MULTIMODAL STRUCTURE OF AN ONLINE LECTURE IN GERMAN STUDIES

Abstract

This article focuses on the multimodal structure of the online lecture in German Studies. In a pandemic context, the field of teaching at German universities has responded very quickly to the changes that have taken place in the way of communication. Although the academic lecture is a largely established form of scholarly interaction between professor and students, in distance learning it is being replaced by the online lecture. The various communicative elements (text and images in the presentation, as well as facial expressions and gestures accompanying the teacher’s speech) combine with each other to create a complex and multidimensional form of multimodality. The analysis in this article is based on the classification of online lectures and the model of this multimodal text in scientific Internet communication. The 25 German-language online lectures in linguistics and literary studies posted between 2020 and 2022 on the YouTube platform as well as on the websites of five German universities (e. g. lecture2go.uni-hamburg.de) were selected as research material. The choice of these lectures was caused by their availability on the Internet and their general topic (German Studies lectures). Discourse analysis as well as the method of systematization and classification were used to study the empirical material. Based on lecture transcripts, nonverbal characteristics and audiovisual components three main types of online lectures were identified: two-modal lectures with a predominance of audio and verbal communication channels, the most common three-modal online lectures, in which three main modes of information transmission interact at once: verbal, nonverbal and prosodic. The most complex combination of multimodal means is reflected in the last group of crossmodal lectures, where the lecturer simultaneously duplicates several communication channels in different ways to communicate more effectively with the student audience. To sum up, the analysis allowed us to answer the question, what is the peculiarity of multimodal structure in online lectures and what discursive-communicative strategies are used by German-speaking lecturers for constructing lecture discourse in the humanities field of study.