This paper addresses how the university lecture is evolving in response to new realities in international higher education driven by two important trends: innovative online instructional technologies and the rise of English Medium Instruction (EMI). Following a brief review of the lecture as the core instructional channel in universities, we offer a detailed overview of the new technology-driven lecture formats that are now available to learners worldwide. We then shift the focus to the role of EMI, with particular attention to understanding how both instructors and students view this relatively new approach to learning. This was accomplished through a systematic review of EMI-related literature available in scholarly databases. Findings showed that most research has focused on the language-related issues of learners, and little attention has been paid to the crucial issue of lecture comprehension, which is mainly caused by the low level of proficiency of students/instructors and domain-specific vocabulary. Moreover, studies have almost exclusively addressed face-to-face settings, indicating a need to expand EMI research to include online lecture settings that are increasingly frequent in international higher education. This paper contributes to the body of knowledge relating to new trends in how lectures are experienced and perceived in international educational settings.
Discussions sessions have not received much attention within the genre of conference presentations. In this paper, we present the theoretical framework that underlies the approach followed to analyse the multimodal expression of evaluation. Then, an example of the application of the study has been considered necessary to understand it. Corpus linguistics provided the indications to collect the corpus, annotate it and find the appropriate software to digitalise the relevant information for the study. Secondly, genre studies and conversational analysis gave the clues to establish a structure in the linguistic expressions found in the discussion sessions of paper presentations. Thirdly, systemic functional linguistics and pragmatics provided the basis for an evaluative scheme that could be applied to the academic discourse of the corpus, considering its multimodal nature. Fourthly, the tools to observe the non-verbal communication associated with evaluative language were found in multimodal discourse analysis studies. All together, the application of these variables led to an original study of discussion sessions, which deployed interesting results.
Evaluation in academic discourse has received considerable attention from researchers.Much of the work on evaluation has focused, however, on written genres, and less attention has been paid to how evaluation unfolds in spoken academic genres. In our present research, we are interested in disclosing how the interpersonal meaning of evaluation is expressed in the discussion session (hereafter DS) that follows conference paper presentations, since DS has already been defined as an "evaluative forum", when comparing its phraseological patterns with those of the presentation.Though the study of evaluation in spoken genres has been developed focusing exclusively on linguistic aspects, we assume the non-linguistic message that accompanies the linguistic message has an effect on the interpersonal meaning of the communication. Therefore, the aim of our research is to analyse the evaluative meaning conveyed in DSs that follow paper presentations in an applied linguistics conference. In the study, we draw on a social semiotic theory of language and of kinesics and paralanguage to frame a multimodal exploration of this interpersonal meaning. The comparative analysis between linguistic evaluation and multimodal evaluation reveals the significant contribution of non-linguistics features, which are commonly used to intensify linguistic evaluation or to express the speakers' attitude.Key words: discussion sessions, multimodal discourse analysis, conference paper presentations, evaluation, spoken academic discourse, discourse analysis IntroductionConference presentations are one of the first challenges a researcher has to face in his or her career, due to the complexity and inter-relationships between the speech events involved in it. This challenge becomes even more relevant for the non-native speaker when the presentation and the discussion session following it have to be done in 1 querolm@gmail.com 2 fortanet@uji.es English. One of the most complete studies of the genre of conference presentations is that of Räisänen (1999), which situates the conference paper presentation as part of a genre chain. This chain starts with the call for abstracts in a conference and ends either with the oral presentation during the conference or with the publication of the proceedings. This author (1999, p.69) defines conferences as "sites for publishing research results and an open ground for confrontation, discussion, and ratification of meaning". Conference presentations are meant to provide a forum to promote interaction between scholars. It is also important to note the complexity of conference discourse. Ventola (1999) coined the term 'semiotic spanning' to acknowledge the involvement of all modes of communication: written as well as spoken texts, visual materials and actions, among others; they all form a cohesive communication event. She points out that the relationship between all speech events, between the paper presentation and its source materials as well as between the presentation and the final version of the paper, as pub...
Broadly speaking, pragmatic competence can be defined as the ability to communicate appropriately in a social context. Learning how to use pragmatic features adequately in a particular setting is paramount for language users in order to achieve communicative purposes effectively. However, since communication involves the interplay of various semiotic modes such as spoken language, gestures, facial expression, head movement or gaze, researchers examining face-to-face interaction should go a step further to explore pragmatic competence from a multimodal perspective, which leads them to focus on multimodal pragmatics. The aim of this paper is to show how a multimodal approach can shed some light in the study of interlanguage pragmatics. We conducted a microanalysis of the performance of learners of English as an additional language at two different proficiency levels, who produced complaint sequences. Results suggest that spoken language is just one of the resources that learners use during the interaction, which is not always prevalent in all the moves in which the complaint is structured, the different roles, and the proficiency levels under examination. This confirms that the centrality of the linguistic mode in the analysis of this speech act will lead to a biased understanding of the interlanguage pragmatic competence.
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