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Abstract :
[en] In this talk, I show how lecturers verbally mark comparatively (un)important points in a large corpus of lectures (British Academic Spoken English corpus). This kind of discourse organization is thought to be beneficial to students’ note-taking, comprehension and recall.
We’ll see that lecturers use a wide variety of lexicogrammatical importance markers. Examples include ‘the point is’, ‘remember’, ‘I want to stress’, ‘anyway’, ‘I don’t know’ and ‘etcetera’. Some of the key findings I’ll be highlighting are that (1) students often need an understanding of the lecture genre and the cotext of the markers to be able to identify these discourse markers; that (2) studying only transcripts of spoken discourse without considering prosodic and multimodal features affects the validity of results; and that (3) to create English for Academic Purposes teaching materials we need to examine authentic lecture texts rather than rely on our intuitions.