The language of English academic lectures: the case of field of study in highlighting importance
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Javad Zare [1] ; Zahra Keivanloo-Shahrestanaki [2]
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[1] Kosar University of Bojnord
Kosar University of Bojnord
Irán
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[2] Esfarayen University of Technology, Iran
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- Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 193, 2017, págs. 36-50
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
This paper explores importance marking in the academic lectures of different disciplines from a functional perspective. Drawing on a corpus-driven and discourse analytic approach, we extracted the importance markers of this study from the 160 English academic lectures of the BASE corpus, which are equally distributed in the four main academic disciplinary groups of arts and humanities, social studies, physical sciences, and life and medical sciences. First, it was observed that in highlighting importance, the discipline the speaker lectures in does not make a difference. Second, we observed that, irrespective of discipline, marking importance involves (1) pointing up the lecture, (2) expressing attitudinal evaluation according to a hierarchy of importance, (3) stating which topics need extensive coverage, (4) revealing what is likely to appear in the assessment, and (5) establishing interaction with the audience. Finally, ‘life and medical sciences’ lecturers were found to involve the students in the lecture more frequently than the lecturers of other disciplinary groups.
