Interactive lecture discourse for university EFL students

Abstract

Interactive lectures play an important role in improving comprehension and in enhancing communicative competence in the English language for EFL university students taking content lecture courses. This article considers the interactive discourse in lectures of the English Studies Department at the University of Alicante, Spain. It describes an empirical study which set out to describe and compare textual and interpersonal discursive aspects (i.e., personal pronouns, discourse markers, questions and negotiation of meaning) of three non-interactive and three interactive lectures. The interactive lectures were found to be characterized by a greater amount of personal pronouns, elicitation markers, display and referential questions, as well as the presence of negotiation of meaning. The findings of the comparative analysis were used to promote interaction in originally non-interactive lectures. It was found that an increase in the use of the linguistic aspects analyzed were a product of interaction and not necessarily the cause of it.