Analyzing discourse in EMI courses from an ELF perspective

Abstract

Although characteristics of academic lectures in English-medium instruction (EMI) are well-documented within the framework of the functional and/or corpus-based approach, they have not been studied in terms of how they are affected by the classroom context; therefore, our study explores how similarly and/or differently instructors deliver their EMI lectures, considering the environment each instructor is put in. We video-recorded the lectures of three content professors for a total of about 180 minutes while observing and taking field notes of each class. We applied thematic analysis with no pre-determined framework and divided each instructor’s discourse into several categories in an inductive way. Our findings show that the instructors’ speech rate and their discourse organization varied greatly depending on the overall context, and that no general discourse patterns were observed. We suggest that the characteristics of EMI lectures be identified not only linguistically but also holistically, considering the classroom context.