Spoken Academic Discourse Research Articles

This deserves a brief mention

Abstract This article takes a doubly contrastive approach to spoken academic language. On the one hand, it explores genre differences between spoken and written academic English and French; on the other, it considers divergences between spoken academic discourse in the two languages. The corpora used for this purpose were purpose-built on the basis of YouTube video subtitles and other sources. The focus of attention is on keywords and key metadiscursive routines. The results suggest that, somewhat counterintuitively, the distance between academic speech and writing is smaller in French than it is in English, so that written routines can be more easily transferred to speech in French. French written and spoken discourse shows a greater degree of abstraction and self-referentiality than is the case in English. The article selectively illustrates that both French and English have a distinct set of spoken routines that are not used in writing; these need to be described and recorded in lexicographic resources to make them available for teachers and learners.

Functions of discourse micro-markers in spoken academic discourse in university setting

The present article aims to study the nature of spoken academic discourse in English in university setting and looks particularly at the role of discourse micro-markers in the organization of discourse of a lecturer. English is used as a medium of instruction by non-native academic personnel delivering soft science lectures to international students. The theory provides an overview of contemporary linguistics on discourse markers, outlining the definitions and their functional characteristics. The empirical part of the study is based on the analysis of a case study and the quantitative discourse analysis of a corpus of academic lectures available online. Discourse markers, that are most frequently used in spoken discourse of a lecturer, are studied and the use and the role of ‘so’, ‘now’, ‘OK’, ‘well’, ‘however’, ‘therefore’ and ‘all right’ is investigated. The results of the study describe the functions of discourse markers in spoken academic discourse and show how discourse micro-markers help in understanding the structure and the thematic development of the discourse. / Keywords: spoken academic discourse, university setting, English as a medium of instruction, discourse micro-markers

Directive Speech Acts in Academic Discourse: Ethnography of Communication from Gender Perspective in Higher Education

In spoken academic discourse, there are various directive speech acts forms and strategies both formal and informal. Based on the previous research with different focuses show that directive speech acts is one of speech acts types mostly used in daily conversation. The study of directive speech acts can also be found in classroom interaction as spoken academic discourse. The locutors’ and interlocutors’ expressions in spoken academic discourse are vary. Language variation involves direct and indirect strategies as well as literal and non-literal with small portion of local language use. The use of directive speech acts is affected by contextual socio-cultural factors within the conversation. The locutors sometimes use local language in conveying certain meaning to the interlocutors. The structure of dialogue, moreover, disallows the taking up of any position beyond the interlocutors from which they can be integrated into a larger totality.

Hedging Functions in Malaysian Doctoral Candidature Defense Sessions

The main aim of the present study is to build knowledge and understanding regarding the linguistic use of hedging by Malaysian speakers of English in academic spoken discourse and, more specifically, doctorate students presenting their thesis in the candidature defense. It looks not only to describe the specific nature of spoken academic hedging in Malaysia but to make inroads into identifying cultural factors that shape the way this hedging takes place. To realize these aims, a corpus-based investigative case study that used both quantitative and qualitative methods was used. Transcriptions of candidature defenses and semi-structured interviews regarding the nature of doctoral candidature defense were used to gather the data. The study found that national culture and the dynamic power distance in the educational culture surrounding the defense had an effect on the interpersonal hedging used by Malaysian speakers and the gap in hedging use between panel members and candidates. Disciplinary culture was also observed to influence hedging, specifically in referencing other work and testing theory to build an argument.

Language Regulation in English as a Lingua Franca: Focus on Academic Spoken Discourse

Language Regulation in English as a Lingua Franca: Focus on Academic Spoken Discourse

Hynninen, Niina.: Language regulation in English as a Lingua Franca: Focus on academic spoken discourse (Developments in English as a Lingua Franca)

Hynninen, Niina.: Language regulation in English as a Lingua Franca: Focus on academic spoken discourse (Developments in English as a Lingua Franca)

Review: Language regulation in English as a lingua franca: Focus on academic spoken discourse

Review: Language regulation in English as a lingua franca: Focus on academic spoken discourse

Discourse Elements in English Academic Discourse

This paper presents a study of discourse elements in spoken academic discourse – a lecture – and identifies their specificities. The study seeks to identify discourse elements in a wide body of research material; to study structural, functional and pragmatic features of discourse elements in terms of the implementation of the intentions of the speaker; to identify from the auditory analysis any prosodic features of discourse elements. Discourse elements are specifically defined from the point of view of their pragmatics: the intention of the speaker influences the language of the lecture and the way in which ideas are connected with words. The study on discourse elements included several stages. Research material consisted of audio recordings of Philology lectures to students studying English as a foreign language by three native speakers of English (General American standard of pronunciation), all of whom are professors at American colleges and universities. In total, 6 lectures were recorded; they formed a wide body of research material lasting 7 hours 33 minutes. This wide body of research material consisted of 2 306 linguistic facts, i.e. discourse elements in context. From these, 150 fragments containing various discourse elements were then chosen to form a narrow body of research material lasting 40 minutes. The phonetic research consisted of auditory analysis: dividing the fragments of discourses into syntagms; defining the boundaries of syntagms; specifying pitch movement, tone level and type of scale; using perceptual gradations of each prosodic feature, etc. Prosodic marking was carried out in accordance with the method of notation adopted at the Department of English Phonetics at Moscow State Teacher Training University (1997). Scaling enabled the classification and sorting of all the studied elements (discourse elements). The authors used the following types of scales: nominative, ordinal and interval. Structural analysis proved that discourse elements have different structure and may be one-word elements and predicative phrases S+P incorporated into the structure of the academic discourse. All discourse elements can be divided into two large groups – connecting elements (connectors) and pragmatic elements. The results of the research show that the studied elements differ structurally and can perform various functions. The functions of the discourse elements, their structure, intentions of the speaker and also their position in the phrase determine their prosodic features.

A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Approach to Humour in Conference Presentations: The Case of Autobiographic References

Abstract Humour plays an important role in human-to-human interaction and as so it has attracted the attention of researchers when analysing discourse (Kyratzis, 2003; Long & Graesser, 2009). Yet, these analyses have focused on conversation (Attardo et al., 2011, 2013), taking the point of view of semantics (Kyratzis, 2003), pragmatics and cognitive linguistics (Attardo et al., 2011, 2013). There are very few multimodal discourse analyses that focus on oral academic research genres in general and therefore on the role of humour in human-to-human interaction, in particular. To our knowledge, only Frobert-Adamo (2002) studies the use of humour in conference presentations. The aim of our research is to look into the humorous role of autobiographic references when used in plenary lectures in conferences in English and in Spanish. We have followed a Multimodal Discourse Analysis methodological framework on spoken academic discourse (Querol-Julian, 2011; Querol-Julian and Fortanet, 2012).

Turn openings in academic talk: where goals and roles intersect

This study uses Corpus Linguistic (CL) techniques to explore multiple turn openings in conjunction with comparative measures of turn-initial priming (the proportion of occurrences of a form that are turn-initial). Using a benchmark corpus of casual conversation as a point of comparison, six frequent items which have a particularly strong affinity with the turn-opening position – mhm, mm, yes, laughter, oh, no – are identified in a corpus of 250,000 words of spoken academic discourse as key indices of what makes this talk ‘academic’ in respect of role/goal-driven behaviour in interactionally asymmetrical encounters. The paper concludes by arguing that there should be a greater focus on tutor reflection on roles, goals and discourse as part of tutors’ professional development.

A corpus linguistic analysis of turn-openings in spoken academic discourse: Understanding discursive specialisation

AbstractRecent corpus linguistic (CL) investigations of academic discourse (both written and spoken) have tended to use easily excisable lexical items and/or grammatical forms to determine what is ‘special’ about the language of academia, and to compare and contrast particular disciplines or subjects with each other. This study takes a different approach to characterising academic talk – beginning with position rather than item. It is predicated on the well-established tenet that a considerable amount of discursive activity occurs in the extremely elastic and highly charged openings of turns, a position in the discourse that is the nexus of textual and interpersonal obligation, risk and potential. It therefore presents the results of the systematic analysis of the openings of 13,337 turns taken by tutors and students in a range of common pedagogic encounters in the humanities and social sciences. A set of ‘core’ turn-openers is then identified so that further detailed contextualised analysis can be carried out, which includes comparison with a benchmark corpus of casual conversation. The results suggest that academic speakers start their turns with recognisably conversational items that show subtle, but regularised, discursive specialisations related to their reflexive relationship with the academic encounters in which they are uttered and which they help to create.

Coherence relations in academic spoken discourse

According to Rhetorical Structure Theory, implicit propositions emerge from the combination of pieces of text which hang together. Implicit propositions have received various labels as coherence relations, discourse relations, rhetorical relations or relational propositions. When two portions of a text hold a relation, the addressee of the text may recognize the connection even without the presence of a formal sign as a conjunction or a discourse marker. In this paper we claim that some intrinsic spoken discourse phenomena like paraphrasing, repetition, correction and parenthetical insertion hold coherence relations with other portions of discourse and, thus, may be considered strategies for the construction of coherence. The analysis, based on academic spoken discourse (five university lectures in Brazilian Portuguese), shows that these phenomena are recurring and relevant for the study of spoken discourse.

Laughter in university lectures

This paper analyses laughter in spoken academic discourse, with the aim of discovering why lecturers provoke laughter in their lectures. A further purpose of the paper is to identify episodes in British data which may differ from those in other cultural contexts where other lecturing practices prevail, and thus to inform the design of study skills and staff development programmes for multilingual, multicultural, international university environments. Examination of the data indicates that the management of laughter in British lectures is strategic, and has a rhetorical purpose. Six main types of laughter episode are described: 'teasing', 'lecturer error', self-deprecation', 'black humour', disparagement' and 'word play'. Laughter results from references to shared ‘scripts’ for student and lecturer behaviour, evaluations of outsiders who do not form part of the lecturer-student in-group, and the lecturers' efforts to forge group intimacy. It serves as a means of maintaining social order, building rapport, relieving tension, and modelling academic and professional identities. Comparisons of laughter episodes across cultures, however, suggest that references to conventional British lecturer and student scripts would be out of place in many non-British contexts.

<i>What uh the Folks Who Did this Survey Found</i>: Expert Attribution in Spoken Academic Lectures

Academic writing has been said to display a tension between originality and humility to the community (Myers 1990; Berkenkotter & Huckin 1995; Hyland 1999). One of the fundamental ways in which this tension plays out is in references to previous research, or ‘attribution’. While recent research has emphasized the importance of attribution in academic writing—Hyland (1999), for example, found the average number of citations in research articles to be as high as 70 per 10,000 words—the role of attribution in spoken academic discourse is relatively uncharted territory. In this study of attribution in academic speech, transcripts of 30 large lectures from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE; Simpson et al. 1999) were analysed, totalling 250,000 words. References to expert sources in the academic domain were analysed, specifically third person attribution (including third person pronouns, proper names, and a selection of nouns), as in “um and, Marx points out that those are the tools that the proletariat are gonna use”. The research questions were: To what degree do lecturers situate intertextually the knowledge and facts they are presenting? Do the disciplinary differences found in written citation practices also occur in speech? How variable are the formal realizations of attribution in speech? Contrary to previous research findings (e.g. Biber 2006; Swales 2005), the study showed both that expert attribution is quite pervasive and that there is disciplinary variation in academic speech. The findings are compared to studies of attribution in academic writing (e.g. Hyland 1999; Tadros 1993), with the goal of contributing to current research on the commonalities that academic speech (lectures) exhibits with academic writing on one hand, and non-academic speech on the other.

"… It's Really Ultimately Very Cruel …": contrasting English intensifier collocations across EFL writing and academic spoken discourse

This paper investigates and contrasts recurrent intensifier collocations across a corpus of EFL writing - The International Corpus of Learner English - ICLE (Granger, 1993) and The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English - MICASE (Simpson et al., 2002). It seeks to show that such recurrent collocations are an important part of writers and speakers' linguistic repertoire and that they may provide a window onto their lexicon. On general grounds, the results indicate that there is a great predominance of boosters over maximizers and that a limited number of maximizers and boosters are used in recurrent combinations. The analysis further revealed that maximizers tend to intensify non-gradable words while boosters tend to intensify gradable ones and that EFL writers' overuse of intensifiers appears to be associated with colloquial style and an exaggerated tone that is often considered to be inappropriate in formal academic texts.

Engaged listenership in spoken academic discourse: the case of student–tutor meetings

This article uses a corpus of spoken English from an Irish university setting to examine how engaged listenership is signaled in meetings between tutors and graduate students. The various linguistic devices employed by both parties for this purpose are quantified and functionally analysed. The three strategies examined include minimal response tokens, for example, mm hm, mm, yeah, non-minimal response tokens e.g. really, right, fine, good, and simultaneous speech and interruptions. These items are found to differ quantitatively and functionally and are shown to be highly relevant for the effective functioning of students in such a spoken EAP context. Pedagogic implications are presented.

The British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus Project

Paul Thompson p.a.thompson@reading.ac.ukSLALS, Language Resource Centre, PO Box 241, TheUniversity of Reading, Reading RG6 6WBHilary Nesih.nesi@warwick.ac.ukCELTE, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7ALRunning time of project: Spring 1999–December 2003The primary aim of the project is to create a freely accessibleresource for research into spoken academic discourse. The EnglishLanguage Institute, Michigan University, has established an on-linecorpus (MICASE) representative of academic speech events in aNorth American university, and the present project (BASE) willconstitute a British counterpart to the Michigan corpus. A varietyof university speech events (lectures and seminars, in a range ofdisciplines, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level) arebeing recorded at two UK universities, then transcribed andencoded to form a searchable corpus. As of spring 2001, we haveover 130 lecture recordings, of which about 70 have beentranscribed. We also have about 20 video-recorded seminars, sevenof which have been transcribed.The corpus should provide a major resource for research intothe linguistic and rhetorical features of spoken academic discourse.One line of research that we will follow is an exploration of thelexis of academic lectures across the disciplines and we intend tocompile a Spoken Academic Word List to complement theAcademic Wordlist of Coxhead (1998), which was based on acorpus of written academic discourse.

The effect of discourse structuring devices on listener perceptions of coherence in non‐native university teacher's spoken discourse

ABSTRACT: This paper addresses some of the sources of communication difficulty in the academic context through a discourse analytic examination of videotaped teaching demonstrations by 18 Korean and Chinese teaching assistants. It has been suggested that the primary source of listener perceptions of disorganization in spoken academic discourse might be the overall order in which information is presented. This study, however, reveals that rhetorical organization was not the problem. Research on native speakers’ discourse in an academic environment has indicated that effective communicators use a number of devices to orient their listeners to the relative importance among ideas within the discourse, and simultaneously to convey the interrelationships among these ideas. In particular, we find extensive use of prosody. Native speakers also use a variety of syntactic constructions such as topicalization in order to focus the attention of the listener and show relative foregrounding and backgrounding. Use of these devices provides native‐speaker listeners with a set of cues which allow them to construct coherence. This study shows these cues were absent in the Chinese and Korean speakers. The main structuring devices were lexical repetition and parataxis. In effect, the Chinese and Korean speakers are constructing an undifferentiated, flat discourse structure within which the native‐speaker listener is unable to perceive the intended relationships among the ideas presented.