiteit steeds internationaler wordt, is doceren in het Engels een “must”. Maar dat is niet zo eenvoudig als het lijkt. Hoe zorg je er bijvoorbeeld voor dat studenten hoofd- van bijzaken kunnen onderscheiden?
De internationalisering van het hoger onderwijs gaat vaak gepaard met de invoering van het Engels... more De internationalisering van het hoger onderwijs gaat vaak gepaard met de invoering van het Engels als onderwijstaal. Hoe effectief het doceren en leren in deze vreemde taal verloopt, staat nog niet vast. Wél is al gebleken dat zowel docenten als studenten hierbij problemen ondervinden. Een duidelijk gestructureerd college helpt studenten bij het begrijpen en notities nemen en compenseert deels de soms minder duidelijke communicatie door de docent. Een belangrijke soort structurele aanduidingen zijn verbale signalen van het relatieve belang van bepaalde punten in het collegediscours. De taalkundige studie van authentieke colleges laat ons toe na te gaan hoe dit gebeurt.
Om inzicht te verwerven in hoe het onderscheid tussen belangrijke en minder belangrijke punten door moedertaalsprekers van het Engels wordt gesignaleerd identificeerde ik ‘belangrijkheidsmarkeerders’ in Britse colleges. De resultaten kunnen verwerkt worden in handboeken en cursussen academisch Engels en laten ons toe niet-moedertaalsprekers gerichter te trainen in het herkennen en produceren van dergelijke structuuraanduidingen. De studie onthult een enorme verscheidenheid aan belangrijkheidsmarkeerders die vaak ook weinig expliciet zijn en toont dat onze intuïtie over het taalgebruik in een specifiek genre zoals het college niet noodzakelijk strookt met het reële taalgebruik.
This paper provides a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical markers of important lecture po... more This paper provides a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical markers of important lecture points and proposes a classification in terms of their interactive and textual orientation. The importance markers were extracted from the British Academic Spoken English corpus using corpus-driven and corpus-based methods. The classification is based on the markers’ constituents and cotext. Most markers are interactively oriented towards the content (e.g. the point is) or listeners (e.g. you should remember) rather than the speaker (e.g. I should stress) or speaker and listeners jointly (e.g. I want you to notice). Many content-oriented markers also have secondary listener orientation (e.g. these are the things to take home). As regards their textual orientation, markers typically occur before the highlighted point. The analysis aims to reveal how the realizations of this metadiscursive feature reflect key characteristics of the lecture genre and suggests factors which may affect the efficacy of importance marking. The findings are useful for lecture listening and note-taking courses, lecturer training, and educational research assessing the efficacy of such discourse organizational cues.
This paper explores the lexicogrammatical marking of less relevant or less important points in le... more This paper explores the lexicogrammatical marking of less relevant or less important points in lecture discourse. The attested markers of lesser relevance derive from a close reading of 40 lectures from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus and their use is documented with evidence from the whole BASE corpus of 160 lectures. Five basic types of markers were found, viz. markers of message status (e.g. irrelevant), topic treatment (e.g. briefly), lecturer knowledge (e.g. not know), assessment (e.g. not learn), and attention and note-taking (e.g. ignore). Most markers denote partial relevance rather than irrelevance and typically require interpretation using contextual information. Some markers also have interpersonal functions. Our findings provide valuable input for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses aimed at improving lecture delivery, note-taking and comprehension, for subject lecturer training and for educational research. Since the study also addresses a gap in the literature on relevance marking, the results should also interest analysts of academic discourse specifically and spoken discourse generally.
This paper presents a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical devices which highlight importa... more This paper presents a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical devices which highlight important or relevant points in lectures. Despite the established usefulness of discourse organizational cues for lecture comprehension and note-taking, very little is known about the marking of relevance in this genre. The current overview of lexicogrammatical relevance markers combines a qualitative and quantitative investigation of 160 lectures from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. These markers could mostly be classified according to their main element into adjective, noun, verb and adverb patterns. Verb patterns were the most common, followed by noun patterns. The verb pattern V clause (e.g. remember slavery had already been legally abolished) and the noun pattern MN v-link (e.g. the point is) are the predominant types of relevance markers. The discrepancy between the prevalent markers and what may be thought of as prototypical or included in EAP textbooks as relevance markers also demonstrates the need for corpus linguistic research. Implications for EAP course design, teaching English for lecturing purposes, and educational research are discussed
This paper reports findings from a study on the discourse functions of basic wh-clefts such as wh... more This paper reports findings from a study on the discourse functions of basic wh-clefts such as what our brains do is complicated information processing in 160 lectures drawn from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. Like much linguistic research on this academic genre, the investigation is motivated by the need to gain a better understanding of language use in lectures to aid effective English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course design. To this end, the composition of the wh-clauses was analysed for its main constituents (subjects, verb phrases and modality) and the clefts were grouped according to their apparent main function and subfunction within the lecture discourse. The results show that basic wh-clefts mostly serve to highlight aspects of content information and there was also disciplinary variation in their use. Implications for EAP course design are discussed.
Despite the importance of lectures in higher education, relatively little is known about lecture ... more Despite the importance of lectures in higher education, relatively little is known about lecture discourse. To contribute to our understanding of this genre, this paper presents a comprehensive overview of lecture functions, i.e. what lecturers use language for. The functional overview is based on a qualitative analysis of lectures from the British Academic Spoken English Corpus and findings from existing research. Six main functions were identified: informing, elaborating, evaluating, organizing discourse, interacting and managing the class. This functional analysis of the lecture genre should be of interest to both genre analysts in the field of academic discourse and English for Academic Purposes practitioners.
The multilingual University of Luxembourg has three official teaching languages: German, English ... more The multilingual University of Luxembourg has three official teaching languages: German, English and French. All Bachelor programmes and almost half of the Master programmes are at least bilingual. Students must be proficient enough in their programme’s teaching languages to understand content and produce written and oral academic texts. The University of Luxembourg Language Centre focuses on academic writing and presentation courses starting at level B2, which are integrated into study programmes. We aim to support and promote productivity and flexibility in the use of different academic languages. Linguistic research has studied the differences between academic languages, while writing research analyses students' multilingual writing practices and develops didactic concepts to improve writing skills. However, many of these studies focus on the differences between languages, neglecting their similarities and the potential for cross-lingual teaching (Huemer et al, 2019). This paper presents the results of our qualitative textlinguistic study in which we compared German, English and French Literature review sections from 12 master's theses from a trilingual study programme (Deroey et al, 2019). Most students wrote these texts in their second or third language. The attested differences between the languages at the macro- and meso-level (discursive patterns of paragraphs, coherence between paragraphs) are rather small. This may mean that discursive concepts and linguistic formulation patterns already learned in the first language are productively transferred to other academic languages in the field of the strongly standardized text type "academic paper or thesis". This seems to work well when the academic language cultures are similar, as is the case with the three languages studied. The results of our study have inspired us to jointly develop a course design for academic writing for all three university languages that promotes transfer and sensitizes students to similarities and differences in academic writing across these languages. References Deroey, K., Huemer, B., Lejot, E. (2019). The discourse structure of literature review paragraphs: a multilingual study. In B. Huemer, E. Lejot & K. Deroey (Eds.). (2019). Academic writing across languages: multilingual and contrastive approaches in higher education. Wien: Böhlau. Huemer, B., Lejot, E., & Deroey, K. (Eds.). (2019). Academic writing across languages: multilingual and contrastive approaches in higher education. Wien: Böhlau.
In this talk, I show how lecturers verbally mark comparatively (un)important points in a large co... more In this talk, I show how lecturers verbally mark comparatively (un)important points in a large corpus of lectures (British Academic Spoken English corpus). This kind of discourse organization is thought to be beneficial to students’ note-taking, comprehension and recall. We’ll see that lecturers use a wide variety of lexicogrammatical importance markers. Examples include ‘the point is’, ‘remember’, ‘I want to stress’, ‘anyway’, ‘I don’t know’ and ‘etcetera’. Some of the key findings I’ll be highlighting are that (1) students often need an understanding of the lecture genre and the cotext of the markers to be able to identify these discourse markers; that (2) studying only transcripts of spoken discourse without considering prosodic and multimodal features affects the validity of results; and that (3) to create English for Academic Purposes teaching materials we need to examine authentic lecture texts rather than rely on our intuitions.
The internationalization of higher education has led to a variety of contexts in which native and... more The internationalization of higher education has led to a variety of contexts in which native and non-native speakers of English teach students with different cultural, educational and linguistic backgrounds through the medium of English. In this talk, I will survey the key issues associated with ‘English Medium Instruction’ for lecturers and students. In addition, we will look at linguistic and pedagogical strategies that can facilitate teaching and learning in these contexts.
Lecture listening is a common component of EAP training. In deciding which coursebook to adopt, a... more Lecture listening is a common component of EAP training. In deciding which coursebook to adopt, a key consideration is arguably whether it prepares students for real lectures. Yet, lecture listening coursebooks have been criticised for their lack of realistic lecture models. Research on lecture corpora such as the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus can provide useful insights to prepare students for the language they are likely to encounter in lectures.
I examine the correspondence between the treatment of importance markers (e.g. the point is; remember; I want to emphasize this) in listening coursebooks with their realisation in a lecture corpus (cf. Deroey 2015). As these markers reflect the lecturer’s stance towards the importance of points, students’ ability to spot these may facilitate lecture comprehension and note-taking.
Importance markers were retrieved from 160 BASE lectures and compared with phrases presenting key points in 25 coursebooks. These include the Cambridge and Oxford EAP series, Contemporary Topics (2017) Study Listening (Lynch, 2004), Lecture Ready (2013) and Unlock (2014).
The investigation revealed that while listening books typically point out the importance of identifying the lecturer’s main points, students are generally either not or inadequately trained to recognise importance markers. Where examples of such markers are included, they are few and prototypical (e.g. the important point is). However, in the lecture corpus less explicit, multifunctional markers such as ‘the thing is’ and ‘remember’ predominate. The findings raise questions about the extent to which training with such materials prepares our students to deal with real lecture discourse. I conclude with suggestions about the selection and development of lecture listening materials.
Deroey, K. L. B. (2015). Marking importance in lectures: interactive and textual orientation. Applied Linguistics, 36(1), 51-72.
BALEAP Conference Innovation, Exploration and Transformation, 2019
English-medium instruction (EMI) is a worldwide phenomenon. EMI language and communication issues... more English-medium instruction (EMI) is a worldwide phenomenon. EMI language and communication issues (e.g. Hu et al., 2014; Murray, 2015; Werther et al., 2014) have led to calls for EAP practitioners to collaborate with lecturers and other HE stakeholders to explore ways in which these lecturers can be supported and teaching standards ensured (Coleman, 2006; Doiz et al., 2013; Dubow & Gundermann, 2017). The design and implementation of EMI training and support programmes can be an especially challenging task for EAP practitioners. First, lecturers may not recognize the need for support and may be reluctant to be assessed. Second, we need to factor in practical considerations such as their limited availability and possible reluctance to attend ‘classes’ with colleagues. Third, we have limited resources in terms of specialized standardized tests, training materials and research literature that could inform our 'course' design. Innovative approaches are therefore needed to factor in all these circumstances. This paper has two main parts. First I summarize research on the challenges EMI lecturers face, including the results of a needs analysis among lecturers at the University of Luxembourg and my work on lecture discourse organization (Deroey, 2015). From the relatively few studies that exist, we will see that lecturers tend to believe they have sufficient English language skills and that reduced interactivity is a particularly common issue. Second, I survey different support and training schemes at HE institutions across the world. Here, it will become clear that work on relevant pedagogical skills needs to be included and an apparently ‘remedial’ approach should be avoided if we want to get lecturers on board.
In this talk I demonstrate how we can design and adapt materials for presentation skills to build... more In this talk I demonstrate how we can design and adapt materials for presentation skills to build on students’ individual needs and disciplinary backgrounds in an interactive way. The context for this is a conference skills course I’ve designed and successfully taught for several years. The PhD students on this course vary greatly in their presentation skills, experience and disciplinary background. After an overview of the course content and format, I illustrate how students’ own presentations and research can be integrated so as to enhance personal relevance and interactivity. Aspects of this personalized, interactive course design include filming student presentations, structured peer feedback and reflection, a pre-course questionnaire, and tasks requiring them to work with their conference calls, research, texts, visuals and experiences. I conclude with a summary of course feedback, highlighting what students reported as being particularly useful and what they would add or change.
This paper confronts language use in the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus with the r... more This paper confronts language use in the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus with the representation of lectures in 25 listening coursebooks (Deroey, submitted; Deroey, 2017). Following key tenets such as authenticity, specificity and needs analysis, English for Academic Purposes (EAP) materials development should be guided by an understanding of target genres and their communicative demands. Yet, lecture listening coursebooks have often been criticised for their lack of realistic lecture models (e.g. Alexander, Argent, & Spencer, 2008; Field, 2011; Thompson, 2003). The aspects of representativeness examined in these coursebooks are language, lecture authenticity and research-informedness. To assess the representativeness of language, signposts of important points are compared with those retrieved from the BASE corpus of 160 authentic lectures (Deroey, submitted; Deroey and Taverniers, 2012). The coursebook lectures are also analysed in terms of their source, delivery and length. The materials are further reviewed for their use of findings from research into listening comprehension and lecture discourse. Results suggest that current lecture listening materials often do not reflect the language and lectures students are likely to encounter on their degree programmes. Moreover, materials are typically not (systematically) informed by listening and lecture discourse research. These findings highlight the need for EAP practitioners to approach published materials critically and supplement or modify them in ways that would better serve students.
References Alexander, O., Argent, S., & Spencer, J. (2008). EAP Essentials: a teacher’s guide to principles and practice. Reading: Garnet. Deroey, K. L. B. (submitted). The representativeness of lecture listening coursebooks: language, lectures, research-informedness. Deroey, K. L. B. (2017). How representative are EAP listening books of real lectures? . In J. Kemp (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2015 BALEAP Conference. EAP in a rapidly changing landscape: Issues, challenges and solutions. Reading: Garnet. Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012). Just remember this: Lexicogrammatical relevance markers in lectures. English for Specific Purposes, 31(4), 221-233. Field, J. (2011). Into the mind of the academic listener. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 10(2), 102-112. Thompson, S. E. (2003). Text-structuring metadiscourse, intonation and the signalling of organisation in academic lectures. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2(1), 5-20.
Keywords: discourse organization, evaluation, importance marking, lecture discourse
This paper s... more Keywords: discourse organization, evaluation, importance marking, lecture discourse
This paper surveys how less important lecture discourse is marked lexicogrammatically in the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus (Deroey and Taverniers, 2012; Deroey, 2014). Such interpersonal, metadiscursive devices combine discourse organization with evaluation along a ‘parameter of importance or relevance’ (Thompson and Hunston, 2000: 24). They can help students discern the relative importance of points and so may aid lecture comprehension, note-taking and retention. The markers were first retrieved manually from 40 lectures and then using Sketch Engine from all 160 lectures. They fell into five categories: (i) message status markers (e.g. not pertinent, joke, anyway); (ii) topic treatment markers (e.g. briefly, not look at, for a moment); (iii) lecturer knowledge markers (e.g. not know, not remember); (iv) assessment markers (e.g. not examine, not learn); and (v) attention- and note-taking markers (e.g. ignore, not copy down). This study illustrates the challenge of identifying and quantifying pragmatic features in academic discourse. Few markers explicitly evaluated discourse as being unimportant (e.g. not pertinent) and few had an inherent meaning of lesser importance (e.g. incidentally). Instead, they depended rather heavily on pragmatic interpretation to achieve their effect and could generally be viewed as ‘muted signals’ (Swales and Burke, 2003: 17), expressing importance implicitly or cumulatively (cf. Hunston, 2011). Hence, Hunston’s observation that ‘much evaluative meaning is not obviously identifiable, as it appears to depend on immediate context and on reader assumptions about value’ (2004: 157) is particularly pertinent here.
References Deroey, K. L. B. (2014). ‘Anyway, the point I'm making is’: Lexicogrammatical relevance marking in lectures. In L. Vandelanotte, D. Kristin, G. Caroline, & K. Ditte (Eds.), Recent Advances in Corpus Linguistics: Developing and Exploiting Corpora (pp. 265-291). Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012). ‘Ignore that' cause it's totally irrelevant’: Marking lesser relevance in lectures. Journal of Pragmatics, 44(14), 2085-2099. Hunston, S. (2004). Counting the uncountable: Problems of identifying evaluation in a text and in a corpus. In A. Partington, J. Morley, & L. Haarman (Eds.), Corpora and discourse (pp. 157-188). Bern: Peter Lang. Hunston, S. (2011). Corpus approaches to evaluation: phraseology and evaluative language (Vol. 13). New York: Routledge. Swales, J. M., & Burke, A. (2003). " Its really fascinating work": Differences in Evaluative Adjectives across Academic Registers. Language and Computers, 46(1), 1-18. Thompson, G., & Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation: An introduction. In Hunston, S., & Thompson, G. (Eds.), Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 1-27). Oxford: OUP.
This paper surveys how relative importance is marked lexicogrammatically in lectures (cf. Deroey ... more This paper surveys how relative importance is marked lexicogrammatically in lectures (cf. Deroey and Taverniers, 2012; Deroey, 2014; Deroey, 2015). Markers of (lesser) importance (e.g. the point is, remember, anyway, briefly) are metadiscursive devices combining discourse organization with evaluation along a ‘parameter of importance or relevance’ (Thompson and Hunston, 2000: 24). Such marking can benefit lecture comprehension, note-taking and retention. Using corpus-driven and corpus-based methods, 40 lectures from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus were first manually examined to identify candidate markers. Further instances of these and related markers were then retrieved from the whole corpus of 160 lectures using Corpus Query Language in Sketch Engine. A wide variety of markers were thus attested, the predominant ones of which are not the ones we would intuitively think of. Markers of important information were classified into lexicogrammatical patterns depending on the word class of their main lexeme. The multifunctional, semi-fixed expressions ‘the point is’ and ‘remember’ predominate over more stereotypical, explicit markers such as ‘the important point is’. Markers of lesser importance were classified according to how they achieved their effect. Most denote partial relevance (e.g. detail, in passing, briefly) rather than irrelevance (e.g. not pertinent, not matter, trash) and some markers appear pragmaticalized in certain contexts. As many markers required significant interpretation to achieve their importance marking effect, an understanding of the lecture genre as well as co-textual, visual, non-verbal and prosodic clues seem particularly important in identifying their precise status. This poses a challenge to quantification. Indeed, Hunston’s observation that ‘much evaluative meaning is not obviously identifiable, as it appears to depend on immediate context and on reader assumptions about value’ (2004: 157) is particularly pertinent here.
Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012). ‘Ignore that'cause it's totally irrelevant’: marking lesser relevance in lectures. Journal of Pragmatics, 44(14), 2085-2099. Deroey, K. L. B. (2014). ‘Anyway, the point I'm making is’: Lexicogrammatical relevance marking in lectures. In L. Vandelanotte, D. Kristin, G. Caroline, & K. Ditte (Eds.), Recent advances in corpus linguistics: developing and exploiting corpora (pp. 265-291). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Deroey, K. L. B. (2015). Marking importance in lectures: interactive and textual orientation. Applied Linguistics, 36(1), 51-72. Thompson, G., & Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation: An introduction. In Hunston, S., & Thompson, G. (Eds.), Evaluation in text: authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 1-27). Oxford: OUP.
This paper reports on a multilingual course developed and taught at the University of Luxembourg ... more This paper reports on a multilingual course developed and taught at the University of Luxembourg Language Centre in 2015. The Language Centre offers academic language support in English, French and German across the universities three faculties, where most study programmes are bi- or trilingual.
The question of how to use existing multilingual resources and support the acquisition of multilingual competences has become increasingly important due to the Bologna agreement and internationalisation strategies at many European universities. However, while research on third language acquisition (Cenoz, Hufeisen, Jessner 2001; Hufeisen, Neuner 2003; Jessner 2008) and multilingualism in higher education (Jessner 2008, Hu 2015; Rindler Schjerve, Vetter 2012) is a common theme, little has been published that could guide language teachers in the design of multilingual courses. Teaching methods such as Intercomprehension with GALANET (Degache 1997) or Eurocom (Meissner 2004; Hufeisen, Marx 2007; Klein 2007) and European projects like CARAP (Candelier 2007) and MAGICC document the need for new concepts in language education very well.
Informed by the results of a university wide needs analysis of language competences at the University of Luxembourg, the Language Centre developed a trilingual presentation skills course (FR/EN/GE) for MA students to support second and third language acquisition. In this paper, we will present our course design, comment on the running of the course and present findings from our teaching and student course evaluations that can be used to inform the future teaching of multilingual courses. Our aim is to provide insights into how multilingual courses can be successfully designed and run.
Candelier, M. et al. (2007). CARAP. Framework of reference for pluralistic approaches to languages and cultures. Graz: European Center of Modern Languages. Cenoz, J. & Jessner, U. (eds.). (2000). English in Europe: The acquisition of a third language. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Degache, C. (1997). Développer l'intercompréhension dans l'espace linguistique roman: le programme Galatea/Socrates. Assises de l'enseignement du et en français, séminaire de Lyon: Aupelf-Uref. Hu, A. (2015). Internationalisierung und Mehrsprachigkeit: Universitäten als interkulturelle und mehrsprachige Diskursräume. In A. Küppers & P. Uyan-Sermeci & B. Pusch (eds.): Education in transnational spaces. Wiesbaden: 257-268. Hufeisen, B. & Neuner, G. (2003). Mehrsprachigkeitskonzept- Tertiärsprachenlernen – Deutsch nach Englisch. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. Hufeisen, B. & Marx, N. (2007). How can DaFnE and EuroComGerm contribute to the concept of receptive multilingualism? Theoretical and practical considerations. In J.Ten Thije & L. Zeevaert (eds.): Receptive multilingualism: Linguistic analyses, language policies and didactic concepts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 307-321. Jessner, U. (2008). Teaching third languages: Findings, trends and challenges. State-of-the-Art Article. In: Language Teaching 41/1, 15-56. Klein, H.-G. (2007). Où en sont les recherches sur l'eurocompréhension ? http://eurocomresearch.net/lit/Klein%20FR.htm: Université de Francfort/Main. Meißner, F-J. (2004). Transfer und Transferieren: Anleitungen zum Interkomprehensionsunterricht. In H.G. Klein & D. Rudtke (eds.): Neuere Forschungen zur Europäischen Intercomprehension. Aachen: Shaker, 39-66. Rindler Schjerve, R. & Vetter, E. (2012). European Multilingualism Current Perspectives and Challenges. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
This talk aims to engender discussion about how EAP tutors can support non-native speaker lecture... more This talk aims to engender discussion about how EAP tutors can support non-native speaker lecturers in an EMI context. I will first review research on EMI lecture discourse, including my study about discourse organizational signals in native and non-native lecturer speech (cf. Deroey, 2015). Next I will present the results of an extensive needs analysis into lecturers’ perceived needs for EMI support at the multilingual University of Luxembourg. The needs analysis, which was performed by the University Language Centre, encompassed a university-wide online questionnaire (N=400) and semi-structured interviews with academic course directors (N=25). Results revealed that most EMI lecturers felt their English is at CEF level C2 and hence they were not usually looking to improve their English. Nevertheless, quite a few wanted to improve their pronunciation and grammar and were interested in training to help them teach in a language that is not their mother tongue. Similarly, the course directors were more concerned with lecturers improving their English for research writing rather than for lecturing. Finally, I will provide examples of how European universities have tried to support their staff in teaching through the medium of English. With this talk I hope to paint an informative picture of the needs EMI lecturers may have and open up a discussion about issues surrounding the provision of adequate and appropriate support. Deroey, K. L. B. (2015). Marking importance in lectures: interactive and textual orientation. Applied Linguistics, 36(1), 51-72. doi:10.1093/applin/amt029
Multilingualism at the University of Luxembourg: policy, practice and attitudes
Katrien Deroey, ... more Multilingualism at the University of Luxembourg: policy, practice and attitudes
Katrien Deroey, Eve Lejot, Birgit Huemer
Multilingualism is a key feature of the identity and development strategy of the University of Luxembourg. This is reflected in its slogan: ‘University of Luxembourg. Multilingual, personalized, connected’. The University Language Centre was recently founded to support multilingual education and the growth of the university as a research institution. To establish the needs for language and communication support and inform language policy decisions, we conducted an extensive needs analysis among staff and students. This paper presents the findings of that investigation.
The needs analysis consists of semi-structured interviews with study programme directors and online questionnaires for all staff and students. The interviews principally enquired after the following: language entry requirements for students and the means used to assess language skills; current language support provided in different study programmes; and the perceived need for academic, professional and general language support for staff and students. The online questionnaires collected data on students’ and staff’s self-assessed proficiency in the three main languages, and the perceived need for specific language and communication support across study programmes, disciplines and staff categories.
The interviews with the programme directors revealed that language entry requirements vary greatly across study programmes and that applicants’ language skills have hitherto mainly been assessed in a non-standardised way. Interviewees mostly thought that for students academic writing support was paramount, while for their academic staff they did not usually feel any need for research- or teaching -related language support apart from proofreading. At the time of writing, the student and staff questionnaires are being administered. However, in our presentation we will be able to present and compare the findings of all three parts of the needs analysis so that we can highlight the perceived needs for language and communication support at this multilingual university as well as how these relate to its language policy.
Lecture listening and note-taking classes are a common component of EAP programmes and the list o... more Lecture listening and note-taking classes are a common component of EAP programmes and the list of listening course books is accordingly long. In deciding which of these to use, a key consideration is arguably whether it prepares students for lectures. In this regard, the availability of spoken academic corpora (e.g. BASE, MICASE, ELFA) and the research arising from these provides insights into lecture discourse that could be usefully integrated in such materials. However, as I will here show, the integration of corpus findings in EAP course books is surprisingly limited, raising the question of whether training based on such materials forms an adequate preparation for the demands of real lectures.
I illustrate the gap between authentic lecture discourse and various current listening books by comparing the treatment of importance markers (e.g. the important point is; remember; I want to emphasize this) with their realisation in a lecture corpus. (Deroey and Taverniers 2012; Deroey 2013). Since these discourse organisational signals alert students to key points, being able to identify these markers may facilitate lecture comprehension and note-taking. Importance markers were retrieved from all 160 lectures of the British Academic Spoken English corpus using corpus-driven and corpus-based methods.
The investigation revealed that while listening books typically highlight the importance of identifying the lecturer’s main points, students are either not or inadequately trained to recognise importance markers. Where examples of such markers are included, they are few and prototypical (e.g. the important point is). However, in the lecture corpus prototypical markers are relatively uncommon; instead less explicit, multifunctional markers such as ‘the thing is’ and ‘remember’ predominate. The findings suggest that much remains to be done to make lecture listening books more representative of real lectures.
References
Deroey, K. L. B. and Taverniers, M. 2012. “‘Just remember this’: Lexicogrammatical relevance markers in lectures”. English for Specific Purposes 31 (4): 221-233.
Deroey, K. L. B. (2015). Marking importance in lectures: Interactive and textual orientation. Applied Linguistics, 36(1), 51-72.
In this paper I will discuss the extent to which lecture listening textbooks reflect authentic le... more In this paper I will discuss the extent to which lecture listening textbooks reflect authentic lecture language. I will also demonstrate Sketch Engine, which allows you to easily retrieve target language from (academic) corpora, and FileMaker Pro, a database programme which I find extremely useful in processing concordances.
The degree to which EAP materials correspond to the demands of real lectures is arguably an important factor in their ultimate usefulness. As Thompson (2003, p. 6) notes, ‘[f]or EAP practitioners, a key issue is how to provide as accurate as possible a model of lecture organisation and help their learners to develop the skills to interpret organising signals’. To assess how representative organisational cues in EAP books are, I compare importance marking cues with those attested in the British Academic Spoken English corpus.
Reference
Thompson, S. E. 2003. “Text-structuring metadiscourse, intonation and the signalling of organisation in academic lectures”. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 2 (1): 5-20.
This workshop provides a basic introduction to the database programme FileMaker Pro. I will use e... more This workshop provides a basic introduction to the database programme FileMaker Pro. I will use examples from my research for which I used Corpus Query Language in Sketch Engine to retrieve importance markers from BASE lectures which I then stored and annotated with FileMaker Pro. Although this programme is mainly used by businesses and so probably less familiar to corpus researchers than, for example, Access, it offers many features which greatly facilitate and speed up
To assess how representative discourse organisational cues in EAP listening books are, I compared... more To assess how representative discourse organisational cues in EAP listening books are, I compared importance marking cues with those I retrieved from the BASE lectures using corpus-based and corpus-driven methods.
The corpus investigation revealed a large variety of importance markers, the most common of which (e.g. the point is; remember; anyway; not talk about) differ from those which usually appear in EAP materials. More specifically, the predominant markers in the corpus were multifunctional and less explicit than their far less frequently used prototypical counterparts (e.g. the important point is; you should note; that’s an aside; that’s irrelevant) (cf. Deroey 2013; Deroey & Taverniers 2012a; Deroey & Taverniers 2012b). However, the EAP books I examined vary widely in their inclusion of importance markers and mostly provide fairly prototypical, explicit examples. Most are also not (obviously) based on corpus research. In short, much remains to be done to ensure that corpus evidence informs lecture listening materials so that students are better prepared for the demands of their course lectures.
Importance marking organises lecture discourse by signalling key points (e.g. the point is; remem... more Importance marking organises lecture discourse by signalling key points (e.g. the point is; remember; that is important). Comparing how this is achieved by native and non-native speakers of English sheds light on the generalisability of genre findings across users of the same language and can inform lecturer training and lecture comprehension courses.
The markers were extracted from the British Academic Spoken English corpus and the Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings combining corpus-based and corpus-driven methods. They were quantified and classified for their ‘interactive orientation’ to the listeners (e.g. note), speaker (e.g. I want to emphasize) or content (e.g. the important point is) (Deroey, 2013).
Identifying important points is arguably a key aspect of effective lecture delivery and comprehension and interactivity is also widely advocated. However, non-native speaker lecturers are reportedly less interactive and structure their discourse less explicitly and effectively. Comparing the interactive orientation, explicitness and frequency of importance marking in these corpora enhances our understanding of the lecture genre, its generic variation and the factors that may affect lecturing efficacy.
Deroey, K. L. B. (2013). Marking importance in lectures: Interactive and textual orientation. Applied Linguistics. doi: 10.1093/applin/amt029
Drawing on the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) lecture corpus, this paper presents an ove... more Drawing on the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) lecture corpus, this paper presents an overview of how important and less important discourse is marked lexicogrammatically (cf. Deroey and Taverniers 2012a; Deroey and Taverniers 2012b). Such markers of (lesser) relevance (e.g. anyway, the point is) are metadiscursive devices which combine discourse organization with evaluation along a ‘parameter of importance or relevance’ (Thompson and Hunston, 2000: 24). Relevance marking can help students discern the relative importance of points and so may aid comprehension, note-taking and retention. However, until recently very little was known about this feature of lecture discourse and the few markers that can be found in educational literature and most English for Academic Purposes (EAP) listening materials seem based on intuitions rather than corpus linguistic evidence.
Both studies are based on a close reading of 40 lectures to identify candidate markers which were then retrieved from the whole corpus of 160 lectures using Sketch Engine. In addition, for the study on relevance markers results were supplemented by items from the BASE word list and previous lecture research (Swales and Burke 2003; Crawford Camiciottoli 2004); markers discovered in the co-text of concordances were also added, as were words derived from or synonymous with all lexemes found through the above procedures. Interestingly, the manual analysis of 40 lectures yielded the vast majority of all markers.
The research on relevance markers revealed a wide variety of markers, the most frequent of which are not amongst those which may intuitively come to mind or which are typically included in EAP materials. The markers could be classified into different lexicogrammatical patterns based mostly on nouns (e.g. the important point is, the thing is), verbs (e.g. remember, let me just emphasise) and adjectives (e.g. it is important to note, this is absolutely crucial). Adverb patterns are extremely rare (e.g. importantly), as are expressions referring to assessment (e.g. it is something that you can be examined on). The verb pattern ‘V clause’ (e.g. remember slavery had already been legally abolished) and the noun pattern ‘MN v-link’, a metalinguistic noun with a link verb (e.g. the point is) are the predominant types of relevance markers.
Markers of lesser relevance were classified into five broad types according to how they signal lesser relevance: (i) message status markers assign a negative value in terms of relevance to part of the lecture message (e.g. not pertinent, joke) or signal transitions between more and less relevant discourse (e.g. anyway); (ii) topic treatment markers (e.g. briefly, not look at, for a moment) indicate limited discourse or time is devoted to a topic; (iii) lecturer knowledge markers (e.g. not know, not remember) suggest the lecturer has imprecise or partial knowledge about the topic; (iv) assessment markers (e.g. not examine, not learn) indicate what information will not be examined; and (v) attention- and note-taking markers (e.g. ignore, not copy down) direct students not to pay attention to or take notes of what is presented. Most denote partial relevance (e.g. detail, in passing, briefly) rather than irrelevance (e.g. not matter, trash) and some markers appear pragmaticalized in certain contexts. For instance, markers denoting limited coverage (e.g. briefly, quickly, a little bit) can serve as mitigation devices. As most markers require some or substantial interpretation to achieve their relevance marking effect, an understanding of the main characteristics and purposes of the lecture genre as well as co-textual, visual, non-verbal and prosodic clues seem particularly important in identifying the function of these lexicogrammatical items but poses a challenge to quantification. Indeed, Hunston’s observation that ‘much evaluative meaning is not obviously identifiable, as it appears to depend on immediate context and on reader assumptions about value’ (2004: 157) is particularly pertinent here.
The research presented here should interest anyone interested in spoken (academic) discourse, evaluative language, identifying discourse functions in corpora, and EAP course design for lecture listening and delivery.
References
Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012a). ‘Just remember this’: Lexicogrammatical relevance markers in lectures. English for Specific Purposes, 31 (4), 221-233.
Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012b). ‘Ignore that ‘cause it’s totally irrelevant’: Marking lesser relevance in lectures. Journal of Pragmatics, 44 (14), 2085-2099.
Crawford Camiciottoli, B. (2004). Audience-oriented relevance markers in business studies lectures. In Del Lungo Camiciotti, G., & Tognini Bonelli, E. (Eds.), Academic discourse: New insights into evaluation (pp. 81-98). Bern: Peter Lang.
Hunston, S. (2004). Counting the uncountable: Problems of identifying evaluation in a text and in a corpus. In Partington, Morley, A. & Haarman, L. (Eds), Corpora and discourse (pp. 157-188). Bern: Peter Lang.
Swales, J. M. & Burke, A. (2003). “It’s really fascinating work”: Differences in evaluative adjectives across academic registers. In Leistyna P., & Meyer, C. F. (Eds.), Corpus Analysis: Language structure and language use (pp. 1-18). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Thompson, G., & Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation: An introduction. In Hunston, S., & Thompson, G. (Eds.), Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 1-27). Oxford: OUP.
"Drawing on the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) lecture corpus, this paper presents an ov... more "Drawing on the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) lecture corpus, this paper presents an overview of how important and less important discourse is marked lexicogrammatically (cf. Deroey and Taverniers 2012a; Deroey and Taverniers 2012b). Such markers of (lesser) relevance (e.g. anyway, the point is) are metadiscursive devices which combine discourse organization with evaluation along a ‘parameter of importance or relevance’ (Thompson and Hunston, 2000: 24). Relevance marking can help students discern the relative importance of points and so may aid comprehension, note-taking and retention. However, until recently very little was known about this feature of lecture discourse and the few markers that can be found in educational literature and most English for Academic Purposes (EAP) listening materials seem based on intuitions rather than corpus linguistic evidence.
Both studies are based on a close reading of 40 lectures to identify candidate markers which were then retrieved from the whole corpus of 160 lectures using Sketch Engine. In addition, for the study on relevance markers results were supplemented by items from the BASE word list and previous lecture research (Swales and Burke 2003; Crawford Camiciottoli 2004); markers discovered in the co-text of concordances were also added, as were words derived from or synonymous with all lexemes found through the above procedures. Interestingly, the manual analysis of 40 lectures yielded the vast majority of all markers.
The research on relevance markers revealed a wide variety of markers, the most frequent of which are not amongst those which may intuitively come to mind or which are typically included in EAP materials. The markers could be classified into different lexicogrammatical patterns based mostly on nouns (e.g. the important point is, the thing is), verbs (e.g. remember, let me just emphasise) and adjectives (e.g. it is important to note, this is absolutely crucial). Adverb patterns are extremely rare (e.g. importantly), as are expressions referring to assessment (e.g. it is something that you can be examined on). The verb pattern ‘V clause’ (e.g. remember slavery had already been legally abolished) and the noun pattern ‘MN v-link’, a metalinguistic noun with a link verb (e.g. the point is) are the predominant types of relevance markers.
Markers of lesser relevance were classified into five broad types according to how they signal lesser relevance: (i) message status markers assign a negative value in terms of relevance to part of the lecture message (e.g. not pertinent, joke) or signal transitions between more and less relevant discourse (e.g. anyway); (ii) topic treatment markers (e.g. briefly, not look at, for a moment) indicate limited discourse or time is devoted to a topic; (iii) lecturer knowledge markers (e.g. not know, not remember) suggest the lecturer has imprecise or partial knowledge about the topic; (iv) assessment markers (e.g. not examine, not learn) indicate what information will not be examined; and (v) attention- and note-taking markers (e.g. ignore, not copy down) direct students not to pay attention to or take notes of what is presented. Most denote partial relevance (e.g. detail, in passing, briefly) rather than irrelevance (e.g. not matter, trash) and some markers appear pragmaticalized in certain contexts. For instance, markers denoting limited coverage (e.g. briefly, quickly, a little bit) can serve as mitigation devices. As most markers require some or substantial interpretation to achieve their relevance marking effect, an understanding of the main characteristics and purposes of the lecture genre as well as co-textual, visual, non-verbal and prosodic clues seem particularly important in identifying the function of these lexicogrammatical items but poses a challenge to quantification. Indeed, Hunston’s observation that ‘much evaluative meaning is not obviously identifiable, as it appears to depend on immediate context and on reader assumptions about value’ (2004: 157) is particularly pertinent here.
The research presented here should interest anyone interested in spoken (academic) discourse, evaluative language, identifying discourse functions in corpora, and EAP course design for lecture listening and delivery.
References
Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012a). ‘Just remember this’: Lexicogrammatical relevance markers in lectures. English for Specific Purposes, 31 (4), 221-233.
Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012b). ‘Ignore that ‘cause it’s totally irrelevant’: Marking lesser relevance in lectures. Journal of Pragmatics, 44 (14), 2085-2099.
Crawford Camiciottoli, B. (2004). Audience-oriented relevance markers in business studies lectures. In Del Lungo Camiciotti, G., & Tognini Bonelli, E. (Eds.), Academic discourse: New insights into evaluation (pp. 81-98). Bern: Peter Lang.
Hunston, S. (2004). Counting the uncountable: Problems of identifying evaluation in a text and in a corpus. In Partington, Morley, A. & Haarman, L. (Eds), Corpora and discourse (pp. 157-188). Bern: Peter Lang.
Swales, J. M. & Burke, A. (2003). “It’s really fascinating work”: Differences in evaluative adjectives across academic registers. In Leistyna P., & Meyer, C. F. (Eds.), Corpus Analysis: Language structure and language use (pp. 1-18). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Thompson, G., & Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation: An introduction. In Hunston, S., & Thompson, G. (Eds.), Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 1-27). Oxford: OUP."
This paper reports on the use of bracketed text in a large corpus of student writing. The functio... more This paper reports on the use of bracketed text in a large corpus of student writing. The function of bracketing has been neglected in academic writing research and coursebooks. Yet it is closely related to important text construction issues such as information packaging, coherence, clarity, conciseness, intertextual framing and sourcing. With a view to informing academic writing description and instruction, we examined the relationship between bracketed text and its cotext in a wide variety of disciplines and assignment genres. The relationships are described using an adaptation of Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2014) logico-semantic framework of clausal relationships. To better understand and teach the use of this information packaging feature, we studied the relationship between bracketed text and its cotext in the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus of high-graded student assignments. Using Sketch Engine and corpus query language, we extracted a random sample of 2000 instances of bracketing in running text only. This subcorpus is composed of 500 instances from each of the four main disciplinary groupings (Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences) and contains instances from most of the BAWE assignment genres. The concordances were imported into a database table in FileMaker Pro. This database programme facilitates coding by limiting choices depending on previous selections and thus guiding the coder through the analytical steps. For the analysis of the data, it offers flexibility for grouping records and aggregating results on different levels. The logico-semantic framework used in systemic functional linguistics to classify the relationships between clauses (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) served as our starting point to classify the relationships between bracketed text and cotext. This framework distinguishes two fundamental logico-semantic relationships: expansion, which ‘relates phenomena as being of the same order of experience’, and projection, which ‘relates phenomena of one order of experience (the processes of saying and thinking) to phenomena of a higher order (semiotic phenomena – what people say and think)’ (p. 443). The latter contains three subtypes: elaboration (‘one clause elaborates on the meaning of another by further specifying or describing it’) (p. 461), enhancement (‘one clause (or subcomplex) enhances the meaning of another by qualifying it) (p. 476) and extension (‘one clause extends the meaning of another by adding something new to it’) (p. 471). This framework was refined and expanded through several stages of interrating and discussion in order to reflect our findings. We first analysed a random sample of 1000 instances from the whole BAWE corpus. With the resulting adapted classificatory framework we next independently analysed a quarter of our subcorpus of 2000 concordances. This led to further refinement of the framework and classificatory criteria. Finally, we each analyzed a different set of concordances from the disciplinary groupings. Disciplinary informants were consulted where needed. Our analysis revealed four major logico-semantic relationships between the bracketed text and cotext: in addition to Halliday & Matthiessen’s (2014) projection (1) and expansion (elaboration (2), enhancement (3, 4), extension (5)), we identified bracketed text functioning as intratextual reference (6) and code (7). The few instances that could not be confidently classified were assigned to a ‘hard to classify’ category. (1) However the anticipated number of children per woman in Europe and the USA is still near or above two (Bongaarts, 1999), showing that many are still having children. (2) Many of these injures are healed fractures and breaks occurring around the torso (upper body). (3) It is dated to the reign of Nectanebo II (360-343 BC). (4) Acetanilide (4.78g, 35.4 mmol) was dissolved in cold, glacial acetic acid (25ml, 437.1 mmol) (5) Parmenides decision to include a cosmology that he has already (apparently) proved to be flawed is an interesting one to say the least. (6) This is called circular polarization (figure 5) and is the natural state of white light. (7) Stronger field ligands such as (PPh 3) and (NCS) increase the splitting. Projection was –perhaps not surprisingly- the most common relationship by far, although markedly less frequent in the Physical Sciences. Expansion was mainly achieved through elaboration, with restatements (2) and abbreviations predominating. Enhancement relationships were mostly temporal locations (3) or measurements (4). Extension was relatively rare (5). Intratextual references (6) took various forms, such as figures, appendices, equations, and line numbers for quoted text. Bracketed code was a marked feature of the Physical Sciences, occurring in formulae and enclosing symbols or abbreviations (7). Overall, students’ use of bracketed text appeared to reflect disciplinary conventions and reflected the genre goals of assignments by demonstrating knowledge, understanding and appropriate source use. Contrary to expectations, instances where the bracketed text seemed superfluous or adversely affected coherence were rare. We conclude by discussing what these findings mean for academic writing instruction. Reference Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2014). Halliday's introduction to functional grammar (4 ed.). Abingdon: Routledge.
Uploads
Books by [email protected] Deroey
Sprachen aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven, um die Lehre
wissenschaftlichen Schreibens in mehrsprachigen Umgebungen
zu bereichern. Das Buch enthält Studien zur Schreibpraxis mehrsprachiger
Schreibender, sprachvergleichende Untersuchungen
wissenschaftlicher Texte und diskutiert innovative Ansätze zur
Lehre mehrsprachigen Schreibens an der Universität. Zusätzlich
bietet der Band eine gute Übersicht zum aktuellen Stand mehrsprachiger
wissenschaftlicher Schreibforschung an und diskutiert
bestehende Anforderungen an zukünftige Forschung. Die Beiträge
in diesem Band sind auf Deutsch, Englisch und Französisch.
Papers by [email protected] Deroey
reports with their own ‘voice’. The study was motivated by the design of a multilingual academic writing course at the University of Luxembourg Language Centre. The analysis distinguished three main discourse elements, nl. report, discussion and text orientation. The data reveal considerable variation in the frequency with which these combine to form different paragraph types. However, in all three languages, report discourse uses the same quotation and reformulation strategies and tends to employ ‘list’ structures with few cohesive links. Discussion elements are generally not elaborated and the writer’s voice is weak. Text organization uses the same linguistic strategies and is mainly used to orientate readers rather than to summarize or signal transitions. Pedagogical implications for multilingual academic writing courses are discussed.
It has often been noted that EAP listening textbooks do not provide a realistic model of lectures (e.g. Alexander, Argent, & Spencer, 2008; Field, 2011; Flowerdew & Miller, 1997; Nesi, 2001; Salehzadeh, 2013; Thompson, 2003). Issues include the use of short and scripted texts, artificially slow and clear speech, and unusually frequent and explicit structuring. While we need to balance authenticity with pedagogical appropriateness, it stands to reason that ‘exposing students only to simplified lecture texts certainly does students a disservice’ (Salehzadeh, 2013, p. xix).
This paper explores the correspondence between the language in published EAP lecture listening courses and authentic lecture discourse. Specifically, it compares signposts of important lecture points attested in a large lecture corpus with those in listening courses. Although importance marking is but one feature of lecture discourse, identifying key points is a vital listening skill and issues with the representation of discourse structuring in lectures have already been noted: EAP lectures are said to be comparatively coherent and explicit (Flowerdew & Miller, 1997) as well as more heavily and carefully signalled (Flowerdew & Miller, 1997; Thompson, 2003) with more transparent phrases (Field, 2011).
Importance markers are here defined as ‘lexicogrammatical devices that overtly mark the importance, relevance, or significance of points that are presented verbally or visually’ (Deroey, 2015, p. 52). Crucially, they organize discourse while also evaluating it (cf. Crawford Camiciottoli, 2007). Hence, signposts without evaluative force such as enumerators (e.g. ‘firstly’, ‘the next point is’) were not included, nor were instances where entities in the real world were evaluated (e.g. ‘an important philosopher’) instead of the lecturer’s discourse (e.g. ‘an important point’).
Readers will be aware that authenticity is multi-faceted concept, of which text authenticity is but one aspect (cf. Widdowson, 1998). Here I have simply defined authentic lectures as those delivered on degree courses and not adapted for language learning purposes (cf. Basturkmen, 2010). I should point out, however, that even these lectures cannot provide our students with a totally authentic listening experience as they are removed from the original context and may not be fully representative of lectures in their disciplines and institutions (MacDonald, Badger & White, 2000).
In what follows I provide an overview of the corpus and listening courses used for this study and compare importance markers in the two. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications.
Om inzicht te verwerven in hoe het onderscheid tussen belangrijke en minder belangrijke punten door moedertaalsprekers van het Engels wordt gesignaleerd identificeerde ik ‘belangrijkheidsmarkeerders’ in Britse colleges. De resultaten kunnen verwerkt worden in handboeken en cursussen academisch Engels en laten ons toe niet-moedertaalsprekers gerichter te trainen in het herkennen en produceren van dergelijke structuuraanduidingen. De studie onthult een enorme verscheidenheid aan belangrijkheidsmarkeerders die vaak ook weinig expliciet zijn en toont dat onze intuïtie over het taalgebruik in een specifiek genre zoals het college niet noodzakelijk strookt met het reële taalgebruik.
Sprachen aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven, um die Lehre
wissenschaftlichen Schreibens in mehrsprachigen Umgebungen
zu bereichern. Das Buch enthält Studien zur Schreibpraxis mehrsprachiger
Schreibender, sprachvergleichende Untersuchungen
wissenschaftlicher Texte und diskutiert innovative Ansätze zur
Lehre mehrsprachigen Schreibens an der Universität. Zusätzlich
bietet der Band eine gute Übersicht zum aktuellen Stand mehrsprachiger
wissenschaftlicher Schreibforschung an und diskutiert
bestehende Anforderungen an zukünftige Forschung. Die Beiträge
in diesem Band sind auf Deutsch, Englisch und Französisch.
reports with their own ‘voice’. The study was motivated by the design of a multilingual academic writing course at the University of Luxembourg Language Centre. The analysis distinguished three main discourse elements, nl. report, discussion and text orientation. The data reveal considerable variation in the frequency with which these combine to form different paragraph types. However, in all three languages, report discourse uses the same quotation and reformulation strategies and tends to employ ‘list’ structures with few cohesive links. Discussion elements are generally not elaborated and the writer’s voice is weak. Text organization uses the same linguistic strategies and is mainly used to orientate readers rather than to summarize or signal transitions. Pedagogical implications for multilingual academic writing courses are discussed.
It has often been noted that EAP listening textbooks do not provide a realistic model of lectures (e.g. Alexander, Argent, & Spencer, 2008; Field, 2011; Flowerdew & Miller, 1997; Nesi, 2001; Salehzadeh, 2013; Thompson, 2003). Issues include the use of short and scripted texts, artificially slow and clear speech, and unusually frequent and explicit structuring. While we need to balance authenticity with pedagogical appropriateness, it stands to reason that ‘exposing students only to simplified lecture texts certainly does students a disservice’ (Salehzadeh, 2013, p. xix).
This paper explores the correspondence between the language in published EAP lecture listening courses and authentic lecture discourse. Specifically, it compares signposts of important lecture points attested in a large lecture corpus with those in listening courses. Although importance marking is but one feature of lecture discourse, identifying key points is a vital listening skill and issues with the representation of discourse structuring in lectures have already been noted: EAP lectures are said to be comparatively coherent and explicit (Flowerdew & Miller, 1997) as well as more heavily and carefully signalled (Flowerdew & Miller, 1997; Thompson, 2003) with more transparent phrases (Field, 2011).
Importance markers are here defined as ‘lexicogrammatical devices that overtly mark the importance, relevance, or significance of points that are presented verbally or visually’ (Deroey, 2015, p. 52). Crucially, they organize discourse while also evaluating it (cf. Crawford Camiciottoli, 2007). Hence, signposts without evaluative force such as enumerators (e.g. ‘firstly’, ‘the next point is’) were not included, nor were instances where entities in the real world were evaluated (e.g. ‘an important philosopher’) instead of the lecturer’s discourse (e.g. ‘an important point’).
Readers will be aware that authenticity is multi-faceted concept, of which text authenticity is but one aspect (cf. Widdowson, 1998). Here I have simply defined authentic lectures as those delivered on degree courses and not adapted for language learning purposes (cf. Basturkmen, 2010). I should point out, however, that even these lectures cannot provide our students with a totally authentic listening experience as they are removed from the original context and may not be fully representative of lectures in their disciplines and institutions (MacDonald, Badger & White, 2000).
In what follows I provide an overview of the corpus and listening courses used for this study and compare importance markers in the two. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications.
Om inzicht te verwerven in hoe het onderscheid tussen belangrijke en minder belangrijke punten door moedertaalsprekers van het Engels wordt gesignaleerd identificeerde ik ‘belangrijkheidsmarkeerders’ in Britse colleges. De resultaten kunnen verwerkt worden in handboeken en cursussen academisch Engels en laten ons toe niet-moedertaalsprekers gerichter te trainen in het herkennen en produceren van dergelijke structuuraanduidingen. De studie onthult een enorme verscheidenheid aan belangrijkheidsmarkeerders die vaak ook weinig expliciet zijn en toont dat onze intuïtie over het taalgebruik in een specifiek genre zoals het college niet noodzakelijk strookt met het reële taalgebruik.
The University of Luxembourg Language Centre focuses on academic writing and presentation courses starting at level B2, which are integrated into study programmes. We aim to support and promote productivity and flexibility in the use of different academic languages.
Linguistic research has studied the differences between academic languages, while writing research analyses students' multilingual writing practices and develops didactic concepts to improve writing skills. However, many of these studies focus on the differences between languages, neglecting their similarities and the potential for cross-lingual teaching (Huemer et al, 2019).
This paper presents the results of our qualitative textlinguistic study in which we compared German, English and French Literature review sections from 12 master's theses from a trilingual study programme (Deroey et al, 2019). Most students wrote these texts in their second or third language. The attested differences between the languages at the macro- and meso-level (discursive patterns of paragraphs, coherence between paragraphs) are rather small. This may mean that discursive concepts and linguistic formulation patterns already learned in the first language are productively transferred to other academic languages in the field of the strongly standardized text type "academic paper or thesis". This seems to work well when the academic language cultures are similar, as is the case with the three languages studied. The results of our study have inspired us to jointly develop a course design for academic writing for all three university languages that promotes transfer and sensitizes students to similarities and differences in academic writing across these languages.
References
Deroey, K., Huemer, B., Lejot, E. (2019). The discourse structure of literature review paragraphs: a multilingual study. In B. Huemer, E. Lejot & K. Deroey (Eds.). (2019). Academic writing across languages: multilingual and contrastive approaches in higher education. Wien: Böhlau.
Huemer, B., Lejot, E., & Deroey, K. (Eds.). (2019). Academic writing across languages: multilingual and contrastive approaches in higher education. Wien: Böhlau.
We’ll see that lecturers use a wide variety of lexicogrammatical importance markers. Examples include ‘the point is’, ‘remember’, ‘I want to stress’, ‘anyway’, ‘I don’t know’ and ‘etcetera’. Some of the key findings I’ll be highlighting are that (1) students often need an understanding of the lecture genre and the cotext of the markers to be able to identify these discourse markers; that (2) studying only transcripts of spoken discourse without considering prosodic and multimodal features affects the validity of results; and that (3) to create English for Academic Purposes teaching materials we need to examine authentic lecture texts rather than rely on our intuitions.
I examine the correspondence between the treatment of importance markers (e.g. the point is; remember; I want to emphasize this) in listening coursebooks with their realisation in a lecture corpus (cf. Deroey 2015). As these markers reflect the lecturer’s stance towards the importance of points, students’ ability to spot these may facilitate lecture comprehension and note-taking.
Importance markers were retrieved from 160 BASE lectures and compared with phrases presenting key points in 25 coursebooks. These include the Cambridge and Oxford EAP series, Contemporary Topics (2017) Study Listening (Lynch, 2004), Lecture Ready (2013) and Unlock (2014).
The investigation revealed that while listening books typically point out the importance of identifying the lecturer’s main points, students are generally either not or inadequately trained to recognise importance markers. Where examples of such markers are included, they are few and prototypical (e.g. the important point is). However, in the lecture corpus less explicit, multifunctional markers such as ‘the thing is’ and ‘remember’ predominate. The findings raise questions about the extent to which training with such materials prepares our students to deal with real lecture discourse. I conclude with suggestions about the selection and development of lecture listening materials.
Deroey, K. L. B. (2015). Marking importance in lectures: interactive and textual orientation. Applied Linguistics, 36(1), 51-72.
The design and implementation of EMI training and support programmes can be an especially challenging task for EAP practitioners. First, lecturers may not recognize the need for support and may be reluctant to be assessed. Second, we need to factor in practical considerations such as their limited availability and possible reluctance to attend ‘classes’ with colleagues. Third, we have limited resources in terms of specialized standardized tests, training materials and research literature that could inform our 'course' design. Innovative approaches are therefore needed to factor in all these circumstances.
This paper has two main parts. First I summarize research on the challenges EMI lecturers face, including the results of a needs analysis among lecturers at the University of Luxembourg and my work on lecture discourse organization (Deroey, 2015). From the relatively few studies that exist, we will see that lecturers tend to believe they have sufficient English language skills and that reduced interactivity is a particularly common issue. Second, I survey different support and training schemes at HE institutions across the world. Here, it will become clear that work on relevant pedagogical skills needs to be included and an apparently ‘remedial’ approach should be avoided if we want to get lecturers on board.
After an overview of the course content and format, I illustrate how students’ own presentations and research can be integrated so as to enhance personal relevance and interactivity. Aspects of this personalized, interactive course design include filming student presentations, structured peer feedback and reflection, a pre-course questionnaire, and tasks requiring them to work with their conference calls, research, texts, visuals and experiences.
I conclude with a summary of course feedback, highlighting what students reported as being particularly useful and what they would add or change.
The aspects of representativeness examined in these coursebooks are language, lecture authenticity and research-informedness. To assess the representativeness of language, signposts of important points are compared with those retrieved from the BASE corpus of 160 authentic lectures (Deroey, submitted; Deroey and Taverniers, 2012). The coursebook lectures are also analysed in terms of their source, delivery and length. The materials are further reviewed for their use of findings from research into listening comprehension and lecture discourse.
Results suggest that current lecture listening materials often do not reflect the language and lectures students are likely to encounter on their degree programmes. Moreover, materials are typically not (systematically) informed by listening and lecture discourse research. These findings highlight the need for EAP practitioners to approach published materials critically and supplement or modify them in ways that would better serve students.
References
Alexander, O., Argent, S., & Spencer, J. (2008). EAP Essentials: a teacher’s guide to principles and practice. Reading: Garnet.
Deroey, K. L. B. (submitted). The representativeness of lecture listening coursebooks: language, lectures, research-informedness.
Deroey, K. L. B. (2017). How representative are EAP listening books of real lectures? . In J. Kemp (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2015 BALEAP Conference. EAP in a rapidly changing landscape: Issues, challenges and solutions. Reading: Garnet.
Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012). Just remember this: Lexicogrammatical relevance markers in lectures. English for Specific Purposes, 31(4), 221-233.
Field, J. (2011). Into the mind of the academic listener. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 10(2), 102-112.
Thompson, S. E. (2003). Text-structuring metadiscourse, intonation and the signalling of organisation in academic lectures. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2(1), 5-20.
This paper surveys how less important lecture discourse is marked lexicogrammatically in the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus (Deroey and Taverniers, 2012; Deroey, 2014). Such interpersonal, metadiscursive devices combine discourse organization with evaluation along a ‘parameter of importance or relevance’ (Thompson and Hunston, 2000: 24). They can help students discern the relative importance of points and so may aid lecture comprehension, note-taking and retention.
The markers were first retrieved manually from 40 lectures and then using Sketch Engine from all 160 lectures. They fell into five categories: (i) message status markers (e.g. not pertinent, joke, anyway); (ii) topic treatment markers (e.g. briefly, not look at, for a moment); (iii) lecturer knowledge markers (e.g. not know, not remember); (iv) assessment markers (e.g. not examine, not learn); and (v) attention- and note-taking markers (e.g. ignore, not copy down).
This study illustrates the challenge of identifying and quantifying pragmatic features in academic discourse. Few markers explicitly evaluated discourse as being unimportant (e.g. not pertinent) and few had an inherent meaning of lesser importance (e.g. incidentally). Instead, they depended rather heavily on pragmatic interpretation to achieve their effect and could generally be viewed as ‘muted signals’ (Swales and Burke, 2003: 17), expressing importance implicitly or cumulatively (cf. Hunston, 2011). Hence, Hunston’s observation that ‘much evaluative meaning is not obviously identifiable, as it appears to depend on immediate context and on reader assumptions about value’ (2004: 157) is particularly pertinent here.
References
Deroey, K. L. B. (2014). ‘Anyway, the point I'm making is’: Lexicogrammatical relevance marking in lectures. In L. Vandelanotte, D. Kristin, G. Caroline, & K. Ditte (Eds.), Recent Advances in Corpus Linguistics: Developing and Exploiting Corpora (pp. 265-291). Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi.
Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012). ‘Ignore that' cause it's totally irrelevant’: Marking lesser relevance in lectures. Journal of Pragmatics, 44(14), 2085-2099.
Hunston, S. (2004). Counting the uncountable: Problems of identifying evaluation in a text and in a corpus. In A. Partington, J. Morley, & L. Haarman (Eds.), Corpora and discourse (pp. 157-188). Bern: Peter Lang.
Hunston, S. (2011). Corpus approaches to evaluation: phraseology and evaluative language (Vol. 13). New York: Routledge.
Swales, J. M., & Burke, A. (2003). " Its really fascinating work": Differences in Evaluative Adjectives across Academic Registers. Language and Computers, 46(1), 1-18.
Thompson, G., & Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation: An introduction. In Hunston, S., & Thompson, G. (Eds.), Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 1-27). Oxford: OUP.
Using corpus-driven and corpus-based methods, 40 lectures from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus were first manually examined to identify candidate markers. Further instances of these and related markers were then retrieved from the whole corpus of 160 lectures using Corpus Query Language in Sketch Engine.
A wide variety of markers were thus attested, the predominant ones of which are not the ones we would intuitively think of. Markers of important information were classified into lexicogrammatical patterns depending on the word class of their main lexeme. The multifunctional, semi-fixed expressions ‘the point is’ and ‘remember’ predominate over more stereotypical, explicit markers such as ‘the important point is’. Markers of lesser importance were classified according to how they achieved their effect. Most denote partial relevance (e.g. detail, in passing, briefly) rather than irrelevance (e.g. not pertinent, not matter, trash) and some markers appear pragmaticalized in certain contexts.
As many markers required significant interpretation to achieve their importance marking effect, an understanding of the lecture genre as well as co-textual, visual, non-verbal and prosodic clues seem particularly important in identifying their precise status. This poses a challenge to quantification. Indeed, Hunston’s observation that ‘much evaluative meaning is not obviously identifiable, as it appears to depend on immediate context and on reader assumptions about value’ (2004: 157) is particularly pertinent here.
Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012). ‘Ignore that'cause it's totally irrelevant’: marking lesser relevance in lectures. Journal of Pragmatics, 44(14), 2085-2099.
Deroey, K. L. B. (2014). ‘Anyway, the point I'm making is’: Lexicogrammatical relevance marking in lectures. In L. Vandelanotte, D. Kristin, G. Caroline, & K. Ditte (Eds.), Recent advances in corpus linguistics: developing and exploiting corpora (pp. 265-291). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Deroey, K. L. B. (2015). Marking importance in lectures: interactive and textual orientation. Applied Linguistics, 36(1), 51-72.
Thompson, G., & Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation: An introduction. In Hunston, S., & Thompson, G. (Eds.), Evaluation in text: authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 1-27). Oxford: OUP.
The question of how to use existing multilingual resources and support the acquisition of multilingual competences has become increasingly important due to the Bologna agreement and internationalisation strategies at many European universities. However, while research on third language acquisition (Cenoz, Hufeisen, Jessner 2001; Hufeisen, Neuner 2003; Jessner 2008) and multilingualism in higher education (Jessner 2008, Hu 2015; Rindler Schjerve, Vetter 2012) is a common theme, little has been published that could guide language teachers in the design of multilingual courses. Teaching methods such as Intercomprehension with GALANET (Degache 1997) or Eurocom (Meissner 2004; Hufeisen, Marx 2007; Klein 2007) and European projects like CARAP (Candelier 2007) and MAGICC document the need for new concepts in language education very well.
Informed by the results of a university wide needs analysis of language competences at the University of Luxembourg, the Language Centre developed a trilingual presentation skills course (FR/EN/GE) for MA students to support second and third language acquisition. In this paper, we will present our course design, comment on the running of the course and present findings from our teaching and student course evaluations that can be used to inform the future teaching of multilingual courses. Our aim is to provide insights into how multilingual courses can be successfully designed and run.
Candelier, M. et al. (2007). CARAP. Framework of reference for pluralistic approaches to languages and cultures. Graz: European Center of Modern Languages.
Cenoz, J. & Jessner, U. (eds.). (2000). English in Europe: The acquisition of a third language. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Degache, C. (1997). Développer l'intercompréhension dans l'espace linguistique roman: le programme Galatea/Socrates. Assises de l'enseignement du et en français, séminaire de Lyon: Aupelf-Uref.
Hu, A. (2015). Internationalisierung und Mehrsprachigkeit: Universitäten als interkulturelle und mehrsprachige Diskursräume. In A. Küppers & P. Uyan-Sermeci & B. Pusch (eds.): Education in transnational spaces. Wiesbaden: 257-268.
Hufeisen, B. & Neuner, G. (2003). Mehrsprachigkeitskonzept- Tertiärsprachenlernen – Deutsch nach Englisch. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing.
Hufeisen, B. & Marx, N. (2007). How can DaFnE and EuroComGerm contribute to the concept of receptive multilingualism? Theoretical and practical considerations. In J.Ten Thije & L. Zeevaert (eds.): Receptive multilingualism: Linguistic analyses, language policies and didactic concepts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 307-321.
Jessner, U. (2008). Teaching third languages: Findings, trends and challenges. State-of-the-Art Article. In: Language Teaching 41/1, 15-56.
Klein, H.-G. (2007). Où en sont les recherches sur l'eurocompréhension ? http://eurocomresearch.net/lit/Klein%20FR.htm: Université de Francfort/Main.
Meißner, F-J. (2004). Transfer und Transferieren: Anleitungen zum Interkomprehensionsunterricht. In H.G. Klein & D. Rudtke (eds.): Neuere Forschungen zur Europäischen Intercomprehension. Aachen: Shaker, 39-66.
Rindler Schjerve, R. & Vetter, E. (2012). European Multilingualism Current Perspectives and
Challenges. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
MAGICC http://www.unil.ch/magicc/home.html
GALANET, http://www.galanet.eu/
With this talk I hope to paint an informative picture of the needs EMI lecturers may have and open up a discussion about issues surrounding the provision of adequate and appropriate support.
Deroey, K. L. B. (2015). Marking importance in lectures: interactive and textual orientation. Applied Linguistics, 36(1), 51-72. doi:10.1093/applin/amt029
Katrien Deroey, Eve Lejot, Birgit Huemer
Multilingualism is a key feature of the identity and development strategy of the University of Luxembourg. This is reflected in its slogan: ‘University of Luxembourg. Multilingual, personalized, connected’. The University Language Centre was recently founded to support multilingual education and the growth of the university as a research institution.
To establish the needs for language and communication support and inform language policy decisions, we conducted an extensive needs analysis among staff and students. This paper presents the findings of that investigation.
The needs analysis consists of semi-structured interviews with study programme directors and online questionnaires for all staff and students. The interviews principally enquired after the following: language entry requirements for students and the means used to assess language skills; current language support provided in different study programmes; and the perceived need for academic, professional and general language support for staff and students. The online questionnaires collected data on students’ and staff’s self-assessed proficiency in the three main languages, and the perceived need for specific language and communication support across study programmes, disciplines and staff categories.
The interviews with the programme directors revealed that language entry requirements vary greatly across study programmes and that applicants’ language skills have hitherto mainly been assessed in a non-standardised way. Interviewees mostly thought that for students academic writing support was paramount, while for their academic staff they did not usually feel any need for research- or teaching -related language support apart from proofreading. At the time of writing, the student and staff questionnaires are being administered. However, in our presentation we will be able to present and compare the findings of all three parts of the needs analysis so that we can highlight the perceived needs for language and communication support at this multilingual university as well as how these relate to its language policy.
I illustrate the gap between authentic lecture discourse and various current listening books by comparing the treatment of importance markers (e.g. the important point is; remember; I want to emphasize this) with their realisation in a lecture corpus. (Deroey and Taverniers 2012; Deroey 2013). Since these discourse organisational signals alert students to key points, being able to identify these markers may facilitate lecture comprehension and note-taking. Importance markers were retrieved from all 160 lectures of the British Academic Spoken English corpus using corpus-driven and corpus-based methods.
The investigation revealed that while listening books typically highlight the importance of identifying the lecturer’s main points, students are either not or inadequately trained to recognise importance markers. Where examples of such markers are included, they are few and prototypical (e.g. the important point is). However, in the lecture corpus prototypical markers are relatively uncommon; instead less explicit, multifunctional markers such as ‘the thing is’ and ‘remember’ predominate. The findings suggest that much remains to be done to make lecture listening books more representative of real lectures.
References
Deroey, K. L. B. and Taverniers, M. 2012. “‘Just remember this’: Lexicogrammatical relevance markers in lectures”. English for Specific Purposes 31 (4): 221-233.
Deroey, K. L. B. (2015). Marking importance in lectures: Interactive and textual orientation. Applied Linguistics, 36(1), 51-72.
The degree to which EAP materials correspond to the demands of real lectures is arguably an important factor in their ultimate usefulness. As Thompson (2003, p. 6) notes, ‘[f]or EAP practitioners, a key issue is how to provide as accurate as possible a model of lecture organisation and help their learners to develop the skills to interpret organising signals’. To assess how representative organisational cues in EAP books are, I compare importance marking cues with those attested in the British Academic Spoken English corpus.
Reference
Thompson, S. E. 2003. “Text-structuring metadiscourse, intonation and the signalling of organisation in academic lectures”. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 2 (1): 5-20.
The corpus investigation revealed a large variety of importance markers, the most common of which (e.g. the point is; remember; anyway; not talk about) differ from those which usually appear in EAP materials. More specifically, the predominant markers in the corpus were multifunctional and less explicit than their far less frequently used prototypical counterparts (e.g. the important point is; you should note; that’s an aside; that’s irrelevant) (cf. Deroey 2013; Deroey & Taverniers 2012a; Deroey & Taverniers 2012b). However, the EAP books I examined vary widely in their inclusion of importance markers and mostly provide fairly prototypical, explicit examples. Most are also not (obviously) based on corpus research. In short, much remains to be done to ensure that corpus evidence informs lecture listening materials so that students are better prepared for the demands of their course lectures.
The markers were extracted from the British Academic Spoken English corpus and the Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings combining corpus-based and corpus-driven methods. They were quantified and classified for their ‘interactive orientation’ to the listeners (e.g. note), speaker (e.g. I want to emphasize) or content (e.g. the important point is) (Deroey, 2013).
Identifying important points is arguably a key aspect of effective lecture delivery and comprehension and interactivity is also widely advocated. However, non-native speaker lecturers are reportedly less interactive and structure their discourse less explicitly and effectively. Comparing the interactive orientation, explicitness and frequency of importance marking in these corpora enhances our understanding of the lecture genre, its generic variation and the factors that may affect lecturing efficacy.
Deroey, K. L. B. (2013). Marking importance in lectures: Interactive and textual orientation. Applied Linguistics. doi: 10.1093/applin/amt029
Both studies are based on a close reading of 40 lectures to identify candidate markers which were then retrieved from the whole corpus of 160 lectures using Sketch Engine. In addition, for the study on relevance markers results were supplemented by items from the BASE word list and previous lecture research (Swales and Burke 2003; Crawford Camiciottoli 2004); markers discovered in the co-text of concordances were also added, as were words derived from or synonymous with all lexemes found through the above procedures. Interestingly, the manual analysis of 40 lectures yielded the vast majority of all markers.
The research on relevance markers revealed a wide variety of markers, the most frequent of which are not amongst those which may intuitively come to mind or which are typically included in EAP materials. The markers could be classified into different lexicogrammatical patterns based mostly on nouns (e.g. the important point is, the thing is), verbs (e.g. remember, let me just emphasise) and adjectives (e.g. it is important to note, this is absolutely crucial). Adverb patterns are extremely rare (e.g. importantly), as are expressions referring to assessment (e.g. it is something that you can be examined on). The verb pattern ‘V clause’ (e.g. remember slavery had already been legally abolished) and the noun pattern ‘MN v-link’, a metalinguistic noun with a link verb (e.g. the point is) are the predominant types of relevance markers.
Markers of lesser relevance were classified into five broad types according to how they signal lesser relevance: (i) message status markers assign a negative value in terms of relevance to part of the lecture message (e.g. not pertinent, joke) or signal transitions between more and less relevant discourse (e.g. anyway); (ii) topic treatment markers (e.g. briefly, not look at, for a moment) indicate limited discourse or time is devoted to a topic; (iii) lecturer knowledge markers (e.g. not know, not remember) suggest the lecturer has imprecise or partial knowledge about the topic; (iv) assessment markers (e.g. not examine, not learn) indicate what information will not be examined; and (v) attention- and note-taking markers (e.g. ignore, not copy down) direct students not to pay attention to or take notes of what is presented. Most denote partial relevance (e.g. detail, in passing, briefly) rather than irrelevance (e.g. not matter, trash) and some markers appear pragmaticalized in certain contexts. For instance, markers denoting limited coverage (e.g. briefly, quickly, a little bit) can serve as mitigation devices. As most markers require some or substantial interpretation to achieve their relevance marking effect, an understanding of the main characteristics and purposes of the lecture genre as well as co-textual, visual, non-verbal and prosodic clues seem particularly important in identifying the function of these lexicogrammatical items but poses a challenge to quantification. Indeed, Hunston’s observation that ‘much evaluative meaning is not obviously identifiable, as it appears to depend on immediate context and on reader assumptions about value’ (2004: 157) is particularly pertinent here.
The research presented here should interest anyone interested in spoken (academic) discourse, evaluative language, identifying discourse functions in corpora, and EAP course design for lecture listening and delivery.
References
Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012a). ‘Just remember this’: Lexicogrammatical relevance markers in lectures. English for Specific Purposes, 31 (4), 221-233.
Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012b). ‘Ignore that ‘cause it’s totally irrelevant’: Marking lesser relevance in lectures. Journal of Pragmatics, 44 (14), 2085-2099.
Crawford Camiciottoli, B. (2004). Audience-oriented relevance markers in business studies lectures. In Del Lungo Camiciotti, G., & Tognini Bonelli, E. (Eds.), Academic discourse: New insights into evaluation (pp. 81-98). Bern: Peter Lang.
Hunston, S. (2004). Counting the uncountable: Problems of identifying evaluation in a text and in a corpus. In Partington, Morley, A. & Haarman, L. (Eds), Corpora and discourse (pp. 157-188). Bern: Peter Lang.
Swales, J. M. & Burke, A. (2003). “It’s really fascinating work”: Differences in evaluative adjectives across academic registers. In Leistyna P., & Meyer, C. F. (Eds.), Corpus Analysis: Language structure and language use (pp. 1-18). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Thompson, G., & Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation: An introduction. In Hunston, S., & Thompson, G. (Eds.), Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 1-27). Oxford: OUP.
Both studies are based on a close reading of 40 lectures to identify candidate markers which were then retrieved from the whole corpus of 160 lectures using Sketch Engine. In addition, for the study on relevance markers results were supplemented by items from the BASE word list and previous lecture research (Swales and Burke 2003; Crawford Camiciottoli 2004); markers discovered in the co-text of concordances were also added, as were words derived from or synonymous with all lexemes found through the above procedures. Interestingly, the manual analysis of 40 lectures yielded the vast majority of all markers.
The research on relevance markers revealed a wide variety of markers, the most frequent of which are not amongst those which may intuitively come to mind or which are typically included in EAP materials. The markers could be classified into different lexicogrammatical patterns based mostly on nouns (e.g. the important point is, the thing is), verbs (e.g. remember, let me just emphasise) and adjectives (e.g. it is important to note, this is absolutely crucial). Adverb patterns are extremely rare (e.g. importantly), as are expressions referring to assessment (e.g. it is something that you can be examined on). The verb pattern ‘V clause’ (e.g. remember slavery had already been legally abolished) and the noun pattern ‘MN v-link’, a metalinguistic noun with a link verb (e.g. the point is) are the predominant types of relevance markers.
Markers of lesser relevance were classified into five broad types according to how they signal lesser relevance: (i) message status markers assign a negative value in terms of relevance to part of the lecture message (e.g. not pertinent, joke) or signal transitions between more and less relevant discourse (e.g. anyway); (ii) topic treatment markers (e.g. briefly, not look at, for a moment) indicate limited discourse or time is devoted to a topic; (iii) lecturer knowledge markers (e.g. not know, not remember) suggest the lecturer has imprecise or partial knowledge about the topic; (iv) assessment markers (e.g. not examine, not learn) indicate what information will not be examined; and (v) attention- and note-taking markers (e.g. ignore, not copy down) direct students not to pay attention to or take notes of what is presented. Most denote partial relevance (e.g. detail, in passing, briefly) rather than irrelevance (e.g. not matter, trash) and some markers appear pragmaticalized in certain contexts. For instance, markers denoting limited coverage (e.g. briefly, quickly, a little bit) can serve as mitigation devices. As most markers require some or substantial interpretation to achieve their relevance marking effect, an understanding of the main characteristics and purposes of the lecture genre as well as co-textual, visual, non-verbal and prosodic clues seem particularly important in identifying the function of these lexicogrammatical items but poses a challenge to quantification. Indeed, Hunston’s observation that ‘much evaluative meaning is not obviously identifiable, as it appears to depend on immediate context and on reader assumptions about value’ (2004: 157) is particularly pertinent here.
The research presented here should interest anyone interested in spoken (academic) discourse, evaluative language, identifying discourse functions in corpora, and EAP course design for lecture listening and delivery.
References
Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012a). ‘Just remember this’: Lexicogrammatical relevance markers in lectures. English for Specific Purposes, 31 (4), 221-233.
Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012b). ‘Ignore that ‘cause it’s totally irrelevant’: Marking lesser relevance in lectures. Journal of Pragmatics, 44 (14), 2085-2099.
Crawford Camiciottoli, B. (2004). Audience-oriented relevance markers in business studies lectures. In Del Lungo Camiciotti, G., & Tognini Bonelli, E. (Eds.), Academic discourse: New insights into evaluation (pp. 81-98). Bern: Peter Lang.
Hunston, S. (2004). Counting the uncountable: Problems of identifying evaluation in a text and in a corpus. In Partington, Morley, A. & Haarman, L. (Eds), Corpora and discourse (pp. 157-188). Bern: Peter Lang.
Swales, J. M. & Burke, A. (2003). “It’s really fascinating work”: Differences in evaluative adjectives across academic registers. In Leistyna P., & Meyer, C. F. (Eds.), Corpus Analysis: Language structure and language use (pp. 1-18). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Thompson, G., & Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation: An introduction. In Hunston, S., & Thompson, G. (Eds.), Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 1-27). Oxford: OUP."
To better understand and teach the use of this information packaging feature, we studied the relationship between bracketed text and its cotext in the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus of high-graded student assignments. Using Sketch Engine and corpus query language, we extracted a random sample of 2000 instances of bracketing in running text only. This subcorpus is composed of 500 instances from each of the four main disciplinary groupings (Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, Social Sciences) and contains instances from most of the BAWE assignment genres. The concordances were imported into a database table in FileMaker Pro. This database programme facilitates coding by limiting choices depending on previous selections and thus guiding the coder through the analytical steps. For the analysis of the data, it offers flexibility for grouping records and aggregating results on different levels.
The logico-semantic framework used in systemic functional linguistics to classify the relationships between clauses (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) served as our starting point to classify the relationships between bracketed text and cotext. This framework distinguishes two fundamental logico-semantic relationships: expansion, which ‘relates phenomena as being of the same order of experience’, and projection, which ‘relates phenomena of one order of experience (the processes of saying and thinking) to phenomena of a higher order (semiotic phenomena – what people say and think)’ (p. 443). The latter contains three subtypes: elaboration (‘one clause elaborates on the meaning of another by further specifying or describing it’) (p. 461), enhancement (‘one clause (or subcomplex) enhances the meaning of another by qualifying it) (p. 476) and extension (‘one clause extends the meaning of another by adding something new to it’) (p. 471).
This framework was refined and expanded through several stages of interrating and discussion in order to reflect our findings. We first analysed a random sample of 1000 instances from the whole BAWE corpus. With the resulting adapted classificatory framework we next independently analysed a quarter of our subcorpus of 2000 concordances. This led to further refinement of the framework and classificatory criteria. Finally, we each analyzed a different set of concordances from the disciplinary groupings. Disciplinary informants were consulted where needed.
Our analysis revealed four major logico-semantic relationships between the bracketed text and cotext: in addition to Halliday & Matthiessen’s (2014) projection (1) and expansion (elaboration (2), enhancement (3, 4), extension (5)), we identified bracketed text functioning as intratextual reference (6) and code (7). The few instances that could not be confidently classified were assigned to a ‘hard to classify’ category.
(1) However the anticipated number of children per woman in Europe and the USA is still near or above two (Bongaarts, 1999), showing that many are still having children.
(2) Many of these injures are healed fractures and breaks occurring around the torso (upper body).
(3) It is dated to the reign of Nectanebo II (360-343 BC).
(4) Acetanilide (4.78g, 35.4 mmol) was dissolved in cold, glacial acetic acid (25ml, 437.1 mmol)
(5) Parmenides decision to include a cosmology that he has already (apparently) proved to be flawed is an interesting one to say the least.
(6) This is called circular polarization (figure 5) and is the natural state of white light.
(7) Stronger field ligands such as (PPh 3) and (NCS) increase the splitting.
Projection was –perhaps not surprisingly- the most common relationship by far, although markedly less frequent in the Physical Sciences. Expansion was mainly achieved through elaboration, with restatements (2) and abbreviations predominating. Enhancement relationships were mostly temporal locations (3) or measurements (4). Extension was relatively rare (5). Intratextual references (6) took various forms, such as figures, appendices, equations, and line numbers for quoted text. Bracketed code was a marked feature of the Physical Sciences, occurring in formulae and enclosing symbols or abbreviations (7).
Overall, students’ use of bracketed text appeared to reflect disciplinary conventions and reflected the genre goals of assignments by demonstrating knowledge, understanding and appropriate source use. Contrary to expectations, instances where the bracketed text seemed superfluous or adversely affected coherence were rare. We conclude by discussing what these findings mean for academic writing instruction.
Reference
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2014). Halliday's introduction to functional grammar (4 ed.). Abingdon: Routledge.