Metadiscourse and Topic Introductions in an Academic Lecture: A Multimodal Insight

Abstract

This paper is part of a larger scale project where I explore the structure of academic lecture. The focus of the study here presented is to investigate the structure and organization of a university lecture through the introduction of new topics. One of the tools traditionally referred to as an organizer of discourse is metadiscourse (Crismore et al. 1993. Metadiscourse in persuasive writing: A study of texts written by American and Finnish university students. Written Communication, 10:39-71;Vande Kopple. 1985. Some exploratory discourse on metadiscourse. College Composition and Communication, 36(1):82-93). Although metadiscourse has been studied from a wide range of perspectives (Hyland. 2005. Metadiscourse: exploring interaction in writing. London, England: Continuum), these analyses have most of the time been conducted from a purely linguistic point of view and neither the speaker as a social actor nor metadiscourse as part of a multimodal interaction are taken into account. That being so, the aim of this study is to explore the role played by introducing topic metadiscourse (Ädel. 2010. Just to give you kind of a map of where we are going: a taxonomy of metadiscourse in spoken and written academic English. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 9 (2):69-97) from a multimodal perspective as it is being used within a lecture. In order to obtain a holistic account on how topics are introduced and the role of metadiscourse within the set of actions performed by the speaker in interaction, I make use of the tools provided by Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis (Norris. 2004. Analyzing multimodal interaction. A methodological framework. New York: Routledge; 2011. Indentity in (Inter)Action. Introducing multimodal interaction analysis. Göttingen: De Gruyter Mouton). The main analysis is carried out on two excerpts where new topics are being introduced which come from a lecture on African-American History belonging to Yale University's opencourseware. Through the production of verbal and multimodal transcripts, this paper demonstrates how the lecturer structures the class before he verbally utters metadiscursive expressions and the minor significance that these instances play in the lecturer's broad organization of the lecture, as metadiscourse is predominantly performed as a background task.

How EFL Teachers Engage Students: A Multimodal Analysis of Pedagogic Discourse During Classroom Lead-Ins

“…In a series of studies, Pirini (2014) explores shared attention/awareness in high school tutoring sessions and develops the notions of agency in intersubjectivity in tutoring sessions, among others ( Pirini, 2013 ). Within the field of education, Fernández-Pacheco (2016 , 2018 ) has recently adopted the concept of higher-level action to structure a series of vodcasts with the aim to analyzing which multimodal ensembles are more beneficial for students’ comprehension; Bernad-Mechó (2017) uses MIA to examine how topics are introduced through the use of introducing topic metadiscourse in a history lecture, and he then explores the complex process of lecture structuring by analyzing actions carried out by the lecturers ( Bernad-Mechó and Fortanet-Gómez, 2019 ).…”

Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis for the study of lectures: active and passive uses of metadiscourse

“…Ruiz-Garrido and Fortanet (forthcoming), describe sequences of simultaneous higher-level actions in English as a Means of Instruction lectures and explore how the actions of teaching English are foregrounded throughout the MIA for the study of lectures: active and passive uses of metadiscourse sessions in content lectures. In another study, Bernad-Mechó (2017) shows how lecturers prepare and structure fragments containing metadiscursive instances before they are actually uttered. He also shows how metadiscourse may sometimes be performed as a background task (against its main purpose).…”

İki̇nci̇/Yabanci Di̇l Olarak Türkçe Öğreti̇mi̇ Bağlaminda Üstsöylem Ve Akademi̇k Di̇nleme İli̇şki̇si̇

“…Ancak herhangi bir dilin öğretimi bağlamında bunun gerçekleştirilebilmesi, üniversite derslerinin özelliklerinin belirlenmesine bağlıdır. Bu doğrultuda dilbilimsel ve pedagojik önemi nedeniyle sözlü akademik söylemde, özellikle de üniversite derslerinde üstsöylem konusuna odaklanan pek çok araştırma bulunmaktadır (Ädel, 2010Aguilar, 2008;Alessandra, 2018;Bernad-Mechó, 2017;Bouziri, 2021;Bu, 2014;Deroey, 2015;Deroey ve Taverniers, 2012;Ibrahim ve Ahmad, 2020;Kahkesh ve Alipour, 2017;Klapalová, 2016;Lee ve Subtirelu, 2015;Mauranen, 2001;Nesi ve Basturkmen, 2006;Thompson, 2003). Bir başka çalışmada Dunkel ve Davis (1994) İngilizceyi anadili olarak konuşan ve ikinci dil olarak öğrenen katılımcılarla gerçekleştirdikleri araştırmada yine bir metnin sözbilimsel yapısına işaret eden ipuçları bulunan ve bulunmayan iki versiyonunu dinletmişlerdir.…”