Forms and communicative intent of metadiscourse in Malaysian and British undergraduate engineering lectures

Abstract

The growing influence of English as an academic language has led to various studies on aspects of academic lectures and the associated communicative needs to understand the nature of spoken academic language. This thesis examines how undergraduate engineering lecturers from two different institutional backgrounds guide their students in lectures. Using the linguistic framework of metadiscourse, defined as language expressions that explicitly guide listeners to speakers’ discourse intentions, this study focuses on metadiscoursal features employed by lecturers to guide students to understand lectures. The study used an approximately 85,000-word corpus of 12 hours from ten undergraduate engineering lectures recorded at a Malaysian and British university. Two layered analyses were done: at the macro-level, types of metadiscourse used were identified and taxonomized; at the micro-level, the lexico-grammatical features were further explored. Fourteen different types of metadiscourse performing six major discourse functions were identified and categorized into either content-organizing metadiscourse or content-transmitting metadiscourse. Lecturers from both institutions were found to use more content-organizing metadiscourse, reflecting their strong awareness of students’ needs for guide to information processing. While there were only minor differences in the use of metadiscourse among the two groups of lecturers, detailed micro analysis proved that there are variations in the way metadiscourse is manifested. The use of personal pronouns and micro markers showed many similarities, but the use of wh-cleft for strategic packaging of contents was strikingly different. Overall, cultural differences appeared minimal suggesting that the genre of academic lecture overrides all others. This study provides pedagogical perspectives into the language and linguistic expressions commonly found in engineering lectures, which could have impacts on teaching effective academic listening skills to undergraduates. The findings could also be beneficial for training beginning lecturers on delivering effective lectures.