Academic talk in American university classrooms: crossing the boundaries of oral‐literate discourse?

Abstract

“Is academic speech ‘more like’ casual conversation or academic writing?” [Swales, J. (2001). Metatalk in American academic talk. The cases of ‘point’ and ‘thing’. Journal of English Language, 29(1), p. 37]. Taking a corpus-based perspective to the analysis, this study compares the language of university classroom talk to academic prose and face-to-face conversation, positioning university classroom talk on the language continuum of speech and writing. More specifically, looking at a large number of linguistic features working together, I describe the language of 196 university class sessions (1.4 million words) collected at six universities across the United States. The analysis is based on Biber's multi-dimensional analytical framework [Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. New York: Cambridge University Press]. Overall, the results indicate that in these classrooms language features associated with both informational focus (as in academic prose) and involved discourse (as in face-to-face conversation) are equally present. Hence, this evidence-based research supports the argument that North American university classrooms exhibit language that can be treated as an interface on an oral–literate continuum.