earticle

영어

EMI (English as a Medium Instruction) classes have been expanding for all university fields with the increasing demand of the language ability to use academic English. In this line of demands, effective academic lectures with a special focus on Discourse Markers (DMs) have recently been researched as one of the important features for learners’ effective comprehension in a foreign language setting since the ability to use DMs naturalistically can signal learners’ potential development of interactional skills. In this paper, we investigate distributional characteristics of DMs found in general (TED talks) and academic lectures (MICASE) and provide insights to facilitate DMs for academic listening comprehension in higher education. Our findings show firstly that spoken lectures use a limited group of DMs (out of 120 items) whose lexical load is further localized to few items, such as “and, so, but.” Secondly, more interpersonal DMs are found in general lectures than in academic ones. Finally, certain interpersonal DMs seem to characterize a lecture style whether it is monologic or interactional. The findings reported in this paper have some pedagogical implications for English learners as well as lecturers designing EMI courses.