The Language of Business Studies Lectures: A corpus-assisted analysis (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

The Language of Business Studies Lectures

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS) Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and its Companion Series. The New Series offers a selection of high quality work covering the full richness of Pragmatics as an interdisciplinary field, within language sciences.

Editor Andreas H. Jucker

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University of Southern Denmark

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Jef Verschueren

Susan C. Herring

Emanuel A. Schegloff

Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp

Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp

Editorial Board Shoshana Blum-Kulka Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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Université de Poitiers

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Deborah Schiffrin

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Sachiko Ide

Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

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Claudia de Lemos

Teun A. van Dijk

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Richard J. Watts

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University College London

Bruce Fraser

Boston University University of Trondheim University of California at Los Angeles

University of Leeds Japan Women’s University

University of Lyon 2 University of Campinas, Brazil University of Trieste

Paul Osamu Takahara

University of California at Santa Barbara Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona University of Berne

Volume 157 The Language of Business Studies Lectures. A corpus-assisted analysis Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli

The Language of Business Studies Lectures A corpus-assisted analysis

Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli University of Florence

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Camiciottoli, Belinda Crawford. The language of business studies lectures : a corpus-assisted analysis / Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli. p. cm. -- (Pragmatics & beyond, ISSN 0922-842X ; new ser., v. 157) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Academic language--Data processing. 2. Business education--Data processing. 3. Lectures and lecturing--Data processing. I. Title. P120.A24C36   2007 401'.41--dc22 2007003849 ISBN 978-90-272-5400-9 (hb : alk. paper)

© 2007 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents Preface

ix

List of acronyms and abbreviations

xi

List of tables and figures chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Rationale for the study  1 1.2 The university lecture: pros and cons  2 1.3 Aims of the study  4 1.4 Target readership  6 1.5 Overview of the book  6 chapter 2 Background to the study: The merger of discourses 2.1 Introduction  9 2.2 Spoken discourse  9 2.2.1 The linguistic/discursive approach  10 2.2.2 The interactional approach  13 2.3 Academic discourse  15 2.4 Disciplinary discourse: the field of economics  21 2.5 Professional discourse: the world of business  25 2.6 A conceptual framework for analyzing business studies lectures  28 chapter 3 The business studies lecture corpus: Design, collection and analysis 3.1 Introduction  31 3.2 Corpus design  31 3.3 Collecting the data  34 3.4 Transcribing the data  36 3.5 Methodology: an integrated approach  39 3.5.1 Quantitative and qualitative analysis  39

xiii

1

9

31



The Language of Business Studies Lectures

3.5.2 3.5.3 3.5.4

Comparative analysis  41 Behavioural observation  42 Participant feedback  43

chapter 4 Speaking to the audience 4.1 Introduction  45 4.2 Speech rate  46 4.3 Lecture style  49 4.3.1 Discourse dysfluencies  52 4.3.2 Reduced forms  54 4.4 Lexical informality  57 4.4.1 Vagueness  58 4.4.2 Idioms  62 4.5 Syntactic informality  65 4.5.1 Ellipsis  66 4.5.2 Non-restrictive which-clauses  68 4.6 Lexical density  73 4.7 Summary of findings  76 chapter 5 Interacting with the learners 5.1 Introduction  79 5.2 Discourse structuring  79 5.2.1 Lecture macrostructure  80 5.2.2 Macromarkers  84 5.2.3 Micromarkers  89 5.3 Evaluation  94 5.3.1 Relevance markers  96 5.3.2 Affect markers  100 5.4 Lecturer-audience interaction  104 5.4.1 Questions  105 5.4.2 Comprehension checks  108 5.4.3 Dialogic episodes  109 5.5 Audience responsiveness and feedback  113 5.6 Summary of findings  115

45

79



Table of contents 

chapter 6 Teaching the discipline and the profession 6.1 Introduction  119 6.2 Disciplinary/professional orientations: a descriptive profile  120 6.3 Real vs. hypothetical worlds  122 6.4 Argumentation  125 6.5 Specialized lexis  127 6.5.1 Global analysis  128 6.5.2 Keyword analysis  131 6.5.3 Connections to Business English  135 6.5.4 Compounds and buzzwords  138 6.6 Metaphors  142 6.6.1 Global analysis  144 6.6.2 Comparative analysis  147 6.7 Summary of findings  148

119

chapter 7 151 Beyond speaking: Multimodal aspects 7.1 Introduction  151 7.2 The visual mode  153 7.2.1 The analytical framework  154 7.2.2 The analysis  155 7.2.2.1 Visual typologies in the BSLC  158 7.2.2.2 Comparative analysis  163 7.3 The nonverbal mode  165 7.3.1 Methodology in nonverbal studies  168 7.3.2 The analysis  169 7.3.2.1 Interpersonal episodes  170 7.3.2.2 Nonverbal behaviours of the lecturers  171 7.3.2.3 A microanalysis of one lecturer’s nonverbal behaviours  177 7.4 Summary of findings  181 chapter 8 Final remarks 183 8.1 Introduction  183 8.2 Aims, findings, pedagogical implications and research prospects  183 8.3 Methodological insights  188 8.4 Business studies lectures and interdiscursivity revisited  189

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

References

193

Appendix A – Transcript samples from the twelve lectures of the BSLC

213

Appendix B – Specialized lexis in the BSLC ranked according to frequency

227

Name index

231

Subject index

235

Preface This book represents the culmination of several years of work focusing on the discourse of business studies, one of the most dynamic and popular disciplines in institutes of higher education worldwide. The research began in 2000 under the auspices of an Italian inter-university English-language project entitled Small Corpora and Genre Analysis: Academic Discourse in the Humanities and Social Sciences. As a member of the research team of the University of Florence, I was involved in the creation and investigation of a corpus of lectures given by business academics. Unlike corpora of written discourse which lend themselves well to distinct collection and analysis phases, spoken corpora are typically investigated ‘along the way’ in the form of preliminary or limited-scope studies. For this reason, some of the material in this volume expands on previous publications. In Chapter 5, the analyses of discourse markers and relevance markers build on articles that appeared in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes (Crawford Camiciottoli 2004a) and the volume Academic Discourse: New Insights into Evaluation (Crawford Camiciottoli 2004b), respectively. In Chapter 6, the study of domain-specific metaphors extends the findings of an article published in the volume Evaluation in Oral and Written Academic Discourse (Crawford Camiciottoli 2004c). In Chapter 7, the investigation of non-verbal behaviour further develops a study that appeared in the volume Academic Discourse, Genre and Small Corpora (Crawford Camiciottoli 2004d). In the summer of 2002, I had an extremely rewarding experience at the English Language Institute of the University of Michigan as a Morley Scholar. It was then that the idea for this book began to take form. I am particularly grateful to John Swales for his advice and guidance towards realizing this goal when it was still in its infant stages. At that time, I also had the opportunity to read Alan Partington’s (1998) Patterns and Meanings: Using Corpora for Language Research and Teaching which inspired the core methodology adopted in this study. Since then and throughout this project, I have benefited from the support of several colleagues and friends. I would especially like to thank Gabriella Del Lungo, Inmaculada Fortanet, Polly Walsh and, again, John Swales and Alan Partington, for all taking the time to read drafts of chapters and provide insightful comments. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions allowed me to incorporate new and broadened perspectives into the final version.



The Language of Business Studies Lectures

I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to all the professors who agreed to participate in this research. By authorizing the recording of their live lectures or by kindly sending their lectures directly to me, they made this study possible. Finally, I wish to thank my husband, Adriano, for his unfailing encouragement and patience throughout this long endeavour.

List of acronyms and abbreviations BASE BEC BSLC BSLCtag BSTM BSTMtag CANBEC CANCODE CLAWS EAP EBM EFL ESL ESP L1 L2 MDLC MDLCtag MICASE NNS NRWC NS NS/BR NS/US NVC SIE SMEs T2K-SWAL

British Academic Spoken English corpus Business English Corpus Business Studies Lecture Corpus Tagged 20,000-word sample from the Business Studies Lecture Corpus Business Studies Text Materials corpus Tagged 20,000-word sample from the Business Studies Text Materials Corpus Cambridge and Nottingham Business English Corpus Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System English for Academic Purposes European Business Module (guest lecture series) English as a Foreign Language English as a Second Language English for Specific Purposes First Language Second Language Multi-Disciplinary Lecture Corpus Tagged 20,000-word sample from the Multi-Disciplinary Lecture Corpus Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English Non-native speaker Non-restrictive which-clauses Native speaker Native speaker of British English Native speaker of American English Nonverbal communication Sentence-initial ellipsis Small and medium sized enterprises TOEFL 2002 Spoken and Written Academic Language

List of tables and figures

chapter 2 Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2

The two-way discursive link between the professional world and the business studies classroom The interdiscursive nature of business studies lectures

27 29

chapter 3 Table 3.1

The Business Studies Lecture Corpus (BSLC)

Table 3.2

Mark-up for the BSLC

34 38

Speech rate distribution in the BSLC Distribution of average words per minute in the BSLC Stylistic analysis of the BSLC Discourse dysfluencies in BSLC vs. MDLC Reduced forms in BSLC vs. MDLC Vague expressions in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Idioms in BSLC vs. MDLC Sentence-initial ellipsis (SIE) in BSLC vs. MDLC Non-restrictive which-clauses (NRWCs) in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Lexical density and lexical variation in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Dispersion plot of pause fillers in the BSLC Sample of concordance output of false starts in the BSLC Dispersion plot of false starts in the BSLC Dispersion plot of reduced forms in the BSLC Sample of concordance output of gonna in the BSLC Sample of concordance output of kind of in the BSLC Sample of concordance output of NRWCs in the BSLC

47 48 50 54 55 59 64 67 70 74 52 53 53 56 56 61 71

Example, instance and case in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Verbs used in macromarker patterns in the BSLC Macromarkers in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Micromarkers in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM

82 86 87 90

chapter 4 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4 Table 4.5 Table 4.6 Table 4.7 Table 4.8 Table 4.9 Table 4.10 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 4.5 Figure 4.6 Figure 4.7 chapter 5 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures Table 5.5 Table 5.6 Table 5.7 Table 5.8 Table 5.9 Table 5.10 Table 5.11 Table 5.12 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4 Figure 5.5

Co-occurrence of micromarkers in the BSLC Relevance markers in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Affect markers in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Questions in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Comprehension checks in BSLC vs. MDLC Dialogic episodes in BSLC vs. MDLC Audience responsiveness in six BSLC lectures Lecturer-audience interaction and levels of audience responsiveness in six BSLC lectures Dispersion plot of macromarkers in the BSLC Dispersion plot of relevance markers in the BSLC Dispersion plot of affect markers good and bad in the BSLC Dispersion plot of questions in the BSLC Sample of concordance output of comprehension check okay? in the BSLC

93 98 102 106 108 110 113 114 88 100 104 107 109

chapter 6 Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 6.4 Table 6.5 Table 6.6 Table 6.7 Table 6.8 Table 6.9 Table 6.10 Table 6.11 Table 6.12 Table 6.13 Table 6.14 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 6.3

Disciplinary overview of the BSLC Hypotheticality in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Meta-argumentative devices in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Top sixty lemmas of specialized lexis in the BSLC Content-specific three-word lexical bundles in the BSLC Top thirty keywords in BSLC vs. MDLC Keywords in BSLC vs. BSTM Common specialized lexis: BSLC vs. BEC keywords Common specialized lexis: BSLC vs. CANBEC keywords Word compounds in BSLC vs. BSTM Business buzzwords in the BSLC Lexical items grouped by root metaphor category Discipline-specific metaphors in the BSLC Discipline-specific metaphors in the BSTM Hard-soft cline of business studies Dispersion plot of the lemma firm in the BSLC Dispersion plot of the lemma produce in the BSLC

121 124 126 129 131 132 134 136 137 140 142 144 145 147 120 130 130

A framework for analyzing visuals in academic speech (Rowley-Jolivet 2002) Overview of visuals in the BSLC Distribution of visual typologies in the BSLC Visual typologies in BSLC vs. BSTM

155

chapter 7 Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 7.3 Table 7.4

156 158 164



List of tables and figures  Table 7.5 Table 7.6 Table 7.7 Table 7.8 Table 7.9 Table 7.10 Table 7.11 Figure 7.1 Figure 7.2 Figure 7.3 Figure 7.4 Figure 7.5 Figure 7.6 Figure 7.7

Types of interpersonal episodes in the five lectures Distribution of interpersonal episodes in the five lectures Sample of performance indicator grid Interpersonal episodes and gesturing/gaze in the five lectures Qualitative comparison of gesturing and gaze in the five lectures Qualitative comparison of body posture, proximity and spatial movement in the five lectures A multimodal transcription of a lecture video sequence Scriptural visual in the BSLC (Lecture 12) Scriptural visual in the BSLC (Lecture 2) Numerical visual in the BSLC (Lecture 1) Graphical visual in the BSLC (Lecture 2) Graphical visual in the BSLC (Lecture 11) Figurative visual in the BSLC (Lecture 11) Figurative visual in the BSLC (Lecture 11)

178 159 159 160 161 161 162 162

The interdiscursive nature of business studies lectures (revisited)

190

170 171 172 173 174 176

chapter 8 Figure 8.1

chapter 1

Introduction Business Studies has been characterized as an education for business closely allied to the needs of employers. (Macfarlane 1997: 19)

1.1 Rationale for the study Among the myriad of discourse analyses undertaken over the years, one might wonder why an entire book should be dedicated to something so specific as business studies lectures. Beyond the goal of providing a description of a particular type of language-in-use, there is also a very practical reason. In today’s globalized world where job competition is ever keener, there is a growing demand for academic credentials in business studies. These qualifications often represent the key to breaking into the job market as a newcomer, but also to advancing one’s career as an experienced business professional. Moreover, the interdisciplinary nature of business studies programmes allows learners to acquire knowledge and skills that spill over into a number of fields beyond the traditional core of economics, accounting, management and marketing, giving them the broader multi-disciplinary expertise that is now a highly desirable asset in the dynamic world of business. In fact, most business studies programmes incorporate topics from other disciplines, such as law, communication and information technology.1 Thus, ‘business studies’ can be seen as an umbrella term to refer to the variety of courses that are offered at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels to develop business professionals. As a consequence of these changing trends in the workplace, business education has moved to the forefront of academics. In the UK, with approximately 13% of the total enrolments at university in 2004–2005, business studies ranked at the top of all other academic divisions (UK Higher Education Statistics Agency). According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, since 1970 in the US there has been a constant increase in the number of business studies degrees conferred at both the Bachelor and Master levels. In 2003–2004, they counted close to 22% of all Bachelor’s degrees and 25% of all Master’s degrees. At my own home institution, the University of Florence, according to official statistics for the aca-



The Language of Business Studies Lectures

demic year 2005–2006, the Business Administration degree ranked second for number of enrolments among all 106 undergraduate degree programmes offered by the university. Business studies programmes attract learners from a range of life experiences and cultural backgrounds, and thus with different requirements. Novices at the beginning of their academic careers need to be introduced to basic disciplinary concepts and strongly guided in their learning. Other learners may already have professional experience, as is often the case of students enrolled in MBA or distance learning programmes, and therefore require advanced content, together with more autonomous and flexible learning formats. Yet one factor in particular has had a strong influence on this growing demand: the dominant role of English as the lingua franca in goal-oriented international business negotiations and transactions (Louhiala-Salminen 1996; Nickerson 1999; Candlin and Gotti 2004). This has led to a dramatic increase in the number of non-native speakers desiring to attend business studies courses conducted in English. However, in order to achieve academic success, these students must overcome many well-known difficulties, among which is understanding content lectures in a foreign language. This continues to be an obstacle for many international students even at advanced proficiency levels (Olsen and Huckin 1990; Thompson 1994; Mulligan and Kirkpatrick 2000), but it is one they must surmount; lectures have always been the backbone of university education. For a better understanding of this issue, I will now briefly discuss university lectures, how they have evolved and where they may be headed in the future.

1.2 The university lecture: pros and cons As a teaching methodology, we know that the lecture dates back to Aristotle’s time.2 Today lectures typically take place within the framework of institutionalized education and have been broadly characterized as a type of pedagogic discourse, i.e., the specialized communicative practices of education that are concerned with the transmission and acquisition of knowledge. According to Bernstein (1986), operating within pedagogic discourse are instructional discourse, or the specific knowledge and skills to be transmitted and acquired, but also regulative discourse, which establishes the order and social relations necessary for transmission. This is reflected in university lectures where specific competencies are transmitted (the instructional plane) by an authority figure who maintains and legitimizes the goals of the teaching activity (the regulative plane). Thus, university lectures have been seen as a channel used by an expert to impart information for the benefit of a student audience (Brown 1978). More recently, lectures have been described as an



Chapter 1.  Introduction

expository classroom genre (Fortanet 2005), which similarly takes into account both their purpose and the relationship between the lecturer and the audience.3 Lectures conforming to this model have traditionally dominated university instruction. However, in recent years there have been some questions raised about their effectiveness, stemming from a rejection of the view that learning takes place by acquiring and storing information in an essentially passive way. As pointed out by Gold et al. (1991), learning occurs in other ways, such as discussion, reflection and hands-on experience. Taking a stronger position, Lave and Wenger (1991) maintain that effective learning is not achieved through the transmission of knowledge, but through processes of social co-participation that transform newcomers into members of a community of practice, as occurs in apprenticeship. Using empirical data, Bligh (2000) shows that while lectures are effective for disseminating factual information, they are less so for promoting critical thinking skills and developing attitudes compared to the discussion method. Furthermore, there is evidence that lectures may not even be completely successful in transmitting information since they are typically much longer than the average attention span of audiences, which dwindles away significantly after about twenty to thirty minutes (Bligh 2000). The idea of individual learning styles has also been brought into the discussion. While auditory learners can benefit from the lecture method, students with other learning styles (e.g., visual or kinesthetic) are at a disadvantage (Johnson et al. 1991). Yet from the practical and tactical points of view, lectures do offer some advantages, particularly when compared to other less structured and more interactive teaching methods, such as seminars or tutorials. With classes of a hundred or more students, which is unfortunately often the reality of today’s academic world, lectures are basically the only feasible teaching method. They lend themselves well to course pre-planning with detailed syllabuses to structure content, allowing teachers to cover material efficiently and adequately. At the same time, lectures can help students to streamline learning since they can take in content much more quickly than if they had to find it for themselves. Moreover, once a lecture has been prepared, it can be rather easily updated and re-used. These are all plausible reasons why lectures rank high among the preferred teaching methods of instructors, but also of students, as shown by studies carried out in both the US and Europe (Knapper and Cropley 1991; Bourdieu and Passeron 1994). Therefore, in spite of the criticisms weighed against them, lectures in universities are probably here to stay. A compromising response to the critics of lectures can be found in the literature that suggests various ways to improve them. Some of these refer to techniques for structuring lecture content: previews, intermediate progress reports, final summaries, and effective use of visual aids (Gold et al. 1991). With particular reference to the latter, recent technological advances offer us new options. For example, soft-





The Language of Business Studies Lectures

ware that was originally developed for business presentations (e.g., Microsoft PowerpointTM) can be used to structure information and present it to students during lectures in an extremely efficient way. In addition, lecturers can now use interactive whiteboards (e.g., MimioBoard™) to electronically capture, save and share whiteboard notes, diagrams and drawings. Another way to assist students in assimilating content during lectures is to use reinforcement strategies. Repetition of key concepts and important points, or short review tasks or quizzes incorporated directly into the lecture can be helpful. The heightened awareness of the relational dimension of learning (Lave and Wenger 1991) has triggered a trend towards more interactive lectures where students take part in buzz groups, controlled discussion and brainstorming sessions (Ferris and Tagg 1996; Nesi 2001; Morell 2004). In addition, various interpersonal devices can be used as a way to engage listeners as much as possible. These include questions (Bamford 2005), asides (Zorzi 1999; Walsh and Crawford Camiciottoli 2001) and inclusive personal pronouns (Rounds 1987; Fortanet 2004a). Many of the strategies to improve the effectiveness of lectures have been devised with essentially L1 audiences in mind as a way to arouse and maintain interest, while promoting higher order learning at the same time. L2 lecture audiences have the same needs, but compounded by limited English language proficiency.

1.3 Aims of the study In response to both the growing popularity of business studies and the lecture comprehension problems of international business students, this book offers an in-depth look at the language of business studies lectures. Using an authentic corpus, I aim to shed light on the linguistic, academic, disciplinary and professional features of the lectures, and how these are influenced by the settings and the participants. This is important for a number of reasons linked to both learning and teaching. First of all, several linguistic variables associated with the spoken mode can have an impact on lecture comprehension (Flowerdew 1994). Understanding to what extent speech-like features characterize the lectures is particularly valuable for L2 learning contexts where students may have little experience with the ‘nonstandard’ lexical, syntactic and phonological forms often found in live speech. It is equally important to distinguish the features that reflect the academic nature of the lectures, particularly those that encode lecturer-audience interaction. Knowing how the lecturers interact with students to facilitate learning is useful to reinforce and promote the dialogic approach to teaching, which encourages two-way critical reflection in the classroom (Freire 1970).



Chapter 1.  Introduction

Business studies lectures represent a nexus between the academy and the profession. In this sense, they may be viewed as a sort of situated learning experience (Lave and Wenger 1991), going beyond the mere transmission of factual information to stress the relational and social aspects of learning within a given community of practice. In fact, the ultimate goal of business studies lectures is to induct novices into the practices of the business community. However, in order to become legitimate members, they must master its language. Therefore, identifying key disciplinary and professional features is a step towards helping them achieve this goal. The above discussion suggests that the language of business studies lectures is multi-faceted, representing the merger of different types of discourse: spoken, academic, disciplinary and professional. This is the broad hypothesis underpinning my study. At first glance this may seem to be a matter of simple common sense, but upon further reflection, it becomes clear why it is not. In fact, in order to verify this hypothesis, we must show precisely how this merger occurs by first identifying, analyzing and interpreting specific features that draw from the different discourses, and then by exploring how they interpenetrate to create this particular variety of socially-situated language. Towards this aim, I seek to answer the following research questions: 1. How does the language of business studies lectures reflect the spoken mode? 2. How do the lecturers use language to interact with audiences to facilitate learning? 3. How do the lectures reflect the disciplinary and professional orientations of the community of practice? 4. How do the lecturers exploit the visual and gestural modes for instructional purposes? 5. How do the spoken, academic, disciplinary and professional dimensions converge in the lectures? To address all of these questions, it is necessary to adopt a new methodological approach that brings together different research traditions. Using language corpora makes it possible to accurately identify, quantify and compare discrete features. Follow-up qualitative discourse analysis is useful for greater insight into the empirical data obtained. Observational methods are needed to study extra-linguistic features. Ethnographically-inspired techniques (e.g., interviews, field methods) achieve ‘thick’ or explanatory descriptions that consider the social processes and contexts of language use (Bhatia 2002; Hyland and Hamp-Lyons 2002). This study will integrate elements from all these methodologies to provide a uniquely panoramic and interpretive account of business studies lectures.





The Language of Business Studies Lectures

1.4 Target readership Because this book deals with a type of discourse that incorporates key areas of language study and domains of usage, it will hopefully be of interest to several audiences. These range from professionals who study and teach language to newcomers who are just coming into contact with the community of practice. Therefore, the usefulness of the findings can be viewed from various perspectives. From the descriptive perspective, the study contributes to the growing body of linguistic evidence available to discourse analysts working in the area of spoken language in general, as well as those who focus more specifically on academic speech. In addition, the disciplinary and professional dimensions of the study should prove interesting for analysts of economics and business discourse, respectively. From the methodological perspective, the study can provide insights for linguists who work with corpora, particularly small specialized corpora that are well suited to combining computerized textual processing with forms of qualitative analysis. From the teaching perspective, EAP practitioners should be interested in the findings that can be applied towards designing more effective lecture comprehension teaching materials, while ESP practitioners working in the area of English for Business Studies will find useful discipline-related notions. Business studies academics who work with international audiences and desire to enhance the effectiveness of their lectures can discover more about the language used in this particular setting. Finally, from the learning perspective, the students who make up the audiences of business studies lectures can draw some benefits from this book. Of course, international business students are clearly not interested in theoretical aspects of language or detailed linguistic analyses. However, the wealth of examples provided throughout the book can be exploited by English language teachers to introduce these students to the authentic language and communicative practices they will experience both during lectures and in the world of business. This can have a positive influence not only on their present academic needs, but also on their future careers.

1.5 Overview of the book Following this introduction, Chapter 2 reviews the literature relevant to the study, serving both as the interpretive backdrop for the rest of the book and as the basis for its conceptual framework. Chapter 3 provides a close-up view of the data on which the study is based: the Business Studies Lecture Corpus, consisting of 12 recorded and transcribed lectures (109,449 words). It includes a discussion of corpus design and the collection/transcription of spoken data from both general and



Chapter 1.  Introduction

local perspectives. This chapter also describes the methodological approach, which draws heavily on techniques from corpus linguistics but, as previously mentioned, also integrates other types of analysis. The following three chapters are dedicated to the linguistic analysis of the corpus. They correspond to the broad categories of discourse associated with business studies lectures and focus on selected features involved in successful comprehension in L2 settings. Chapter 4 investigates aspects linked to the spoken mode. These include speech rate and lecture style, as well as some specific lexico-grammatical devices (e.g., vague expressions, idioms, ellipsis). Chapters 5 deals with the academic dimension, with particular emphasis on interactional strategies used to facilitate learning. I examine discourse patterns and markers used by the lecturers to guide the listeners through the content, in addition to other forms of interaction that contribute to consolidating the lecturer-audience relationship (e.g., questions, evaluative markers and dialogic episodes). The disciplinary and professional nature of the corpus is addressed in Chapter 6 through an analysis of some domain-specific strategies for constructing and negotiating knowledge, including hypotheticality, argumentation and real-world connections. The impact of discipline is further investigated through the analysis of specialized lexis and metaphorical expressions, while the influence of the profession is studied through the identification of features that reveal ties with the business world. In addition, all three chapters comprise analyses that compare business studies lectures with lectures from other disciplines and with written business studies texts in order to identify their most distinctive features. Chapter 7 looks at the use of visual aids in the lectures and explores an aspect that has traditionally received little attention in language studies: nonverbal cues. This is probably due to the notable difficulties involved in systematically collecting, analyzing and interpreting this elusive type of data. However, by investigating some of the nonverbal signals in video recordings of lectures, I attempt to enhance our understanding of this much neglected issue. Chapter 8 returns to the original aims of the study and reviews the overall findings, with particular reference to pedagogical implications and directions for further research. I also discuss some methodological insights that have emerged along the way. The book concludes with a reflection on the notion of interdiscursivity, explaining how the different discourses have been shown to merge together within the business studies lectures.

Notes 1.

For more on the rise of interdisciplinary studies, see Bhatia (2002).





The Language of Business Studies Lectures 2. For an interesting study showing how modern day lectures have maintained many of the same communicative strategies of antiquity, see Giménez Moreno (1998). 3. Alongside these scholarly descriptions of lectures, I would like to offer (tongue-in-cheek) an ‘alternative’ one found on the Internet. Lecture: The process by which the notes of the lecturer become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either (Retrieved 07/05/05 from http://www.learningandteaching.info/teaching/lectures.htm).

chapter 2

Background to the study The merger of discourses Discourses have no discrete boundaries because people are always, in history, creating new Discourses, changing old ones, and contesting and pushing the boundaries of Discourses. (Gee 1999: 21)

2.1 Introduction This chapter will provide an overview of the literature relating to several broad discourse areas that come into play in business studies lectures: spoken, academic, disciplinary and professional, with the latter two referring to economics and business discourse, respectively. Because each of these constitutes a very wide field of research in its own right, this review cannot be completely exhaustive. However, by tracing some of the most significant research carried out, I hope to provide sufficient background to properly situate the analysis to come in the rest of the book.

2.2 Spoken discourse Although written discourse has traditionally received more attention in language study, over the years a number of scholars have concentrated on spoken language. This research can be grouped into essentially two major streams: one that focuses more on the distinctive linguistic and discursive features of speech, and the other that places more emphasis on the interactional, contextual and social aspects of face-to-face communication. Business studies lectures are delivered through the spoken channel, but are also constrained by the context of interaction and the social relations of the participants. Therefore, both approaches need to be considered in their analysis. In the following two paragraphs, I will review the developments and trends in these approaches, as illustrated through selected works of particular relevance to this study.



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2.2.1 The linguistic/discursive approach The early studies of this type are typically based on small amounts of data and tend to describe speech by way of comparison to writing. Chafe (1985) concludes that the real time and face-to-face nature of spoken language is reflected in linguistic features denoting involvement and fragmentation. These include first and second person pronouns, mental processes, hedging, emphatic particles, flow-monitoring devices, and dysfluencies, defined by Chafe (1985: 113) as “false starts, afterthoughts, repetitions, corrections and fumblings”, which are usually not perceived as deficiencies and thus do not interfere with communication. Similarly, Biber et al. (1999: 1048) speak of “normal dysfluency”.1 By contrast, formal written discourse shows more evidence of detachment and integration (e.g., nominalization, attributive adjectives, participle forms, relative clauses) linked to remoteness from interlocutors and more time available for editing. Tannen (1982) traces a similar picture by characterizing spoken discourse as interpersonal with an emphasis on involvement and internal evaluation, compared to written discourse which stresses content and external evaluation. Ochs (1979a) points out the unplanned nature of most spoken discourse which often features more referent deletion, demonstratives, active voice, implicit coordination, present tense and left-dislocation as compared to more planned written discourse. Similarly, Givón (1979) notes that spoken language makes frequent use of the topic-comment structure, while the grammatical subject-predicate structure is more characteristic of written language. Halliday (1985, 1989) describes spoken language as a process, having a dynamic structure characterized by complex sentence structures and grammatical intricacy, as well as a preference for verbs and clauses. On the other hand, he considers written discourse more of a static product which features relatively simple grammatical structures, but high lexical content, and thus favouring nouns and nominal groups. He pays particular attention to a text’s “lexical density”, measured by the number of lexical items per clause (Halliday 1989: 63–67), pointing out that spoken discourse tends to have a much lower lexical density than written discourse. Stubbs (1996: 64) nicely sums up this ‘polarized’ view: “[…] much written language is standard, formal, planned, edited, public and non-interactive, whereas spoken language is typically casual, spontaneous, private and face-to-face.” However, even in relatively early studies, both Chafe (1985: 122) and Halliday (1989: 46) warned against the danger of considering spoken and written language as a dichotomy. For example, news broadcasts may have characteristics that are normally associated with formal written prose (e.g., few dysfluencies and high lexical density), while a novel may be purposely written in a conversational style with hesitation fillers, low lexical density and grammatical intricacy. In addition, technological advances have led to the emergence of new modes of communication



Chapter 2.  Background to the study: The merger of discourses

that mix elements of the traditional spoken and written channels. A case in point is the e-mail, which incorporates aspects of spoken language (e.g., informality, marked ellipsis, context-bound deixis, lack of punctuation) into a written code (Louhiala-Salminen 2002; Argondizzo and Plastina 2004). Therefore, in order to have a more accurate picture, it is necessary to consider other aspects of speech beyond the channel of transmission. Much work of this type has been based on the functional approach, inspired by Firth’s (1957: 182) linguistic view of “context of situation” and further developed within the tradition of Hallidayan systemic grammar. Halliday’s (1978) concept of register describes language in its immediate context of use according to three fundamental variables: field (the content or informational focus of the discourse), tenor (the roles of the participants in terms of status and relationship) and mode (the way in which the language is transmitted and structured). These variables are then encoded at three metafunctional levels, respectively: ideational (realized through transitivity patterns), interpersonal (realized through mood and modality) and textual (realized through thematic choices). If situational variables are associated with register in the systemic-functional approach, culturally-influenced social actions are instead linked to genre, defined by Eggins and Martin (1997: 236) as: “[…] different ways of using language to achieve different culturally-established tasks, and texts of different genres are texts which are achieving different purposes in the culture.” Eggins (1994: 35) sees the relationship between genre and register in terms of “genre potential”, which she describes as “the possible configurations of register variables allowed within a given a culture at a given time.” Thus, according to systemic linguists, a lecture is a genre realized through the pedagogic register, featuring the informational content of the lecture as field, the lecturer-audience relationship as tenor and face-to-face spoken language as mode. I will return to the concept of genre in the next section dedicated to academic discourse, where it will take on a broader meaning. The systemic theoretical framework has laid the groundwork for studies of spoken language within the tradition of discourse analysis. In Sinclair and Coulthard’s (1975) pioneering study, classroom discourse was structurally described as a series of three-part exchanges (Initiation-Response-Feedback) which contain various functional moves (e.g., framing, focusing, answering). This model has inspired the analysis of speech in a variety of settings, e.g., doctor-patient interviews (Coulthard 1981), service encounters (Ventola 1987), everyday conversation (Francis and Hunston (1992), business meetings (Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris 1995) and university discussion classes (Basturkmen 2003). Of particular relevance is an early study by Coulthard and Montgomery (1981) which identified a series of move-like units (e.g., informing, commenting, glossing) in lecture extracts, thus showing how this approach can be adapted to describe discourse which is not overtly dialogic, but is nonetheless strongly oriented towards an audience

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and therefore interactively designed. Because breaking down an entire text into functional moves requires detailed qualitative analysis, it is feasible only with relatively limited amounts of spoken data, typically extracts or short samples of speech. However, move analysis still remains a valid option for analysts of spoken discourse as shown by the more recent studies indicated above. The advent of computerized corpora, or large amounts of electronically stored language, and the ensuing consolidation of corpus linguistics as a branch of the discipline, has created opportunities for much larger-scale studies of spoken language.2 Thanks to specially designed software, it is now possible to process vast amounts of text and generate empirical evidence of their particular linguistic and discursive features, and thus more systematically describe language and investigate its variation. When comparing the Lund spoken corpus with the LOB (Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen) written corpus in terms of lexical density, Stubbs (1996) found that, on average, spoken texts showed lower lexical density than written texts, in line with Halliday’s (1989) earlier observations. This tendency is supported by the large-scale work of Biber et al. (1999) based on the Longman Spoken and Written English Corpus of over forty million words. They investigated a range of lexical, grammatical, syntactic and functional features across four core registers: conversation, fiction, news texts and academic prose. In comparison with the written registers, conversation is characterized by low lexical density, more verbs than nouns, marked use of personal pronouns, dysfluencies and informal discourse markers. Further insights about the nature of spoken language have come from research based on the CANCODE (Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English) corpus, a five-million word collection of spontaneous conversation, comprising four interactional settings (i.e., transactional, professional, pedagogic and social). The corpus was developed at the University of Nottingham under a project funded and copyrighted by Cambridge University Press. Starting from the premise that spoken language is best investigated by looking at authentic everyday speech, CANCODE has spawned numerous studies highlighting important distinguishing features that have been largely neglected in standard pedagogic grammars traditionally based on written language. Among these are vague language (Carter and McCarthy 1997; Carter 1998), ellipsis, marked forms of reported speech and idioms (McCarthy 1998), hyperbole (McCarthy and Carter 2004) and non-restrictive which-clauses (Tao and McCarthy 2001). Using this evidence from the CANCODE corpus, McCarthy (1998: 47) convincingly argues that “Spoken language has its own grammar and lexicon, which although coinciding in most cases with the written language, differ in crucial areas that correspond to the goals and relations of the interactants and particular settings.” For this reason, McCarthy (1998) advocates a much higher status of spoken language in applied linguistics in general and



Chapter 2.  Background to the study: The merger of discourses

second language pedagogy in particular, as the above-mentioned features can clearly be problematic for L2 learners. On the other hand, corpus-based research has also confirmed that when varieties of spoken language beyond everyday conversation are considered, differences between the spoken and written mode become less distinct. Stubbs (1996) found that in terms of lexical density, spoken radio commentary was more similar to written fiction than to conversation. Biber (1988) notes that variation between speech and writing is necessarily influenced by the particular situational and functional variables involved. His widely acclaimed technique of multi-dimensional analysis (Biber et al. 1998) provides empirical evidence of variation among spoken and written registers. This methodology is based on the multivariate statistical analysis of texts to determine the co-occurrence of specific linguistic features which reflect five major underlying textual dimensions: informational vs. involved production, narrative vs. non-narrative discourse, elaborated vs. situation-dependent reference, overt expression of argumentation and impersonal vs. non-impersonal style (Biber et al. 1998: 62). Again comparing the Lund spoken corpus with the LOB written corpus, Biber’s findings showed that, compared to face-to-face conversation, prepared speech is more informational in nature and that broadcast speech is markedly less narrative. Thus, these spoken registers actually have more in common with written registers such as academic prose and official documents. Another interesting facet of the less than net distinction between spoken and written language has been recognized by Gunnarsson (1998). She stresses the need to integrate studies of text and speech, as the two are frequently not separate events, but instead represent a process that combines written and spoken components into an intertextual chain, thereby supporting Bakhtin’s (1986: 69) affirmation “any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances”. For example, a lecture may be derived from previously written notes, but also incorporate other types of written texts (e.g., handouts and slides). In this way, lectures would be part of a “genre chain” (Swales 2004a: 18), where a given genre is the product of a chronological series of antecedent genres. 2.2.2 The interactional approach The interactional dimension of speech has been the focus of sociolinguistic research, which emphasizes the interrelationship between language and social structure. Important insights have come from the theoretical work of the sociologist Goffman (1981: 137), who sees speech in terms of a “participation framework” in which all those involved manifest a certain stance towards utterances well beyond the traditional distinction of speaker vs. hearer. He further articulates the status of hearers into addressed recipient, unaddressed recipient or bystander, and distin-

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guishes different speaker production formats that include “animator” (the person who physically produces the speech), “author” (the person who authors the speech) and “principal” (the person or organization who endorse the content of the speech) (Goffman 1981: 167). Thus, speakers are seen as assuming an alignment or “footing” from which they projects themselves, which may at times shift to project a different aspect of self (Goffman 1981: 172). In this way, meaning is constantly being re-situated as speech unfolds. Goffman recognizes the triple role of lecturers as principal, author and animator all in the same person who assumes an authorial expert status, i.e., the “textual” self (Goffman 1981: 173). However, this status can change when lecturers shift footing to a more personal self, for example when using parenthetical remarks to digress from the lecture topic. Levinson (1988: 163) later expanded Goffman’s categories into “participant roles” which account for a wider range of role configurations found on both the production and reception ends of communication. He further elaborated the model from a linguistic perspective providing evidence of the grammatical realization of participant roles through deixis (person, time, spatial and social), evidentials and minor sentence types (e.g., imprecatives, exclamations, hortatives). This has led to a number of studies on various types of spoken language, among which can be cited courtroom trials (Matoesian 1999), television news narratives (Lombardo and Piazza 2001) and business meetings (Poncini 2002). The participation framework also offers insights about the nature of interactive discourse in classroom settings. In her analysis of university seminars, Anderson (1999) found that professors signalled their status as indirect recipients of student presentations through introductory frames and lack of acknowledgement tokens, thus orienting the discourse towards fellow students as the primary recipients. Another major line of interactionally-oriented research can be recognized in the work of conversation analysts within the ethnomethodological tradition. Using naturally-occurring spoken exchanges, the ground-breaking studies in this field revealed the sequential organization of utterances through mechanisms such as turn-taking (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974), adjacency pairs (Schegloff and Sacks 1973) and repair (Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks 1977). Such distinctive features act to structure social interaction during ongoing conversation. In this way, the interactional context dynamically evolves with each utterance, which can thus be seen as both “context-shaped” and “context-renewing” (Drew and Heritage 1992: 18). The conversation analytic approach has also been applied to discourse in institutional settings where, unlike mundane conversation, interaction is conditioned by the goal-oriented nature of the talk and the professional/organizational identities of the participants, e.g., news interviews (Greatbatch 1988), medical consultations (Heath 1992) and service encounters (Gavioli 1997). In classroom interaction, McHoul (1990) found that in repair sequences, high school



Chapter 2.  Background to the study: The merger of discourses

teachers systematically clued students towards self-correction of errors. Koshik (2002) observed a similar strategy among teachers in a university-level L2 setting who elicited self-correction through incomplete repetition of students’ immediately preceding phrases. Such behaviours clearly reflect their professional identities and responsibilities. As a methodological framework conversation analysis is, of course, inherently linked to overtly dialogic discourse. However, it can be useful to shed more light on the interactional aspects of today’s lectures. In fact, in recent years there has been a move towards more interactive lectures (Ferris and Tagg 1996; Morell 2004) in which lecturers and students engage in direct exchanges in order to promote mutual reflection on topics and issues of learning. This approach recalls Freire’s (1970) theory of dialogical education, a method used to teach illiterate peasants and empower them to transform the oppressive societies in which they live. Yet this idea is equally relevant to any educational setting. Through dialogic encounters, learners develop the ability to critically perceive realities and then act upon them. This section has highlighted the linguistic, discursive and interactional insights about spoken language that have emerged over the years. Although these constitute an important foundation for analyzing business studies lectures, for a more complete picture we need to know more about the context in which they are produced. This leads us into the following discussion of discourse that takes place in academic settings.

2.3 Academic discourse As an initial approach to academic discourse, we might refer to Biber et al.’s (1999: 5) idea of registers as “situationally-defined varieties of language”. Thus, academic discourse might be seen as a register of written and spoken language linked to a situation which, broadly speaking, entails the transmission and acquisition of knowledge. Yet this interpretation appears overly simplistic as it does not take into sufficient account the relational factors that inevitably come into play. For this reason, it is more useful to return to and expand on the notion of genre. Bakhtin’s essay The Problem of Speech Genres first emphasized the idea of language as a product of social relations and not of isolated minds. Thus, speech genres are “determined by the specific nature of the given sphere of communication, semantic (thematic) considerations, the concrete situation of the speech communication, the personal composition of its participants, and so on” (Bakhtin 1986: 78) and develop into “relatively stable types” (Bakhtin 1986: 60). Because this conceptualization of genre embraces both the interpersonal and conventional aspects of texts, it provides greater insight into the nature of aca-

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demic discourse which involves differing social relationships among participants and well-established text types. For instance, research articles and conference presentations are typical of expert-to-expert communication, just as textbooks and lectures are of expert-to-novice communication. In the latter case, there is an asymmetrical relationship between participants similar to what we find in institutional discourse, where interaction is “primarily accomplished through the exchange between professional and lay persons” (Drew and Heritage 1992: 3). Yet participant relationships may be somewhat blurred (e.g., dissertation defences might be classified as ‘expert to neo-expert’) and the purpose of the communication (which may be likened to Bakhtin’s “concrete situation” quoted above) varies considerably. Typical aims of instructional academic discourse would be to impart knowledge, teach skills and practices, induct learners into discourse communities, promote critical thinking and encourage a positive attitude towards learning – all of which would come under a pedagogic umbrella. Research-oriented academic discourse may instead have very different aims, such as contributing new knowledge in a field, promoting one’s own academic standing, obtaining funding for research and gate-keeping for the discourse community. At the same time, it is important to recognize a certain degree of overlapping in roles and purposes. Academics are both instructors and researchers, and they may produce texts having more than one purpose. For example, a textbook can aim to transmit new concepts to learners, to convince peers of its worth (both intellectual and commercial) and, particularly in the case of advanced textbooks, to divulge new research findings (Swales 1995).3 Thus, this multi-faceted nature is perhaps best captured by Swales’ definition of genre as [...] a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the discourse community and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains the choice of content and style. (1990a: 58)

Building on variation studies, systemic functional grammar, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, he shows how genres can be recognized by their recurring structural patterns and rhetorical styles which are determined by their communicative purpose. The Swalesian concept of genre has had an enormous impact on studies of academic discourse, generating a plethora of studies on an ever-increasing variety of genres found in the academic world. It has also had far-reaching implications in the analysis of discourse in non-academic settings: legal (Bhatia 1993), business (Akar and Louhiala-Salminen 1999), engineering consultancy (Dudley-Evans 2000) and politics (Trosborg 2000) – to mention just a few. This accumulation of scholarly work has recently led to a ‘revisitation’ of the concept,



Chapter 2.  Background to the study: The merger of discourses 

where genres are seen as evolving and becoming “repurposed” according to changing social trends (Swales 2004a: 72). From this expanded perspective, genre analysis will no doubt continue to offer many more insights well into the future. Due to the elevated number of genre-based studies, a complete review is clearly not feasible. However, I would like to mention some important research that will attest to the broad applicability of this approach, looking first at studies of written academic discourse. Beginning with Swales’ (1990a) own seminal study on research articles, this particular genre has continued to receive much attention (Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995; Paltridge 1997; Samraj 2002). The genre approach has been extended to other written research-process genres, such as book reviews (Motta-Roth 1995), review articles (Diani 2004) and PhD theses (Bunton 2002), but also to texts that do not come into the public eye or, “occluded genres” (Swales 1996: 45). Some examples are grant proposals (Connor and Mauranen 1999), manuscript submission letters (Okamura and Shaw 2000) and dissertation acknowledgements (Hyland 2004). Written genres linked to instructional settings, such as textbooks (Love 2002) and undergraduate student writing (Kusel 1992; Bloor 1996) have also been illuminated by this approach. On the whole, genre analysis yields not only descriptive insights, but also has important pedagogical implications. The goal of increasing students’ awareness of the generic and rhetorical structure of a range of texts has become a well-consolidated teaching methodology which is particularly suited to EAP/ESP contexts (Dudley-Evans and St. John 1998). Genre analysis has also been applied in studies of spoken academic discourse, both instruction and research-oriented. Thompson (1994) analyzed the rhetorical functions of introductions to lectures and found that in terms of communicative purpose, they seemed to have more in common with textbooks than with research articles. Shalom (1993) concluded that while plenary lecture discussions demonstrated the features of a well-established research genre, poster session discussions were instead not yet clearly defined. Weissberg’s (1993) study of graduate student seminar presentations revealed an affinity with the depersonalized style of written scientific texts, with relatively few features of extemporaneous speech. In his analysis of PhD dissertation defences, Swales (2004a) proposed a four-part structure incorporating several optional sub-elements to account for the considerable variation found in the data he surveyed. Aguilar’s (2004) investigation of the move structure of peer seminars highlights their hybrid nature, sharing some features with lectures, conference presentations and written research articles, but also having an important status as a genre in their own right for the informal dissemination of scientific knowledge. Differences between conference presentations and their written article counterparts have also been addressed. Thompson (2002) found that the personalized narrative passages detected in presentations had been removed from the article write-up of the talk. Rowley-Jolivet and Carter-Thomas

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(2005) observed marked differences in the structuring of information between conference presentations and their corresponding articles in the published proceedings. These studies illustrate how genre analysis can reveal the distinctive characteristics of spoken academic genres, what they have in common with other genres and how both instruction and research may overlap within academic discourse communities. In the next few paragraphs, I will turn to other methodological frameworks applied to spoken academic discourse. Some studies have been ethnographicallyinspired, going beyond situational and linguistic aspects to include the roles, values, assumptions and behaviours of participants (Flowerdew 2002). This type of research relies on the triangulation of data sources and collection methods such as direct observation, interviews with participants, focus group discussions, surveys and biographical histories. Although they are localized in nature and findings are not broadly generalizable, ethnographic studies can provide useful indications to enhance the learning experience. Tracy (1997) investigated weekly departmental colloquia over a two-year period in which both faculty and graduate students participated. She produced recommendations to promote the colloquia as an occasion for successful intellectual discussion. In EAP/ESP contexts, some ethnographic work has aimed at improving lecture comprehension. A long-term study with Chinese learners at an English-medium university revealed a series of key linguistic and socio-cultural features of second language lectures in this setting (Flowerdew and Miller 1995; Flowerdew and Miller 1996; Miller 2002). Working from the idea that lectures are a fundamental component of the culture of learning in universities, Benson (1994) identified some sociolinguistic features that have particularly useful applications in the preparation of L2 learners for listening to content lectures. From an interactional sociolinguistic perspective, Dyer and Keller-Cohen (2000) found that university professors use narratives of personal experience embedded within lectures to construct both their identities as competent experts, but also as ordinary people who at times fumble with the problems of everyday life. In this way, they succeed in striking a balance between authority and egalitarianism, a desirable trait within current North American intellectual culture. Walsh’s (2004a) analysis of first and second person pronouns in university lectures showed how speakers shift footing during guest lectures, apparently as an attempt to facilitate their audience of non-native speakers. Other studies have used techniques from conversation analysis to gain a better understanding of the more dialogic types of academic speech. Guthrie (1997) observed that patterns of the acknowledgement tokens “Okay” and “Mmhmm” occurring in academic advising sessions seemed to reinforce the institutional roles of advisors as holders/dispensers of information vs. students as seekers/receivers of



Chapter 2.  Background to the study: The merger of discourses 

information. Farr (2003) found that response tokens, interruptions and speaker overlaps in student-tutor interaction appear to function as signals of engaged listenership whereby both parties seek to express their interest in the ongoing discussion. In recent years, a growing number of studies have incorporated the methodologies of corpus linguistics thanks to the development of large corpora of academic talk at universities. The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) (Simpson et al. 1999) has been compiled at the English Language Institute of the University of Michigan. It consists of 1.8 million words and can be freely accessed online. Designed to represent the variety of speech that typically occurs on a university campus, it includes a range of events classified as primarily monologic (e.g., lectures, seminars, discussion sections, student presentations), dialogic (e.g., advising sessions, tutorials, study groups, meetings) as well as some mixed modes (e.g., dissertation defences, colloquia, lab sections).4 The public availability of such a significant quantity of data has begun to generate a considerable amount of research. Several studies have looked at selected features across the entire MICASE corpus. For example, Swales and Malczewski (2001: 147) analyzed “new episode flags” used by speakers to signal a shift in the discourse. So, okay and now were the most common items and often clustered together. Mauranen (2002) found high frequencies of positive evaluative and discourse-reflexive expressions (e.g., that’s a good question) which appear to play a key role in socializing learners into the academic community. A later study (Mauranen 2004) focused on hedges (e.g., just, a little bit), determining that they frequently co-occur with metadiscursive expressions as a strategy to mitigate the speakers’ controlling role in the discourse. Simpson and Mendis’ (2003) study of idioms showed that there were no clear patterns of usage linked either to the degree of interactivity of the event or to the academic discipline in question. Idioms thus appear to be most influenced by individual speaking styles. Looking instead at selected features in specific genres of academic speech, Swales (2004a) found that MICASE PhD defences showed signs of informality in the form of casual transitional phrases and frequent episodes of laughter, seeming to promote a friendly and collaborative atmosphere in what is typically perceived by candidates as a very stressful event. MICASE colloquia were also found to incorporate elements of informality, such as conversational style, asides, personal narratives and humour. However, in contrast to PhD defences which contained frequent interruptions of the candidate for questions or comments by committee members, colloquia speakers monopolized the floor until the question and answer sessions at the end. Although there is still much to be done with the wealth of opportunities provided by this corpus, some interesting general indications have already emerged. Swales and Burke (2003) note that academic speech appears to have much in com-

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mon with everyday conversation in terms of phonological reductions, dysfluencies and vague language. Moreover, when compared to the challenging nature of written academic discourse, Mauranen (2002) found the corpus to have a generalized consensus-building orientation. A similar project was undertaken at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff to compile the TOEFL 2002 Spoken and Written Academic Language (T2KSWAL) Corpus. This is a 2.7 million word corpus of the language of university life in four American universities, including both spoken (e.g., classroom teaching, study groups, office hours, service encounters) and written (e.g., textbooks, course syllabuses, brochures, catalogues) genres. A new multi-dimensional analysis performed on this corpus identified four major dimensions of variation: oral vs. literate discourse, procedural vs. content-focused discourse, narrative orientation and academic stance. In line with studies based on the MICASE corpus, Biber (2003) found that academic speaking is rather different from academic writing. Even classroom teaching, which might be expected to be much more informational and pre-planned in nature, turned out to be positioned toward the oral end of the oral/ literate cline. This was also supported by Csomay’s (2000) work concentrating on classroom discourse from this corpus, which showed an analogous picture. Research on academic discourse has also seen a dovetailing of methodological approaches. Swales (1998) draws on discourse analysis, ethnography, case studies and biographies, coining the term textography, to investigate the writing of several individuals in three separate academic units in order to identify their distinctive discursive practices: a Computing Resource Center with texts of a brief and mainly instructional nature produced for internal staff and users, a Herbarium where texts were highly descriptive and technical, reflecting the key genres of the discipline (flora and monographs), and an English Language Institute whose members generated a range of pedagogic, research and institutional genres. In a very comprehensive work on a variety of written academic genres (i.e., textbooks, research articles, book reviews, abstracts, and scientific letters) across disciplines, Hyland (2000) combines a genre-based approach, quantitative analysis and participant verification within a social-constructionist framework. He found that writers use a wide range of linguistic resources (e.g., reporting verbs, evaluation, metadiscourse, hedges and boosters) strategically in order to interact and position themselves with readers and the discourse community. Henry and Roseberry (2001) integrate traditional manual inspection with computerized text analysis to identify the generic structure of a small corpus of introductions to guest lectures. They determined a recurring pattern of moves which ranged from getting the audience’s attention to introducing the speaker and previewing the talk, to inviting the speaker to begin. The trend towards combining different methodologies in discourse analysis (Harris and Bargiela-Chiappini



Chapter 2.  Background to the study: The merger of discourses 

1997; Biber et al. 2004) offers even more promising prospects for the future as knowledge accumulates and technology progresses. The numerous studies having a vast range of focuses and methodological approaches described in this section have greatly enhanced our understanding of how language is used in the academic world. We have seen how spoken academic discourse is characterized by marked variation according to genre, but still have not considered how content fits into the picture. In their survey of research in EAP over the past two decades, Hyland and Hamp-Lyons (2002: 6) comment, “It is important for EAP to build on this research and establish practices that challenge the widelyheld assumption that academic conventions are universal and independent of particular disciplines […].” In other words, academic discourse cannot be divorced from its content. The role of discipline will be the focus of the next section.

2.4 Disciplinary discourse: the field of economics The theoretical foundation of business studies can be identified in the discipline of economics which is in fact a core subject of the curriculum. However, before reviewing some insights from the literature on the language of economics, it is useful to first reflect on the more general notion of specialized discourse for a broader understanding of how domains of usage can influence language variation. According to Gotti, specialized discourse is: […] the specialist use of language in contexts which are typical of a specialized community stretching across the academic, the professional, the technical and the occupational areas of knowledge and practice. This perspective stresses the type of user and the domain of use, as well as the special application of language in the setting. (2003: 24)

This view highlights the multi-faceted nature of specialized discourse, which reflects not only a given epistemological framework, but also certain social and contextual features. Thus, we can find a specialist use of language in academic settings, where specificity is determined by subject matter together with communicative purpose. Specialists in a given disciplinary field communicate with peers for professional reasons, but they may also interact with non-specialists for instructional purposes. Disciplinary variation in academic discourse has become increasingly evident from comparative studies. Several have dealt with written genres. For example, Holmes (1997) observed differences in the move structure of discussion sections of research articles in history, sociology and political science. Chang and Swales (1999) found disciplinary variation in the use of informal grammatical features in journal articles, with writers of philosophy using the highest level of informality

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and writers of statistics the least. Hyland (2000) identified differences in how a range of textual and interpersonal devices are used in several academic genres across disciplines, often finding alignments in hard (pure and applied sciences) vs. soft (social sciences and humanities) fields of knowledge. He also found variation in self-mention forms in research articles, apparently linked to disciplinary conventions regulating the level of authorial presence (Hyland 2001). In a comparative study of stance in theses in politics/international relations vs. material sciences, Charles (2003) detected variation in the choice of metalinguistic nouns, seemingly related to research practices and epistemological aspects of the disciplines. Motta-Roth (1995) noted that book reviews adopt different criteria for positive evaluation of works according to consensual ideals of disciplines: recency of citations in chemistry, appeals to readership in linguistics and effective use of mathematical models in economics. However, even in the relatively close disciplines of wildlife behaviour, conservation biology and resource policy, Samraj (2004) observed noticeable differences in the move structure of research article introductions and student-produced research papers. Similarly, Swales (1998) identified differences in the rhetorical impact of new species accounts in ornithology compared to botany, even though they are both biological sciences. There has generally been less research on disciplinary variation in spoken academic genres. In an early study, Young (1990) found discipline-related differences among the three lectures she analyzed. More verbal exemplification was found in a sociology lecture compared to engineering and economics lectures, which instead made more use of numerical computations and models, respectively. This variation would seem to be determined by different ways of transmitting knowledge among discourse communities. Dudley-Evans (1994) showed that the problem-solution organizational framework of two highway engineering lectures was instead not used in two plant biology lectures, which were more theoretical and research-oriented in line with the concerns of this particular discipline. However, due to the availability of large corpora of academic speech, we are now beginning to see more studies dedicated to disciplinary variation. Using the MICASE corpus, Poos and Simpson (2002) found that two forms of hedging (sort of and kind of) were markedly more frequent in the humanities compared to the physical sciences, possibly linked to the richer vocabulary and more interpretive nature of content associated with the humanities. In the T2K-SWAL corpus, some disciplinary differences in classroom teaching have been found as well. Using multi-dimensional analysis, Biber (2003) found that the more technical disciplines of engineering and business were procedure-oriented compared to the humanities and sciences which were content-focused. In the same corpus, Csomay (2004) observed differences in linguistic features and discourse patterning between lectures in humanities and social sciences compared to natural sciences and engineering.



Chapter 2.  Background to the study: The merger of discourses 

Generally speaking, all the above studies confirm the need to consider the practices of the disciplinary community in question in order to more accurately interpret variation. Therefore, to steer the discussion towards the focus of this study, I will now turn to the literature on economics discourse that has shed light on the key linguistic and discursive features of this domain of usage. The role of language in the transmission of knowledge in economics has often been a source of conflicting positions within the discipline itself (Samuels 1990; Backhouse, Dudley-Evans and Henderson 1993; Bondi 1999). Although economics is a social science involving human behaviour which cannot be predicted or measured with the degree of accuracy associated with the pure sciences, it has traditionally been presented within a positivist framework using the instruments and language of the scientific method. However, this position has been attacked by some major figures of the discipline, who give more credence to persuasive techniques than to empirical evidence to put forth their ideas. They are thus keenly aware of the special role of language in economics. In fact, Keynes (1936/1973: 470) tells us that “In economics you cannot convict your opponent of error – you can only convince him of it.” In his highly influential work The Rhetoric of Economics, McCloskey (1985: 8) completely rejects the positivist approach, or what he calls “scientism”. He maintains that economists, despite their emphasis on mathematical models and statistical techniques, actually rely on human reasoning to communicate their ideas and proposes a range of rhetorical devices (e.g., metaphor, analogy and appeals to authority) from the literary tradition used for this purpose. In the same vein, Samuels (1990) affirms that economists choose different types of language (e.g., everyday speech, technical terminology, mathematical models) which is influenced by the type of knowledge they wish to propose. He speaks of a flexible approach to knowledge claims based on alternative credentials, with meaning in economics texts being jointly constructed by the writer and the reader who interprets it. Similarly, Klamer (1990: 130) supports a “rhetorical perspective” on texts. Although the anti-positivist stance has been far from uncontroversial, Henderson and Dudley-Evans aptly comment: With the publication of McCloskey’s work the opportunity for common ground between economists and linguists was established. What is needed now is for linguists to be alerted to the potential of this common ground and the opportunities it provides for further ‘conversation’, to borrow a powerful term from McCloskey […] (1990: 3)

And indeed since then the McCloskeyan school of thought has stimulated considerable interest in economics discourse and a great deal of work has been produced. Some studies have dealt with the linguistic and discursive aspects of the widely-



The Language of Business Studies Lectures

read masterworks of economic theory: Keynes’ General Theory (Gotti 1990), Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (Bazerman 1993) and Marshall’s Elements of Economics (Del Lungo Camiciotti 2005). Other studies have instead focused on the distinctive characteristics of key written economics genres used for the transmission and dissemination of knowledge: prediction in scholarly writing (Merlini 1983) and financial news articles (Walsh 2004b), schematic structure in research articles (Dudley-Evans and Henderson 1990) and forecasts (Bloor and Pindi 1990), metaphor in research articles (Bamford 1998) and evaluation in economic/financial news stories (Del Lungo Camiciotti 1996). Economics textbooks have had an important role in shaping knowledge in the discipline and introducing novices into the community of practice. Not by chance, several of the most widely textbooks were authored by illustrious economists such as Paul Samuelson, William Nordhaus and Richard Lipsey. For this reason, textbooks have been the object of several discourse studies. Mason’s (1990) and Henderson and Hewings’ (1990) analyses found a strong presence of abstract language (e.g., nominalization, the passive, metaphors, personification), thus explaining some the difficulties encountered by learners. In his analysis of rhetorical strategies used to discuss the paradox of value across six introductory economics textbooks, Swales (1993) found that writers often exploited the topic to promote the predominance of modern microeconomic analytical methods and mainstream economic thought. Bondi (1999) provides a very comprehensive study that compares written economics discourse across genres (i.e., textbooks, research articles, abstracts), combining techniques of both genre analysis and corpus linguistics to yield both qualitative and quantitative findings. She focuses on the interactive aspects of these texts as a reflection of their fundamentally persuasive purpose. Economics textbooks were found to contain a high number of dialogic devices (e.g., metadiscursive expressions, imperatives, argumentative sequences, analogical reasoning) designed to guide the student reader, but also to persuade colleagues of the value of the textbook. These forms of reader-writer dialogue were also present in research articles and abstracts as a way to lead the reader into agreement. Because the above-cited studies have revealed so much about the language of economics, they have made a significant contribution to content-based English language teaching for L2 students of economics. Studies of spoken economics discourse that make particular reference to the disciplinary dimension are rather few. They are essentially limited to economics lectures which, like textbooks, are concerned with inducting learners into the discourse community. Using a corpus of economics lectures, Bamford (2002) observed that forms of repetition and reformulation were used not only to facilitate listeners, but also to activate an awareness of the conventional linguistic patterns used among economists. She further analyzed the interplay of oral, numerical and



Chapter 2.  Background to the study: The merger of discourses 

visual literacies as different semiotic modes used to represent knowledge in the field and render it more accessible to learners (Bamford 2004a). In comparison with lectures of other disciplines, she found a particularly strong presence of visuals throughout all the lectures of her corpus. Using a variety of analytical frameworks, the above studies have given us a greater understanding of how knowledge is constructed and communicated in economics. In business studies lectures, the transmission of these discourse practices constitutes an essential component of learning for students whose interests and goals are broadly grounded in economic theory.

2.5 Professional discourse: the world of business In this section, we move out of the academic/theoretical sphere of economics and into the workplace where business studies students aspire to establish themselves as professionals. Several studies have focused on the language used in this unique communicative environment. Business discourse has been defined by BargielaChiappini and Nickerson (1999: 2) as “[…] talk and writing between individuals whose main work activities and interests are in the domain of business and who come together for the purpose of doing business.” The criteria of ‘doing business’ is further emphasized by Poncini (2004) who notes the clearly profit-oriented nature of most forms of business discourse. According to Bargiela-Chiappini and Nickerson (1999), although business discourse may fall within the broader category of professional discourse, it nonetheless presents its own special characteristics. In fact, business discourse typically involves participants of equal status, whereas professional discourse is often associated with interaction between experts and lay persons in institutional settings. Moreover, even if business discourse may share domain with economics discourse, it is professionally-oriented while the latter tends to be academically-oriented.5 Given the goal-oriented features of business discourse, much research has involved spoken events (e.g., negotiations and meetings), showing how a range of linguistic devices such as hedging, politeness, directness, evaluation and the use of personal pronouns are influenced by the business relationship and by both corporate and national culture (Charles 1996; Bargiela-Chiappini and Harris 1997; Poncini 2002). The lexical dimension of business discourse has also been studied. Collins and Scott (1997) used quantitative keyword analysis to generate lexical landscapes (i.e., webs of lexical items with their collocations) in Brazilian vs. British business meetings, thus revealing the patterning of the main topics that were discussed. Poncini’s (2004) investigation of specialized lexis in intercultural meetings showed that some lexical items are used by participants to establish common ground and in-



The Language of Business Studies Lectures

group membership, while other items may be re-negotiated to take on a local meaning within the context of the meeting. Nelson (2000) found that both spoken and written business discourse showed some significant lexical differences when compared to general English and published business English teaching materials. With particular reference to metaphorical expressions, David (1999) found that in epideictic speeches, female CEOs used the typically feminine metaphors of nurturing, growth and psychological connectedness alongside the sports and warfare metaphors that are often found in the discourse of male CEOs. Following the current interest in large quantities of authentic data, the CANBEC (Cambridge and Nottingham Business English Corpus) has been developed through collaboration between the University of Nottingham and Cambridge University Press. It consists of over 1 million words of spoken business discourse produced by both native and non-native speakers of English and includes meetings, presentations and informal discussions. Findings from comparative lexicogrammatical analyses showed that spoken business English has much in common with casual conversation and forms of institutional talk, but also has distinctive features that reflect its community of practice. Moreover, some initial work focusing on pronouns and modality highlighted an orientation towards collaborative and non-threatening relationships despite the hierarchical imprint traditionally associated with business settings (McCarthy and Handford 2004). Business discourse analysts have also investigated a variety of written genres, including letters (van Nus 1999; Jung 2005), CEOs’ statements (Hyland 1998; Nickerson and De Groot 2005), mission statements (Swales and Rogers 1995), faxes (Akar and Louhiala-Salminen 1999) and e-mails (Gimenez 2000; Poncini 2005). This work has often underlined the intertextual nature these genres, which not only draw on other genres in terms of form and structural features, but may also reflect a chain of interwoven spoken and written texts, incorporating both traditional and computer-mediated modes. This has important implications when teaching business communication skills to both L1 and L2 learners who need to come into contact with authentic communicative processes undergoing constant technological evolution. Although Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998: 65) suggest that a “core” grammar and lexis of English business discourse has not yet been established, the findings from the research reviewed above indicate business vocabulary, metaphors/stylistic devices, hedging, interpersonal strategies and ways of expressing stance as promising prospects for further investigation. At this point, it seems appropriate to relate business discourse as described above to the language of business studies lectures. Towards this end, I would like to propose a two-way link between academe and profession as illustrated in Figure 2.1 below.



Chapter 2.  Background to the study: The merger of discourses  The professional world

The business studies classroom

Lecturers’ incoming language

Lecturerstudent interaction Students’ acquired language

Figure 2.1  The two-way discursive link between the professional world and the business studies classroom

First of all, there is an incoming link from the professional world to the classroom. According to a survey carried out by Macfarlane (1997), a number of business studies lecturers, particularly those specializing in Accounting and Marketing, have had recent experience in business or industry. Moreover, business studies lecturers are typically active members of the professional community. In addition to producing scholarly writing, they often participate in publicly and privately funded projects, serve on government policy advisory boards and direct research institutes; activities of this type can be easily verified by browsing through the web sites of business studies faculty members. As noted by Bargiela-Chiappini and Nickerson (1999: 7), there is often “hybrid membership” in academic and professional discourse communities. They cite the example of management consultants who combine academic activities with private practice. As a consequence, the language that business studies lecturers bring to the classroom for interaction with students is likely to be tinged with their professional experiences. The outgoing link is from the classroom to the professional world. In discussing the nexus between EAP and ESP, Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998: 40) point out that learners have immediate needs due to institutional academic requirements, but must also acquire the skills necessary to become successful members of the professional community, representing their delayed needs. From this perspective, the features of business discourse that learners are exposed to during lectures can play a key role in preparing them for their future communicative activities in the corporate world.



The Language of Business Studies Lectures

2.6 A conceptual framework for analyzing business studies lectures In the preceding sections of this chapter, I have reviewed the literature on spoken, academic, disciplinary and professional discourse that is pertinent to the study of business studies lectures. Working from this, it is now possible to formulate a conceptual framework to serve as a foundation for the forthcoming analysis. A good way to start is to take a closer look at just what business studies lectures are. First of all, they are speech events (Hymes 1972) or, more specifically, activities where speech is governed by rules and norms determined by contextual factors such as situation, participants, norms, mode and goals. Similarly, they coincide with the Bakhtinian notion of secondary speech genres (Bakhtin 1986: 61– 62) which take place in a sphere of communication that is relatively formal and culturally-organized, in this case institutional education. Focusing more on their purpose, their participants and their relationships (Swales 1990; Lave and Wenger 1991), business studies lectures are academic genres where novices and experts interact in a meaningful way in order to construct knowledge within a community of practice. Thus, the spoken, academic, disciplinary and professional dimensions of business studies lectures will be investigated and interpreted through the interrelated and overlapping theoretical constructs of speech event and genre. It is also useful to conceptualize business studies lectures in terms of Fairclough’s (2003: 220) notion of order of discourse as “a particular combination of genres, discourses and styles which constitutes the discoursal aspect of a network of social practices”. However, as we have seen, academic, disciplinary and professional discourse communities may coincide, and consequently so may their orders of discourse. This is what Candlin and Maley (1997: 212) describe as a form of interdiscursivity, i.e., “the use of elements in one discourse and social practice that carry the institutional and social meanings from other discourse and social practices”. Therefore, I will also consider how different discourses are mixed and ‘worked into’ business studies lectures. Figure 2.2 below posits the interdiscursive nature of business studies lectures that will be explored in the study. To conclude, this chapter has shown how studies in each of the above-illustrated discourses have significantly enhanced our understanding of the language used within them. What it has not shown is how these discourses may interact synergistically to characterize a particular variety of language. The analyses in the upcoming chapters showing how the language of business studies lectures draws on and reflects off this pool of discourses aim to do just that. And, I would add, with reference to a spoken genre that represents an increasingly important conduit between the academic and professional worlds.



Chapter 2.  Background to the study: The merger of discourses 

Spoken Discourse Professional Discourse

Academic Discourse

Business Discourse

Disciplinary Discourse

Economics Discourse

Business Studies Lectures

Figure 2.2  The interdiscursive nature of business studies lectures

Notes 1. Mauranen (2005) makes the interesting point that this term is perhaps inappropriate since ‘dysfluencies’ are characteristic of all ‘fluent’ speakers. However, since the term is widely used in the literature and a better one is apparently still lacking, I will continue to use it. 2. See Sinclair (1991) for a general introduction to corpora and Sinclair (2001) for an overview of their development and applications in linguistics and language teaching. 3.

See Askehave and Swales (2001) for more on multi-purpose genres.

4. A parallel corpus has been developed at the Universities of Warwick and Reading: the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) Corpus. Although it covers only lectures and seminars, it will nonetheless provide interesting opportunities for cross-cultural comparisons between British and American spoken academic English. Moreover, most events have been digitally videorecorded, thus allowing for much-needed attention to visual aspects. 5. Some overlapping in terminology can be found in the literature, attesting to fuzziness among discourse types. As pointed out by Poncini (2004) professional discourse has been used for a variety of institutional settings which may encompass clinical, bureaucratic and business events. It is also used by Swales (1990b) with reference to academic discourse that has a professional slant (e.g., research articles and presentations).

chapter 3

The business studies lecture corpus Design, collection and analysis It is one of the paradoxes of spoken data that the more interesting and valuable the data, the more difficult they are to obtain. (Carter and McCarthy 1997: 7)

3.1 Introduction My aim in this chapter is to provide a close-up look at the corpus on which the study is based, as well as an inside account of the experience of compiling it. As the above epigraph suggests, compared to written texts, live speech is notoriously more complicated and costly to access and transform into analyzable form (Leech et al. 1995; Stubbs 1996; McCarthy 1998; Sinclair 2001). Therefore, in the next few sections, I will discuss at length some key issues involved in the design, collection and transcription of the corpus. Then, I will turn to the analytical approach of the study, which can be best described as multi-disciplinary, including both textual and non-textual methodologies in an attempt to offer a full-circle profile of business studies lectures.

3.2 Corpus design There are many criteria that need to be considered when designing a corpus, such as size, variety of language, mode of transmission and period of time covered (Pearson 1998). However, these decisions ultimately depend on the type of corpus envisaged and its foreseen use. If a corpus is being designed for general purposes, then it will be as large as possible and incorporate many different types of language. Following Sinclair (1991: 17), a general corpus is “broadly homogeneous, but gathered from a variety of sources so that the individuality of a source is obscured […].” Such corpora (e.g., the British National Corpus, the Longman Spoken and Written English Corpus) have been developed to be representative of language in general for the benefit of the scientific community at large. They are especially suitable for the production of grammars and dictionaries, but also serve



The Language of Business Studies Lectures

as key reference sources for innumerable other studies. If instead a corpus is being designed with a specific research goal in mind, then it will likely be more restricted in scope, perhaps targeting only written or spoken language, or a particular historical period, or even specific varieties of language that occur only in certain contexts. In this way, the corpus will be “specialized” in terms of both purpose and the type of language it contains (Partington 2004: 13). The dual dimension of content and purpose is also seen in the terminology found in the literature. A specialized corpus may be described as “monogeneric” as opposed to “heterogeneric” (Partington 2003: 4), i.e., the type of large reference corpora described above. Pearson (1998: 48) uses the term “special purpose corpora” to distinguish specialized corpora from “special corpora” which, according to her, contain language that in some way deviates from the norm (e.g., the language of very small children). Although specialized corpora tend to be smaller in size with fewer language variables, they still need to be carefully designed. With reference to corpora in general, Pearson (1998: 52–53) distinguishes “external” criteria, referring to mode, genre, origins, participants and aims, from “internal” criteria, which instead involve topic and style. With specialized corpora, all these criteria are particularly important if the corpus is to achieve the purpose for which it was constructed. Unfortunately, in the case of spoken language, the difficulties of assembling such corpora can lead to what McCarthy (1998: 8) describes as an “opportunistic” design, whereby compilers tend to throw in whatever data they have been able to collect. To avoid shortcomings of this type, it is important to accurately plan the spoken events and rigorously select the data to be included in the corpus. As the next few paragraphs will hopefully show, this was attempted in compiling the corpus for the present study. The Business Studies Lecture Corpus (hereinafter BSLC) is a small specialized spoken corpus designed for a specific research objective: to gain more understanding of the linguistic and discursive features of business studies lectures from the perspective of L2 listening comprehension. Working with my colleague Polly Walsh at the University of Florence Faculty of Economics within the framework of an Italian national research project, I embarked on the creation of a corpus whose content would match this purpose.1 This meant that the corpus should represent the types of lectures to which international business students are likely to be exposed, including lectures on a variety of business studies topics delivered by both male/female and native/non-native speakers of English, at undergraduate and postgraduate academic levels, as well as large (>40) and small (<40) class sizes. Initially, a guest lecture series offered through the Department of Business Administration was identified as a plausible source of data. Although guest lectures are a tradition in higher education, they are becoming an increasingly common event in today’s globalized academic world (Henry and Roseberry 2001), and particularly



Chapter 3.  The business studies lecture corpus: Design, collection and analysis 

so in L2 settings as a way to expose learners to different types of interactional experiences (Crawford Camiciottoli 2004a). In fact, guest lecturers are recruited not only from the academic and professional communities, but also from different linguistic/cultural backgrounds. Thus, the guest lecture is an effective way of achieving the ‘international perspective’ that is now essential in many disciplines, particularly the social sciences. The guest lecture series in question here is known as the European Business Module (hereinafter EBM) which corresponds to a one-semester credit-bearing course open to both Italian and international students. The course represents an initiative of cooperation among business faculties in universities across Europe. It consists of fifteen lectures, each of which focuses on aspects of business and economics in a particular country or geographical area, often with the underlying common theme of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Many of the lectures are given in English by visiting academics from the participating universities. In some cases, the visiting lecturers give two lectures over two consecutive days. Attending students must certify a sufficient level of English language proficiency. Considering that several of the same EBM lecturers returned in the following years and were therefore not approached a second time, over a three-year period, we were able to record six lectures that were subsequently transcribed by myself and my colleague. Three of the lecturers were native speakers of British English. The other three were native speakers of other languages (Spanish, German and Italian). Two of them spoke English fluently though not always accurately, while the third spoke very fluent, accurate and native-like English. Some preliminary analyses of the EBM lectures indicated that the L2 guest lecture setting, i.e., where speakers and audiences do not share the same speech community, are unfamiliar with each other and do not participate in an ongoing instructional experience, seemed to have an influence on the discourse (Walsh and Crawford Camiciottoli 2001, Crawford Camiciottoli 2004a).2 For a better understanding of these variables, it seemed important to gain access to lectures that were not limited only to L2 guest lecture settings. This would also render the corpus more representative of business studies lectures in general and thus more suitable for further research. Therefore, over the next year, the corpus was expanded to include six additional lectures having the same design criteria, but all derived from L1 classroom settings, i.e., where lecturers and audiences share the same speech community and where lectures are delivered by the same person within the framework of an ongoing course that develops content from one lecture to the next. Thus, in this setting, the lectures can be described as integrated in terms of content, whereas the L2 guest lectures may be seen as more isolated.3 The six L1 classroom lectures were procured from various sources. Two lectures from the University of Iowa and North Central State College (Ohio) were available via Internet. They



The Language of Business Studies Lectures

were kindly sent to me in audio CD format by the professors involved so that I could more easily transcribe them. Two lecture transcripts and corresponding audio files were retrieved from the MICASE online corpus (see Chapter 2). Finally, two lectures were selected from a series recorded at New York University. The transcriptions and audio tapes were courteously provided by a colleague from another Italian university, where they had been collected as part of a research project, but subsequently not used.4 The above account illustrates the various phases of the design and collection of the twelve lectures of BSLC (109,449 words) as they evolved over a four-year period from 2000 through 2003. Table 3.1 provides an overview of the BSLC. Sample extracts from each of the twelve lectures are provided in Appendix A. Table 3.1  The Business Studies Lecture Corpus (BSLC) Topic

Source/Setting

Speaker status

Level

Class Size

1. SMEs in the UK 2. The Japanese Economy 3. UK Business Strategies 4. Productive Systems in Spain 5. SMEs in Aachen (Germany) 6. UK Industrial Policy 7. Labor Economics 8. Macroeconomics 9. Economic Principles 10. Ethics and Economics 11. Microeconomics 12. Industrial Organization

EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest MICASE/L1 class MICASE/L1 class NYU/L1 class NYU/L1 class Iowa/L1 class Ohio/L1 class

NS/BR NS/BR NS/BR NNS NNS NNS NS/US NS/US NS/US NS/US NS/US NS/US

UG PG UG UG UG UG UG PG UG UG UG UG

Small Small Small Small Small Small Small Large Large Large Large Large

3.3 Collecting the data Compiling a spoken corpus typically involves arranging to record a live speech event in which a number of issues inevitably come into play. First of all, it is necessary to have access to more or less sophisticated recording equipment, and possibly assisting technical personnel, depending on the quality of sound/image desired and the financial resources available. Yet live recording is prone to unforeseen ‘hitches’ that include not only technical equipment break-downs, interferences and disturbances, but also last-minute changes involving the agenda or speakers which can thwart the entire purpose. All of these risks have the potential to render



Chapter 3.  The business studies lecture corpus: Design, collection and analysis 

data incomplete, inconsistent in quality or, at worst, unusable. Because such snags are relatively common occurrences in live events, they should be expected and accounted for in the subsequent analysis of the data. Some of the above problems can be avoided by using ‘pre-collected’ data from other sources. For example, audio files of recorded speech and even corresponding transcripts are increasingly available for downloading directly from the Internet. While this drastically reduces many of the difficulties and costs involved in accessing speech, the fact that the researcher is removed from the process can also be a drawback, depending on the type of corpus being collected and, more crucially, the research aims. Biber et al. (2002) note that not being able to observe interactions can result in the loss of potentially important information about the setting, unless it can be recuperated in some other way. There are also ethical aspects to consider in collecting spoken discourse. It is important to avoid surreptitious recording so that all speakers are aware that they are being recorded (Holmes 1994). On the other hand, particularly when collecting casual face-to-face conversation, this awareness can cause participants to be selfconscious and choose their words more carefully than usual, thus resulting in somewhat unnatural data (Cutting 2000). When researchers are present, this tendency may be even more exacerbated, reflecting what Labov (1972: 209) calls “the observer’s paradox”: behaviours are inclined to change simply because they are being observed. For all of the above reasons, the collection of spoken data often entails some sort of compromise in terms of authenticity, naturalness, quality and completeness. Many of these issues arose to some extent during the collection of the BSLC. For the EBM lectures, it was decided to both audio and video tape the events, foreseeing the possibility of studying nonverbal features at some time in the future. A professional camera operator was hired to film the lectures, while back-up audio tapes were produced using a common tape recorder. On the whole, the quality of both the video and audio recordings was quite adequate with no major gaps in the data. Moreover, both researchers initially involved in the project were present to oversee the recording procedures and take note of important contextual data. The video camera was set up rather close to the lecturers (about three meters away) in order to follow their movements accurately. The researchers both had the impression that lecturers spoke quite naturally and did not seem to be affected by this presence, although admittedly there was no way to verify this. As recording took place in an institutional setting, authorization first had to be obtained from the member of Department of Business Administration who was responsible for organizing the events. This was granted, on the condition that the recording and the presence of the researchers be as unobtrusive as possible. Then, the individual academics who would be lecturing in English were contacted via e-mail to explain the purpose of the research and to request their authorization to



The Language of Business Studies Lectures

record and use their lectures (anonymously) within the framework of the study.5 In this way, our research took on what Swann (2001: 325) calls an “ethical” stance, where research is carried out on consenting participants, but seeks to reduce any inconvenience and to protect privacy. Because the six L1 classroom lectures were collected subsequently from remote sources, the researchers were not present during recording and in some cases did not transcribe the lectures. To compensate for this problem, I selected only lectures for which I was able to retrieve complete transcripts, audio files and important contextual information, either through correspondence with the speakers themselves or from data provided by other researchers.

3.4 Transcribing the data In order to systematically analyze spoken language, the audio channel of speech must be somehow transformed into written form, or transcribed. Even with the aid of digital technology and transcribing software to facilitate access to audio data simultaneously with the computer keyboard, this is still a highly labour-intensive and time-consuming task. It has been estimated that an hour of recorded speech takes on average ten hours to transcribe, without considering post-transcription proofing and mark-up (Creer and Thompson 2004). According to McCarthy (1998), one hour’s worth of recording can require twenty hours for transcription, and even then some segments may still be undecipherable. Furthermore, when trained transcribers must be paid to accurately process large amounts of data, costs can quickly elevate. Recent advances in technology have led to the development of voice recognition software, where the user can simply speak while words are converted into written electronic form, thus eliminating keyboard typing. However, such devices function optimally with the live voice of a certain individual that they have been ‘trained’ to recognize (Jensen 2005). Therefore, at the present time, voice recognition technology does not offer a viable alternative for the transcription of the speech of several speakers. Furthermore, unlike machines, humans can interpret speech sounds from contextual cues and also integrate any additional information that might be of interest. Similarly, Leech et al. (1995: 10) warn against the dangers of “editing out meaningful layers of information” that could occur if automated transcription processes actually come into widespread use. Thus, for the purposes of language study, texts produced by transcribers trained according to pre-established criteria are currently the best alternative. Given the central role of transcription in spoken discourse analysis, a few scholars have delved more deeply into this topic, pointing out that transcription involves a great deal more than simply writing down speech. In her seminal study,



Chapter 3.  The business studies lecture corpus: Design, collection and analysis 

Ochs (1979b) first pointed out that transcription is necessarily a process of selection among options according to the theoretical aims of the research and therefore, to a certain degree, already constitutes an interpretation of the event. More recently, Bucholtz (2000: 1441) further elaborated this selective process as decisions that must be made concerning what is transcribed (at the interpretive level) and how it is transcribed (at the representational level). For example, a transcription may or may not include indications of extra-linguistic phenomena, such as pauses, laughter and coughing, or it may use standard or non-standard orthography (e.g., want to vs. wanna). These decisions are inevitably constrained by the purposes and theoretical basis of the research, the personal inclinations of the researcher/transcriber and socio-political framework in which the research takes place. They must further be weighed against other factors, such as the accuracy and readability of the transcripts. Thus, it can be said that transcripts are not objective ‘products’, but are instead the reflection of a compromise between conflicting issues (Cook 1990; Roberts 2003). It is crucial for researchers to be aware of and acknowledge these choices (and their limitations) in order to engage in reflexive analyses. In the words of Bucholtz: A reflexive transcription practice, then, is one in which the researcher is conscious of her or his effect on the unfolding transcript, and the effect of the transcript on the representation of the speakers whose discourse is described (2000: 1462).

Following Halliday’s (1989: 90) advice to transcribe spoken language “sensibly and with understanding” according to one’s research aims, at the outset of the project, it was decided that the transcripts should reflect primarily the linguistic and textual features of the language. For the lectures transcribed by myself and my colleague, rather than typing blocks of running text, the utterances were distinguished into information units (Halliday 1985: 274), where the end of one utterance was signalled by a falling intonation and the beginning of a new utterance was signalled by a rise in pitch. The beginning of a new information unit corresponds to a new line of text. This solution has been used for other studies of monologic discourse, or more generally, studies with a discursive orientation (Edwards 1995; Bamford 2002). In fact, the motivation behind this choice was to render the data suitable for the analysis of discourse episodes that may stretch over several utterances and can be more easily distinguished in line as opposed to block format. Prosodic signals were exploited only for this purpose as the analysis of paralinguistic information (e.g., stress, intonation, pace, vowel-stretching) was beyond the scope of this study. Fortunately, the availability of good quality audio recordings means that this information could be retrieved at a later time if so desired. Conventional punctuation was not incorporated in order to avoid misinterpretation of the data from the printed pages (Swann 2001). Thus, the information units



The Language of Business Studies Lectures

include no commas or full stops. However, question marks were used in the case of interrogative forms with a rising intonation to facilitate the identification of moments of direct interaction with the audience. Pauses were included, although simply classified as short (2–3 seconds) or long (more than 4 seconds), in adaptation of Chafe’s (1995) system. Capitalization was used for proper names, acronyms and the pronoun I, while numbers (except years) were written out in word form. Because we were also interested in pedagogical issues, we decided to transcribe certain features that could have an impact on lecture comprehension. We sought to transcribe dysfluencies (e.g., hesitation or pause fillers, false starts), contractions and lexicalized reductions (e.g., wanna, kinda) as accurately as possible, gaining firsthand understanding of Cameron’s (2001: 33) well-turned phrase “It takes a real effort not to hear spoken language in terms of the written model.” Less distinct variations in pronunciation due to accent or individual propensity were instead not transcribed. Extra-linguistic information that could be either heard or deduced, and potentially helpful in interpreting the transcripts was also included (e.g., laughter, writing on the board during pauses, operating equipment). As essentially monologic data, dialogic episodes between speakers and members of the audience were relatively limited. However, all changes of speaker were annotated to be able distinguish utterances that were not produced by lecturers when analyzing the corpus. The very few instances of overlapping speech between lecturers and members of the audience were ignored. The above information was encoded into the transcripts as shown in Table 3.2, together with a few tags from the TEI Guidelines in order to adequately cover what was relevant to this study. Table 3.2  Mark-up for the BSLC Mark-up symbol

Description

(.) (..) ? (xx) -

short pause (2–3 seconds) long pause (4 or more seconds) question with rising intonation incomprehensible speech false starts/repairs (before truncated or changed word or phrase) examples from the corpus: - com- complete - I’ll sum- I’ll sum up at the end - It moves in whichever dimen- direction - Let’s take a step forward- step backward Marker of utterance produced by a student non-lexical vocal event contextual event

(Student) , <writing on board>,



Chapter 3.  The business studies lecture corpus: Design, collection and analysis 

This mark-up was applied to all of the lectures collected from the EBM lecture series, the two Internet lectures sent to me in audio CD format and the two lectures kindly provided by a colleague. With reference to the latter, I had also access to the full transcripts, but they had been extensively marked up in an undecipherable way. The original researcher could no longer be contacted. Fortunately, the corresponding audio tapes were also available so that I was able to revise the markup of these two lectures according to my own conventions. However, a problem of this sort lends support to calls for transcription conventions to be selective, economical and accessible to others (Cook 1995; Roberts 2003). The two MICASE lectures had instead been transcribed by other persons according to the criteria established within the framework of that project. Their mark-up also draws from the TEI Guidelines, but is more extensive with greater articulation of pauses and punctuation, includes overlapping speech and the layout is in block rather than line form. However, because this analysis does not focus on any of these features, the presence of additional or differing mark-up of this type in the MICASE transcripts does not create difficulties. Moreover, the availability of the audio files of the two lectures enabled me to verify the transcripts and also clarify any possible doubts relating to mark-up. The preceding description of the transcription of the BSLC illustrates how the choices made regarding what to transcribe and how to transcribe it are reflected in the aim of this research. To be able to analyze features that can have an impact on L2 listening comprehension, it was necessary to take the ‘lecture listener’s perspective’, transcribing both words and selected dysfluencies in order to render the transcripts as authentic and natural as possible, but at the same time, as readable and analyzable as possible, while also keeping in mind future research interests.

3.5 Methodology: an integrated approach 3.5.1 Quantitative and qualitative analysis In his discussion of methodological issues relating to small corpora, Sinclair writes: A small corpus is seen as a body of relevant and reliable evidence, and is either small enough to be analysed manually, or is processed by a computer in a preliminary fashion […]; thereafter the evidence is interpreted by the scholar directly. (2001: xi)

He continues noting that small corpora are designed for “early human intervention”, as the researcher constructs the corpus according to a pre-established research purpose.

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

The methodology used in this study reflects this approach. The BSLC was originally envisaged as an instrument to be used for both language description and pedagogical insights. It draws on techniques from both corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, thus combining electronic text elaboration with manual inspection of the transcripts. As observed by Henry and Roseberry (2001), small corpus analysis relies not only on computerized processing to generate frequencies and identify patterning, but also on insights that can only come from reading and studying the corpus from a more global perspective. Once the lectures of the BSLC were digitized into computerized form, they were printed out for preliminary overviewing to get a general impression of the data (feasible of course only with relatively small corpora) and to identify particularly salient linguistic and discursive features for further study. Beyond this initial overview, the printouts also proved useful for other studies of a more limited scope, dealing with discursive or episodic variables that could only be identified by manual inspection (Walsh and Crawford Camiciottoli 2001; Crawford Camiciottoli 2005). The individual lecture files were then compiled into a corpus and analysed in various stages with the text analysis software suite Wordsmith Tools (Scott 1998). This generated data on items that had been previously selected for analysis, but also brought to light other interesting features that had not been foreseen (e.g., different usages of items or additional items beyond those originally hypothesized). From this perspective, the study can be seen as both corpus-based and corpus-driven (Tognini-Bonelli 2001), since at times the data itself served as the initial source of evidence to describe the language under investigation. Finally, the emerging quantitative data served as a springboard for follow-up qualitative analysis back in the transcripts to better interpret the findings. An integration of the empirical and hermeneutic approaches is important to shed light on the reasons underlying the speakers’ linguistic choices, particularly when the outcome of the research is finalized towards specific practical applications. As a small corpus representing the speech of only twelve individuals, the findings clearly cannot be considered either exhaustive or generalizable to all business studies lecture settings, even if they can alert us to features that may characterize other comparable events. On the other hand, it is a readable corpus (Walsh 2004b) that lends itself well to more in-depth qualitative analysis, in addition to electronic quantitative analysis. In this way, the important characteristics and potentially recurring patterns of this particular genre can be uncovered and subsequently used for specific aims. As suggested by Sinclair (2001), this is one of the strengths of small specialized corpora.



Chapter 3.  The business studies lecture corpus: Design, collection and analysis 

3.5.2 Comparative analysis One of the primary reasons for collecting and analysing corpora in the first place is to be able to make comparisons among different varieties of language (Sinclair 2001; Haarman et al. 2002). The distinguishing characteristics of a particular type of text become evident and meaningful when contrasted to another type of text, according to the objectives of the research. As pointed out by Partington (1998: 146). “By and large, we are not methodologically justified in interpreting the significance of a particular linguistic event unless we can compare it with other similar events.” For this reason, it seemed important to understand how business studies lectures may differ from two related varieties of academic discourse: business studies text materials (their written counterpart) and lectures in academic subjects other than business studies. Two additional electronic corpora were compiled strictly for comparative purposes: a. The Business Studies Text Materials Corpus (hereinafter BSTM) was derived from both widely read published textbooks and the relatively new phenomenon of online business studies materials, in roughly equal proportions.6 It was designed to cover topics that were similar to those found in the BSLC, including macroeconomics, microeconomics, industrial organization, economic policy, ethics, and business organization and strategies. In this way, the potentially confounding effect of significantly different lexis linked to new topics could be reduced to the minimum, thus allowing variation to be more likely attributable to the spoken vs. written modes. b. The Multi-Disciplinary Lecture Corpus (hereinafter MDLC) was derived from MICASE (Simpson et al. 1999). It contains ten lectures from the following disciplines: political science, historical linguistics, musicology, women’s studies, art history, computer programming, microbial genetics, hydrology, physics, biology. These lectures were selected to include both guest and classroom settings, large and small class sizes, undergraduate and post-graduate levels, native speakers of American and British English and one non-native speaker. In this way, variation could be more easily explained by disciplinary differences. In order to facilitate straightforward comparisons without the need to perform proportional calculations, these two corpora were designed to have the same word count as the BSLC (approximately 110,000). To have a more complete picture of the linguistic dimension of a corpus, it is useful to be able to retrieve specific grammatical information which allows for a wider range of analytical options. By annotating or tagging a corpus according to parts-of-speech, it is possible to perform searches on entire word classes (e.g., nouns, modal verbs, attributive adjectives), rather than on only single or lemma-

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

tised items. Towards this end, I compiled three comparable subcorpora of 20,000 words randomly selected from each of the original files comprising the BSLC, the BSTM and the MDLC. According to Pearson (1998: 45), the term “subcorpora” means a part of a corpus having all the same properties as the larger corpus and thus being representative of it. In contrast, a “component” is a part of a corpus having some distinctive feature and is therefore not intended to be representative of the whole corpus. The subcorpora were tagged with the CLAWS (Constituent Likelihood Automatic Word-tagging System) tagger, developed by UCREL (University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language) at Lancaster University. It has been used extensively with the British National Corpus and is compatible with Wordsmith Tools.7 The three subcorpora will be referred to as follows: BSLCtag, BSTMtag, MDLCtag. Again, the word counts were standardized for the sake of uncomplicated comparisons. The BSLC was designed to reflect the authentic lecture experiences of international business students and thus incorporates variation in both setting (L1 classroom lecture vs. L2 guest lecture) and participants (NSs vs. NNSs). This was exploited at times for additional comparative analyses between corpus components as a way to further interpret initial findings. 3.5.3 Behavioural observation Because this study aims to provide a comprehensive description of business studies lectures, forms of extra-linguistic communication have also been taken into account. Thanks to the availability of video recordings of five of the lectures comprising the BSLC, which could be further integrated with field notes taken during the live lecture events, it was possible to analyze selected features of nonverbal communication. Of course, in comparison with textual analysis, this requires a completely different methodology. In nonverbal studies, a key issue is how to observe behaviours in a systematic way so that they can be meaningfully analyzed (Galloway 1972; Scherer and Ekman 1982). In fact, observation is a two-fold process: behaviours must first be described and then interpreted according to a given theoretical framework. In this study, two different methodological approaches were used to observe nonverbal behaviours. On a quantitative level, frequency counts were taken of pre-defined categories of behaviours. On a qualitative level, open-ended narrative was used to describe and record significant nonverbal events. In addition, using digital technology, a short video segment was studied in minute detail from a multimodal perspective. Although this component of the study is clearly limited in scope, it nonetheless provides some interesting insights



Chapter 3.  The business studies lecture corpus: Design, collection and analysis 

into this much neglected aspect of academic lectures (von Raffler-Engel 1980; Khuwaileh 1999). 3.5.4 Participant feedback Because my approach to this study is fundamentally that of a discourse analyst, the methodologies described in the previous sections are aimed at describing and understanding the key features of the language in its context of usage and the communicative strategies of the lecturers. Yet business studies lectures are more than just an instance of academic speech to be analyzed from different perspectives; they represent a community of practice that is characterized by the social relations of its participants who interact to construct knowledge (Lave and Wenger 1991). For this reason, it is useful to incorporate their views for a more complete interpretation of the findings. Typical ways of soliciting participants’ views are questionnaires and interviews. In this study, such direct access to participants was unfortunately quite limited. Six of the twelve lectures that comprise the corpus were procured from secondary sources. The participants were anonymous, with the exception of two lecturers with whom I was able to have some contact via e-mail. I was instead present during the collection of the other six lectures from the EBM guest lecture series. However, for reasons mentioned previously, I was not able to administer a written questionnaire either to the lecturers or to the audiences in order to systemically gather data on their views. Yet I was able to conduct brief semi-structured interviews with some lecturers (live and via e-mail) and have informal conversations with some students of the audiences. Although this feedback is limited in scope, it can nonetheless offer some additional insights into the business studies lectures. To sum up, this chapter has outlined the integrated methodological approach used in this study, highlighting several theoretical and practical issues along the way. The next four chapters will be dedicated to its application and to the ensuing outcomes.

Notes 1. The inter-university project Small Corpora and Genre Analysis: Academic Discourse in the Humanities and Social Sciences was co-financed by the Italian Ministry of Universities, Scientific and Technological Research (MURST) and the participating universities. National Project Coordinator: Marina Bondi. Florence Unit Co-ordinator: Gabriella Del Lungo. 2. Technically speaking, the EBM lectures take place in an EFL setting since the students are foreign language learners and not second language learners as in ESL settings. However, I do not



The Language of Business Studies Lectures deal with this distinction and therefore throughout the book use the term L2 to refer to the EBM guest lectures in particular and to teaching contexts involving NNSs in general. 3.

I thank Inmaculada Fortanet for pointing out this difference.

4. Many thanks to Laura Gavioli. 5. In two cases, permission was denied. One academic that granted permission also happened to mention that he had decided to give his lecture in Italian rather than in English as originally planned. We were fortunate to discover this change before arranging for recording! 6. The print materials were extracted from Microeconomics (Parkin and King 1995) and International Business (Czinkota et al. 1996) and Marketing and Entrepreneurship in SMEs (Carson et al. 1995). The online materials were downloaded from two sites: the Bized business education website (http://www.bized.ac.uk), an online service for students and educators of business and economics, containing texts that range from secondary school to MBA levels, and an online textbook Essential Principles of Economics: A Hypermedia Text, produced by Dr. Roger McCain, Professor of Economics, Drexel University (Philadelphia, USA). Retrieved 22/06/2004 from http://william-king.www.drexel.edu. 7. I am very grateful to Paul Rayson, director of UCREL, for allowing me free limited access to the CLAWS tagger.

chapter 4

Speaking to the audience Those who present themselves before an audience are said to be “performers” and to provide a “performance” – in the peculiar, theatrical sense of the term. (Goffman 1981: 165)

4.1 Introduction Perhaps the most logical starting point to begin an analysis of business studies lectures is what can be considered their most basic distinctive characteristic: the fact that they are spoken and thus perceived aurally. According to Flowerdew (1994), understanding spoken language hinges on a number of variables that encompass the real-time and phonological dimension of speech, as well as its lexico-grammatical features. During a lecture, listeners must process incoming messages as they are uttered. Unlike readers, they have no control over the flow of the input and cannot backtrack or pause to reflect on various parts whenever necessary. In L2 settings where language proficiency is already limited, this can easily contribute to a lack of comprehension, which is exacerbated by a fast speech rate or unfamiliar accent. Also on the phonological level, listeners must be able to distinguish boundaries between words, recognize phonological reductions and filter out the hesitation fillers and false starts typical of speech. While this kind of processing is usually automatic for native speakers, it may not be so for non-native speakers, especially if they have not had much exposure to authentic natural-sounding speech. On the lexico-grammatical level, lectures can present other difficulties for non-native learners. On the one hand, we may find features of conversation such as vagueness, casual expressions, idioms and ellipsis. On the other, given their instructional purpose, we may find a concentration of both technical and semi-technical terminology used to introduce concepts. Coping with a significant amount of potentially unknown vocabulary together with features of informal language is not an easy task for many L2 listeners, as indicated by lecture participants themselves. In a survey of US faculty members to identify what they considered to be key lecture listening skills for L2 learners, Powers (1986) found that being able to follow the spoken delivery mode, comprehend key vocabulary and distinguish the

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

main points from supporting information were ranked among the most important. Flowerdew and Miller’s (1992) survey of Chinese ESL students revealed that they perceived lack of understanding to be caused primarily by fast speech rates and large amounts of new vocabulary and concepts. The following sections of this chapter will be dedicated to the analysis of selected features of the BSLC linked to the spoken mode and recognized as having a strong impact on comprehension in L2 lecture settings.

4.2 Speech rate Speech rate has been a topic of considerable interest in the literature. Early experimental studies found that, in general, listening comprehension improved when texts were delivered at a slower rate (Conrad 1989; Anderson-Hsieh and Koehler 1989). However, other research found that while L2 listeners may have difficulties with fast speech rates, they do not seem to benefit from either relatively slow or artificially reduced speech rates (Griffiths 1990; Derwing and Munro 2001). On the other hand, Zhao (1997) determined that comprehension improved when L2 listeners were allowed to artificially reduce lecture speech rate by means of computer technology. Thus, the role of speech rate on comprehension is not yet altogether clear. More specifically, while excessively fast rates are likely to create problems, we do not know just how much they would need to be reduced, or even what might be considered an optimal rate. With particular reference to academic lectures in L2 settings, Tauroza and Allison (1990) surveyed 22 native speakers of British English lecturing to NNS audiences and found a rather wide variation in speech rates. These ranged from 102 to 199 words per minute (wpm), classified as moderately slow and faster than normal, respectively. The mean speech rate was 140 wpm. This falls within the average range of 125–160 wpm indicated for the lecture category, but well below the mean speech rate of 210 wpm for conversation. This prompted the authors to speculate that there had been a reduction in speech rate in response to the speakers’ perception of the listeners’ needs. And perhaps this is actually the most important question here: whether or not lecturers are willing and able to reduce their speech rates for NNS audiences. Speech rates in the BSLC were analyzed by performing a series of calculations based on the word counts and the durations of the lectures. By dividing the total number of words in each file by the total number of minutes recorded, the number of words per minute can be determined, thus allowing for meaningful comparisons to be made among the twelve lectures. The results are shown in Table 4.1.



Chapter 4.  Speaking to the audience 

Table 4.1  Speech rate distribution in the BSLC Lecture

Source/Type

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest MICASE/L1 class MICASE/L1 class NYU/L1 class NYU/L1 class Iowa/L1 class Ohio/L1 class

Word Count

Minutes

wpm

5,566 11,460 9,444 14,667 3,665 12,905 12,005 8,046 6,138 7,410 7,006 11,137

46 93 76 108 28 98 74 73 37 52 44 62

121 123 124 136 131 132 162 110 166 143 159 179

As can be seen, there was quite a lot of variation in the word counts and durations of the lectures, so some preliminary explanation is in order. Lectures 1 and 5 present lower word counts and total minutes compared to the other lectures because they did not follow a teacher-dominated lecture format. In Lecture 1, the speaker interspersed his lecture with tasks for the students to do in pairs, followed by short student presentations. Similarly, Lecture 5 was essentially an introductory mini-lecture, followed by group work and presentations.1 The remaining EBM lectures and the six L1 classroom lectures were instead more traditional in format, but their durations ranged from approximately forty minutes to an hour and half, in which case there was a short break in the middle. Given these differences, it was necessary to take into account only the primarily monologic parts of the lectures and subtract from the durations any stretches in the recordings that did not contain the lecturers’ speech. It is also important to recognize that the data do not represent absolute values. All twelve of the lectures included sporadic questions by students to a greater or lesser extent. In the EBM L2 guest lectures, there were some planned question and answer sessions at the end, although most of the talking was still done by the lecturers who provided rather lengthy answers to brief questions. At any rate, the very minimal part of the total word count produced by students is not likely to change the broad picture. From the wpm calculations in the far right column, we see that none of the lectures can be classified as either faster than normal (>185 wpm) or slower than normal (<100), according to Tauroza and Allison’s (1990) classification. Only Lectures 7, 9 and 12 fall within the moderately fast range of 160–185 wpm, while all the others are either average (125–160 wpm) or moderately slow (100–125 wpm).

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

Because all rates are below the range for conversation (190–230 wpm), this generalized reduction could be linked to the institutional role of lecturers, who may shift into a ‘teacher talk’ mode when in front of a classroom of students. In fact, the results lead us to the same question raised by previous research. Is it possible that the lecturers made an effort to reduce their speech rates for the L2 audiences? To attempt to shed more light on this issue, average wpm calculations were performed on sub-groups according to lecture type and speaker language background. As illustrated by the data in Table 4.2, the average speech rate for the whole corpus was 139 wpm, and therefore very much in line with Tauroza and Allison’s (1990) corresponding figure of 140 wpm. There were no major differences between any of the various groupings, even if on average the six L2 guest lecturers did speak somewhat more slowly than the six L1 classroom lecturers (128 vs. 153 wpm). Table 4.2  Distribution of average words per minute in the BSLC Average words per minute Overall BSLC lecture corpus 6 L2 Guest lectures 6 L1 Classroom lectures 3 NNS lectures 9 NS lectures

139 128 153 133 141

However, if we look back Table 1, we see that were was a much wider range of variation in the six L1 classroom lectures (110–179 wpm) compared to the six L2 guest lectures (121–136 wpm). It could be that the individual propensities of the L1 lecturers were freer to emerge, while those of the L2 lecturers were instead more constrained by an awareness of their audiences’ needs. An analysis of the speech rate of multi-disciplinary lectures from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus seems to corroborate this hypothesis. In this L1 setting, Nesi (2001) determined the average speech rate to be 150 wpm, but widely ranging from a very slow 57.8 wpm to a fast 205 wpm. Some indications that the L2 lecturers’ speech rate may have been purposely adjusted for their audiences came from a separate case study conducted with one of these lecturers.2 In comparing his lecture given in Florence to the same lecture delivered later at his home institution in the UK, I found that this speaker’s speech rate was indeed slower in the Florence lecture. Moreover, in a follow-up interview he confirmed that he had consciously sought to speak more slowly. Even if it was not possible verify a reduction in speech rate through additional comparative analyses, other L2 guest lecturers were at least aware of the effect of speech rate, as illustrated by their own words in the following examples.3



Chapter 4.  Speaking to the audience 

(4.1) Uh if I talk too quick normally I talk not slowly as this huh? If I’m going in a hurry please call me pst huh? Because normally I talk fast. (Lecture 4/L2/NNS) (4.2) What- what I’d like to do is to- is to talk to you about how and I’ll do it slowly we get the information on small businesses the way we survey companies. (Lecture 3/L2/NS) (4.3) So I now slowly transfer to the third point of uh our lecture and our seminar which is of course the most important. (Lecture 5/L2/NNS)

Even lecturer n. 4 whose rate of 136 wpm was the highest among all the EBM lecturers had no requests from students to speak more slowly, and judging from my field observations, the students were able to follow this lecture as well as the others. No similar instances of speakers referring to their own speech rates were found in the six L1 classroom lectures. Therefore, on the whole, these findings point to two factors that influence speech rate: individual propensity, but also a setting where lecturers and audiences may or may not share the same speech community. Indeed, unlike L2 settings, in L1 classrooms lecturers can speak at their natural pace, slow or fast as it may be, without having to be concerned about whether their audiences can follow them.

4.3 Lecture style A good starting place for a discussion of style in the BSLC is the lecture as envisaged by Goffman, the first to study its sociolinguistic aspects beyond the mere transmission of content. In his words, A lecture is an institutionalized extended holding of the floor in which one speakers imparts his views on a subject, these thoughts comprising what can be called his “text”. The style is typically serious and slightly impersonal, the controlling intent being to generate calmly considered understanding, not merely entertainment, emotional impact, or immediate action (1981: 165).

While this definition can be applied to all types of lectures, Goffman (1981: 140) points out that course lectures have an additional feature, described as “binding talk”. Here listeners have a vested interest in what is being said as they will eventually be held responsible for it. This also has an influence on delivery as the lecturer attempts to accommodate this need (e.g., strategies to reinforce learning or to facilitate note-taking). He further recognizes three speaking modes that are associated with lectures, “memorization”, “aloud reading” and “fresh talk” (Goffman 1981: 171), where the text is not pre-planned, but produced in an online fashion in response to the situ-

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

ation at hand. This last mode broadly corresponds to what Dudley-Evans (1994: 148) calls the ‘‘conversational style”, where the topic has been planned, but not the actual speech, and lecturers may interact with students to some extent. The conversational style is contrasted to the “reading style” – essentially in line with Goffman’s (1981: 171) “aloud reading” – and the “rhetorical style”, where the lecturer engages in a sort of performance with frequent digressions and joking. In keeping with what we know about extemporaneous speech, conversational and rhetoricalstyle lectures are also characterized by pauses, hesitation fillers, false starts, repetitions and reformulations. Lecture style has also been described in terms of interaction with the audience. An interactive style is one which provides for and encourages various levels and types of student participation (Northcott 2001), whereas a non-interactive style would have strong teacher control and little audience input (Morell 2004). Mason (1994: 203) refers to “give and take” and “report and discuss” lecture styles as more interactive, compared to the less interactive “talk and chalk” style. Clearly, the level of interaction in a lecture can also depend on other factors, such as class size or academic level. However, on the whole, the present day trend is towards more informal, conversational and interactive lectures (Benson 1994; Flowerdew and Tauroza 1995; Miller 2002; Bamford 2005). Table 4.3 illustrates the stylistic analysis of the BSLC based on direct observations of lectures and/or overviews of the transcripts. Table 4.3  Stylistic analysis of the BSLC Lecture

Type/source

Style

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest MICASE/L1 class MICASE/L1 class NYU/L1 class NYU/L1 class Iowa/L1 class Ohio/L1 class

Conversational/participatory Conversational Conversational Conversational Conversational/participatory Conversational Conversational Conversational Conversational Conversational Conversational Conversational

Episodes of interaction Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes



Chapter 4.  Speaking to the audience

All of the lectures could be considered conversational in style. Judging from the field data collected during the EBM guest lectures, these lecturers spoke quite spontaneously, at most referring to notes from time to time. Almost all the lectures contained varying degrees and types of interaction typically associated with casual conversation, e.g., direct questions by both lecturers and students.4 Quite interesting was the fact that two of these lectures also incorporated the “participatory” style (Frederick 1986: 45), or lectures that involve some form of extended facultystudent interaction. They contained lengthy episodes in which the lecturers put the students into pairs or small groups and then circulated among them as they worked on a case-study task to be presented in front of the class. This reflects the more contemporary view of the teacher as a ‘facilitator’ rather than ‘dispenser’ of knowledge, and of learning by means of hands-on experience where teachers and learners negotiate knowledge (Lave and Wenger 1991). An interview with one of these lecturers revealed some interesting thoughts on this issue. He felt that this highly interactive style was not only better for learning, but also allowed him to more accurately gauge the students’ understanding in a way that a more passive approach could not. Moreover, he considered active participation to be the most effective way to introduce learners to the real-world and problem-solving orientation of the business community. The largely conversational style is also reflected through signs of intertextuality in the lectures, or in this case, “manifest intertextuality” where “other texts are explicitly present in the text under analysis – they are marked or cued by features on the surface of the text” (Fairclough 1992: 271). Although this notion is usually associated with written texts (e.g., citations, quotations, reported speech), it is equally applicable to spoken lectures. When preparing lectures, speakers often draw from texts written by others and refer to these explicitly during the lecture itself. While speaking, they may make reference to various written texts, such as a textbooks, handouts, overhead slides or writing on the chalkboard. Thus, formal written texts are transformed into spoken discourse of a more conversational and interactive nature, thus rendering their concepts more accessible to learners. The lecturers of the BSLC made frequent use of this strategy with specific references to written texts such as statistical reports from agencies, theories formulated by experts in the field, articles written by journalists and research published by others or by themselves, as shown in examples 4.4–4.8. (4.4) I’ve reworked some figures from the DTI website just to give you an idea of the relative size and importance of SMEs in the UK. (Lecture 1/L2/NS) (4.5) Then Friday there was an article in the Wall Street Journal that they were offering a tender bid of fifty nine dollars a share. (Lecture 12/L1/NS)

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

(4.6) I’ll take up a few uh additional points a- about Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurship and its relation to the issue of justice. (Lecture 10/L1/NS) (4.7) One of the major confidence surveys in Japan it’s called the Tankan survey which is undertaken by the bank of Japan showed that […] (Lecture 2/L2/NS) (4.8) What I’d like to do is talk to you about how we survey companies and then go through some of the key results from our latest one. (Lecture 3/L2/NS)

4.3.1 Discourse dysfluencies Further evidence of a conversational style can be seen in the analysis of discourse dysfluencies attributable to the real-time production of speech. For example, filled pauses frequently occur when speakers momentarily hesitate to search for the next word or phrase. Wordsmith Tools was used to analyze a series of pause fillers, including uh, um, er and variations thereof.5 The first finding of interest was revealed by the software’s wordlist tool. Uh was the eleventh most frequent item in the corpus, following ten of the most common words in the English language (i.e., the, of, and, to, a, that, in, is, you, so), in line with Biber et al.’s (1999: 1054) finding that filled pauses are pervasive in both American and British conversational English. Using the dispersion plot tool, it was possible to visualize the distribution of all pause fillers throughout the corpus, as illustrated in Figure 4.1 below.6

Figure 4.1  Dispersion plot of pause fillers in the BSLC

As can be seen, pause fillers occurred in all 12 lectures, although with wide range of variation among of the individual speakers (min 27/max 442). Moreover, there appear to be no particular trends linked either to L1 or L2 setting, or to language background of the speakers (lectures 4, 5, and 6 were delivered by NNSs). A similar picture emerges from the analysis of false starts, when speakers correct, repeat or reformulate words or phrases before completing them. Using the concordance tool, which locates, quantifies and displays searched items along with some co-text to the right and left, false starts could be identified by performing a



Chapter 4.  Speaking to the audience 

search on hyphens which had been used during transcription to indicate truncations (see Figure 4.2 below). N Concordance 164 dertakings. In a very famous case 165 k process. okay? and so, what that 166 concept of rationality or if it's 167 t laws and so they can more easily 168 th who they who they um who they 169 hat's true in abstract but when we 170 copied I give you an outline of a 171 ey were providing for example um 172 rst issue. Is that the actors have 173 OK this ten percent could be that

Chly- Chrysler tried cl- stochastic dynami clearly- it uh it bec clo- close companies collabor- collaborate come- when we get do comp- company history compu- computer techn con- a consistent se construc- constructi

Figure 4.2  Sample of concordance output of false starts in the BSLC

After removing unwanted hyphenated items (i.e., verbal renditions of numbers and compound words) from the concordance lines, a dispersion plot was produced to show the distribution of false starts across the lectures (see Figure 4.3 below). Again, individual propensity seems to be the primary determining factor. For example, three lecturers (11, 2 and 5) had low frequencies of both fillers and false starts, representing a native speaker in an L1 setting, a native speaker in an L2 setting and a non-native speaker, respectively. Similarly, high frequencies were found in Lecture 9 (NS/L1), Lecture 3 (NS/L2) and Lecture 6 (NNS/L2).

Figure 4.3  Dispersion plot of false starts in the BSLC

Because all the lectures presented both types of dysfluencies, they are clearly conversational in style, and thus in line with current trends in the academic world. This is further supported by comparing them to the MDLC, a comparably sized corpus of ten multi-disciplinary lectures derived from MICASE (see Chapter 3). All of these lectures also contain pause fillers and false starts. As illustrated by

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

Table 4.4, the BSLC has higher total frequencies of both types of dysfluencies than the MDLC, perhaps because there are an additional two lecturers who may contribute their own speaking idiosyncrasies. However, on the whole, the lectures in both corpora show a similar range of variation from minimum to maximum number of occurrences. Interestingly, the range of variation of pause fillers in the MDLC appeared to be quite arbitrary and not linked at all to discipline. This contrasts with a study by Schachter et al. (1991) that found a significantly higher number of pause fillers in humanities lectures compared to natural and social science lectures, attributed to alternative interpretations and options which characterize the discourse of the former. Table 4.4  Discourse dysfluencies in BSLC vs. MDLC BSLC Pause fillers False starts

2886 (Min 27 – Max 442) 1278 (Min 18 – Max 350)

MDLC

1772 (Min 63 – Max 422) 993 (Min 7 – Max 256)

4.3.2 Reduced forms Phonological reductions or reduced forms (e.g., gonna, kinda, ‘em, cuz) are patterns of speech production that eliminate word boundaries through the contraction, assimilation, elision and deletion of certain vowels and consonants (Brown and Hilferty 1986). They are a normal feature of spoken language produced in relaxed informal contexts where careful articulation of words is not essential and they contribute to the natural-sounding quality of NS speech. The use of reduced forms seems to be on the rise. According to Rayson, Leech and Hodges (1997), they are frequent in the conversational component of the British National Corpus and some are even treated as quasi-auxiliary verbs. Vogel Sosa (2000) found that 46% of all tokens of of in the Switchboard telephone conversation corpus were reduced (e.g., sorta). As further testimony to the growing importance of reduced forms, gonna, wanna and kinda now appear in many English language dictionaries, although informal usage is always specified. To investigate this feature in the BSLC, concordance searches were performed on a series of the most common reduced forms found in speech, beyond standard contractions such as it’s or there’s, which presumably would not present problems for L2 students. Table 4.5 shows the frequency break-down of reduced forms in the BSLC and also in the MDLC.



Chapter 4.  Speaking to the audience 

Table 4.5  Reduced forms in BSLC vs. MDLC

gonna wanna cuz kinda gotta ‘em lemme hafta buncha gimme lotta oughta sorta lotsa Total

BSLC

MDLC

175 73 53 27 31 9 9 7 10 2 3 1 1 1 402

300 66 50 10 10 22 6 1 – – 6 2 3 1 477

Before discussing the results, a word of caution is necessary. Although all the lectures were transcribed with the intent of reproducing as authentic speech as possible, there is always a certain degree of subjectivity entailed in the perception of phonological reductions from one transcriber to another. Consequently, the data should be interpreted as indicative and not absolute. As can be seen from the table, overall there were somewhat fewer instances of reduced forms in the BSLC (n=402) compared to the MDLC (n=477), mainly attributable to the difference in the use of gonna. It should be remembered that almost all the lecturers of the MDLC were speakers of American English, whereas in the BSLC there were three speakers of British English and six speakers of American English. According to Biber et al. (1999) the semi-modal going to is more common in American English, which could explain why gonna was more frequent in the MDLC. The forms wanna, cuz, kinda, gotta and ‘em follow gonna at a considerable distance but are broadly similar across the two corpora. The remaining reduced forms appeared occasionally in both corpora, but could sometimes be traced to only one speaker (lotta, hafta, and oughta) or two speakers (lemme and buncha). Thus, among these less frequent forms, usage seems to be largely idiosyncratic. The dispersion plot of all reduced forms in the BSLC shown in Figure 4.4 below can help to shed more light on their use.

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

Figure 4.4  Dispersion plot of reduced forms in the BSLC

The highest frequencies of phonological reductions appear in the L1 classroom lectures (Lectures 7–12) perhaps due to the more relaxed atmosphere generated the familiarity of regular classes. A few instances occurred also in the L2 guest lectures, but they were produced by the NSs (Lecturers 1, 2, and 3) and the one NNS (Lecturer 6) whose speech was very native-like. Indeed, in Lectures 4 and 5, given by the other two NNSs, there were no occurrences at all. On the other hand, reduced forms were produced by all the lecturers in the MDLC, although there was a wide range of variation (from minimum 4 to maximum 147). Thus, it would seem that individual speaking habits, familiarity with audiences and language background all contribute to the presence of reduced forms. N 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Concordance rd uh board meetings are that- that teenagers are ments that landlords are ally these other two are nal GDP and real GDP are ’re the stockholders are now and the bonds aren’t bonds and nobody’s even ming out and everybody’s normal software and he’s me money that means he’s say then dang what am I t of my life okay um I'm st talked about that I'm ht I think that what I'm rt of it is that and I'm r and then, negative I’m mounts of employment I’m depends on that but I'm so very very quickly I'm

gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna gonna

be held when are where the lose out when thers’s a mi offer for rent and they ca pin down R now capital R n be equal because you calcu meet for a stockholders me mature for a hundred years talk to you they say seven see how much the company e say why should I do that w have to take money away fr do hey I got these thousan re-write that as one piece assume that people can con do is stop here um and fir talk about that more speci need this in one I already let the free market alloca make the Mundell-Fleming a give you a lot of statistic

Figure 4.5  Sample of concordance output of gonna in the BSLC



Chapter 4.  Speaking to the audience 

Just as the dispersion plot analysis provides insights about the use of reduced forms in the BSLC, a short extract of concordance output (see Figure 4.5) can tell us something more about their discursive functions, taking into account both co-text and context. The item gonna has been selected as the most frequent reduced form in the corpus. This output has been re-sorted according to the item that comes directly to the left of gonna in order to identify the subjects of the verb phrase. This shows that a number of different entities can be found in the subject slot. As would be expected in a lecture setting, this includes the speakers themselves who use gonna to announce what they intend to do next, as can be seen in concordance lines 15, 16 and 20. However, just from this very small sample we see uses of gonna well beyond such signposting, thus entering the discourse from different angles (e.g., explanatory, expository, narrative). A similar disparity of uses of gonna was also found in a corresponding sample of concordance output from the MDLC. A few additional examples of some of the other reduced forms found in the BSLC corpus are useful to illustrate the informal imprint that this feature brings to the lectures: (4.9) They might switch from full-service to self-service to get rid of a whole buncha people and hope that that would not reduce the volume of their business. (Lecture 9/L1/NS) (4.10) So this is where the story sorta breaks down. (Lecture 8/L1/NS) (4.11) If you wanna ask me questions just stop me will you cuz I know this might seem quite boring. (Lecture 3/L2/NS) (4.12) And what Ozawa has done is kinda taken that approach. (Lecture 2/L2/NS)

The analysis undertaken in this section has shown that reduced forms are an integral part of the BSLC. We know that speech containing these forms is less comprehensible to L2 listeners (Henrichsen 1984; Van Duzer 1997), whose limited language proficiency renders them less able to compensate for missing input signals. In the case of lectures, learners must further cope with such features embedded into what they may equate with traditionally formal events. This can render the content lecture experience particularly challenging for L2 listeners who need to be made aware of this important characteristic of lecture discourse.

4.4 Lexical informality It stands to reason that the move towards the conversational-style lecture would also entail a similar trend towards greater lexical informality. Some recent work

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

has shown that the academic speech does indeed contain such features as vagueness (Swales 2001; Poos and Simpson 2002; Mauranen 2004) and idioms (Simpson and Mendis 2003). However, since these studies were not limited to lectures, it is important to determine to what extent they are present in the BSLC, especially in light of the difficulties they may present for L2 listeners. 4.4.1 Vagueness Expressions of vagueness (e.g., sort of, things like that, or something) are a common feature of spoken language, particularly in informal contexts where it is more appropriate to convey information in a less precise and authoritative way (Carter and McCarthy 1997). Biber et al. (1999: 116) group such expressions under the term “coordination tags” and found that they figure among the most frequent lexical bundles in conversation. From a theoretical point of view, vagueness has much in common with hedging, which also involves the mitigation and inexactitude of assertions for either epistemic purposes, oriented toward the propositional content, or for strategic ones, serving more of an interactional function (Mauranen 2004). However, according to Poos and Simpson (2002), in academic speech these purposes often overlap and vagueness expressions may be multi-functional. Nevertheless, in whatever form or function, “vagueness in communication is part of our taken-for-granted world” (Channell 1994: 4), and is thus a key aspect of competence for L2 learners at both the production and reception ends of communication. Vague language in the BSLC was analyzed by focusing on the common hedges kind of, sort of and somewhat, as well as a series of “vague category identifiers” (Channell 1994: 143), or tags such as something like that added onto an otherwise precise term to produce a vague meaning. The corpus was searched for these items and the results are shown in Table 4.6, along with comparable analyses of the MDLC and the BSTM (Business Studies Text Materials Corpus, see Chapter 3), since unlike the features investigated thus far, it is possible that some forms of vague language might be found in written texts.



Chapter 4.  Speaking to the audience 

Table 4.6  Vague expressions in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM BSLC

MDLC

BSTM

Hedges kind of/kinda sort of/sorta somewhat Subtotal

86 42 1 129

39 75 9 123

– – – 0

Vague category tags and so on or something/anything or so or whatever and things like that and stuff like that and that sort of thing and suchlike and so forth or what have you and the like Subtotal Total

24 14 1 4 8 17 3 2 2 – – 75 204

17 18 3 5 2 1 – – – 3 – 49 172

2 – – – – – – – – – 1 3 3

At first glance, the most striking finding is the scarcely filled column on the far right, indicating the extremely low frequency of these vagueness expressions in the written business studies text materials. There were only two instances of and so on and one of and the like. Even the items somewhat and or so, which would seem reasonably appropriate for written texts, were surprisingly missing. This suggests that perhaps the BTSM privileges other types of vague expressions, namely approximators (Channell 1994: 17) which add a degree of vagueness to numerical values. Both Channell (1990) and Bondi (1999) found these devices to feature prominently in economics writing. To investigate this possibility, the three corpora were searched for the approximators almost, about, around, nearly and approximately. After deleting the occurrences not functioning as approximators, I found that the BSTM corpus did indeed contain 55 of these items, compared to 76 in the BSLC and 51 in the MDLC with the lowest frequency. Thus, it seems that while some forms of vague language are determined more by the spoken mode (examples 4.13 and 4.14), others are more closely linked to content containing frequent numerical references (examples 4.15 and 4.16), in both spoken and writ-

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

ten form. This line of reasoning would also explain why the BSLC has the highest number of approximators (n=76), since it combines the spoken mode with numerically-oriented business studies content. (4.13) If you divide that by a quantity real GDP that only reflects changes in quantity. You kind of divide out the quantity effect and what you’re left with is the price of that. (BSLC/11/L1/NS) (4.14) It’s unusual to happen over a short period of time unless you have a torrential rain or something. (MDLC – Ground Hydrology) (4.15) Only five percent of employment is agriculture then nearly thirty percent is industrial and construction activity. (BSLC/4/L2/NNS) (4.16) For instance, if interest rates are around 10 per cent, the supply of and demand for stocks of oil will result in people expecting oil prices to rise by about 10 percent a year. (BSTM)

For the items kind of and sort of, the analysis proved to be somewhat more complex, as it was first necessary to manually weed out the many occurrences in the concordance output that did not function as vagueness indicators, but instead as a synonym of type. As can be seen from Table 4.6, there was an inversion of the frequencies of these two items between the two corpora. The BSLC has more instances of kind of (n=86), whereas the MDLC has more of sort of (n=75), thus confirming Mauranen’s (2004) analysis of these items in MICASE lectures which also found sort of to be more frequent. Although both Poos and Simpson (2002) and Mauranen (2004) consider the two items to be essentially interchangeable, this outcome prompted me to explore possible reasons for the difference. In the MDLC, the items showed no evident disciplinary alignments. Both items were used interchangeably by eight lecturers, while one lecturer (NNS) used exclusively sort of and one (NS) only kind of. In the BSLC, five lecturers (four NSs/US and one NS/BR) used both items interchangeably, while two NSs/BR used only sort of and the only two NNSs who produced vague expressions at all used exclusively kind of. Since no clear pattern of usage emerged, I am inclined to agree that the two terms are interchangeable and basically a matter of individual speaking habits. Nevertheless, my findings could be interpreted as a slight tendency for sort of to be preferred by native speakers of British English, but obviously a targeted analysis on a much larger sample would be necessary to confirm this. A sample of the concordance output for item kind of (see Figure 4.6 below) extracted from the BSLC corpus reveals an interesting and perhaps rhetorical use of this prominent hedge. In addition to mitigating verbs (lines 6, 8, 10, 13, 17), it was also linked to some rather strong or creative adjectives and adverbs (lines 2, 5, 9, 20). A similar phenomenon appeared in the MDLC where kind of was followed



Chapter 4.  Speaking to the audience 

by amazing, funny, cool, decadent, sloppy, and neat. Moreover, as can be seen in lines 3, 11 and 19, kind of was found to collocate with some interesting idiomatic expressions. Yet when used before such items, kind of appears somewhat paradoxically to emphasize them even more, and thus function as an attention-focusing device. This interpretation would seem to corroborate Poos and Simpson’s (2002: 16) finding of frequent instances of kind of in the MICASE corpus preceding “particularly sophisticated or jargon words” and having a metapragmatic function to draw listeners’ attention. Similarly, Mauranen (2004: 183) speaks of the “ad hoc signalling function” of kind of. In these cases, the lecturers may be engaging in a form of solidarity with listeners, either to share the effect of a particularly expressive item (i.e., adjectives or adverbs), or to lessen the threat of a potentially unknown one (i.e., idiomatic expressions). N 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Concordance money alright so it’s d and here it's really you have growth it's a ion that there is um a r less their income is hanges in quantity you after they leave is is red model. uh but also e something that has a es Then very slowly it d why is that? well we to do first and you're ey find okay now let's he point cuz these are calculate percentages um and once you make a assisted regions were ets which is the other good year and you just reases with age what’s

kind kind kind kind kind kind kind kind kind kind kind kind kind kind kind kind kind kind kind kind

of of of of of of of of of of of of of of of of of of of of

an interesting model becau bizarre right because it's catch twenty two problem y constant sort of utility o depressingly true for an a divided out the quantity e doubly important okay? so estimating or re-estimatin folksy feel to it um to th goes down in nineteen nine let the cat out of the bag locked into this sort of d look back on on what we’ve lower-case M micro foundat on the sly So we’re gonna one can have a discussion phasing out money for assi reigning alternative uh wo slug your way through it u strikingly missing from th

Figure 4.6  Sample of concordance output of kind of in the BSLC

Overall, although the two spoken corpora both contain a fair amount of vague language, they do not show strong differences (n=204 in BSLC vs. n=172 in MDLC). However, at the level of individual items, there was some noticeable variation between the two corpora, even if it could usually be traced to the habits of certain speakers. For example, 16 out of 17 occurrences of and stuff like that were produced by the same speaker in the BSLC, as were the 3 instances of or what have you in the MDLC. In both corpora, some speakers used these tags more than oth-

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

ers, ranging from a minimum of 1 vs. a maximum of 24 in the BSLC, and a minimum of 4 vs. a maximum of 27 in the MDLC. Therefore, individual preferences appear to be the most determining factor in the use of vagueness expressions. 4.4.2 Idioms Idioms have been described as a type of formulaic language, having a more or less fixed composition and transparency of meaning (McCarthy 1998).7 As pre-fabricated chunks of language that are stored and retrieved as holistic units, idioms greatly facilitate the communicative process (Wray 2000). They also have important socio-interactional functions involving solidarity, evaluation and the negotiation of meaning (Carter and McCarthy 1997; McCarthy 1998). Their key role in spoken language is perhaps best rendered by McCarthy: Idioms are never just neutral alternatives to literal, transparent, semantically equivalent expressions. Idioms always comment on the world in some way, rather than just describe it. […] Idioms are communal tokens that enable speaker to express cultural and social solidarity (1998: 145).

Idioms are therefore interpersonal in nature and rely on shared social and cultural knowledge to be understood (Moon 1994; McCarthy 1998). Consequently, they represent a challenge in L2 teaching contexts, where learners come across the lexical obstacles of idioms and further lack knowledge of their socio-pragmatic functions. Accordingly, several scholars have recently stressed the importance of addressing idioms in English language teaching (McCarthy 1998; Wray 2000; Simpson and Mendis 2003). As interactional devices, idioms are characteristic of informal communicative settings (McCarthy 1998). In strictly numerical terms, they were not found in high frequencies in conversation by Biber et al. (1999: 1024). However, given the vast range of items that can be classified as idioms, such quantitative indications are perhaps not as illuminating as they may be for more discrete types of linguistic items. In the same vein, Simpson and Mendis (2003: 427) found idioms in academic speech from the MICASE corpus to be “neither rare nor particularly frequent in academic speech or in any of its subgenres (i.e., monologic vs. dialogic modes) and also “remarkably patternless” (Simpson and Mendis 2003: 425) over academic disciplines, with more than half of the items found occurring only once. To determine the status of idioms in the BSLC, following Simpson and Mendis (2003), I opted to focus on those that could be considered essentially semantically opaque, as these would likely create the greatest difficulties for L2 listeners. I referred to their lists of idioms of particular relevance to academic settings and the most frequent items (four or more instances) in the MICASE corpus as a starting



Chapter 4.  Speaking to the audience 

point for my searches (Simpson and Mendis 2003: 435–436). This was integrated by idioms that had emerged from the corpus during various phases of direct hands-on work with the transcripts (one of the benefits of a relatively small, selfcollected and largely self-transcribed corpus). This analysis will refer to general idioms that are not necessarily related to any particular domain. Figurative expressions with a specific disciplinary focus will be discussed at length in Chapter 6. Table 4.7 reports the findings, along with a comparable analysis in the MDLC. The same items were searched in the BSTM corpus, but none whatsoever were found, not even the relatively formal by and large. What is immediately evident from the data is that while frequencies are low, with a maximum of three tokens and most having only one, there is a wide variation among the items and very little overlapping between the two corpora. There were only six items (1–6) in common. Items 7–26 occurred only in the BSLC, while items 27–37 that had already come to surface in Simpson and Mendis’ (2003) study based on the entire MICASE corpus were not found at all in the BSLC. In line with their findings, idioms in the BSLC are not particularly frequent and appear to be used in a patternless way. Yet the impression one gets from the table is that idioms seem somehow oddly permeating in terms of their sheer variation, especially considering that this list is not likely to be an exhaustive one that could only be produced by extensive in-depth manual analysis, and thus beyond the scope of this study. On closer inspection of the concordance output of the BSLC, some interesting points emerged. From a functional perspective, most of the idioms could be seen as various combinations of evaluation, description, emphasis and paraphrasing. Similarly, both Simpson and Mendis (2003) and Swales (2004b) note that in academic speech idioms are often multi-functional and functions can also be difficult to distinguish. In example 4.17, get their hands dirty is both evaluative and emphatic. In example 4.18, bread-and-butter is descriptive, evaluative and emphatic. In example 4.19, catch twenty-two is evaluative, emphatic and also serves as a paraphrase of the previous utterance. (4.17) But then when you ask them what their sample is they- they don’t have one I mean they don’t get their hands dirty in the world of applied economics. Theythey um they make hypotheses about what firms do. (Lecture 3/L2/NS) (4.18) We- we look at this graph looking at the short run right? That’s a bread and butter kind of analysis here like we- we’re looking at the short run so there is not much variation. (Lecture 9/L1/NS) (4.19) So you need growth before you can have reform but I’d argue that you need reform before you have growth. It’s a kind of catch twenty two problem you know the title of that book catch twenty two? (Lecture 2/L2/NS)

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

Table 4.7  Idioms in BSLC vs. MDLC

1 the bottom line 2 take at face value 3 in the same ballpark/ballpark idea 4 nitty-gritty 5 rule of thumb 6 by and large 7 get a grasp of 8 flip of a coin 9 out the door 10 catch twenty two 11 have your cake and eat it too 12 at rock bottom 13 hanging in mid air 14 get their hands dirty 15 bread-and-butter 16 cut corners 17 yackety-yack 18 peachy keen 19 the grand poo bah 20 bottom of the totem pole 21 stick it out 22 pain in the neck 23 let the cat out of the bag 24 come back up for air 25 slug your way through (something) 26 put a ceiling on (something) 27 carrot and stick 28 the big picture 29 take my word for it 30 go off on a tangent 31 chicken-and-egg question 32 come into play 33 get a handle on 34 in a nutshell 35 on the right track 36 make a stab at it 37 ring a bell Total

BSLC

MDLC

3 3 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 – – – – – – – – – – – 32

3 1 2 2 1 1 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 3 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 25



Chapter 4.  Speaking to the audience 

With reference to speaker language background, as to be expected, in the BSLC idioms tended to be used mostly by NS lecturers. Only one of the three NNSs (whose English was also the most native-like) produced some idioms (i.e., by and large and hanging in mid air). On the other hand, in terms of class setting, among the NSs there were no noticeable differences between the L2 guest lecturers and L1 classroom lecturers. Thus, among the native speakers, it would seem that the use of idioms in academic speech is essentially idiolectal, a conclusion reached also by Simpson and Mendis (2003) and Swales (2004b). To finish up this discussion of idioms in the BSLC, I would like to mention one particularly interesting case. The same item that had been used as an idiom also appeared in the corpus with its literal meaning, as shown by the following examples: (4.20) I have three models for doing that and the bottom line turns out to be that all three models do about equally well. (Lecture 7/L1/NS) (4.21) The first line shows the percentage of companies that are exporting and the bottom line shows British companies at something less than half. (Lecture 3/L2/NS)

This raises the issue of helping L2 listeners to distinguish idioms from literal meanings and lends still further support to the call for greater attention to this feature of spoken language in English language teaching.

4.5 Syntactic informality The availability of large amounts of spoken data obtained by means of computer-assisted methodologies has brought to the foreground syntactic variation that is strongly associated with speech. In fact, there is now evidence of a “spoken grammar” (Carter 1997: 57; McCarthy 1998: 76), which refers to features found in authentic speech in informal settings, but often not dealt with in standard grammars that are based exclusively on written language. Among these are elliptical forms, preand post-posed items (e.g., topics and tails), stand-alone relative clauses and nonstandard forms of reported speech (e.g., variation in verb tense and word order). Clearly, this has important repercussions for second language pedagogy in general, but also for listening comprehension more specifically. The following subsections will investigate two syntactic features of the BSLC that can have an impact on the successful lecture comprehension: ellipsis and non-restrictive which-clauses.

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

4.5.1 Ellipsis Ellipsis involves the deletion of structural elements that are essential to form a grammatically complete sentence, at least in terms of standard written English. Initially investigated from the perspective of textual cohesion where the omitted item is presupposed or recovered from the text in order to fill in the missing information and thus achieve a coherent interpretation (Halliday and Hasan 1976), ellipsis has since become a topic of interest in spoken language studies. With particular reference to everyday conversation, Carter and McCarthy (1995: 145) note the pervasiveness of “situational” ellipsis where deleted items must be retrieved from the communicative context (e.g., Had a great time, where we is elided), as opposed to “textual” ellipsis were items are retrieved anaphorically or cataphorically from the text, or “structural” ellipsis, such as the omission of that in relative clauses. Biber et al. (1999: 1104–5) instead describe ellipsis in terms of its position: initial, medial or final. They found that initial ellipsis where the subject is deleted is most common in conversation (e.g., Depends on what you want), compared to medial ellipsis (e.g., we got a problem here, where the operator have is elided) and final ellipsis (e.g., Yes, I suppose we can, where items that would follow can are elided). Sentence-initial ellipsis (hereinafter SIE) has also been found in academic speech, albeit not with particularly high frequencies. In a subcorpus of research speech derived from MICASE, Swales (2004a) found that 14% of the occurrences of depends were elliptical, but other common forms (Looks, Got, Sounds) ranged from only 1 to 8%. SIE linked to questioning (e.g., Anything else?, Any questions?) were the predominant form (not surprisingly), accounting for roughly two-thirds of the total occurrences. To investigate the occurrences of SIE in the BSLC, taking cues from the literature cited above, a number of potential candidates were searched. The results are shown in Table 4.8, together with a comparable search in the MDLC. Just for a matter of scrupulousness, the items were also searched in the BSTM but, as expected, no occurrences of any sort were found in the written counterpart of business studies lectures. As can be seen from the table, SIE is not particularly frequent in either of the two lecture corpora. Interestingly, there were no instances of some of the more common elliptical forms Looks, Sounds, Got, and Wanna. These forms are perhaps more characteristic of overtly dialogic academic discourse (Swales 2004a). Both corpora contained a few instances of the Any questions-type SIE, clearly linked to their didactic purposes. However, the largest difference between the two corpora can be traced to the item Sorry. Of the 18 occurrences in the BSLC, only 3 were produced in L1 settings, while the remaining 15 were distributed over five of the six EBM lectures. It seems that these guest speakers felt the need to apologize for even run-of-the-mill hitches that can happen to anyone when speaking before an



Chapter 4.  Speaking to the audience 

audience (examples 4.22–4.24), perhaps influenced by their unfamiliarity with audiences and lack of consolidated institutional role. Table 4.8  Sentence-initial ellipsis (SIE) in BSLC vs. MDLC

Sorry Anything…?/Anyone…?/Anybody…? You…? Just Depends Kind of Guess Seems Turns out Last Total

BSLC

MDLC

18 4 2 3 2 2 2 1 – – 34

6 7 1 1 – – – – 1 1 17

(4.22) Sorry there’s a spelling mistake there . (Lecture 2/L2/NS) (4.23) You can see that in Europe the European Union sorry in the fifteen countries from the European Union only five percent of employment is agriculture. (Lecture 4/L2/NNS) (4.24) Most of the companies that wanted sort of more than seventy percent sorry almost eighty percent of the companies. (Lecture 3/L2/NS)

A few additional forms of SIE in the BSLC came to light during manual work with the transcripts, as illustrated by the following examples: (4.25) A couple more uh remarks before I leave. (Lecture 8/L1/NS) (4.26) Not even clear what an amount of alertness is. (Lecture 10/L1/NS) (4.27) Growing like crazy. (Lecture 12/L1/NS) (4.28) Three reasons for this. (Lecture 4/L2/NNS) (4.29) Very easy to understand. (Lecture 5/L2/NNS) (4.30) Blue and yellow ones this time . (Lecture 1/L2/NS)

Although sentence-initial ellipsis is not particularly prominent in the BSLC, it does occur and with quite a bit of variation, judging from the above examples. It is therefore descriptively somewhat elusive. From a functional standpoint, it seems to be used to promote a more generally more relaxed atmosphere, but also to demonstrate a heightened interpersonal awareness of the audience on the part of the lecturers.

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

Because L2 listeners will inevitably be exposed to SIE, they need to become more aware of it as a normal feature of spoken English found even in relatively formal communicative settings. According to Carter (1998) many ESL textbooks do not adequately address this topic, and this can contribute to misunderstandings and frustrations on the part of students. As pointed out by Neil (1996), L2 learners may be puzzled to find that the syntactic structures they have worked so hard to master are not rules ‘carved in stone’ after all (e.g., Did you see that? vs. See that?), or they may even have doubts about the soundness of their hearing: perhaps the initial words were actually uttered, but they did not hear them (Swales 2004a). 4.5.2 Non-restrictive which-clauses To complement the analysis of SIE found at the onset of utterances, I will now turn to a syntactic feature often tagged on at the end of phrases, namely the non-restrictive relative clause. Also known as non-identifying relative clauses (Swan 1995: 498), Quirk et al. (1985: 1239) broadly define non-restrictive relative clauses as a type of modification that gives “additional information which is not essential to identification”, typically introduced by which or who. The criteria for distinguishing between non-restrictive and restrictive relative clauses is whether or not the information is essential to defining or identifying the noun phrase which precedes it. Two simple examples will suffice to clarify this difference: a. We went to the restaurant which is quite far away from the hotel b. Have you seen her new house, which she bought last year? In the first example, the clause introduced by the relative pronoun which is restrictive because it is essential to identify which restaurant is meant. In the second example, the which-clause is non-restrictive since it is not essential to identify which house is meant. Non-restrictive relative clauses have always been a topic of considerable interest among grammarians and linguists. Even as far back as the beginning of the last century, Jesperson (1909) distinguished between appositive clauses, which are embedded in the main clause and normally cannot be extraposed, and continuative clauses, tacked onto the main clause and functioning much like an additional sentence, where the relative pronoun could easily be substituted by the conjunction and. In more recent work based on authentic data from the Lancaster/IBM Spoken English Corpus, Yamashita (1994) found that non-restrictive relative clauses often contain lengthy episodes of complex information and tend to be added on at the end of utterances. Indeed, Carter (1997: 57) calls such information-laden elements “complete relative clauses”. Focusing on non-restrictive relative clauses introduced by which in the CANCODE corpus of conversational English, Tao and McCarthy



Chapter 4.  Speaking to the audience 

(2001) identified their prototypical pattern as which + copula be, even if other verbs are also common. This pattern frequently includes intervening modal verbs or expressions (e.g., I think, I suppose) to express degrees of certainty/uncertainty and discourse markers (e.g., you know, of course, actually). From a functional perspective, these authors identified three broad categories of clauses: evaluative to express a stance, expansive to offer additional information and affirmative to confirm a previous utterance. These functions are exemplified as follows: a. They were able to find a solution, which I think is wonderful. (evaluative) b. They were able to find a solution, which is described in your report. (expansive) c. They were asked to find a solution, which they did. (affirmative) However, it should be noted that these categories may not always be discrete. Particularly between expansion and evaluation, there is some fuzziness. As underlined by Tao and McCarthy (2001), expansion is typically pragmatically motivated and thus also involves stance. In the second example above, the underlying reason for specifying where the solution is found is linked to a stance towards it (i.e., it is deemed worthy of reading). Nevertheless, for purposes of classification, evaluative which-clauses are considered those that contain an overtly evaluative component. The above discussion has highlighted the interactional role of non-restrictive relative clauses in spoken discourse. The analysis that follows will investigate the use of non-restrictive which-clauses (hereinafter NRWC) in the BSLC. In context of L2 lecture comprehension, one of the major problems encountered by listeners is how to distinguish the main points from the more peripheral content (Thompson 1994; Jung 2003). In comparison with written texts where NRWCs are normally marked with a comma, during lectures listeners are unable to exploit such visual cues. Moreover, aural cues such as pauses or intonation breaks are considered to be unreliable (Biber et al. 1999; Tao and McCarthy 2001). Given these difficulties, it is important to have a clearer picture of how NRWCs are used in the BSLC. Identifying non-restrictive clauses in spoken language is no easy task. Biber et al. (1999) in fact did not even attempt to distinguish between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses in the spoken component of their corpus of over forty million words. Because they relied on the presence of a comma to define non-restrictive clauses, only written registers were analyzed from this perspective. Tao and McCarthy (2001) describe a series of difficulties encountered when identifying NRWCs in the CANCODE spoken data. These include highly inconsistent intonation cues, difficulty in interpreting exactly what the clauses referred to (e.g., the immediately preceding noun phrase or the entire utterance) and considerable distance between the head noun phrase and the NRWC (e.g., in cases of multiple speaker turns or lengthy stretches of intervening text). Their solution was to restrict the analysis to a reduced sample of occurrences and to adopt the criterion of

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

omissibility (i.e., the NRWC can be omitted from the utterance without compromising meaning), while recognizing that some cases will remain ambiguous. I use the same criterion to identify NRWCs in the BSLC, which as a small corpus renders this type of in-depth analysis feasible. Like Tao and McCarthy (2001), I restricted the analysis to which-clauses, excluding non-restrictive clauses introduced by who. This seemed to be a logical choice for this instructional setting where additional information about concepts, phenomena or entities would presumably have priority over additional information about people. This BSLC was searched for which-clauses based on the prototypical pattern with copular be, but also those with modal verbs and discourse markers. Instances of which-clauses containing verbs other than be were also processed. All concordance lines were then studied manually in order to eliminate unwanted restrictive which-clauses. A few items could not be classified due to false starts or non sequiturs, making it impossible to classify the which-clause as either restrictive or non restrictive. These were removed from the data.8 Table 4.9 shows the results of the analysis, along with comparative findings from the MDLC and the BSTM written corpus, where NRWCs could be easily distinguished by a comma preceding which. Table 4.9  Non-restrictive which-clauses (NRWCs) in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM

which + copular be – is/are – was/were – has been – would be which + other verbs which + modal verb (e.g., may, can, will) + be which + modal expression (e.g., I think, I’m not sure) which + discourse marker (e.g, you know, of course) Total

BSLC

MDLC

BSTM

102 11 1 1 39 6 6 4 170

69 12 – – 52 10 3 4 150

20 4 – – 51 16 – 1 92

As can be seen from the overall totals, there were quite a lot more NRWCs in the two spoken corpora with respect to the written texts, thus attesting to their key interactional function in speech. Between the two spoken corpora, differences were not particularly strong on a global level. The most noticeable variation was found in which + is/are, with 102 occurrences in the BSLC compared to only 69 in the MDLC. Looking back at the data for a possible explanation, I found many instances of which



Chapter 4.  Speaking to the audience 

+ is in particular referring to technical explanations of parameters or models typical of the discipline, as seen in lines 1, 4, 5, 7, 14 and 15 of Figure 4.7 below. N 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Concordance lls this is the circular flow which sign designing computer games which n to four point seven million which ly takes a profit or the loss which stment gross fixed investment which happen to such a type of SME which ws gross domestic expenditure which uh let's look at rent control which t becomes true by definition Which an have a look at some figure which to an early-out window okay? which as the hard core unemployment which he first big one in 1997 Sogo which per employed per employee uh which s discount factor D-S-comma-T which

is a uh graph that yo is a massive growth i is a fifty percent ov is a return o- over a is a an overall measu is a typical situatio is a a measure of GDP is a big issue today is a uh which is unco is a bit more intere is, a deliberate atte is a different statis is a big department s is almost a measure o is actually my notat

Figure 4.7  Sample of concordance output of NRWCs in the BSLC

In the MDLC, the presence of a range of other disciplines seemed to limit the need for such technical explanations. There were only four and these appeared in the microbiology and physics lectures. This low frequency appears to be offset by more which-clauses containing other verbs in the MDLC. In Table 4.9, in fact, we see that there are 52 which-clauses with other verbs compared to only 39 in the BSLC. This usage is illustrated in following examples: (4.31) So you know they- they- cre- created large luxury cars which you know at least sold among people um of- of- of higher incomes. (MDLC – Political Science) (4.32) Especially that field that approach to linguistics known as structuralism which by the way has its origins in Europe and not in not in America as such. (MDLC – Historical Linguistics)

Some interesting indications about the functions of NRWCs in the BSLC emerged from an ulterior analysis of all the occurrences of which- + is clauses, as the most prominent type found in the corpus. These items were inspected to classify them as evaluative, expansive or affirmative, according to Tao and McCarthy’s (2001) framework. Out of a total of 102 items, the vast majority (n=80) could be classified as expansive (examples 4.33–4.34), 20 were evaluative (examples 4.35–4.36) and only two were affirmative (example 4.37).

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

(4.33) If we look at GDP per employed per employee uh which is actually almost a measure of income so it’s how much money each employee receives. (Lecture 6/L2/NNS) (4.34) Here’s the error term which is just the difference between this guy and this guy. (Lecture 7/L1/NS) (4.35) You’re the president of the company and then you file your taxes you get taxed again which is kinda stinky. (Lecture 12/L1/NS) (4.36) So there’s a ratio between students and population which is remarkable and er very interesting. (Lecture 5/L2/NNS) (4.37) In that way they could price discriminate in their home market as against elsewhere which is what they did. (Lecture 2/L2/NS)

These results are in contrast with Tao and McCarthy’ (2001) study which instead found a majority of evaluative NRWCs (62%) in the data they analyzed from the CANCODE conversational corpus. On the other hand, given the educational setting of the BSLC, it is not surprising that expansive NRWCs would dominate here. However, what is perhaps most interesting is the presence of some fuzzy items (examples 4.38–4.40), which are not overtly evaluative and therefore classified as expansive, but nonetheless still carry an evaluative meaning in terms of what the speaker considers important. Again, this particular type of evaluation appears to be linked to the instructional role of the lecturers who wish to emphasize certain content to listeners. (4.38) Let’s look at rent control which is a big issue today as you know. (Lecture 9/L1/NS) (4.39) It’s really difficult to have- to find a data base with local information which is important information we want to use in our analysis. (Lecture 4/L2/NNS) (4.40) It’s necessary to have a view beyond Europe into overseas areas like Japan for example which is completely different from what we experience in the diversity of cultures in Europe. (Lecture 2/L2/NS)

On the whole, this analysis has shown that NRWCs are an important feature of the BSLC that can take on a variety of forms and functions. Indeed, there was evidence of NRWCs being used by the lecturers to signal important content and not just to mark omissible information as described in standard grammars. This raises important concerns for international lecture settings. Learners must recognize when NRWCs are used to introduce supplementary information (e.g., examples or further specifications) or evaluative digressions, but also to highlight more salient points.



Chapter 4.  Speaking to the audience 

4.6 Lexical density In the literature on spoken vs. written language, lexical density is widely recognized as a major distinguishing feature. It is broadly intended as the proportion of content-carrying lexical words to non-content-carrying grammatical words. It can be expressed either as a percentage of lexical words within all the words of a text (Ure 1971) or as a ratio of the number of lexical words per clause, and also taking into account high vs. low frequency lexical items (Halliday 1985). Regardless of the parameters adopted, over the years studies have shown that, on the whole, writing is more lexically dense than speech (Ure 1971; Halliday 1989; Eggins 1994; Stubbs 1996). Generally speaking, written texts have a lexical density ranging from about 40–54% for fiction and 40–65% for non-fiction (Stubbs 1996), compared to less than 40% for most spoken texts (Ure 1971). However, lexical density in spoken language is also influenced by its variety (e.g., dialogic or monologic) and the degree of pre-planning that may or may not go into it. Ure’s (1971) early study revealed relatively low lexical density in everyday dialogic exchanges where feedback among interlocutors is constant (23–33%) and higher lexical density in monologic recorded instructions (41%) and radio commentary (43%). For conversation, similar calculations emerged from the CANCODE corpus, ranging from 22 to 35.7% (McCarthy 1998). Stubbs (1996) found percentages of 34% in conversation, and somewhat higher percentages in monologic discourse, ranging from 48% in political speeches and 58% in radio commentary. On the other hand, in comparison with everyday conversation, some dialogic speech can have relatively high lexical density. O’Loughlin (1995) determined that the lexical density of oral language proficiency interviews of NNS can be as high as 43%. Furthermore, Berber Sardinha (1996) found the lexical density can vary significantly within the same text. In excerpts of conversation from the British National Corpus, lexically dense intervals were found to be interspersed with lexically sparse ones. Thus, lexical density appears to be affected by a number of factors linked to the type of text in question. However, from a pedagogical perspective, there is a general consensus that high lexical density is associated with more propositional content and greater complexity, which can render language more difficult for to process, particularly for non-native speakers (McNeill 1994; Ventola 1996; Hartnett 1998). Although lexical density gives us an idea of informational content, it does not necessarily tell us anything about the range of vocabulary used in a text, which can also contribute to its difficulty. For example, a text can be lexically dense but also highly repetitive, thus limiting the amount of new lexis introduced as it unfolds. For this reason, it is useful to calculate lexical variation as the ratio of type (number of different words) to token (total number of words). A low type to token ratio is an indication of a limited range of lexis, while higher ratios are associated with a

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

wider range. High lexical variation increases the likelihood of unfamiliar lexis, which has been shown to be a major cause of L2 comprehension difficulties (Kelly 1991; Rost 1994). Thus, it is important to determine just where the BSLC lies on the lexical density/variation cline. This will allow us to have a better understanding of this key aspect of their spoken dimension. To calculate lexical density, it is first necessary to identify all lexical items in the text. Following a classification first devised by Halliday (1985: 61) and later refined for spoken language by O’Loughlin (1995: 228), the following were counted as lexical items: nouns, lexical verbs, and adjectives and adverbs of time, place and manner. The remaining words were considered grammatical items (i.e., verbs be and have, auxiliaries, determiners, proforms, numerals, interrogative and negative adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, discourse markers, interjections). Unless one is dealing with very brief texts, this word-by-word identification is only feasible by means of automatic part-of-speech taggers. A subcorpus (BSLCtag) consisting of approximately 20,000 words randomly selected from the entire corpus was tagged with CLAWS (see Chapter 3). Using the concordancer of Wordsmith Tools, it was then possible to search the text by tags rather than words, which facilitated the quantification of the number of lexical items. Then the number of lexical items was divided by the total number of words in the text and multiplied by 100 to yield a percentage of lexical density. I opted to use this method of calculating lexical density rather than Halliday’s (1985) formula of number of lexical items per clause for two reasons. First, distinguishing all the clauses in a corpus of this length would be an unmanageable endeavour. Second, in spoken data clause boundaries are often blurry, which makes it problematic to accurately distinguish them. The same procedure was applied to comparable 20,000-word tagged samples from the MDLC and the BSTM. Following O’Loughlin (1995) and Nesi (2001) all non-lexical pause fillers were deleted from the total word counts of the two spoken samples, since their inclusion would have skewed the relationship between lexical and grammatical items. Lexical variation was then determined through the standardized type to token ratios, calculated automatically by the wordlist function of Wordsmith Tools. The results of these analyses are illustrated in Table 4.10. Table 4.10  Lexical density and lexical variation in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Corpus Sample BSLCtag MDLCtag BSTMtag

Lexical density (%)

Lexical variation (standardized type/token ratio)

36.9% 35.8% 43.7%

27.31 28.73 31.18



Chapter 4.  Speaking to the audience 

As the table indicates, the lexical densities of the BSLC and MDLC, ranging from 35–36%, are decidedly on the high end of the 22–36% range for conversation, whereas the BSTM is on the low end of written texts, typically starting at about 40%. These findings are in line with Ure (1971) who calculated a density of 39.6% for an extract of a lecture. They are instead in contrast with Nesi’s (2001) study that found quite high densities of 49% in academic lectures and 44-49% specifically in business lectures. However, as the author cautions, the analysis was based on small five-minute samples extracted from each lecture. Because these would correspond to only 750 words at an average speech rate of 150 wpm, it seems that the larger 20,000-word samples used in the present study can provide a more accurate picture, especially in light of the evidence that spoken language can have interspersed episodes of higher and lower density (Berber Sardinha 1996). Further processing of the tagged samples revealed that there were strong differences in the use of first and second person pronouns between the spoken samples (830 occurrences in the BSLC and 608 in the MDLC) and the written BSTM (114 occurrences). This is not surprising; as face-to-face events, lectures clearly entail more overt references to the participants, compared to the type of pronoun usage that encodes reader-writer interaction in written materials.9 However, it is interesting to note that in the BSTM, I was used exclusively in the online component (examples 4.41–4.42), and not in the printed text extracts. This could suggest a move towards a more explicitly interactive style in computer-mediated text materials compared to traditional ones – an idea that would merit further investigation, but beyond the purview of this study. (4.41) What is Cash? Hopefully this is an obvious question as I am sure the quantity of it you have is important to you in much the same way it is important to a business. (BSTM – Bized online business education site) (4.42) What I want to add is that the division of labor and specialization are aspects of what we might call cooperative production. (BSTM – Essential Principles of Economics online textbook)

At any rate, what seems most interesting from this analysis is that the range of variation in lexical density between the spoken and written sample corpora (6– 7%) is not as wide as expected. At 43.7%, the BSTM sample is clearly positioned at the low end of the non-fiction writing cline extending from 40% to 65% (Stubbs 1996). Perhaps the pedagogical purpose of the three texts overrides the spoken/ written distinction, thus contributing to a sort of ‘flattening’ of lexical density. This would seem to be supported both by Ure’s study (1971) that also reported relatively low lexical densities of 45–47% for some textbooks and by Flowerdew’s (1993) comparison of lexical density in biology textbooks and lectures. Although

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

the percentages were higher (58.2 for textbooks vs. 51.7% for lectures), the range of variation (6.5%) was similar to what was found here. Further insight comes from the lexical variation calculations. For written texts, a ratio ranging from 36 to 57 is considered normal (Samad 2004). As can be seen from the table, these ratios are all lower, ranging from 27.31 to 31.18 and differing by only a few points. The slightly lower ratio of the BSLC compared to the MDLC is likely due its single disciplinary focus, which naturally limits the range of vocabulary. This could also explain the only slightly higher ratio found in the BSTM. It is written language, but it deals only with one academic subject. However, with a ratio of only 31.18, the BSTM is still well below the low end of the written language range, perhaps because these texts were written for novices. Again, this suggests that the didactic function of these three texts has a homogenizing effect on their lexical make-up.

4.7 Summary of findings What has emerged from the analysis of the spoken dimension of the BSLC undertaken in this chapter is a rather complex picture. In some respects, the lectures share much common ground with everyday conversation, while in others they align themselves with more formal written genres. In terms of style, the BSLC lectures were decidedly ‘conversational’. They contained features that are typical of extemporaneous speech such as discourse dysfluencies and reduced forms. The highly interactive approach of several lecturers highlighted the role of the students as interlocutory ‘partners’ in the learning context, as was further stressed by one of the lecturers during an interview. Moreover, during manual perusals of the transcripts, other conversation-like features emerged, including interjections (e.g., yeah, yep, hey, gosh, wow, heck, whoops, oops, whoa, jeez, man, dang) and expletives (e.g., fart, hell, crap, ass), which are both conversational and interactional in nature. The BSLC lectures were also characterized by some lexical and syntactic features that are normally associated with informal speech, such as vague expressions, idioms and ellipsis. It may well be that it is the combined effect of all these features acting together which give the BSLC a strong conversational imprint. It is important to recognize that speech-like and informal features were more marked in some lectures than in others. The extent to which they were used appeared to be influenced by factors related to the speakers, the settings and the discipline. The absence of reduced forms and the low frequency of idioms in the L2 guest lectures given by NNSs would seem to be a function of speaker language background. The high frequency of reduced forms in the L1 classroom lectures of



Chapter 4.  Speaking to the audience 

the BSLC and the MDLC suggests that familiarity among participants is also a factor. On the other side of the coin, the elliptical form sorry was more frequent among the L2 guest lecturers, possibly related to their lack of familiarity and established institutional identity. No clear patterns in the use of discourse dysfluencies and vagueness expressions could be linked to NS vs. NNS speaker or L1 vs. L2 setting, and seem to depend largely on individual speaking habits. However, approximators (a type of vague expression) were more prominent in the BSLC compared to the MDLC. This could be attributed to frequent references to numerical data by the BSLC lecturers, which instead was clearly not as characteristic of lectures in other disciplines, particularly the humanities. On the other hand, the formal ‘written-like’ side of the BSLC can be seen in other features. The speech rates of the lecturers were more in line with those of more planned and structured genres, such as radio monologues and interviews, and thus slower than conversation. Of particular interest here were some indications that the slightly slower speech rate in the L2 guest lectures compared to the L1 classroom lectures was due to a purposeful adjustment on the part of some speakers to facilitate their L2 audience (further corroborated by an interview with one of lecturers). Although non-restrictive which-clauses (NRWCs) are normally considered to be characteristic of spoken language, their presence in the BSLC actually reflected a more written-like usage. In conversation, most NRWCs evaluate preceding information. In the BSLC, the vast majority was used in an expansive capacity to provide further information about the content, and therefore similar to the kind of language found in textbooks. Discipline also appeared to factor into this usage. In the BSLC there were more instances of NRWCs used to provide technical explanations of models and theories compared to the MDLC, where such usage was limited by the presence of lectures from less technical disciplines. Unlike the above features which can be interpreted as either speech-like or written-like, others showed no clear alignments. There was little variation in the lexical density of the BSLC, the MDLC and the BTSM, suggesting that neither discipline nor mode has a marked effect on this variable. Thus, the similar lexical density of all three corpora would seem to be linked to their instructional purpose which tends to even out typical patterns of spoken/written variation. Forms of intertextuality found in the BSLC are further signs of the overlapping spoken and written dimensions, as formal written texts are transformed by the lecturer into less formal spoken discourse. In fact, the lectures have numerous references to specific works written by others, which is something we normally associate with research articles or textbooks, and not with spoken discourse. Moreover, the lecturers frequently incorporated written texts in the form of handouts, slides and chalkboard writing to support their speech.10

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

An interpretation of this interesting amalgamation of styles and modes in the BSLC can be traced to its underlying pedagogical aims. To promote learning, the lecturers need to establish a rapport with students in order to reduce interpersonal distances that can inhibit communication. For this reason, they tend to speak in a natural and relaxed way, which is of course coloured with individual speaking habits and personalities. At the same time, because they are concerned with introducing conceptual knowledge, their speech is also content-oriented, but with a delivery rate designed to facilitate its assimilation. Thus, the spoken dimension of the lectures reflects both interactional and transactional language, intermingled and counterbalanced according to the instructional objectives. Having established this, the next step is to investigate the more explicitly academic features of the corpus, i.e., the language used by the lecturers to interact with audiences in order to facilitate learning. This will be the focus of the next chapter.

Notes 1.

I will discuss these two lectures further in the next section dedicated to lecture style.

2. The complete results of this investigation can be found in Crawford Camiciottoli (2005). 3. As indicated in Chapter 3, commas and full-stops were not transcribed. However, in order to facilitate the reading of the examples provided throughout this book, full stops have been added and represent the end of an information unit. 4. The exception was Lecture 11 given to a large undergraduate class of close to 100 students, which could explain the lack of interaction. The interactional features of the lectures will be dealt with at length in Chapter 5. 5. Biber et al. (1999: 1053) mention differences in the transcription of American and British English, with uh and um found more commonly in the former and er in the latter. However, since such cultural variation is not a major issue in this study, for the sake of simplicity I have grouped all pause fillers together. 6. The order in which the plots appear is determined by the software. 7. In the literature, there is considerable overlapping in terminology for this feature of language, e.g., “formulaic sequences” (Wray 2000: 463) and “multi-word sequences” (Butler 2003: 179). However, I will maintain the term idiom, which seems to better convey the idea of semantic opacity, an aspect that is of particular interest given the pedagogical aims of this study. 8. For all analyses that follow in the remainder of the book involving similarly unclassifiable items, I will adopt this policy. 9. See Hyland (1999a, 2000) for more on first and second person markers in university level textbooks. 10. The use of visual aids in the BSLC will be analyzed extensively in Chapter 7.

chapter 5

Interacting with the learners Without dialogue there is no communication, and without communication there is no education. (Freire 1970: 81)

5.1 Introduction In the above epigraph, Freire advocates his dialogic theory of education which envisages learning as meaningful interaction between teachers and students. To be effective, these encounters must take place in an environment that encourages dialogue and mutual reflection, and prompts learners to act on their newfound critical awareness. In academic settings, this approach can be seen in some participatory-style activities, such as brainstorming, discussion groups, question/answer sessions and field projects. It is also reflected in other ways that are not as obviously dialogic (e.g., discourse structuring and evaluative language that encodes attitudes and opinions), but nonetheless constitute important interactional strategies to establish and maintain the social relations between teachers and learners which are necessary for the negotiation of knowledge. This chapter focuses on a range of linguistic devices used by the BSLC lecturers to enter into ‘dialogue’ (both more and less overt) with their audiences in order to facilitate understanding.

5.2 Discourse structuring In the literature on academic lectures, the term discourse structuring refers to how speakers organize discourse as it unfolds. Because discourse structuring is used to guide listeners through the lecture, it is considered a key interactional device, even though there is no verbal exchange between participants. Discourse structuring has been analyzed from a global perspective, revealing different organizational formats, such as point-driven structure, problem→solution patterning and interweaving functional phases (Olsen and Huckin 1990; Young 1990, Dudley-Evans 1994; Allison and Tauroza 1995; Flowerdew and Miller 1995). It has also been in-

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

vestigated at a more local level, looking at multi-word expressions that indicate how the lecture will proceed (e.g., Today I’m going to talk about, Next we’ll look at). These studies have used a variety of different terms for such expressions, including metastatements (Murphy and Candlin 1979), macromarkers (Chaudron and Richards 1986; Flowerdew and Miller 1997), lexical phrases (DeCarrico and Nattinger 1988), introductory chunks (Khuwaileh 1999) and text-structuring metadiscourse (Thompson 2003). Nevertheless, regardless of terminology, these expressions all fall under the broad umbrella of metadiscourse which might simply be defined as “talk about talk” (Hyland 2000: 109). Of course, the concept of metadiscourse is much more complex and comprises both organizational and attitudinal aspects of discourse. However, the discourse-structuring function of these expressions is clearly metadiscursive as lecturers ‘intrude’ into the text to explicitly announce to audiences what they intend to talk about. Analyses of discourse structuring in lectures have also focused on individual lexical items such as so, now, OK, and right, and well (Chaudron and Richards 1986; Flowerdew and Tauroza 1995; Swales and Malczewski 2001). These studies are grounded in extensive work found in the literature. In her ground-breaking study, Schiffrin (1987: 31) refers to such items as discourse markers, which she operationally defines in conversation as “sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk”, thus highlighting their capacity to mark relationships between segments of discourse. Over the years, discourse markers have been studied from a variety of linguistic perspectives, e.g., textual, interactional, attitudinal and cognitive (Jucker and Ziv 1998: 4). This has led to a proliferation of terms including pragmatic marker, pragmatic expression, discourse particle and discourse connective (Jucker and Ziv 1998: 1), starter (Murphy and Candlin 1979) and micromarker (Chaudron and Richards 1986; Flowerdew and Tauroza 1995). In the following three sub-sections, I will analyze discourse structuring in the BSLC both globally and locally, adopting the terms lecture macrostructure to refer to overall organizational patterning, macromarker to refer to multi-word metadiscursive expressions and micromarker to refer to single lexical items that preface utterances. 5.2.1 Lecture macrostructure In response to a growing awareness of the lecture comprehension needs of L2 learners, over the last two decades or so some research has been dedicated to understanding the global structure of lecture discourse. This work is inspired by schema theory (Rumelhart 1980; Carrell 1987) first applied to reading comprehension. In addition to bottom-up linguistic decoding, successful readers also use top-down processing, which comprises both content schemata (background knowledge and previous experience) and formal schemata (knowledge of textual



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

and rhetorical structures). However, as observed by Flowerdew (1994), this approach is equally beneficial for lecture comprehension as listeners may exploit knowledge of lecture structure to follow the development of the topic, identify key and subsidiary points, and predict upcoming information. One of the models proposed for lecture organization is based on the problem→ solution pattern (Olsen and Huckin 1990; Dudley-Evans 1994; Allison and Tauroza 1995; Flowerdew and Miller 1995), where the lecturer describes a situation and a problem that emerges from it, and then goes on to propose a solution. This structure has been found in technical disciplines such as engineering and computer science. However, lectures may also be structured along a theoretical framework. Dudley-Evans (1994) found that research results were used to illustrate a series of key points in plant biology lectures, while Flowerdew and Miller (1995) noted that examples were used to explain concepts in lectures on economics and public administration. Thus, global lecture structure would seem to be influenced by the nature of the discipline, i.e., either more technical or theoretical. Other studies have looked at lecture discourse organization from a rhetorical perspective. Thompson (1994: 176) applied genre analysis to identify a series of moves in lecture introductions, which include announcing the topic, indicating the scope, outlining the structure and presenting aims. In a very comprehensive study of lecture discourse, Young (1994) takes a different view. She describes lectures not as a monolithic whole with a distinct beginning, middle and end, but rather as a series of interweaving phases which do not occur in any particular order and can re-appear intermittently throughout the lecture. In addition to the content phase which contains theoretical information and the example phase in which it is illustrated, there are also three metadiscursive phases functioning to ensure the successful transmission of information. These are discourse structuring to announce which direction the lecture will take, conclusion to recapitulate key points and evaluation to indicate to listeners how content should be interpreted. There are also interaction phases, where the lecturer interacts directly with the audience by means of questions, imperatives and comprehension checks. In order to investigate the macrostructure of the lectures comprising the BSLC, I first relied on indications that had emerged from the many stages of direct handson work with the transcripts. In terms of overall structure, the lectures appeared to make extensive use of exemplification (or Young’s previously mentioned example phase) to further explain theoretical concepts, often by transporting them into the real world or by creating a fictional world. Such exemplification ranged from particular economic parameters to various aspects of business organization and policy, as illustrated in the following examples:

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

(5.1) The GDP deflator on the other hand is a measure of all of the prices of all of the goods that our economy produces. So it’s much broader than the CPI. So let’s say we have a mythical town called Cicely. (Lecture 11/L1/NS) (5.2) We’re setting an incentive for employers in the minimum-wage industries the ones on the lowest echelon for example the fast-food industries are the minimum-wage industry. Like McDonald’s. People who work behind the counter and in the kitchen. (Lecture 9/L1/NS) (5.3) The first one is an individual proprietorship which is when you start out and you wanna start a business. Like you’re gonna sell something maybe open up a little ice cream shop. (Lecture 12/L1/NS) (5.4) We have er specialities or type of products it’s from the dictionary I suppose you understand what’s the meaning of of this okay? where? in Valencia okay? textile products one of the best examples of defining of specialization in Spain and in Italy too. (Lecture 4/L2/NNS)

This tendency was further supported by information that emerged during an interview with one of the L1 classroom lecturers. He indicated that giving examples (both real and fictional) is an important learning strategy because students are able to exploit their own experience to better assimilate information. In addition, he felt that it is particularly useful for business studies as many of his students aspire to start their own businesses and can therefore formulate opinions and plans for their own purposes. Exemplification was further investigated on a quantitative level by searching the corpus for the lemmas example/instance/case. Although it is true that exemplification can occur without necessarily using these terms (see examples 5.1 and 5.3), their presence (or absence) can nonetheless serve as a broad measure of exemplification within a text. Table 5.1 shows the results of a comparative analysis of these three lemmas in the BSLC, MDLC and BSTM. Table 5.1  Example, instance and case in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Frequency of example/instance/case BSLC MDLC BSTM

170 107 187

As we can see from the figures, compared to the MDLC (n=107), there were more instances of the three lemmas in both the BSLC and the BSTM, which showed roughly similar frequencies with 170 and 187 instances, respectively. This suggests



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

that exemplification plays a more important role in business studies than in other disciplines. Thus, in line with Flowerdew and Miller’s (1995) study of economics and public administration lectures, these business studies lectures also seem to be largely structured according to general statement→example. This discursive pattern is also highly typical of economics textbooks (Bondi 1999), which evidently carries over to some extent into business studies lectures. The BSLC also contained quite a lot of statistical data offered to support statements. This is similar to the claim→justification pattern typically found in argumentative genres, even if we must recognize that statements are not likely to be disputed in the context of lectures. Episodes with supporting data are illustrated in the following examples. (5.5) It’s a real SME structure. Look at this . On the top from left to right you find zero to forty-nine employees that’s one category […] So that means er forty-three thousand SMEs and er that sums up to ninety-nine point five percent of all companies and only five percent of all companies are bigger that SMEs so it’s a real SME structure in the Aachen region. (Lecture 5/L2/NNS) (5.6) Well we’ve seen a shifting of production overseas. This graph shows uh the percentage of the Japanese manufacturing industry uh produced overseas […] So big increase in the percentage of Japanese- Ja- Japan’s manufacturing industry actually produced overseas. (Lecture 2/L2/NS) (5.7) The richest part of the UK economy erm is actually in the south and southeast unlike Italy where it’s the other way around. And we see London in the southeast having the highest number of registrations per population. The poorer parts of the country uh are the northeast erm Northern Ireland you can see that’s where the lower figures are coming in . (Lecture 1/L2/NS) (5.8) In April there was the biggest increase in six months business productivity. Here they’re talking about productivity I think yeah the uh the third paragraph down. Productivity grew at an annual rate of eight point four percent in the January to March quarter. (Lecture 12/L1/NS)

Most of these instances could be traced to the guest lecture component of the corpus where the lectures tended to be more descriptive and less theoretical. In fact, the primary objective of the EBM guest lecture series was to introduce students to the economic features, enterprise structures and industrial policies of various countries, without delving into theory. This was confirmed during an interview with one of the L2 guest lecturers who stressed the need to make students aware of the current issues in the global business world in which they aspire to operate.

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

In sum, in terms of overall structure, the BSLC appears to reflect an integration of two broad approaches. On the one hand, we find extensive exemplification to explain the theoretical concepts of the discipline; on the other we find authentic data used to support claims that concern real business trends and economic phenomena. 5.2.2 Macromarkers The fact that lecturers use specific devices to signal upcoming discourse to audiences is well documented in the literature. In their investigations of first person pronouns in university lectures, Rounds (1987) and Fortanet (2004a) found that they were frequently associated with phrases carrying out the discourse function of guiding listeners (e.g., what I’d like to do today). Rilling (1996) observed high frequencies of four-word clusters functioning as topic markers (e.g., we’re gonna look at) and topic shifters (e.g., Let’s now turn to) in her corpus of university lectures. Mauranen (2001) discusses discourse reflexivity as a key feature of the MICASE corpus. She found an abundance of expressions used to structure on-going speech. These include prospective devices to signal what is about to come (e.g., today we’re gonna talk a little bit about), as well as retrospective ones to indicate what is being put aside for the moment (e.g., an issue worth mentioning but not today). Corts and Pollio (1999: 95) instead speak of “frozen” figures of speech that revolve around the metaphor ‘a lecture is a journey’ used to structure the lecture into meaningful parts. The lecturer takes listeners on a sort of ‘tour’, guiding them through the unfolding topic and focusing their attention on important points along the way. Although these studies have been undertaken from somewhat different perspectives, they all highlight the prominence of metadiscursive expressions in lectures that contain various combinations of first person pronouns, modals/semi-modals and verbs representing verbal processes (e.g., We will discuss, I’m going to summarize). I will hereinafter refer to such expressions as macromarkers. The important role of macromarkers clearly emerges from research on L2 lecture comprehension. Some studies have shown that the presence of macromarkers improves retention and recall in post-lecture tests (Chaudron and Richards 1986; Jung 2003) and that it is generally beneficial for activating content schemata (DeCarrico and Nattinger 1988) and helping listeners to successfully follow the lecture (Khuwaileh 1999). Further evidence for the facilitating function of macromarkers comes from research dealing with the communication difficulties of NNS university teachers. Tyler et al. (1988) found that the lack of macromarkers in the speech of international teaching assistants caused comprehension problems for their NS audiences. For example, NNSs speakers often overused the coordinating conjunction and as a generic discourse marker to substitute clearer topic shifters such as Let’s turn to the next point. Similarly, Williams (1992) found that the lack of ex-



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

plicit macromarkers in the speech of NNS teaching assistants was linked to reduced levels of comprehension in audiences of native speakers. Macromarkers were analyzed in the BSLC on the basis of three lexico-grammatical patterns: a. 1st person pronoun + modal/semi-modal (e.g., We’ll talk about) b. let + 1st person pronoun (e.g., Let’s move on to) c. 1st person pronoun + want (e.g., I want to look at) The first two patterns were suggested in the literature mentioned above, but the third pattern based on want emerged only after beginning to work with the corpus. In fact, it became evident that in addition to will, want was also frequently found in macromarkers. It has recently been shown that the use of want to is on the rise, particularly in spoken language, and some scholars maintain that it is currently in a transitional phase from a lexical to a modal verb (Krug 2000; Verplaetse 2003), or even consider it to be a semi-modal already (Leech 2003). While all of the above patterns are prospective in orientation, it is important to recognize that discourse structuring can also be retrospective, e.g., as I said before (Mauranen 2001). However, this analysis will not consider such retrospective expressions since prospective macromarkers are more central to helping listeners follow the lecture as it progresses. The BSLC was searched for macromarker patterns with the concordancer of Wordsmith Tools. Once the output was generated, it had to be extensively handedited. Following the criteria of “talk about talk” to define metadiscursive macromarkers, it was necessary to remove all items that did not refer to the upcoming discourse itself. For example, there were several instances of reported speech, embedded narratives and hypothetical uses of Let’s say. Moreover, in many cases it was necessary to carefully examine co-text to determine the meaning of the main verb within macromarker. In addition to the more obvious verbal processes (e.g., talk about, discuss, mention, introduce, review, summarize), many other verbs were ‘borrowed’ to indicate verbal processes. The following examples illustrate how material processes (5.9–5.11) and mental processes (5.12–5.14) can become alternatives to verbal processes. A complete list of all ninety different verbs used in the macromarker patterns is shown in Table 5.2. (5.9) I’m gonna leave it for now and come back to it. (Lecture 8/L1/NS) (5.10) We’ll try and pull it together in just a moment. (Lecture 2/L2/NS) (5.11) So I will jump directly over to that er second topic. (Lecture 5/L2/NNS) (5.12) We’ll see in a moment what this means. (Lecture 6/L2/NNS) (5.13) Let’s look at rent control which is a big issue you know today. (Lecture 9/L1/NS)

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

(5.14) I want to focus on some things now that I’m interested in. (Lecture 4/L2/NNS) Table 5.2  Verbs used in macromarker patterns in the BSLC address analyze ask attempt begin build on carry on check come back come to compare conclude continue cover cut decide define develop discover do draw emphasize examine explain explore face find finish focus

get into get through get to give go back go further go on go over go through have highlight introduce jump keep know leave list look make mention move move into move on notice overlap pick up present put read

realize recap reconvene refer repeat say see share shift show skip solve spend start step back stop study suggest sum up summarize take take up talk about tell touch on try use wrap up write

Table 5.3 illustrates the distribution of macromarkers in the BSLC, with corresponding analyses in the MDLC and BSTM.



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

Table 5.3  Macromarkers in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Macromarkers

BSLC

MDLC

64 46 3 10 8 131

26 23 24 22 5 100

25 – 1 – – 26

let + pronoun Let me/Lemme Let us/Let’s Subtotal

11 26 37

13 29 42

– 35 35

pronoun + want I want/I wanna We want/we wanna Subtotal

25 3 28

24 1 25

1 – 1

196

167

62

pronoun + modal/semi modal We will/We’ll I will/I’ll We are going to/We’re gonna I am going to/I’m gonna I would like/I’d like Subtotal

Total

BSTM

As can be seen from the frequency counts, the presence of macromarkers was broadly similar in the BSLC and MDLC. Some variation was noticeable in the patterns based on pronoun + modal/semi-modal. Will patterns were preferred in the BSLC (110 instances vs. 49 instances in the MDLC), while going to patterns were more frequent in the MDLC (46 instances vs. 13 in the BSLC). Upon closer inspection of the BSLC data, I found that the vast majority of instances (83 out of 110) of macromarkers with will occurred in the L2 guest lecture component. This could have two possible explanations. First, according to Biber et al. (1999) the semi-modal going to is more common in American than British conversational English. The fact that there were no native speakers of American English among the L2 guest lecturers could account for the stronger presence of will compared to going to. On the other side of the coin, it would also explain the opposite trend in the MDLC in which most speakers were native Americans. However, an in-depth investigation of possible cultural differences is clearly beyond the scope of this study. Second, and more important from an instructional perspective, the guest speakers may have been especially careful to signpost their lectures using will patterns to help compensate for the L2 audiences’ lack of familiarity with them and their lecturing style, and for their potential comprehension difficulties. A dispersion plot (see Figure 5.1 below) elaborated from all instances of macromarkers in

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

the BSLC confirms that on the whole the L2 guest lecturers (lectures 1–6) used more macromarkers compared to the L1 classroom lecturers (lectures 7–12). In fact, one L1 classroom lecture (n. 12) does not even appear in the plot since it contained no instances of any of the searched items.1 Yet even among the L2 guest lecturers there was noticeable variation in frequency (e.g., Lecture 4 vs. Lecture 5). Therefore, it is likely that the use of macromarkers also depends on individual lecturing style.

Figure 5.1  Dispersion plot of macromarkers in the BSLC

Another insight that emerges from the plot is that this type of discourse structuring is not limited only to the beginning of lectures as might be expected. Although there is a certain concentration of macromarkers in the initial part of the lecturers represented by the left side of the plots (particularly the L2 guest lectures), when speakers give audiences an overview of what is to come, we see that they also occur intermittently throughout the lecture. The speakers apparently remained concerned to cue their audiences as to what direction the lecture would take. Because metadiscursive macromarkers have also been found in textbooks (Bondi 1999; Hyland 1999a) it seemed worthwhile to look at the BSTM corpus as well. As shown in Table 5.3, compared to the spoken corpora, there were noticeably fewer instances (n=62), suggesting that here macromarkers play a less important role than in their spoken counterpart. We must remember that readers have the chance to go back and ‘re-process’ what they read, while listeners do not. The higher frequency of macromarkers in the spoken texts may therefore reflect a strategy to help listeners cope with the processing of online speech. As to be expected, the macromarkers were predominantly of the Let’s or We will type, which would be more in line with written prose. However, some surprising verb phrases were found in these patterns, as illustrated by examples 5.15 and 5.16. Interestingly enough, both of these examples come from the online component of the BSTM. As hinted at in Chapter 4, online materials may represent fertile ground for innovation in written academic language.



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

(5.15) Let’s have a trawl through some of the current thinking on business ethics. (Bized business education website) (5.16) Let’s have a think about this interesting subject. (Bized business education website)

From the preceding analysis, it appears that macromarkers are used in the BSLC as a pedagogic tool to enhance understanding in general and are largely independent of discipline. The fact that more macromarkers were found in the L2 guest lecture component of the BSLC lends further support to their didactic role. As visitors, the L2 guest lecturers could not rely on the established rapport and language competence of the regular L1 classroom where lecturers may instead be more confident that students can follow them without extensive and repeated cueing. 5.2.3 Micromarkers When used in lectures, micromarkers (e.g., OK, so, well, now) can carry out different functions. According to Chaudron and Richards (1986), they indicate intersentential relations, but also function as pause fillers which give listeners more time to process what they hear. Following Schiffrin’s (1987) suggestion that these markers carry both semantic and pragmatic meaning in conversation, Flowerdew and Tauroza (1995) attribute a more important role to micromarkers in lectures. For example, so may act as a causal connector on the semantic level and, at the same time, it may function pragmatically to signal a switch in communicative function (e.g., from a statement to an evaluative comment). Similarly, in the MICASE corpus Swales and Malczewski (2001) found that so indicates a causal relation, but also functions as a new episode flag to mark a change of direction in the discourse. Okay was used to focus attention on the shift to a new topic, along with right, well and now. Because there is some evidence that the presence of micromarkers in lectures also has a beneficial effect on comprehension in L2 settings (Flowerdew and Tauroza 1995), it is important to understand how they are used in the BSLC. Taking cues from the literature, okay, so, well, now, right/alright were analyzed as the most prevalent micromarkers found in lecture discourse. However, before moving on, it should be noted that these items can carry out other functions. For example, okay with rising intonation acts as a comprehension check. Well may also be a noun or adverb, so an adverb or conjunction, and now an adverb. Two important criteria for deciding whether these items are functioning as discourse markers are that 1) they appear in utterance-initial positions and 2) they can be detached from the syntactic structure of the discourse that follows (Schiffrin 1987; Brinton 1996). Accordingly, the BSLC was searched for the selected micromarkers occurring in sentence-initial position. These were then overviewed to ensure that the micromarkers were followed by syntactically independent phrases. During this phase,

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

some instances of the selected items were found in utterance initial positions, but did not however function as discourse markers (i.e., now as an adverb and right as a back channel response during brief dialogic exchanges). Instances of this type were removed. The results after these adjustments are shown in Table 5.4, along with corresponding data from the MDLC and BSTM. Table 5.4  Micromarkers in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Micromarkers so okay now well alright right Total

BSLC (min/max) 694 177 104 70 28 7 1080

MDLC (min/max)

(10/119) (2/108) (1/22) (2/15) (1/10) (1/3)

430 141 169 44 24 2* 810

(8/99) (1/53) (4/45) (1/17) (1/6)

BSTM (min/max) 57 (2/17) – 11 (1/5) 5 (2/1) – – 73

* Both instances were produced by the same speaker

As can be seen, on the whole micromarkers were more frequent in the BSLC compared to the MDLC. Most of this difference could be traced to so, with 264 more instances in the BSLC. However, re-sorting of the concordance lines in the BSLC revealed no clear trends according to L1 classroom vs. L2 guest setting or to language background of the speakers. To detect a possible disciplinary influence, the concordance lines of the MDLC were re-sorted according to subject matter to see whether those that might have more affinity with business studies (i.e., social science topics) might also have more instances of so. This was not the case. Therefore, in line with previous studies (Flowerdew and Tauroza 1995; Swales and Malczew­ ski 2001), the use of micromarkers seems to depend largely on idiolectal variation. This is further corroborated by the minimum and maximum figures per lecture reported in the table. In both spoken corpora there are strong individual differences across the micromarkers. With only 73 instances, micromarkers were much less frequent in the BSTM compared to the two spoken corpora, with so again being the most prominent. As could be expected there were no instances of okay and alright which could be considered typically ‘conversational’. However, there were a few instances of now and well used in conjunction with interrogative forms (examples 5.17–5.18) which almost seem to mimic conversation. This appears to be a particularly overt manifestation of the reader-writer dialogue strategy associated with textbooks (Hyland 1999a; Bondi 1999). Almost all instances of now and well were found in the online component of the BSTM, suggesting a more informal style compared to print text materials.



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

(5.17) Now just how does a company address these and especially the last three? Let’s take a bank and think how it can build on its tradition. (Bized business education website) (5.18) So is this good news or bad news? Well, not surprisingly, there is no simple answer to this! (Bized business education website)

With reference to individual items, in line with Swales and Malczewski (2001), so was by far the most frequent micromarker in all three corpora and therefore deserves additional comment. From the previous discussion, we know that so is multi-functional. In an utterance-initial position, it can act as a causal connector when an utterance can be interpreted as resulting from the previous one (examples 5.19–5.20), or it can function as a signal of topic shift (examples 5.21–5.22), where there is no causal link and the discourse clearly moves on in a different direction. This multi-functionality likely contributes to the particularly high number of occurrences of so compared to other micromarkers. However, in many cases, the function of so is rather fuzzy. In examples 5.23–5.24, it is not altogether clear whether there is a causal link between the utterances or if the speaker is simply moving onto a different topic. (5.19) In 1997 Sogo which is a big department store and uh also a whole series of uh second tier banks regional banks as well going bankrupt. So a pretty depressing story. (Lecture 2/L2/NS) (5.20) They aren’t particularly relevant when you’re talking about a small change in the price of an input and its impact on prices or output. So we don’t have to include it. (Lecture 10/L1/NS) (5.21) That will be the matter of today. So I show you some pictures now to finish this up. (Lecture 5/L2/NNS) (5.22) And you know greed is greed is nasty and they can really screw up people’s minds okay. So back to this corporation business. (Lecture 12/L1/NS) (5.23) I think it’s about forty thousand thirty thousand employed in coal mining now. So you know shipbuilding all but disappeared. The motor industry is still there although Rover’s in trouble at the moment (Lecture 1/L2/NS) (5.24) We set up an incentive for the employers to uh retain their profit margins byby- by substituting in the various ways. So what would you do if you were the owner of the McDonald chain and right the- there was the United States Congress that just recently had increased the minimum wage? (Lecture 9/L1/NS)

Okay and now were the second most frequent micromarkers and their attentionfocusing function could be interpreted rather clearly as shown in examples 5.25– 5.28. With 177 and 141 occurrences in the BSLC and the MDLC, respectively, okay

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

was quite prominent as a micromarker. This is in contrast with Swales and Malczewski’s (2001) study in which okay was much less frequent in lectures compared to more dialogic types of academic speech such as office hours and tutorials. However, because the bulk of usage could be traced to only one or two speakers in each corpus, the strong presence of this form is likely to be a question of individual speaking habits. (5.25) I’m actually surprised the probit does as well as it does. Um but- but that’s what they find. Okay let’s kind of look back on- on what we’ve done here. (Lecture 7/L1/NS) (5.26) Let’s start from here. Okay here we have regional selective assistance loans and regional selective assistance grants. (Lecture 6/L2/NNS) (5.27) They went from two point three million to four point seven million which is a fifty percent over that ten year period. Now as you may or may not be aware the eighties was actually an era of great structural change. (Lecture 1/L2/NS) (5.28) If the price change induces you to change the market basket that doesn’t show up in the CPI for several years until the market basket gets changed. Now there’s another way that we can measure the price level or the price changes in this economy. (Lecture 11/L1/NS)

In comparison with other micromarkers, well and alright/right were less frequent. Well also proved to be multi-functional as a discourse marker. First, well prefaced responses to questions posed either by students or by the lecturers themselves in a sort of self-elicitation technique, as illustrated in examples 5.29 and 5.30, respectively. The use of well as a marker of response in question and answer patterns is common in conversation and typically signals a divergence of opinion (Schiffrin 1987). In lectures, however, Bamford (2005) found that well often prefaces responses that are relatively straightforward, which appears to be corroborated in examples 5.29 and 5.30. Second, well acted as an attention-focusing device, as shown in examples 5.31 and 5.32. (5.29) (Student) What do you expect for the future? Well there is- there is some evidence that companies are more innovative and more collaborative. (Lecture 3/L2/NS) (5.30) Why is that? Well because inputs are bought- are bought today at certain contractual prices and the output is sold tomorrow. (Lecture 10/L1/NS) (5.31) Let me talk about the equilibrium quickly. Well for equilibrium one thing that’s gonna hafta hold is that R is gonna hafta adjust so that that’s true. (Lecture 8/L1/NS)



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

(5.32) Let’s first look at the UK regional policy. Well the first thing is that regional policy in the UK doesn’t really exist er strangely enough. (Lecture 6/L2/NNS)

A final point of interest concerning micromarkers is their tendency to co-occur. This has already been noted by Swales and Malczewski (2001) who found a striking tendency in the MICASE corpus towards clusters of micromarkers to preface a shift in the direction of the discourse (e.g., okay so now, alright so). This trend was also found in the BSLC. The various co-occurrences of micromarkers are reported in Table 5.5. Table 5.5  Co-occurrence of micromarkers in the BSLC Co-occurring micromarkers okay so right so okay okay okay now alright well well okay okay well okay right alright so okay right well okay now okay so now okay right so alright well so Total

Frequency 68 7 5 5 5 5 4 2 2 2 3 1 1 1 111

As can be seen, most of the clusters initiate with okay, with okay so being by far the most frequent, followed by clusters that begin with right or alright. Thus, it would seem that among all the micromarkers analyzed, okay and right/alright are most commonly used to first focus attention and then shift it towards the upcoming utterance. Moreover, although it has been suggested that such clusters serve primarily as fillers to allow speakers time to process their thoughts into words, they appear to be used in particularly salient moments of the lecture, either to summarize or emphasize important points (examples 5.33–5.36). (5.33) Okay right what we’ve seen then is a set of data showing the relevant importance of SMEs in the UK. (Lecture 1/L2/NS)

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

(5.34) Alright well Knight leaves us in his pure residual view of uh of profit with a certain difficulty in uh in justifying at least by some economic argument the income or profit in uh an economic system. (Lecture 10/L1/NS) (5.35) Okay so now we get to the heavy lifting um G at age T-of-R is the gain at age T for postponing retirement to age R. (Lecture 7/L1/NS) (5.36) Well okay now today in this week we get to some really neat stuff as far as I’m concerned. (Lecture 12/L1/NS)

To wrap up this discussion, I would like to refer to Schiffrin’s (1987: 330) words: “markers allow speakers to construct and integrate multiple planes and dimensions of an emergent reality”. The micromarkers found in the BSLC demonstrate this capacity to shape multiple meanings within this particular context of use. The analysis has shown that while the choice of micromarkers depends largely on individual speaking habits and thus reflects the lecturers’ personal contribution to the discourse, the semantic and pragmatic functions of micromarkers are grounded in the lecturers’ instructional aims to help their listeners follow the lecture and promote fuller understanding.

5.3 Evaluation In discourse studies, evaluation refers to how writers and speakers intervene in their propositions to express attitudes and opinions. By injecting their personal stance to be perceived, interpreted and perhaps counter-evaluated by their interlocutors, speakers and writers enter into the interactional dimension of communication where language has a strong interpersonal impact. A very wide range of devices can be used to express evaluation. From the linguistic perspective, it can be encoded lexically through the choice of certain adjectives, adverbs, nouns, verbs, but also grammatically through the use of modals, tense or aspect. Evaluation may also function at the textual level depending on its position in a text. For example, it is often found at particular discourse boundaries, such as the end of a paragraph, or it may signal clause relations within a paragraph (Thompson and Hunston 2000). Moreover, evaluation can be expressed paralinguistically (e.g., intonation, laughter, silence) and even extra-linguistically (e.g., gaze, gestures, body posturing). Thus, it appears evident that we are dealing with a very complex phenomenon that can permeate language from diverse directions. In recent years, several conceptual frameworks and analytic models have been developed to help us better understand the semantic and functional features of evaluation, although not always calling it by that name. Barton (1993) uses the term evidentiality to encompass markers of both validity and attitude towards propositional



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

content. Biber et al. (1999: 944) instead speak of stance, which is further articulated into epistemic stance (the expression of certainty, precision or perspective) and attitudinal stance (personal attitudes or feelings). For Hyland (1999b), stance entails more broadly the projection of self into texts by means of hedgers, emphatics, attitude markers and person markers. Martin (2000) describes a system of appraisal to categorize resources used to express emotions, moral assessment and valuations, which correspond to the sub-categories affect, judgment and appreciation, respectively. Thompson and Hunston’s (2000: 6) very comprehensive framework analyzes evaluation in terms of three fundamental functions. First and foremost, it is used to express opinions and attitudes. This hinges on an underlying system of values that can be described along four parameters: positive-negative, certainty, expectedness and importance. Second, evaluation is used to establish and maintain relations. By means of devices such as mitigation and politeness, speakers and writers are able to manipulate language as they see fit. Finally, evaluation is used to organize discourse. By imposing a particular structure on an unfolding text, speakers and writers constantly monitor and comment on the text itself. This model perhaps provides the broadest conceptualization of evaluation as it comprises, in Hallidayan terms, all three metafunctions: ideational, interpersonal and textual. Moreover, as the authors point out, the three functions are not mutually exclusive. Evaluative resources may perform more than one function at the same time, which further contributes to the pervasiveness of evaluation in language. Much of the work on evaluation in academic discourse has focused on written genres, including essays (Barton 1993), research articles (Hunston 1994; Webber 2004), book reviews (Shaw 2004) and textbooks (Poppi 2004). However, some recent research has begun to concentrate on evaluation in academic speech. In a series of studies based on the MICASE corpus, Mauranen (2001, 2002, 2003) has shown that evaluation is used largely within a consensus-building context. For example, along the positive-negative parameter, positive lexis (e.g., good, interesting) was much more prevalent than negative lexis (e.g., bad, difficult). Moreover, it tends to be discourse reflexive, i.e., the evaluative comment refers to the discourse itself (e.g., that’s a good question). These findings point to the important role of evaluation in the socialization of learners into the academic world. Focusing on evaluative adjectives, Swales and Burke (2003: 5) found a greater frequency of “polarized” or extreme adjectives in MICASE (e.g., weird, huge, amazing) compared to a written corpus of research articles, even if the difference was not as marked as might be expected. Yet their higher presence serves to indicate a closer affinity of academic speech with everyday conversation than with academic prose. With particular reference to lectures from the MICASE corpus, Fortanet-Gómez (2004b) looked at how verbal stance is expressed with the pronoun I. In particular, she found that epistemic stance (e.g., I think, I guess) was more frequent than attitudinal stance

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

(e.g., I wish, I like). The study thus highlights the important function of epistemic stance in expressing the relationship between speakers and their propositions, which takes on particular significance in an instructional setting. Bamford (2004b) showed how the metalinguistic noun problem is used in lectures to signal evaluation textually, functioning both anaphorically in a summing up capacity and cataphorically as an attention-focusing strategy. All of these studies illustrate that in academic speech, and lectures in particular, evaluation is ubiquitous, taking on a myriad of forms and functions, just as we find in other types of discourse. Evaluation in the BSLC will be investigated with reference to the instructional context in which it is used. Therefore, in the following two sub-sections, I will focus on two specific types of evaluation: relevance markers and affect markers. The first type helps listeners to prioritize information and thus performs a key role in knowledge acquisition. The second type allows the learners to become aware of lecturers’ attitudes towards content, which contributes to enhancing the speakeraudience relationship. 5.3.1 Relevance markers In expert-to-novice communication, evaluation is often used to help learners judge which information is the most important. For example, textbook writers point out the relevance of certain propositions (Hyland 1999a), while lecturers stress salient points to audiences. To do so, they typically use metadiscursive phrases (e.g., This is the important point) containing discourse deictics, i.e., pronouns that refer to chunks of discourse (Levinson 1983: 85–86), adjectives of relevance and metalinguistic nouns (Francis 1994). Thus, these expressions reflect an overlapping of the metadiscursive and evaluative properties of language. By signaling to learners what parts of the lecture they should interpret as important, lecturers structure their discourse and evaluative it at the same time. The blurriness between metadiscourse and evaluation has also been discussed in relation to academic writing. Using data from a corpus of student argumentative essays, Ädel (2005) argues that metadiscourse and evaluation are two concepts that should be kept separate, reserving the former for instances of textual reflexivity and the latter for expressions of attitude. However, when lecturers engage in signposting particularly important content to audiences, the two concepts necessarily merge together, even if here the evaluative dimension is restricted to importance or relevance. Thus, following Hunston (1994: 199), I will refer to these expressions as relevance markers. Relevance markers were searched in the BSLC on the basis of some lexicogrammatical patterns suggested in the literature. (Hunston 1994; Hunston and Sinclair 2000):



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

a. discourse deictic + is + adjective of relevance (e.g., This is important) b. discourse deictic + is + adjective of relevance + metalinguistic noun (e.g., That is the main point) The above patterns are retrospective with an anaphoric element. However, because relevance markers can also be prospective with a cataphoric element (e.g., pseudo-cleft patterns and nominal groups) (Hunston 1994), two additional patterns were searched: a. what + is + adjective of relevance + is (e.g., What is crucial is…) b. determiner + adjective of relevance + metalinguistic noun + is (e.g., The key thing is…) All four patterns were searched with the concordancer tool, first without any adjectives, as a way to identify the range of adjectives that could be used to indicate relevance in this context. The concordance output was then hand-edited to remove unwanted evaluative patterns that referred to the lecturers’ evaluation of the relevance of some entity or phenomenon outside of the discourse itself. This proved to be quite complex. Basically, it entails Hunston’s (2000: 183) “planes” of discourse, where the “autonomous” plane involves evaluation of content and the “interactive” plane involves evaluation of a part of the discourse. While this distinction may be rather straightforward in written discourse, in lectures it is not always so. Consider the following examples. Example 5.37 would seem to represent the autonomous plane, while example 5.38 represents the interactive plane. Yet depending on stress, intonation and local context of usage, example 5.37 could also be interpreted as the interactive plane (i.e., if ‘GDP’ is also a key ‘point’ of the discourse). (5.37) GDP is an important indicator of the Japanese economy. (Lecture 2/L2/NS) (5.38) Of course, this is the important point. (Lecture 4/L2/NNS)

To overcome this problem, I considered as relevance markers only those expressions containing discourse deictics and metalinguistic nouns that clearly oriented the audience towards discourse chunks. Another problematic issue that arose was how to decide which adjectives actually express the concept of relevance among those that emerged within the patterns. I initially referred to Swales and Burke’s (2003) series of adjectives of relevance in the MICASE corpus. These included important, central, main, major, relevant, essential, fundamental, and key. Yet when studying the concordance output, I found a number of adjectives that seemed to signify relevance, at least in these patterns. Among these were interesting, shocking, biggest, surprising, remarkable, critical, significant (examples 5.39–5.41). In fact, interesting was the second most frequent adjective found in the patterns, perhaps representing a more listener-friendly option to the more authoritative important. Some of these adjec-

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The Language of Business Studies Lectures

tives seem to conflate more than one evaluative parameter (Lemke 1998a). For example, in addition to expressing relevance in this context, along the good-bad parameter, interesting has a positive connotation, while shocking has a negative one. Therefore, following Hunston and Sinclair (2000) who argue that words can take on meanings according to the patterns in which they are used, and further considering the instructional setting, I decided to count as adjectives of relevance all those that could be interpreted as stressing the importance of a chunk of discourse even if they might also carry additional meanings. (5.39) So that’s an interesting question for you. (Lecture 4/L2/NNS) (5.40) What is shocking here is that […] (Lecture 6/L2/NNS) (5.41) The biggest thing about this is that […] (Lecture 12/L1/NS)

Once these two issues were resolved, the concordance data were used as the basis for a series of cross-searches. In other words, searches were carried out on the adjectives that had emerged in the patterns and also on frequently appearing metalinguistic nouns (e.g., point, thing, question, issue, idea). The results of this analysis in the BSLC, MDLC and BSTM are presented in Table 5.6. Table 5.6  Relevance markers in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Relevance markers

BSLC

MDLC

BSTM

Retrospective deic + is + adj (This is important) deic + is + adj + meta n (That’s the key question) deic + is (- adj) + meta n (That’s the point) it + is +- adj + that + deic (It’s crucial that this is clear) it + is + adj + to-inf + deic (It’s important to see this) there + is (- adj) + a lot (There’s a lot to be said about that) Subtotal

16 12 4 3 2 2 39

19 9 3 2 6 39

1 1 2

Prospective what + is + adj + is (What is important is…) det + adj + meta n + is (The main point is…) det (- adj) + meta n+ is (The thing is ….) it + is + adj + that (It’s crucial that…) it + is +adj + to-inf (It’s important to see…) there + is (- adj) + meta n (There’s an issue here about…) Subtotal

8 12 5 1 1 3 30

8 3 9 2 1 23

5 1 11 1 18

Total

69

62

20



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

The cross-searching techniques revealed a number of patterns beyond the original four that had been hypothesized, as the table shows. Of particular interest were some more informal patterns without any adjectives whatsoever (e.g., deic + is (- adj) + meta n and det (- adj) + meta n+ is), but where metalinguistic nouns clearly functioned as relevance markers, as illustrated in examples 5.42–5.43. These instances seem to share common ground with Swales’ (2001: 35) “discussive” use of point and thing found in the MICASE corpus to signpost particularly salient points. (5.42) So that’s the point here. (Lecture 6/L2/NNS) (5.43) But the thing is it’s perfectly elastic. (Lecture 8/L1/NS)

As the data illustrate, relevance markers were more frequent in the two spoken corpora, suggesting that they are more important in situations requiring online processing where there is no possibility for listeners to back-track in order to identify key points as when reading. This contrasts with Flowerdew’s (2003) study that found more instances of what he calls signalling nouns (e.g., point, concept, effect, reason) co-occurring with important in biology textbooks compared to biology lectures, which is attributed to generally greater lexical precision in written language. However, it could be that the particular discipline in question (i.e., biology) had some influence as well. Overall frequency differences between the two spoken corpora are not marked. At the level of individual patterns, the largest difference was in the BSLC where there were more prospective patterns with metalinguistic nouns complete with attributive adjectives (e.g., The main point is that…) compared to the MDLC (12 vs. 3 instances, respectively). In the BSLC, the 12 instances were distributed evenly between NSs and NNSs, but most occurred in the guest lecture component. It could be that the guest speakers opted for standard forms rather than more casual options (e.g., The thing is…) because of lack of familiarity with the audience. Finally, it must be pointed out that the BSLC contained several relevance markers that could not be neatly fit into patterns. Examples 5.44–5.46 are reminiscent of casual conversation, while the question format of example 5.47 renders it highly interactional. The presence of such ‘outliers’ is further confirmation of the high degree of variation in form, vocabulary and style that relevance markers can assume, probably due to individual proclivities. This can also be seen in the dispersion plot (see Figure 5.2 below) elaborated from all instances of relevance markers in the BSLC, showing that, even if found in all twelve lectures, usage varies considerably from speaker to speaker. The plot further illustrates how relevance markers are not concentrated in particular moments, but are distributed throughout the lectures. This suggests that the speakers were careful to provide ongoing cues to help listeners prioritize information.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

(5.44) That’s what this is about. (Lecture 9/L1/NS) (5.45) Now here’s where things get interesting. (Lecture 7/L1/NS) (5.46) So the point I’m trying to make is that […] (Lecture 8/L1/NS) (5.47) What’s the important point here? (Lecture 4/L2/NNS)

Figure 5.2  Dispersion plot of relevance markers in the BSLC

5.3.2 Affect markers It is now recognized that interpersonal devices, such as questions, asides and humour, are a crucial part of the lecture experience (Flowerdew 1994). They contribute to reinforcing speaker-audience rapport, which in turn tends to create a more learning-friendly atmosphere. Within the interpersonal dimension, we can find linguistic devices used by lecturers to reveal their attitudes and feelings towards content, thus giving their personal interpretation and satisfying their audiences’ desire to know the viewpoint of an expert (Northcott 2001). According to Biber et al. (1999: 854), attitude markers “convey the speaker’s attitude or value judgement about the proposition’s content”, and include a range of adjectives, adverbials and modal verbs. Similarly, Hyland (1999b) speaks of markers that convey affective attitude, among which are attitude verbs (e.g., I agree), as well as certain adjectives (e.g., disappointing) and adverbs (e.g., unfortunately). In Martin’s (2000: 147) framework, words such as delightful, scandalous and marvellous that express emotions all fall within the basic semantic category of affect. Drawing from these taxonomies, I will investigate affect markers in the BSLC, with a focus on adjectives that express the lecturers’ affective attitude towards their propositions, specifically along the positive-negative parameter. Identifying all items of this type in such overarching grammatical categories as adjectives or adverbs is not feasible, unless one is working with an entirely tagged corpus. Therefore, it was necessary to find a compromise that could still provide an adequate description of this feature in the BSLC. Towards this aim, I used a two-



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

pronged approach. First of all, I referred to Swales and Burke’s (2003) list of positive/negative adjectives found in MICASE which, as a corpus of academic speech, seemed to offer a plausible starting point. This list was further integrated with some particularly interesting items that had come to my attention during the compilation of the corpus (e.g., stinky, patchy, fantastic). Secondly, using the 20,000 word tagged sample of the corpus (see Chapter 3), I generated a list of all general adjectives, which even in these smaller samples produced well over 1,000 items. However, the output could be alphabetically ordered and thus rather easily browsed through in order to identify other positive/negative adjectives of affect. Corresponding lists were also made from the MDLC and BSTM tagged samples. All the adjectives of affect found during these two procedures were then compiled into a comprehensive list of candidates which were searched in the three corpora. The concordance lines that were generated had to be carefully hand-edited to determine which instances actually entailed the lecturer’s personal evaluation of a proposition. For example, in examples 5.48–5.51, the speakers are clearly expressing a positive or negative attitude. On the other hand, in examples 5.52–5.53, the adjectives are simply used within the descriptive content of the utterance, without conveying the speaker’s personal attitude. Instances of this type were removed, along with other unwanted items, such as good luck, an awful lot, good meaning product, poor in the sense of poverty, and positive/negative used in the mathematical sense. (5.48) Just as a general point about doing research bu- on the same data is a really nice feature of this paper. (Lecture 7/L1/NS) (5.49) Footloose in English is I think it’s a lovely word we don’t have actually that in Italian. (Lecture 6/L2/NNS) (5.50) If we look though in- in- in the long run there is really terrible consequences of rent control. (Lecture 9/L1/NS) (5.51) You get paid cause you- you know you’re the president of the company and then you file your taxes you get taxed again which is kinda stinky. (Lecture 12/L1/NS) (5.52) Okay so if my health isn’t good or- or you know my spouse is nagging me to start taking vacations or- or I don’t like my boss um or it’s just too cold to get up and go into work on days like this um I might decide to retire at fifty-two. (Lecture 10/L1/NS) (5.53) So asset prices fell and that led to defaults and bad loans. (Lecture 2/L2/NS).

The results are presented in Table 5.7, along with corresponding analyses of the MDLC and the BSTM.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

Table 5.7  Affect markers in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Affect markers

BSLC

MDLC

BSTM

Positive good great powerful nice neat beautiful fantastic excellent attractive positive wonderful noble lovely effective thrilling marvellous fascinating Subtotal

37 2 1 7 3 2 2 1 1 2 – 2 1 – – – – 61

41 13 1 9 1 2 1 – – – 6 – – – 2 2 1 79

42 5 5 – – – – 1 4 1 2 – – 3 – – – 63

Negative bad not good awful terrible negative ineffective poor patchy inconsistent crazy boring stinky scary unattractive ugly unpleasant disturbing disgusting sleazy dumb sloppy pathetic Subtotal

22 8 2 3 2 2 4 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 – – – – – – – – 50

18 3 1 1 – – – – – – – – – – 3 3 3 2 2 1 1 1 39

10 2 1 – 4 1 – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 18

111

118

81

Total



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

As can be seen from the overall totals, affect markers do not present marked differences across the three corpora. Good and bad are, not surprisingly, the most frequent, followed at considerable distance by a range of other adjectives sprinkled sparsely throughout the two spoken corpora in particular. Many items were used only once, and the few multiple uses could sometimes be traced to one speaker only (e.g., thrilling, ugly, sleazy). An exception is great, which was somewhat more frequent in the MDLC (n=13) compared to both the BSLC (n=2) and the BSTM (n=5). In addition to its positive meaning, it also seems to convey the casually familiar environment that can be established in ongoing L1 classroom lectures (examples 5.54–5.55). Similarly, the two instances of great in the BSLC were found in the L1 classroom lectures, and not the L2 guest lectures. (5.54) They’ve finally seen the light. Cherubini is great. Study him faithfully. (MDLC – Musicology) (5.55) You can start making the genes to make the gene products to make more tryptophan. Okay? That’s great and that controls a lotta the regulation. (MDLC – Microbial Genetics)

Nice was one of the more frequent positive adjectives, but it only appeared in the two spoken corpora, perhaps as a more colloquial alternative to good (example 5.48). Polarized adjectives (e.g., terrible, fantastic) were noticeably absent from the BSTM. Similarly, Swales and Burke (2003) found that such adjectives were somewhat less frequent in written research articles compared to MICASE. However, the more pronounced difference here could be linked to the less challenging nature of textbooks compared to research writing, which is further supported by the higher number of positive items (n=63) compared to negative ones (n=18) in the BSTM. Along the positive-negative cline, some other points of interest emerged. Compared to the MDLC, In the BSLC, there were fewer positive adjectives (n=61 vs. n=79) and more negative adjectives (n=50 vs. n=39). Examples 5.56–5.57 show that negative adjectives are usually linked to economic performance of some type. On the other hand, the positive adjectives in the MDLC were often associated with aesthetic comments that are perhaps more typical of humanities topics (examples 5.58–5.59). Because this contrasts with Mauranen’s (2002, 2003) studies that found generally higher frequencies of positive adjectives compared to negative ones, discipline may have some effect on this feature. In business studies, one learns how to critically analyze economic and business-related problems in order to overcome or avoid them, while in the humanities one is more concerned with understanding and exalting the positive aspects of the works studied.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

(5.56) To have for example a- an earned income tax credit would be really a very good alternative plan that wouldn’t have the- all these bad side effects. (Lecture 9/L1/NS). (5.57) Because Japanese consumers are scared of putting the money in the bank because the banks are in such a terrible state. (Lecture 2/L2/NS) (5.58) Ah of course this absolutely thrilling piece of music is not the overture that Beethoven decided to use. (MDLC – Musicology) (5.59) Giorgionne was admired and written about for his beautiful technique for paintings that looked like poetry. (MDLC – Art History)

The dispersion plot of all instances of the adjectives good and bad within the BSLC (see Figure 5.3 below) shows that eleven of the twelve lecturers expressed affective attitudes to their audiences, although some more than others, suggesting that individual propensity also has a role. While the plot shows the adjectives appearing throughout the lectures, in some lectures there is nonetheless a certain concentration towards the end, as can be seen by the thicker clusters of lines. Reminiscent of Hoey’s (1983) discourse patterns (e.g., Situation→Problem→Response→Evaluation) where the evaluative element is in the key final position, it may be that the speakers tended to ‘save’ their personal commentary as a way to more effectively engage their audiences in this pedagogically crucial moment of the lecture.

Figure 5.3  Dispersion plot of affect markers good and bad in the BSLC

5.4 Lecturer-audience interaction This section will deal with some more overtly dialogic forms of interaction in lectures where the students are engaged more directly. These include questions, comprehension checks and dialogic episodes.



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

5.4.1 Questions Since antiquity, teachers have used questions to define issues and problems, stimulate thought and contribute to developing inquiring minds. Even in essentially monologic lectures, questions can play a similar role, despite the fact that students may not actually respond. This has prompted researchers to classify lecturers’ questions according to their function, thereby gaining more insight into how they use this important interactional device. In a corpus of undergraduate lectures, Thompson (1998: 141) found that questions may be audience-oriented, where the lecturer seems to plausibly expect a response, although in reality there may be no or limited uptake. These include questions to check comprehension or procedural aspects, as well as those that evoke some kind of response or agreement. On the other hand, there were also content-oriented questions which seemed to expect no audience response and served essentially to raise issues and introduce information. Similarly, Bamford (2005) found questions used as a form of self-elicitation by economics lecturers, who first asked the questions and then proceeded to provide the answers. This seemed to be a rhetorical strategy to focus students’ attention and liven up the lecture. However, she distinguishes these questions from so-called “rhetorical questions”, which according to Quirk et al. (1985: 825), are questions that have “the force of a strong assertion” and generally do not require an answer. In contrast, given the inherent instructional purpose of lectures, questions are pointedly raised to be answered (sooner or later) and, in many cases, by the lecturers themselves. To analyze the use of questions in the BSLC, the corpus was searched for interrogative forms signalled by a question mark. As mentioned in Chapter 3, question marks had been inserted during transcription on the basis of both lexico-grammatical and prosodic cues. An utterance was considered to be a question if it conformed to one of the three forms of Biber et al.’s (1999) taxonomy (wh-questions, yes/no questions and alternative questions) and/or had a rising intonation. Elliptical forms (e.g. Any questions?) were also included. Admittedly, it is not always possible to determine the true ‘interrogative intentions’ of speakers even in the presence of these criteria. On the whole, however, this seemed to be an acceptable way to achieve a fairly accurate picture of how questions are used in the corpus. Because several of the L2 guest lectures in the BSLC had pre-arranged question and answer sessions at the end of the lecture, to avoid skewing the results these sections of the lecture transcripts were excluded from this particular analysis, which took into consideration only the lecture proper. The corpus was searched for all interrogative forms as defined above; lecturers’ comprehension checks and questions produced by students were excluded from this analysis as they will be addressed separately later. The results are reported in Table 5.8, which gives a

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

broad indication of the level of interaction in terms of questions by way of comparison with the MDLC and the BSTM. Table 5.8  Questions in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Interrogative forms (min/max) BSLC MDLC BSTM

311 (5/99) 541 (6/111) 314 (17/56)

As the data show, there were 311 questions in the BSLC, ranging from a minimum of 5 to a maximum of 99 per lecture. The corresponding count in the MDLC was much higher at 541, but with a very similar range (minimum 6 vs. maximum 111. The marked variation among the various lectures that make up the two corpora suggests that individual lecturing style has an important impact on this form of interaction. A closer look at the concordance output provided some answers as to why there were more questions in the MDLC compared to the BSLC. When the concordance lines were re-sorted, there were no clear differences that could be attributed to either discipline or language background of the lecturers. However, I noticed that the MDLC lectures had several instances of student names followed by a question mark (e.g., Ben?). Evidently, the lecturers used this elliptical interrogative form to respond to familiar students who had signalled a desire to ask a question, probably by raising their hands. In the BSLC there were only four such instances and none were in the guest lectures. It therefore seems that students in L1 classroom settings are more willing to initiate interaction by asking questions, possibly due to greater familiarity with lecturers. This could explain part of the generally higher frequency of lecturers’ questions in the MDLC. It was interesting to note that the BSTM contains slightly more questions than the BSLC. This suggests a highly interactive style also in written business studies materials, although the range of variation among the individual texts is much less pronounced compared the individual lectures as seen by the minimum/maximum figures. Numerous interrogative forms were used as section headings. This corroborates findings by Bondi (1999), who speaks of the dialogic nature of economics textbooks, where writers engage in an on-going ‘conversation’ with readers as a way to activate the learning process. Due to the high number of items involved, it was not feasible in this study to qualitatively categorize each question according to its function.2 However, some exploratory manual inspection of the BSLC transcripts revealed that the questions appeared to carry out various functions that are in line with previous studies (Thompson 1998; Bamford 2005). In examples 5.60–5.63, the questions are audi-



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

ence-oriented and may have audience uptake (examples 5.60–5.61) or not (5.62– 5.63). Examples 5.64–5.66 are instead content-oriented and are immediately answered by the lecturers themselves. Particularly interesting is example 5.66, where the discourse marker well precedes the self-provided answer. Several instances of this pattern were found, supporting Bamford’s (2005) observation that well was typically used in economics lectures to preface a relatively straightforward answer, as previously discussed in this chapter. (5.60) Have you done case study work before? (Student) no not really. (Lecture 1/L2/NS) (5.61) Does anyone know why it’s not Kentucky Fried Chicken any more and it’s just KFC? (Student) I think they wanted to get away from the old fry thing. (Lecture 12/ L1/NS) (5.62) I suppose it’s familiar to you the Gini index. Do you know the Gini index? But perhaps you have not seen it in an analysis like the one I’m doing now. (Lecture 4/L2/NNS) (5.63) Do you know what I mean? Well I know the expectation of the hope of profit it’s the alertness is what actually gets you to profit. (Lecture 10/L1/NS) (5.64) What are the problems of this kind of policy? First of all it has not sustained it has not promoted self-sustained work. (Lecture 6/L2/NNS) (5.65) So what do we do? We legislate the minimum wage. (Lecture 9/L1/NS) (5.66) Why is that? Well because inputs are bought- are bought today at certain contractual prices. (Lecture 10/L1/NS)

Additional insight emerges from the dispersion plot of all instances of questions posed by the business studies lecturers (see Figure 5.4 below). The image shows that questions were asked by all twelve speakers and were often distributed throughout the lectures as speakers sought to maintain a certain level of interaction.

Figure 5.4  Dispersion plot of questions in the BSLC

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

5.4.2 Comprehension checks Items such as okay?, right?, yeah? in lecture discourse have been described in the literature as comprehension checks (Young 1994; Thompson 1998) having the pedagogic function of verifying listeners’ understanding. Because some of these items may also carry out discourse marking functions as previously discussed, when acting as comprehension checks they can be distinguished by a rising intonation marked in the transcripts with a question mark. The BSLC and the MDLC was searched for a series of common comprehension checks and the results are shown in Table 5.9. Table 5.9  Comprehension checks in BSLC vs. MDLC BSLC (min/max) okay? right? yeah? huh? alright? eh? Total

272 43 5 76 6 11* 413

(1/146) (3/14) (1/2) (1/75) (2/4)

MDLC (min/max) 234 (3/89) 59 (2/43) 73* 3* 34 (1/17) 1 404

*All instances produced by the same speaker

As can be seen, the total number of comprehension checks in the two corpora was remarkably similar. However, frequencies varied greatly from speaker to speaker as shown by the minimum and maximum instances per lecture. Among all speakers, the form okay was clearly the most preferred. The forms yeah and huh showed noticeable differences between the two corpora, but these could be traced almost exclusively to two individual speakers, who also happened to be NNSs. The eleven instances of eh were also produced by one NNS. Thus, it would seem that NSs opt for the more standard forms okay, right, and alright, with the latter perhaps preferred by American speakers of English as indicated by the higher frequencies in the MDLC. Comprehension checks tend to be fleeting moments and rarely have any actual uptake on the part of the audience. As illustrated by the short extract of concordance output in Figure 5.5 below, the lecturers continue to speak after okay? without pausing for audience response. This raises doubts about whether these items are actually comprehension checks or simply manifestations of the habits of individual lecturers. A previous study (Crawford Camiciottoli 2004d) found that the comprehension checks of five lecturers were systematically unaccompanied by gaze towards the audience, again calling into question their true role. At any rate, the marked variation among the speakers of both corpora suggests that individual



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

propensity is the primary factor in determining the frequency and type of comprehension checks. N Concordance 271 we have the single market 272 ou know traditional sector 273 lly to the European market 274 to have a local data base 275 r sectors for example food 276 aving a small market share 277 you two look at number one 278 inority is ethnic minority 279 idized by society at large 280 who most eagerly wants it. 281 nefits over one less year. 282 for is pretty unattractive 283 s option value is positive 284 ou’ve done everything else 285 till working for this firm

okay? okay? okay? okay? okay? okay? okay? okay? okay? okay? okay? okay? okay? okay? okay?

We sell and we buy pro We can see also on the We have another er ide What’s the idea of loc Where er eight percent Which seemed fine prob You two number two num You probably know the That’s the alternative But that is disallowed And so basically there And then if you stay a And that’s gonna reduc And so if i knew the f And B-sub-S is my pens

Figure 5.5  Sample of concordance output of comprehension check okay? in the BSLC

5.4.3 Dialogic episodes The move towards more interactive lectures is certainly reflected in moments of verbal exchange between lecturers and students. It has been suggested that a lecture is interactive when lecturers directly question individual students and respond to students’ unsolicited questions (Northcott 2001). Csomay (2002) classified lectures having more than 25 episodes of turn-taking as highly interactive, while those containing fewer than 10 have a low level of interactivity. Similarly, Morell (2004) considers lectures that contain episodes of negotiation of meaning between lecturers and students (e.g., clarification requests) and spontaneous student interventions as interactive in style. The extent to which a lecture may be interactive in terms of dialogic exchanges depends on a number of factors, including class size, instructional level, shared background knowledge and language proficiency of students. Class size in particular appears to have a strong impact. In general, the smaller the class, the more likely there is to be lecturer-audience interaction (Hansen and Jensen 1994). There is also some evidence that speaker-audience dialogue during in lectures may vary according to discipline. Thompson (1998 :14) found that “dialogic phases” were more prominent in lectures on language and linguistics compared to science and technology. Dialogic episodes between lecturers and audiences were analyzed in the BSLC on the basis of exchanges having at least two student turns. The concordance tool

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

was set to detect additional student utterances within a horizon of twenty-five words from the primary one. In this way, it was possible to identify dialogic episodes between lecturers and students with reasonable accuracy. A corresponding analysis was performed on the MDLC in order to shed light on any possible disciplinary influence on this type of interaction. The results are presented in Table 5.10. Table 5.10  Dialogic episodes in BSLC vs. MDLC Dialogic episodes (min/max) BSLC MDLC

80 (2/19) 106 (1/28)

In the BSLC there were 80 dialogic episodes. These occurred in ten out of the twelve lectures with a frequency that ranged from a minimum of 2 to a maximum of 19 per speaker. The MDLC contained more dialogic episodes (n=106), occurring in 8 out of 10 lectures with a frequency that ranged from a minimum of 1 to a maximum of 28. Thus, according to Csomay’s (2002) classification of interactivity in lectures based on a relatively high number of turns, no lectures in the BSLC could be considered highly interactive and only one in the MDLC could be classified as such. In contrast with Thompson’s (1998) findings, no particular disciplinary alignments were found that could explain the difference in frequency. Within the BSLC, class size did not appear to have an influence on dialogic exchanges, which were rather evenly distributed between lectures having large (n>40) and small (n<40) audiences. Class setting, on the other hand, did show some variation. Out of 80 episodes in the BSLC, 50 were in the L1 lectures vs. 30 in the L2 lectures. The higher frequency of dialogic episodes in the MDLC and in the L1 lectures of the BSLC was probably due to the generally more interactive atmosphere generated by familiarity between lecturers and audiences. This further reinforces the idea that there is a positive relationship between familiarity and interaction, also suggested by the L1 classroom lecturers’ use of first names in elliptical question form to respond to student solicitations as previously discussed. Some different types of dialogic exchanges found in the BSLC are illustrated in examples 5.67–5.70. In example 5.67, the lecturer initiates the exchange by questioning an individual student and then steers the student towards understanding the correct answer. In example 5.68, the exchange begins instead with a spontaneous contribution from a student, which then develops into a mutual negotiation of meaning. In the guest lecture component of the BSLC, dialogic exchanges were instead less content-oriented. In example 5.69, the speaker elicits information from students concerning their previous learning experiences. In example 5.70 the speaker embarks on a mission to get know her audience better in order to create a



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

more familiar atmosphere – a tactic that was highly appreciated by the students judging from their enthusiastic participation. (5.67) (Lecturer) […] and you had two applicants for a job. One was a teenager and one was the head of a household. Which one would you prefer? (Student) Teenager (Lecturer) Which one? (Student) The teenager financially (Lecturer) Well most most employers would prefer the head of the household because that person would be more reliable. Cause that person needs the job to support a family. So they w- they would rather take that person […] (Student) That’s what I’m saying (Lecturer) But you see what happens is this minimum wage law […] (Lecture 9/L1/NS) (5.68) (Lecturer) That’s an economic value. He created that value because prior to his discovery nobody knew about it and- and therefore is just as good as not existing (Student) I think that creation is like sui generis I mean (Lecturer) Right (Student) He doesn’t really create anything but just discovers (Lecturer) He discovers that’s always the point creation out of nothing (Student) So- so is it more like a knowledge problem then? (Lecturer) Oh it’s a- yeah it’s a knowledge problem (Student) And therefore you could say that he’s being rewarded for his knowledge? (Lecturer) And for his discovery […](Lecture 10/L1/NS) (5.69)

(Lecturer) Have you done any case study work? (Student) Not really (Lecturer) That’s all right it’s good- good experience for you (Student) But what do you mean by case study? (Lecturer) I give you an outline of a company- company history balance sheets talk through a little of what’s happening how it developed what problems they’ve had um and then you work on that. (Lecture 1/L2/NS)

(5.70) (Lecturer) Another student not from Italy? You? (Student 1) I’m from Cataluna (Lecturer) Catalun ah fantastic okay later you can talk about from Cataluna muy bien very good (Student 2) Slovakia (Lecturer) Oh Slovakia okay another strange place for me huh? I suppose many of you but I suppose your economy you’ll be European in a few time so we’ll know more about these countries and?

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

(Student 3) Bulgaria (Lecturer) Bulgaria okay okay another not- not a lot of knowledge about this part okay (Student 4) Austria (Lecturer) Austria yes and? (Student 5) France (Lecturer) Which part of France? (Student 5) Paris (Lecturer) Paris the capital okay (Lecture 4/L2/NNS)

Although the lectures of the BSLC have fewer dialogic episodes than the MDLC and may not classify as highly interactive lectures in strictly quantitative terms, it is important to consider the broader picture before reaching a conclusion. Perhaps qualitative analysis is actually more revealing in this case because it allows us to understand the true nature of the dialogic exchanges. For example, in the lectures of the MDLC and the six L1 classroom lectures of the BSLC, there are many exchanges pertaining to exam dates, class meeting times, assignment delivery, access to handouts, etc., typical of ongoing courses. (example 5.71). (5.71) (Lecturer) On the day that there would have been the exam you don’t have anything. You don’t have to show up for the exam. (Student) So I mean we wouldn’t be here? (Lecturer) No. So the papers then are due sometime at the end of the day on the fourteenth. (Student) And uh you’re in the economics building? (Lecturer) Seventh floor seven twenty-six (Student) Seven two six? (Lecturer) Yeah. Okay? If you have any questions that you think of later give me a call or come by or I’m usually there late in the day. (Student) Uh thanks. (Lecture 10/L1/NS)

However, the previous examples 5.67–5.70 show us dialogic episodes in which the BSLC lecturers encourage dialogue with students and engage with them in mutual reflection. Some of the BSLC L2 guest lecturers made strong efforts to learn more about students by means of direct dialogue. Thus, the presence of such ‘motivated’ dialogic episodes alongside the purely ‘logistical’ ones in my view places the several of lectures of the BSLC within the current trend toward more interactive lectures.



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

5.5 Audience responsiveness and feedback So far this chapter has investigated interactional strategies in the BSLC from the lecturer’s perspective. Using data from field notes and informal interviews with some members of the lecture audiences, I will now consider the students’ perspective, with particular reference to their reactions during the lectures and their selfperceived levels of comprehension. Because this data refers only to the six L2 guest lectures during which a fellow researcher and myself were present, this part of the analysis is necessarily limited in scope and is thus intended as broadly indicative. For each of the six L2 guest lectures, field notes were taken on audience responsiveness in terms of the following four parameters: a. b. c. d.

general attentiveness (i.e., the audience appeared to be following the lecture); number of spontaneous questions from the audience during the lecture; participation in planned post-lecture question/answer sessions; other significant student behaviours (e.g., conversing with other students during the lecture, reading other materials during the lecture, laughing at the lecturer’s humorous comments, joking with the lecturer).

The results are presented in Table 5.11 Table 5.11  Audience responsiveness in six BSLC lectures

Attentive Questions Q/A Session Other behaviours

Lect 1

Lect 2

Lect 3

Lect 4

Lect 5

Lect 6

Yes 8 Yes Students laughed at humour; One student joked with lecturer

Yes 2 Yes Students laughed at humour; One student joked with lecturer

Not always 2 Yes Some students conversed during the lecture

Yes 3 Yes Students laughed at humour

Yes 0 Students laughed at humour

Not always 2 No Some students conversed during the lecture; one read a book

The table shows that Lectures 1, 2, 4 had the highest level of responsiveness in terms of attentiveness and participation, while Lectures 3 and 6 had the lowest. Lecture 5 seemed to fall in the middle ground. However, it is important to note that here a question/answer session had not been planned. In addition, this was a brief introductory lecture lasting about 30 minutes after which the students immediately went to work on a task, which could account for the lack of questions.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

Table 5.12 compares the three forms of lecturer-audience interaction considered in the previous section (questions, comprehension checks and dialogic episodes) with the level of audience responsiveness (rated as high, medium or low based on Table 5.11) across the six lectures. As can be seen, where lecturer-audience interaction is the most pronounced (Lectures 1 and 4), audience responsiveness is high. Vice-versa, in two cases where it is less pronounced (Lectures 3 and 6), audience responsiveness is low. Again, for Lecture 5, we must consider that its brevity compared to the other lectures probably influenced the relatively low amount of lecturer-audience interaction. Clearly, this analysis is too limited to draw any real conclusions, but it does suggest that an interactional approach to lecturing can stimulate students to be more responsive and thus participate more actively in the negotiation of knowledge. Table 5.12  Lecturer-audience interaction and levels of audience responsiveness in six BSLC lectures

Lect 1 Lect 2 Lect 3 Lect 4 Lect 5 Lect 6

Questions by lecturers

Comprehension checks

Dialogic episodes

Level of audience responsiveness

43 8 4 24 2 3

27 4 13 260 5 13

12 3 3 11 2

High High Low High Medium Low

After the six BSLC lectures, I was able to informally speak with some of the students hoping to formulate a general idea of their level of comprehension. Taking inspiration from a survey carried out by Mulligan and Kirkpatrick (2000) to determine the lecture comprehension levels of L2 university students, I asked the students the following questions, choosing from the options very well, fairly well or not a lot, or always/mostly, sometimes, hardly ever: a. b. c. d.

Overall, how well did you understand this lecture? Were you able to identify the main points? Were you able to identify examples and supporting information? Were you able to understand the meaning of important terms used by the lecturer? e. Did you understand when the lecturer was introducing to a new topic? f. Did you understand when the lecturer was momentarily going off the topic? g. Were you able to understand the lecturer’s questions to the audience?



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

h. Were you able to understand the lecturer’s jokes/humorous comments? i. Were you able to take notes during the lecture? j. Were you able to understand how this lecture is related to others in the EBM series? Most of the students indicated that overall they had understood the lecture very well. Similarly, most were able to identify/understand always/mostly the main points, the examples, topic shifts, digressions and questions asked by the lecturer. This is not surprising as these students were all relatively advanced; participation in the EBM course required some form of English language certification (see Chapter 3). However, some students were not as confident about understanding the lecturer’s jokes/humorous comments and how this lecture related to others of the series. In addition, some were not always able to take notes during the lesson. This would appear to corroborate previous research that L2 students may have difficulties understanding lectures even at higher proficiency levels (Olsen and Huckin 1990; Thompson 1994; Mulligan and Kirkpatrick 2000). Here it seemed that the cultural and global aspects of the lecture were problematic for some students. This suggests the need for greater attention to different cultural approaches to lecturing and the inclusion of complete lectures (rather than just extracts) in lecture comprehension course materials.

5.6 Summary of findings The series of analyses performed in this chapter has provided some insights into how business studies lecturers use language to interact with students in order to establish a ‘dialogue’ that is conducive to learning. They achieved this through various interactional strategies, more or less overt. First of all, the speakers guided the listeners through their choice of organizational patterns and discourse structuring elements. On a global level, the lectures were organized according to two rhetorical patterns that are strongly associated with the discipline. First of all, the presentation of concepts followed by exemplification was the underlying structure of several lectures. Linguistic devices encoding exemplification were more frequent in both the BSLC and the BSTM compared to the MDLC, thereby linking this strategy closely to the subject matter. This was further corroborated by one lecturer who said during an interview that examples are effective in helping students assimilate abstract economic concepts. The other key pattern was based on affirmations followed by supporting authentic data, this time emphasizing the real-world aspects of business studies. By using both of these macrostructures, the BSLC lecturers not only facilitated understanding, but also introduced learners to

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

what kind of knowledge is important and how it is negotiated within the community of practice. At a more local level, the lecturers used macromarkers and micromarkers extensively to focus listeners’ attention on specific topics and points within them. Both types were much more prominent in the business studies lectures compared to corresponding text materials, attesting to their important role in spoken academic discourse where listeners do not have the possibility to linger over texts as readers do. Because no strong differences were found with respect to lectures from other subjects, both macromarkers and micromarkers seem to perform their didactic functions independently of discipline. There was, however, a wide variety of forms and styles (particularly for macromarkers), which instead appeared to be governed mainly by individual propensity. This has important implications for L2 learners who need to be alerted to the more creative types of lexis often found in macromarkers. The business studies lecturers also interacted with their audiences by means of evaluative devices to express opinions about various aspects of the lecture. They made frequent use of relevance markers to call listeners’ attention to particularly salient points, which again were much less prominent in the written text materials, likely due to the same online processing issues mentioned above for discourse markers. Because no clear trends were found involving discipline or other contextual factors such as speaker language background or instructional setting, also here the pedagogic function appears to transcend all other aspects. However, relevance markers showed marked lexical, syntactical and stylistic variation among the speakers. In contrast, the use of affect markers whereby speakers express attitudes did seem to be somewhat influenced by the discipline. In comparison with the MDLC, there were more negative adjectives in the BSLC used especially to assess economic and business performance, which would presumably not be particularly characteristic of other disciplinary areas. Positive-negative affect markers also showed a wide range of variation well beyond good and bad, demonstrating quite a bit of linguistic creativity among the speakers, again an important issue for L2 teaching contexts. Regarding the more explicit types of lecturer-audience interaction, the business studies lecturers engaged their audiences with comprehension checks, questions, and dialogic episodes. On the quantitative level, questions and dialogic episodes were not as frequent in the business studies lectures compared to lectures in other subjects. Yet we must remember that half of the BSLC lecturers were visiting guest speakers, while all of the MDLC lecturers taught ongoing courses where there was obviously a much higher degree of familiarity. Since no particular disciplinary alignments were found, the lower frequency can be attributed mainly to a lack of familiarity among the guest lecturers and their audiences, which would



Chapter 5.  Interacting with the learners 

tend to hinder certain types of interaction, i.e., questions and dialogic episodes initiated by students (much more prevalent in L1 classroom lectures). On the other hand, qualitative analysis uncovered some especially meaningful dialogic exchanges where it was evident that some business studies lecturers, both L2 guest and L1 classroom, had worked hard to encourage interaction and maintain a relationship with their audiences. Although beyond the scope of this study, it is important to recognize that other factors may have an influence on the level of interaction during lectures. These include physical classroom features (e.g., fixed benches vs. mobile tables and chairs) and different cultural approaches (e.g., highly interactive lectures in US universities vs. traditional podium-style lectures in Italy or Spain, for example). In sum, even if individual speaking habits and style certainly come into play, the business studies lecturers’ use of interactional strategies such as discourse structuring, evaluation and direct forms of lecturer-audience interaction appears to be predominantly pedagogically inspired. This is further reinforced by the functional overlapping of these three features in instructional contexts. Discourse structuring and evaluation can merge together (e.g., relevance markers), and all are forms of interaction in that lecturers are engaging listeners on the interpersonal level. A review of all the dispersion plots elaborated for the various features of discourse structuring, evaluation and lecturer-audience interaction revealed another important trend. While there may be concentrations of features at certain moments, on the whole the plots show that discourse structuring, evaluation and lecture-audience interaction appear intermittently throughout the course of the lectures. Thus, the business studies lecturers made an ongoing effort to interact with their audience, while monitoring and adjusting their discourse according to their instructional aims. The recurrence of various types of interactional devices brings these lectures very much in line with Young’s (1990, 1994) conceptualization of lectures as a series of interweaving discursive phases without distinct boundaries, such as introductions or conclusions. Now that the interactional aspects of lecturing to business students have come into focus, it is important to take a closer look at the disciplinary and professional dimensions of the lectures. Although some indications have begun to emerge, a more indepth investigation of how these two facets impact the language of business studies lectures still remains ahead. This task will be undertaken in the next chapter.

Notes 1. This sparked my curiosity to further investigate this particular lecture. By re-reading the transcript, I was able to find two macromarkers in this lecture after all: Now we get to some

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures really neat stuff and That’s what we’ve got for today. However, as can be seen, they contain simple present verb forms that do not correspond to the three patterns that were searched and were therefore not detected by the concordancer. 2. It has been suggested that the maximum number of concordance lines that can be manually ‘digested’ at one time is about 150.

chapter 6

Teaching the discipline and the profession Learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the socio-cultural practices of the community. (Lave and Wenger 1991: 29)

6.1 Introduction In this chapter, my aim is to discover how the language of the BSLC reflects its disciplinary and professional specificity. This will entail an investigation of features associated with both economics (theory-oriented) and business (practice-oriented) discourse. However, before undertaking this task, we need to take a closer look at how the two orientations converge within the field of business studies. In the introductory chapter of this book, I briefly touched on the multi-disciplinary nature of business studies programmes, which typically have a core of economics, accounting, management and marketing, but also incorporate courses from other areas such as mathematics, statistics and law. I will now expand on this notion by discussing some studies that have focused on business studies as an eclectic field which houses different epistemological traditions and educational aims. Based on the findings of a survey conducted among business studies lecturers in the UK, Macfarlane (1997) describes a multi-faceted discipline. Although business studies is considered a social science, the content comprises both hard or sciencebased knowledge that uses mathematical and empirical methods, and soft or humanities-based knowledge, which draws from the fields of psychology and sociology. The hard/soft make-up of business studies can be articulated along a cline (Corder 1990; Hyland 2000), as illustrated in Figure 6.1 below. As can be seen, economics falls somewhere in the middle; it relies on empirical methods but applies them to unpredictable human behaviour and often encompasses competing schools of thought and epistemological allegiances.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures Information technology Accounting Quantitative methods

Economics

Hard subjects

Marketing Organizational behaviour Human resource management

Soft subjects

Figure 6.1  Hard-soft cline of business studies

Another dualism emerges in the aims of the business studies curriculum, which Macfarlane (1997) characterizes as intrinsic (about business) or extrinsic (for business). In the first case, the objective is to teach students how business impacts social and cultural life and how to critically evaluate this knowledge which is well established and exists independently of context. In the second case, the objective is to prepare students for careers in business by providing them with a set of knowledge and skills to solve work-based problems. From this perspective, knowledge is context-dependent because curricula evolve according to the rapid changes in business practice. Nevertheless, these two apparently conflicting approaches may be complementary when business academics recognize the need to integrate both within the curriculum. A good example can be seen in the consolidated use of case-study methodology in business studies classes where students are encouraged to apply newly-acquired knowledge to problem-solving tasks linked to the real business world (Jackson 2005). The following sections of this chapter will be dedicated to the disciplinary and professional dimensions of the BSLC. I begin with a global analysis of the corpus with particular reference to the diverse epistemological frameworks associated with business studies. I then move on to focus on selected linguistic features that have a key role in the transmission of disciplinary knowledge and professional practices to novices.

6.2 Disciplinary/professional orientations: a descriptive profile In order to understand how the lectures of the BSLC mirror the multi-disciplinary nature of business studies programmes, I categorized each lecture according to its general orientation on the basis of the content. This classification is presented in Table 6.1, along with a synthetic description of the content and teaching method used.



Chapter 6.  Teaching the discipline and the profession 

Table 6.1  Disciplinary overview of the BSLC Topic

Orientation

Content features

1. SMEs in the UK

Business

Description of business Mini-lecture + phenomena; real-world data case study task related to business activity

2. The Japanese Economy

Economics

Critical analysis of theoreti- Lecture cal models in real-world applications; real-world data related to economic trends

3. UK Business Strategies

Business

Report/discussion of survey results; real-world data related to business activity

Lecture

4. Productive Systems in Spain

Business

Description/discussion of business phenomena; realworld data related to business activity

Lecture

5. SMEs in Aachen

Business

Mini-lecture + Description of business phenomena; real-world data case study task related to business activity

6. UK Industrial Policy

Business

Critical analysis of business Lecture policies in real-world applications; real-world data related to business activity

7. Labour Economics

Economics Quantitative methods

Analysis/discussion of theoretical models

Lecture

8. Macroeconomics

Economics Quantitative methods

Analysis/discussion of theoretical models

Lecture

9. Economic Principles

Economics Law

Analysis/discussion of economic theory with realworld examples

Lecture

10. Ethics and Economics

Economics

Analysis/discussion of economic theory

Lecture

11. Microeconomics

Economics

Analysis/discussion of economic theory with realworld examples

Lecture

Analysis/discussion of business concepts with realworld examples

Lecture

12. Industrial Organization Business Law

Teaching method

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

As the table shows, lectures 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 12 have been classified as businessoriented, while 2, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 are economics-oriented. Two lectures were also somewhat law-oriented. Lecture 9 dealt with the economic implications of both rent control and minimum wage laws, while lecture 12 discussed industrial organization from the perspective of corporate law. Lectures 7 and 8 contained numerous references to statistical models to analyze retirement and financial investments trends, respectively. When taking into consideration the type of content and the teaching method, some of the lectures demonstrate disciplinary alignments that can be traced back to their underlying epistemological slants. Lectures 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 all dealt primarily with authentic descriptive information, without delving into any theoretical explanations or abstract reasoning. In fact, empirical data was used as evidence to support factual claims concerning the reality of various aspects of the business world. In addition, two lectures (1 and 5) used this descriptive data as a backdrop for follow-up case study work that allowed students to engage in analytical and problem-solving tasks applied to real-world business settings. Thus, these lectures demonstrate an emphasis on the more concrete objectives of business courses aiming to prepare students for the profession, and consequently in line with Biber’s (2003) description of business lectures as procedure-oriented compared to lectures from the humanities and sciences characterized as content-focused. Lectures 7, 8 and 10 instead remained mainly in the realm of theory. Models, equations and curves were used to explain economic theories and to evaluate the outcome of the various hypotheses that they triggered. These lectures are therefore very much in line with Henderson and Hewings’ (1990) description of economics textbooks as characterized by the language of model-building used to introduce novices not only to the fundamental notions of the discipline, but also to how its knowledge is constructed. The other lectures showed interesting integrations of theory and practice. Lectures 9, 11 and 12 explained economic theories or business concepts frequently by means of concrete examples to show their validity. Lecture 2 was a particularly interesting hybrid. Authentic data was used to critically analyze the application of an economic model in the real world. On the whole, from the preceding analysis, we see that the lectures of the BSLC reflect the diversity of disciplinary orientation and epistemological approach associated with business studies, which sometimes emerges even within the same lecture.

6.3 Real vs. hypothetical worlds From the epistemological perspective, a distinctive feature of economics discourse is its tendency to move between hypothetical and real worlds. Economic theories are tested



Chapter 6.  Teaching the discipline and the profession 

in models where variables can be controlled and then applied to predict real-world phenomena (Tadros 1994; Motta-Roth 1995; Bondi 1999). However, in the BSLC, economics is only one facet of its disciplinary profile. Therefore, it is important to determine to what extent the lecturers may resort to hypotheticality across the corpus, and how this in turn may be influenced by the disciplinary orientation of the lecture. For this investigation, I focused on some lexico-grammatical features that are frequently linked to hypotheticality. In economics textbooks, previous studies have found that interactive devices such as imperative forms (e.g., suppose, let’s say) are signals that writers are shifting into a hypothetical world (Tadros 1994; Hewings 1990; Bondi 1999). Sentences based on if-then patterns are other clear indicators of non-reality. In pedagogic texts, hypotheticality acts as a strategy to help readers grasp a given concept by transforming it into a simplified generalization. Using the concordance tool, the BSLC was searched for the imperative forms consider, imagine, suppose, assume, say, let’s say, in addition to if-then patterns which could be detected by activating a context horizon for both words. The concordance output was then examined to remove all instances of non-imperative forms and non-hypothetical meanings. For example, let’s say was also found with its verbal meaning (e.g., let’s say a few things about…). There were a few instances in which the meaning of let’s say was not entirely clear. Rather than explicitly introducing a hypothetical episode, it actually seemed to re-phrase or qualify a previous utterance as shown in example 6.1. Therefore, I decided to include only those items that could be interpreted as hypothetical without doubt (example 6.2). The results after these adjustments are illustrated in Table 6.2, together with corresponding analyses in the MDLC and the BSTM. (6.1) It’s a- it’s an investment in human capital and um speculation of various kinds let’s say unprovely infraspeculation that in many given uh areas where someone could invest […] (Lecture 9 – Economic Principles) (6.2) Let’s say my wage grew by three and a half percent this year. The net effect would be a one point five percent increase in real wages. (Lecture 2 – The Japanese Economy)

As can be seen, signals of hypotheticality were more frequent in the BSLC (n=79) compared to both the MDLC (n=44) and the BSTM (n=40). While this higher frequency could be expected when compared to lectures of other disciplines that may not necessarily emphasize hypothetical reasoning, it is surprising to find so few occurrences in the BSTM which instead topically parallels the BSLC. Between these two corpora, some differences can be seen in the frequency of the items, especially let’s say which as a more colloquial alternative was evidently favoured by the spoken mode.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

Table 6.2  Hypotheticality in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Feature of hypotheticality Suppose Consider Imagine Assume Let’s say If-then patterns Total

BSLC

MDLC

BSTM

27 – 2 6 11 33 79

2 1 5 2 14 20 44

22 5 – – – 13 40

Within the BSLC, all of the imperative forms were found in the economics-oriented lectures (examples 6.3–6.4), indicating that these more explicit signals of hypotheticality are strongly linked to theoretical content and extensive use of models. In a follow-up interview, one of lecturers whose lesson dealt with economic theory noted that abstraction into hypothetical worlds by means of models is important in economics as it allows students to hone in on a specific point without being distracted by their real world knowledge. Similarly, in Young’s (1990) and Bamford’s (2004a) studies based on economics lectures, models were found to be quite prominent. The 33 instances of if-then patterns were instead distributed rather evenly between the economics and business topics. However, when comparing examples 6.5 and 6.6, we see that their usage in the business-oriented lecture (example 6.6) seems to be grounded more in the real world. (6.3) Suppose it has production function F-I it’s firm I index I and suppose it uses capital and labor and produces output. (Lecture 8 – Macroecnomics) (6.4) Let’s say there were no uncertainties but it’s perfectly predictable. It still would be the case that the sum of the output prices would have to be somewhat less. (Lecture 10 – Ethics and Economics) (6.5) So if you know what nominal GDP is and you know what the price level is then you know what real GDP is. (Lecture 11 – Microeconomics) (6.6) If you- if you’re working in a consultancy firm then if you’re laid off you set yourself up as a consultant so the start-up costs may be may be higher than in service companies. (Lecture 3 – UK Business Strategies)

It is important to recognize that hypotheticality can be expressed in other ways besides imperatives and if-then patterns, such as the modals may and will, or other structural patterns (e.g., we can consider that…). However, the above analysis has nonetheless confirmed some broad tendencies. While features of hypotheticality



Chapter 6.  Teaching the discipline and the profession 

were present across all the lectures, the more explicit imperative forms were found exclusively in the theory-oriented economics topics.

6.4 Argumentation As discussed in section 6.1, one of the objectives of business studies programmes is to teach students to reflect critically on how disciplinary knowledge impacts real world events. To succeed in this, learners need to recognize the alternative viewpoints and approaches within the discipline. Signals of diverse positions are often realized through meta-argumentative expressions, or “nouns and verbs that refer to a speech event as argumentative” (Bondi 1999: 180). These devices are part of the broader category of reflexive language, which comprises metalinguistic forms that foreground the speech events themselves and, going a step further, metapragmatic forms that indicate speakers’ awareness of their appropriate uses (Lucy 1993). In economics textbooks, Bondi (1999) found that meta-argumentative items such as argue, claim and discuss were frequently used to show readers that a topic can be considered from various angles, but also to show them how economists discuss issues within competing schools of thought. Thus, argumentation becomes an important strategy to introduce novices to the discursive practices of the community. To achieve a better understanding of how business academics use meta-argumentative devices, the BSLC was searched for a series of items that signal the existence of alternative positions held by various actors in the field. To determine the metaargumentative function of a particular item, it is necessary to study each occurrence in context in order to identify the discourse participants. As a consequence, this analysis was limited to those items that most explicitly signal alternative viewpoints and did not include less explicit and highly frequent items such as think, show or explain. The results of the analysis are presented in Table 6.3, together with analogous analyses in the MDLC and BSTM. The items have been lemmatized, i.e., inflected forms have been grouped so that the lemma argue comprises argue, argues, argued, arguing, argument and arguable. As the table shows, both the BSLC (n=62) and the BSTM (n=73) contain more meta-argumentative devices compared to the MDLC (n=35). It is of course necessary to exercise caution in this interpretation since the analysis is based on a small number of items. However, there does seem to be a trend of more pronounced argumentation in business studies compared to other disciplines, at least with regard to these more explicit indicators. In the BSLC, ‘who does the arguing’ runs the gamut. This includes an indefinite public (example 6.7), you generalized or possibly audience-inclusive (example 6.8), you the audience (example 6.9), the

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

book (example 6.10), an expert in the field (example 6.11), but often the lecturers themselves (examples 6.12–6.13). Table 6.3  Meta-argumentative devices in BSLC vs. MDLC vs. BSTM Lemma

BSLC

MDLC

BSTM

argue debate claim agree disagree reject suggest maintain Total

38 8 3 6 1 – 5 1 62

19 1 5 3 – 1 6 – 35

36 7 7 5 – 17 1 73

(6.7) It’s a little bit non-agreed matter in Europe. Some say the upper border is five hundred employees others say two hundred and fifty employees. (Lecture 5 – SMEs in Aachen) (6.8) You could argue that’s just reflecting the ever-changing state of the economy erm and they mop they do create jobs and they mop up unemployment. (Lecture 1- SMEs in the UK) (6.9) You may disagree with some of the things I’ve been presenting. (Lecture 2 – The Japanese Economy) (6.10) The book suggests an analogous picture for this model. Again we’re talking about equilibrium here characterizing equilibrium. (Lecture 8 – Macroeconomics) (6.11) Cowling uh argues there are three main reasons for regional policy one is transnationalism short termism and centripetalism. (Lecture 6 – UK Industrial Policy) (6.12) So I guess my claim is more you know how would you like to crank a little more on the option value model and my- my- my sense is that this is a dimension. (Lecture 7 – Labour Economics) (6.13) I would argue that that’s not quite so clear cut as western commentators say. (Lecture 2 – The Japanese Economy)

On the other hand, in the BSTM the discourse participants were removed from the immediate context. These included named third parties, economists in general, representatives of particular schools of thought (e.g., Marxists, monetarists) and even such vague actors as “research” and “experience”. There were no instances of either



Chapter 6.  Teaching the discipline and the profession 

you or I as discourse participants and only three instances of we. There were several agentless passive constructions (e.g., it has been claimed, it might be argued). Therefore, although argumentation is present in the written materials, in the lectures it seems to take on a much more ‘personal’ face, thus rendering it all the more prominent. Furthermore, the meta-argumentative devices were found across all the lectures of the BSLC, regardless of their economics or business orientation, lending further support to their crucial contribution to the discourse of the discipline.

6.5 Specialized lexis One of the fundamental goals of teaching is to introduce learners to concepts of a discipline, and with this goes hand-in-hand the acquisition and consolidation of its specialized lexis. For this reason, a study of the specialized lexical environment of an academic genre is crucial to understanding the link between the disciplinary domain and the language. Within the Hallidayan framework, specialized lexis clearly falls within the ideational function in that it encodes the content or the aboutness of the discourse. However, Drew and Heritage (1992) discuss an additional function of specialized lexis when used by speakers in institutional settings, i.e., to display expertise in a particular domain and thus orient themselves and their audiences to the institutional context. The specialized lexis of lectures, as an instructional event that takes place in an institutional setting, would seem to reflect both functions: to transmit disciplinary knowledge and to situate the participants within the disciplinary community. To analyze specialized lexis, we must first decide what to include in this category. In fact, the literature suggests that specialized lexis can comprise more than the technical terms associated with a given domain and include items that are neither strictly technical nor domain-exclusive, but still have an important role in the context of interaction (Drew and Heritage 1992; Collins and Scott 1997). This might comprise semi-technical or sub-technical lexis, meaning “words which are not specific to a subject specialty but which occur regularly in scientific and technical texts” (Kennedy and Bolitho 1984: 57). In business studies, these would include terms like market, product or price that are neither strictly technical nor discipline-exclusive, and may easily be found in everyday language. Yet they are nonetheless conceptually important in business studies and thus should count as specialized lexis.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

6.5.1 Global analysis I began the analysis of specialized lexis in the BSLC by generating a list of all the words in the corpus with Wordsmith Tools. To facilitate the elimination of large series of unwanted items, the wordlist function was set to include only words having more than two letters, thereby excluding many pronouns, articles and prepositions. In addition, the minimum frequency for inclusion was set at 10 occurrences which seemed to be a reasonable requisite. This procedure produced a list of 1078 different word types. I then manually edited the list to include only items that could be assessed as discipline-significant on the basis of five semantic categories identified as central to business lexis, according to guidelines drawn from previous research (Bhatia 2004; Poncini 2004; Nelson 2005): a. Lexis related to business/economics concepts (e.g., turnover, assets, competition, supply, inflation, deflator, model) b. Lexis related to the business entities and actors (e.g., firms, companies, clusters, employees, investors, partners, board) c. Lexis related to business activities (e.g., production, manufacturing, spending, input/output) d. Lexis that describes business activities and economic trends (profitable, failing, deal, international, increase, decline, dynamic, static) e. Lexis related to measuring business performance (price, cost, rate, percentage, value, figures, data) As might be expected, there is some overlapping among the categories. For instance, a term like innovation can be interpreted as both a concept and an activity. However, because this process was undertaken to obtain a broad base of specialized lexis and not to produce absolute quantitative data, any overlapping was not seen as a problem. After lemmatization, a list of 174 items remained. To facilitate the discussion of the results, the top sixty lemmas and their corresponding frequencies are listed in Table 6.4 (see Appendix B for the complete list). As can be seen, most items are associated with business entities, activities and concepts. For example, items 1/firm, 31/bank and 58/partner are business entities. Items 3/produce, 10/invest and 51/sell are business activities. Items 18/value, 23/ profit and 32/interest are business concepts. Some items could be interpreted as both business concepts and activities, e.g., items 14/employ, 17/grow and 59/collaborate. Only three items were linked primarily to concepts of economics: items 11/model, 52/equilibrium and 55/utility. These were found almost exclusively in the lectures that had more economics-oriented topics. On the other hand, some items were instead found only in the more business-oriented topics: items 28/in-



Chapter 6.  Teaching the discipline and the profession 

novate, 36/bond and 43/tech. These two orientations are illustrated in examples 6.14–6.16 and 6.17–6.19, respectively. Table 6.4  Top sixty lemmas of specialized lexis in the BSLC Lemma (N. instances) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

firm (423) company (378) produce (362) economy (292) price (235) percent (231) work (223) market (189) retire (186) invest (176) model (174) industry (164) dollar (160) employ (159) policy (157) sector (150) grow (149) value (144) rate (139) business (135)

Lemma (N. instances) 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

pay (120) stock (120) profit (118) GDP (117) buy (117) money (111) wage (103) innovate (108) competitive (100) service (97) bank (96) interest (96) manufacturing (93) increase (91) corporate (83) bond (78) data (76) cost (73) labour (70) rent (70)

Lemma (N. instances) 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

develop (68) finance (68) tech (68) capital (67) income (66) foreign (63) figure (62) export (61) quantity (60) measure (59) sell (59) equilibrium (57) supply (56) fund (55) utility (55) index (51) spend (50) partner (50) collaborate (47) exchange (46)

(6.14) In order to answer those questions we’re gonna put together an economic model. (Lecture 11- Microeconomics) (6.15) Okay uh so we need now some explicit assumptions about what these two utility functions look like. (Lecture 7 – Labour Economics) (6.16) That’s the- what sometimes economists have called the- the folk law or the law of general equilibrium. (Lecture 10 – Ethics and Economics) (6.17) I mean a knitting machine company may- can be high tech so can a knitting firm can be high tech. (Lecture 3 – UK Business Strategies) (6.18) And they are a great source of innovation and it tends to be a prerogative of niche markets. (Lecture 1 – SMEs in the UK) (6.19) People are- are willing to lend you money one- one way to raise that money is to sell bonds. (Lecture 12 – Industrial Organization)

Two of the top sixty lemmas were closely linked to a specific topic and used almost exclusively by one lecturer only: item 9/retire in Lecture 7 (Labour Economics) and

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

item 58/partner in Lecture 12 (Industrial Organization). However, close inspection of the concordance output revealed that the vast majority are found in both economics and business oriented lectures. They seemed to transcend theory vs. practice, thus demonstrating flexibility according to context of usage. This is illustrated by the dispersion plot for the most frequent lemma firm in Figure 6.2 below.

Figure 6.2  Dispersion plot of the lemma firm in the BSLC

We see in example 6.20 that firm is clearly used in a concrete sense, while in example 6.21, it is used more theoretically. Interestingly enough, the second most frequent item company was used only in real-world contexts and never in theoretical ones. Apparently, compared to firm, it has a less academic and more practical connotation. (6.20) I mean given that uh an important layer in economy are small firms but maybe small firms should be encouraged to become more international. (Lecture 6 – UK Industrial Policy) (6.21) So the goods that are flowing away from the firm are the products that the firm’s producing. In other words GDP. (Lecture 11 – Microeconomics)

A similar flexibility of usage can be seen with the third-ranked lemma produce through the dispersion plot in Figure 6.3 below and examples 6.22 (theory-oriented) and 6.23 (practice-oriented).

Figure 6.3  Dispersion plot of the lemma produce in the BSLC



Chapter 6.  Teaching the discipline and the profession 

(6.22) If you have this aggregate production function if it summarizes uh what’s happening in the free market economy in the simple case uh if I have this mapping I- I know what its partial derivative is. (Lecture 8 – Macroeconomics) (6.23) This information has a lot of implications when we try to er talk about the organisation of production the location of activity the capacity of export the capacity to innovate. (Lecture 4 – Productive Systems in Spain).

Cluster analysis of the BSLC detected a few content-specific three-word bundles with at least 10 occurrences. These are shown in Table 6.5. As can be seen, almost all were quite lecture-specific, with only one (the minimum wage) appearing in two different lectures. This was surprisingly so, even for such ‘stock’ phrases as the market place, the price level, factors of production, and the interest rate. Apparently, these lexical bundles are strongly associated with certain topics in addition to representing essentially fixed expressions within the discipline. Table 6.5  Content-specific three-word lexical bundles in the BSLC Three-word bundle

Freq.

local productive systems option value model factors of production the GDP deflator high-tech companies strategic decision making the market basket the market place the minimum wage

63 34 26 16 12 12 11 11 11

the price level aggregate production function the interest rate Mundell-Flemming model

11 10 10 10

Topic/lecture Productive systems in Spain/4 Labour economics/7 Ethics and economics/10 Microeconomics/11 UK business strategies/3 The Japanese economy/2 Microeconomics/11 Economic principles/9 UK industrial policy/6 Economic principles/9 Microeconomics/11 Macroeconomics/8 Macroeconomics/8 Macroeconomics/8

6.5.2 Keyword analysis Corpus methodology offers the possibility of carrying out further statistical analyses of the lexical dimension of texts. Once a word list has been generated for a particular corpus, it can then be compared to another word list of a reference corpus that differs according to some pre-established criteria. The comparison returns a list of keywords that appear with a significantly higher frequency in the corpus under investigation compared to the reference corpus. The ‘keyness’ of a word is calculated by the Log Likelihood test for statistical significance, which yields a p value. The lower the

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

p value, the less the probability that any difference is due to mere chance. The p value is linked to a keyness score: the higher the score, the more key the word. This procedure was used to compare the BSLC wordlist and a wordlist generated from the MDLC as a reference corpus of multi-disciplinary lectures.1 Obviously, such a comparison will reveal marked lexical differences given the single domain of the BSLC compared to the range of disciplines covered in the MDLC. However, in this case, keyword analysis is useful to confirm the items selected for the manuallyproduced list of 174 items described in the previous section, and to possibly fine tune it towards a ‘core’ of specialized lexis in business studies lectures. Table 6.6  Top thirty keywords in BSLC vs. MDLC Item 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

firms companies market policy economy price percent GDP production dollars government investment stock manufacturing industrial retire wage activity sector profit model tech capital income pay services equilibrium supply utility business

* Significance level of p<0.000000

Freq. BSLC

Freq. MDLC

Keyness Score

282 246 166 157 157 144 191 117 116 110 159 105 102 93 91 82 79 77 76 74 141 68 67 66 63 59 57 56 55 92

0 0 0 0 0 0 15 0 0 0 14 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 25 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 12

448.0 390.8 263.6 249.3 249.3 228.7 213.9 185.8 184.2 174.7 172.1 166.7 162.0 147.7 144.5 130.2 125.4 122.3 120.7 117.5 113.3 108.0 106.4 104.8 100.0 93.7 90.5 88.9 87.3 86.1



Chapter 6.  Teaching the discipline and the profession 

From the list of words that were returned as key to the BSLC, I removed proper nouns, geographical references, common adjectives, numerical expressions and other unwanted non-discipline related items. Since the keywords were calculated on unlemmatized word lists, I included only top ranking forms and removed alternative forms that appeared subsequently on the list (e.g., firms vs. firm).2 After these adjustments, 111 items remained. Cross-checking determined that all but nine of these items were present in the larger manually-produced list of specialized lexis (Appendix B), with noticeable overlapping particularly among the top 30 items. These items are presented in Table 6.6, together with their frequencies in both corpora and their keyness scores which are calculated automatically on the basis of the difference between the two frequencies. As can be seen from the data, the keyness scores were quite high for those items that appeared with relatively high frequency in the BSLC and low frequency in the MDLC (where there were many cases of zero frequency), thereby confirming their centrality to the specialized lexis of business studies lectures. Interestingly, the nine items that turned out to be key that did not appear in the manually-produced list of 174 items (government, activity, benefits, offer, systems, decision, uncertainty, powerful and plan) are not necessarily specific to business studies. However, they are apparently high-frequency items all the same and could thus be categorized as semi-technical lexis in this domain. On the other hand, sixty-three items that had been included in the manually produced list did not figure as key in the BSLC. Most were those having fewer than sixteen occurrences which was evidently the cut-off point for establishing statistical keyness in this case (in the manually-produced list I had set ten as the minimum number of occurrences for inclusion). Other items that did not result as key in the BSLC (e.g., exchange, data, average, technology, international) can apparently be found in lectures on other subjects and therefore are perhaps better classified as cross-disciplinary semi-technical lexis. Four items that were surprisingly absent from the BSLC key word list were union, trade, worth and demand. While they are not exclusive to the domain, they do take on domain-specific meanings in the contexts of the lectures. In fact, it would be difficult to claim that such items are not important within the business studies framework. Thus, I would argue that while a keyword analysis can confirm broad tendencies, it does not give us the more complete lexical profile that can be obtained only with integrative qualitative techniques. For additional insight, I compared the BSLC wordlist with a wordlist generated for the BSTM written corpus. Table 6.7 lists all the items that were found with significantly higher frequency in the BSLC, again with corresponding frequencies and keyness scores.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

Table 6.7  Keywords in BSLC vs. BSTM Item 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

retire model tech utility dollars figures option GDP nominal manufacturing sectors policy funding bucks collaborate quantities calculate alertness industrial innovators derivative basket companies fiscal equation dynamic enterprises yen discount bonds banks powerful competitiveness

Freq. BSLC

Freq. BSTM

Keyness

82 141 68 55 110 47 40 117 39 93 74 157 35 33 33 31 29 28 91 27 24 24 246 22 20 20 19 19 19 52 50 18 18

0 23 0 0 21 0 0 30 0 19 11 55 0 0 0 0 0 0 26 0 0 0 139 0 0 0 0 0 0 13 12 0 0

114.2 95.1 94.7 76.6 66.8 65.4 55.7 55.5 54.3 53.7 52.7 51.8 48.7 45.9 45.9 43.2 40.4 39.0 38.6 37.6 33.4 33.4 30.8 30.6 27.8 27.8 26.4 26.4 26.4 25.3 25.2 25.1 25.1

* Significance level of p<.000001

After removing a series of unwanted keywords linked primarily to the spoken dimension of the BSLC (e.g., okay, yeah, you), there were relatively few content-oriented keywords (n=33), which was not surprising given the disciplinary alignment of the two corpora compared. As noted in Chapter 3, the materials that make up the BSTM were selected to include topics that were largely parallel to the BSLC. The keyness scores are generally much lower than those of BSLC vs. MDLC, which is a further indication of less accentuated differences. Overall, these items seem to



Chapter 6.  Teaching the discipline and the profession 

reflect the stronger specificity of some of the lecture topics compared to text materials. For example, items 2/model, 4/utility, 9/nominal and 22/basket are all strongly economics-oriented. In fact, the topics of some lectures in the BSLC (e.g., Microeconomics, Labour Economics, Economic Principles) may actually correspond more closely to economics than to business textbooks. Some items were closely linked to specific topics and therefore frequently repeated throughout the course of the lecture, e.g., items 15/collaborate and 20/innovators in Lecture 3 (UK Business Strategies), items 1/retire and 7/option in Lecture 7 (Labour Economics), item 18/alertness in Lecture 10 (Ethics and Economics) and item 28/yen in Lecture 2 (The Japanese Economy). Some items in this list deserve further comment. Item 5/dollars was significantly more frequent in the lectures compared to the text materials, probably reflecting the American component of the discourse. In fact, six out of the twelve lecturers were speakers of American English and they produced all but two of the total instances. Similarly, all instances in the BSTM were found in the two American text sources (the majority of sources here were of British origin). On the stylistic side, item 14/bucks, slang for dollars, was significantly more frequent in the BSLC compared to both the BSTM and the MLDC. Apparently, this particular usage is influenced by both the less formal spoken mode and by the disciplinary domain. As shown in examples 6.24–6.25, bucks was found in episodes of exemplification which the lecturers further enhanced by shifting to an informal footing by the use of personal pronouns and additional slang. (6.24) Are they likely to offer me the big bucks as a raise next year if I stay? Well probably not. (Lecture 7 – Labour Economics) (6.25) You say hey I’ll give you this bond for a thousand bucks and he says well geez if I pay you a thousand bucks all I’m gonna get is five percent. (Lecture 12 – Industrial Organization).

6.5.3 Connections to Business English In order to ascertain professional influences on the specialized lexis of the BSLC, I referred to two significant studies dealing with the lexis of business English. In the first, Nelson (2000) compiled the million-word Business English Corpus (BEC) consisting of both spoken and written language derived from professional business activities. The spoken component includes meetings, telephone calls, negotiations and interviews, business TV programmes, while the written component comprises texts used to conduct business (e.g., faxes, e-mails, and reports) and texts from the business press. By comparing the BEC to the BNC, the author was able to extract a business lexicon that distinguishes itself from general English

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

because it reflects the restricted semantic areas involved in business activities, events and relationships. Table 6.8  Common specialized lexis: BSLC and BEC keywords Item 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Rank BSLC business company market product management price financial bank service stock investment share cost profit sell international corporate rate industry technology account group offer increase payment tax trade meeting firm system strategic

28 2 6 3 71 5 38 26 25 17 8 77 34 18 46 114 30 41 10 117 110 108 98 68 16 43 77 162 1 59 99

Rank BEC 1 2 3 6 9 10 11 12 14 15 26 27 29 33 34 39 42 43 46 48 52 60 61 62 82 83 84 89 90 93 100

Table 6.8 shows the results of cross-checking the specialized lexis in the BSLC (Appendix B) with the top hundred keywords from BEC vs. BNC. As can be seen, a number of frequent items were found to be overlapping, thus indicating a strong lexical link between the academic and professional worlds. Of these, however, some items showed some noticeable differences in ranking. Business, management, international, technology, share, group, and meeting ranked higher in the BEC, re-



Chapter 6.  Teaching the discipline and the profession 

flecting its real-world orientation. On the other hand, industry, investment and especially firm ranked higher in the BSLC and therefore seem to be more academically oriented. However, the two corpora also showed some important differences. Specialized lexis in the BSLC includes many theory-oriented words (e.g., model, GDP, wage, retirement) which are entirely absent from the BEC keywords. On the contrary, exclusively in the BEC we find many items that attest to the dayto-day operations and transactions of business (e.g., fax, mail, internet, sale, contract, customer, Okay, will, copy, we).3 In the second study, McCarthy and Handford (2004) identified the keywords of CANBEC (Cambridge and Nottingham Business English Corpus), a one-million word corpus of spoken business English, with respect to two reference corpora: everyday conversation and spoken academic discourse. Table 6.9  Common specialized lexis: BSLC and CANBEC keywords Item

Rank BSLC

Rank CANBEC

CANBEC vs. conversation 1 product 2 price 3 meeting 4 account 5 companies 6 cost 7 stock

3 5 162 119 2 36 22

12 13 18 33 42 43 45

CANBEC vs. spoken academic discourse 1 meeting 2 price 3 cost 4 companies 5 pounds

162 5 36 2 118

17 23 38 46 49

Cross-checking of their results with specialized lexis in the BSLC determined relatively few points of contact, as shown in Table 6.9 along with respective rankings. This can be explained by the fact that most of the keywords identified in CANBEC represent general English and are often specifically linked to the spoken mode (e. g., Okay, we, yeah, well). Out of the top fifty keywords, less than half could be considered domain-specific and, as the table shows, there were only eight items across both comparisons that overlapped with the BSLC. The much higher ranking of meeting, account and pounds in the CANBEC corpora suggests the more practical focus of spoken business discourse to accomplish goals. Yet the substantial correspondence of these two short lists indicates that some semantic areas (i.e., business

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

entities, performance, events and activities) are shared by profession and education, and therefore particularly important for students of business studies. 6.5.4 Compounds and buzzwords The preceding sections have investigated specialized lexis primarily in terms of frequency. In this section, I shift my focus to creativity, or how the speakers use new or novel specialized terms within the context of their teaching. I will thus be dealing with relatively few but nonetheless important items which will enable us to trace a broader lexical profile of the BSLC. Specialized language undergoes continuous expansion due to the rapid changes in disciplines (Gotti 2003). In other words, specialized lexis is not a fixed set of terms that can be taught to students; it evolves and renews itself according to changing interests within communities of practice. Therefore, it is important to determine whether the language of business academics may reflect this process. According to Roos (1987: 1), “the lexis of business and economics is characterized by a high degree of freedom, productivity, creativity and imagination”. An important indicator of this is word compounding, or the process of forming new words from two or more independent words. In a study based on written texts taken from economics and business administration textbooks, trade journals, business magazines and newspapers (Roos 1987), the tendency to condense information was shown to be realized not only by well-known devices such as heavy pre-modification and nominalization, but also by extensive compounding, including a variety of patterns such as: a. b. c. d. e.

noun + adjective (e.g., cost-intensive, user-friendly) noun + ing-verb (e.g., debt-restructuring, oil-producing) noun + verb (past participle) (e.g., factory-packed, consumer-focused) adj + verb (past participle) (e.g., foreign-made) verb (past participle) + noun (e.g., fixed-rate)

Furthermore, compound forms demonstrated an extremely high level of productivity, often combining together (e.g., all-in-one low-cost solution, high-performing cutting-edge company) and extending into whole phrases to create novel and original expressions that far exceed standard language or even specialized lexis (e.g., pay-as-you-go scheme, ours-is-better-than-theirs type of advertisement, what’s-in-itfor-me attitude). Thus, compounding appears to be a distinctive feature of business and economics lexis, and particularly so in the fast-paced world of business. To understand how word compounds were used by the business studies lecturers, the BSLC and the BSTM were searched with the concordance tool for all hyphenated items. From a methodological viewpoint, this was a sort of compro-



Chapter 6.  Teaching the discipline and the profession 

mise since compound words are not hyphenated consistently in English orthography (Biber et al. 1999). For example, a take-over and a takeover are equally acceptable. If in written texts we can perhaps expect some degree of uniformity, in the case of spoken data, hyphenation depends largely on the transcribers’ perceptions and is therefore likely to present some discrepancies. The only viable solution for this analysis was to consider compounds that actually appear in the transcripts in hyphenated form, also because the identification of compounds in non-hyphenated form could not have been carried out systematically. Because my focus was on discipline-oriented compounds, all of the more common items found in general English (e.g., so-called, short-term, ill-advised, law-abiding) as well as hyphenated proper names (e.g., Mundell-Flemming model) were removed. In addition, I decided not to include some relatively common content-oriented items that frequently appear in the non-hyphenated alternative forms (e.g., high tech, buyout, startup, risk taking, customer focused), thus concentrating the analysis only on the more novel items. However, I opted to include a few items that may also be found in general English, but were used here in specific disciplinary contexts as shown in examples 6.26–6.27. The results are shown in Table 6.10. (6.26) It’s a very important value in the United States to get teenagers to- to- to have some kind of job even a dead-end job because it teaches them uh responsibility and discipline. (Lecture 9 – Economic Principles) (6.27) New startups they depend on venture capital they depend on risk taking and that’s really absent from the cure-all lifetime employment system. (Lecture 2 – The Japanese Economy)

As can be seen, there is a noticeable difference between the two corpora in terms of the variety of word compounds. Although many content-related hyphenated items were actually found in the BSTM, most were items that are easily found in their alternative non-hyphenated form (e.g., risk taking, after sales, knowledge driven) and were thus not counted. Therefore, using the same selection criteria described above, only ten items remained, four of which (items 5, 6, 9 and 10) were overlapping with the BSLC, suggesting that the spoken mode is more conducive to producing novel types of word compounds. In both corpora most of the items were used adjectivally, attesting to their key descriptive function (e.g., peak-hour business, wealth-creating areas, take-home wages). A few were used nominally to convey a concept (know-how, income-while-working, over-appreciation). In the BSLC, some rather creative word compounds were used (examples 6.28–6.30) in the context of certain topics. Of interest is the fact that these were found in the more theoretical economics topics, where one might instead expect to find less linguistic creativity, especially when compared to real-word oriented

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

business topics. However, they were mostly found in the speech of one lecturer, thus pointing to the influence of individual speaking style. Table 6.10  Word compounds in BSLC vs. BSTM Items found in the BSLC

Items found in the BSTM

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

bottom-up (adj) cost-cutting (adj) cure-all (adj) dead-end (adj) down-sloping (adj) early-out (adj) European union-wide (adj) forward-looking (adj) free-standing (adj) hollowing-out (n) income-while-working (n) inner-dependent (adj) interest-elastic (adj) just-in-time (adj) know-how (n) labour-saving (adj) leisure-equal-to-one (n) leisure-greater-than-one (n) minimum-wage (adj) off-peak (adj) once-in-a-lifetime (adj) one-year-ahead (adj) out-of-sample (adj) out-years (n) over-appreciation (n) over-capacity (n) pay-as-you-go (adj) peak-hour (adj) rest-of-life (adj) take-home (adj) upward-sloping (adj) wealth-creating (adj)

consumer-branded (adj) day-labourer (n) industry-specific (adj) inward-looking (adj) just-in-time (adj) know-how (n) man-day (n) on-the-job (adj) pay-as-you-go (adj) upward-sloping (adj)

(6.28) If you’re a firm which has lived off the notion that we provide a career not a one-year-at-a-time employment contract and now you find it’s really optimal to wanna get rid of some of the people. (Lecture 7 – Labour Economics)



Chapter 6.  Teaching the discipline and the profession 

(6.29) You can imagine sort of a Cobb-Douglas function where there’s leisure and income and we let working correspond to leisure-equal-to-one. (Lecture 7 – Labour Economics) (6.30) They make the simple assumption that there is um kind of constant sort of utility of income-while-working is income-while-working to the gamma plus an error term. (Lecture 7 – Labour Economics)

None of the items were used with particular frequency in either corpora, and usually only once or twice. A few were repeated (max 12 times) in episodes focusing on a specific point (e.g., early-out window, just-in-time methods, pay-as-you-go plan). During analysis of the concordance output of word compounds, other items struck my attention although they did not initially appear to be domain-oriented. However, further investigation revealed that some turned out to be business buzzwords, or jargon that is derived directly from the business world and becomes fashionable to use. This led me to cross-check the BSLC with two lists of business buzzwords (Johnson 1990, the American Management Association website).4 Sixteen common items were found and are listed in Table 6.11, together with examples of usage to give an idea of the ‘flavour’ these terms bring to the lectures. They were all produced only once or twice, and all by NSs and the one NNS whose English was quite native-like. The item the bottom line can also be considered a general idiom and is used across domains (see Chapter 4). However, its appearance in business buzzword lists confirms its special significance for this community of practice. All of these items were also searched in the BSTM, but only five of the more common were found (competitive advantage, corporate culture, empower, globalization and just-in-time). The relatively low frequency of both word compounds and buzzwords does not diminish their importance, particularly from the perspective of L2 lecture comprehension. Glancing over the items in tables 6.10 and 6.11, it is easy to imagine potential problems for students. Yet perhaps more importantly, as future members of the business community, students need to be made aware of the capacity of specialized language to expand and renew itself. The multi-faceted analysis carried out in this section has shown two different sides of specialized lexis in the BSLC. Gotti (2003: 34) points out that specialized discourse can be “lexically poor” and “the number of lexical items found in each specialized field is not particularly large”, as it is typically linked to the need for transparency, precision and conciseness. To some degree, this is true of specialized lexis found in the BSLC. In fact, the most comprehensive list (Appendix B) consists of fewer than 200 lemmas. On the other hand, the presence of novel word compounds and buzzwords provides evidence of creativity and productivity in this discourse, thereby ‘enrichening’ it.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

Table 6.11  Business buzzwords in the BSLC Buzzword

Examples from the BSLC

the bottom line catch-up competitive advantage corporate culture credit crunch death valley deindustrialization empower endaka globalization headcount inside trading just-in-time niche no-brainer re-engineer

And the bottom line turns out to be… So Japan was playing catch-up and the US… It gave them a lot of competitive advantage… So it’s a changing corporate culture… And there’s been what’s called a credit crunch… Firms can go through death valley in their first… It has started a process of deindustrialization… Rather than trying to empower local firms… Even have a word for it endaka yen recession Structural changes caused by globalization… If you just make a headcount, you see O equals... You hear about inside trading on the stock market... The introduction of just-in-time techniques... And innovation tends to happen in niche markets… Retire now versus next year that’s a no-brainer I should retire now. Which basically re-engineered the exchange rate…

6.6 Metaphors This section will be dedicated to selected domain-specific metaphors in the BSLC. As we know, metaphor is a very complex phenomenon and can be studied from various perspectives. Therefore, I will provide a brief introduction designed to help to focalize the approach I intend to use in the upcoming analysis. Metaphor has aroused great interest since Aristotelian times, but it has moved even further to the forefront with scholarly work that has taken metaphor out of the traditional literary domain and into the cognitive one. Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal book Metaphors We Live By (1980) argues that metaphor goes far beyond the rhetorical or decorative features of language, but is instead conceptual in nature and reflects the processes of thought and reasoning which in turn influence our actions. Ortony (1993) discusses the role of metaphor in both thought and language, where metaphors are a feature of language creativity linked to the mental construction of meaning. Corradi Fiumara (1995) sees metaphors as creating new worlds of experience through the complex interaction of meaning, language and life. More recently, some studies have focused on the discursive aspects of metaphor, i.e., “metaphor ‘in society’” as opposed to “metaphor ‘in the head’” (Wee 2005: 223). Goatly (1997) provides a comprehensive description of metaphor in a variety of genres (e.g., conversation, news reports, advertising, popular science, novels and poetry) and discusses a number of functions of metaphor that span all



Chapter 6.  Teaching the discipline and the profession 

three Hallidayan metafunctions, among which are filling lexical gaps, explaining and modelling, reconceptualizing, expressing emotions and attitude, cultivating intimacy, structuring texts and foregrounding informativeness. This heightened awareness of the nature and purpose of metaphor has spilled over into domain-specific areas of interest to the present study. McCloskey (1985) argues that metaphor contributes to the evolution of economic thought. It creates new ideas and meanings through the combination of different domains (e.g., human capital). Henderson (1982: 147) sees metaphor “as a device for exploring specific economic problems and as a basis for extending the domain of economic ideas”. He proposes the idea of root metaphors which provide a “sustained basis for the organization of the discussion of a topic and for the selection of terms that are used to discuss the topic” (Henderson 1994: 356). Some important root metaphors that permeate the discourse of economics are the organic metaphor, where economic phenomena and entities are similar to living organisms that grow, suffer or flourish, the mechanical metaphor, where the economy is likened to a machine that starts up, slows down or overheats, and the liquid metaphor, where economic phenomena may circulate, flow or float (Henderson 2000; Charteris-Black 2000; White 2003). Other frequent metaphors in economics and business discourse involve warfare, e.g., the economy or a business is attacked or struggles (Partington 1998; Boers 2000), sports, e.g., players in the market, a record profit (Bamford 1998; David 1999), as well as up/down metaphors where up is more or better and down is less or worse (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). With particular reference to business discourse, some authors speak of business idioms, citing phrases such as survival rate, drive a hard bargain, play the market, dead capital, to be in the red (Goddard 1994; Fedoulenkova 2002). This raises the interesting question of overlapping between metaphors and idioms, and whether they should be distinguished from one another. According to Morgan (1993: 129), there are “stored metaphors” which are highly familiar to most people and are on their way to becoming idioms. Once an idiom, the metaphor becomes “dead”. Yet Black (1979/1993: 25) claims that “a socalled dead metaphor is not a metaphor at all, but merely an expression that no longer has a pregnant metaphorical use”. On the other hand, Gibbs’ (1993) empirical research shows that people understand idioms because they recognize the metaphorical mapping from one domain to another, which is in contrast with the traditional idea that idiomatic meaning is primarily arbitrary. Therefore, since many so-called business idioms are also clearly metaphorical in nature, this analysis will focus on metaphors rather than idioms.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

6.6.1 Global analysis To analyze discipline-specific metaphors in the BSLC, I took cues from the literature discussed above and compiled lists of items representing five root metaphors commonly found in the discourse of business and economics: organic, mechanical, warfare, liquids, and sports, as shown in Table 6.12. Table 6.12  Lexical items grouped by root metaphor category Root

Items

Organic

grow, strong, weak, stimulate, boost, mature, flourish, health, sustain, nourish, survive, recover, resuscitate, cure, remedy, disease, symptom, die, suffer, starve, ail, sick, chronic, wither, stunt

Mechanical

move, drive, start up, trigger, force, kick start, slow down, brake, leverage, accelerate, halt, gear, damper, catalyst, dismantle, fine tune, overhaul, overheat, sputter, spark, fuel, engine, locomotive, pick up, pump

Warfare

target, force, struggle, withdraw, hit, hostile, dominate, fight, attack, combat, take over, war, invade, conquer, battle, retaliate, truce, defend, enemy, raid, kill, manoeuvre, mobilize

Liquids

circulate, bubble, flow, float, buoyant, fluid, liquid, dry up, mop up, leak, trickle, inject

Sports

play, game, race, win, lose, score, coach, record, catch up, strike out, go to bat ball park, first base, home run, track, turf, world class, fast lane, front runner, team

The BSLC was then searched for these items with the concordance tool. The items were lemmatized and each was studied within its co-text to ascertain its metaphorical function with reference to some entity, phenomenon, activity or event involved in economics and business. There were also non-metaphorical uses, such as dying and behaviour referring to human beings or drive referring to a vehicle. These were eliminated. The resulting items are listed according to root metaphor category along with their frequencies in parentheses in Table 6.13. From the data, we can see that organic metaphors were by far the most frequent, with a total of 253 occurrences, compared to mechanical (n=61), warfare (n=58), liquids (n=40) and sports (n=19) metaphors. However, these totals were skewed by another striking result: the extremely high frequency of the lemma grow (n=165), greatly exceeding all the others. This prompted an ulterior investigation of this particular lemma which evidently deserves special treatment. On examining concordance output, I found that most instances could not be interpreted as growth in the sense of physical maturation, but instead as an expression of quanti-



Chapter 6.  Teaching the discipline and the profession 

tative increase (example 6.31). The latter meaning is in fact very common in general English as can be verified in any comprehensive dictionary. Here we see the same trend. Very few instances of grow can be interpreted in the developmental sense (example 6.32), and several seemed to be fuzzy and incorporate both meanings (example 6.33). Table 6.13  Discipline-specific metaphors in the BSLC Organic

Mechanical

Warfare

Liquids

Sports

grow (165) strong (19) behave (13) weak (10) stimulate (7) disease (6) survive (4) boost (4) dies (4) suffer (3) recover (3) mature (3) sustain (3) react (2) starve (2) resuscitate (1) health (1) cure (1) symptom (1) flat line (1)

move (16) drive (10) start up (9) trigger (3) force (3) kick start (3) brake (3) pump (2) slow down (2) leverage (2) accelerate (2) halt (2) gear (1) damper (1) catalyst (1) dismantle (1)

target (14) force (13) struggle (9) hit (5) withdraw (4) hostile (4) dominate (4) fight (2) attack (1) combat (1) take over (1)

flow (26) circulation (8) bubble (2) inject (2) mop up (2)

play (8) record (3) catch up (3) game (2) race (2) ball park (1)

(6.31) And increasingly you’ll see the number of SMEs growing amongst those particular ethnic groups and women as well. (Lecture 1 – SMEs in the UK) (6.32) Why is that in some countries people have a hard time you know people can’t buy anything but our economy grows quite nicely. (Lecture 11 – Microeconomics) (6.33) Like Dave Thomas when he when he founded Wendy’s uh for a long time when it was first growing he was the president of the company. (Lecture 12 – Industrial Organization)

We could argue that grow is a so-called dead metaphor whose alternative meaning has become so conventionalized that it no longer evokes the original domain of meaning. Thus, even if the true metaphorical nature of grow remains somewhat enigmatic, it is still the most prominent metaphor found in the BSLC.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

Within the five categories, there was quite a range of variation among the items (particularly organic, mechanical, and warfare). In several cases, there were only one or two instances of a particular expression (e.g., starve, gear, catalyst, combat, take over). Some clusters of items within the categories could be traced to the same lectures, thus linking them to a specific content. For example, the organic metaphor lemmas disease, resuscitate, cure, and flat line were all found in Lecture 2 where they were used to describe the current crisis of the Japanese economy in terms of an ailing patient in a hospital.5 Similarly, fight, attack, hostile and take over all came from Lecture 12 which dealt with the aggressive aspects of industrial organization and company formation. However, most of the items in the categories were found across the BSLC, and therefore the same root metaphor was used in both the economics-oriented and the business-oriented lectures. The only exception was the liquid metaphor which appeared mostly in economics-oriented lectures, as shown in examples 6.34–6.36. (6.34) So it takes the bonds out of circulation and puts more dollars into circulation. (Lecture 8 – Macroeconomics) (6.35) This is linked back to what occurred in the late nineteen eighties and the bursting of this bubble. (Lecture 2 – The Japanese Economy) (6.36) That stems from the idea that dollar flows have to equal goods flows so the goods that are flowing away from the firm are the products that the firm’s producing. (Lecture 11 – Microeconomics)

Somewhat surprisingly, there were relatively few sports metaphors. However, we must remember that several sports metaphors are derived from baseball (e.g., ball park, home run, strike out, first base, go to bat) and are thus strongly oriented towards American culture. The lecturers of the BSLC represent instead a variety of different cultures and may therefore be less inclined to use such culturally-oriented metaphors, which perhaps contributed to the overall low frequency of sports metaphors. Of particular interest was the lemma force, which appears in two categories with two different meanings: mechanical (i.e., the force of pressure which causes something to move or react) and warfare (i.e., groups of people who constitute a single unit), as illustrated in examples 6.37 and 6.38, respectively: (6.37) In conventional economics the main competitive force is price. (Lecture 3 - UK Business Strategies) (6.38) SME’s employ seventy-seven percent of the whole labour force in the Aachen region. (Lecture 5 - SMEs in Aachen)

Overall, the vast majority of the metaphors were found in the speech of the NSs or the NNS whose speech was very native-like. Therefore, speaker language background



Chapter 6.  Teaching the discipline and the profession 

would seem to play a determining role. NNSs may have less familiarity with metaphorical usage and therefore use more concrete options to express meanings. From this analysis of domain-specific metaphors in the BSLC, it is evident that the same key root metaphors that have been so widely observed in written economics and business texts are also important elements in their spoken academic counterpart. Moreover, there is marked variation in the range of expressions found, generally extending across all the lectures. 6.6.2 Comparative analysis Because metaphors have been found to so strongly characterize economics and business writing, it seemed useful to carry out a parallel analysis in the BSTM as a way to determine potential differences between spoken and written pedagogic discourse. This is illustrated in Table 6.14. Table 6.14  Discipline-specific metaphors in the BSTM Organic

Mechanical

Warfare

Liquids

Sports

grow (297) survive (17) behave (14) suffer (12) boost (9) stimulate (7) recovery (7) strong (2) mature (2) health (2) sustain (2) weak (1) symptom (1)

force (19) move (5) drive (5) accelerate (4) slow down (3) leverage (3) start up (1) trigger (1)

target (37) force (34) dominate (10) withdraw (1) hostile (1) attack (1) take over (1)

flow (66) liquid (28) circulation (1) fluid (1)

team (15) win (3) record (2) play (1) catch up (1)

By comparing these data with Table 6.13, some broad similarities are evident. First of all, the lemma grow is again disproportionately high compared to the other items in the organic root category. Further inspection of the concordance lines revealed a similar duality of usage, although again privileging the quantitative sense over the developmental one. Organic metaphors were thus the most frequent with 373 instances, followed by liquid (n=96), warfare (n=85), mechanical (n=41) and sports (n=22). Ranking second and third, liquid and warfare metaphors were more prominent in the BSTM compared to the BSLC. However, some of the more frequent items in these two categories involved common collocations

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

(e.g., cash flow, labour force, work force, performance target) that were often used repeatedly in section headings and then in the text that followed, thus resulting in higher frequencies. What appears as most interesting is that there is a smaller range of variation within the categories of metaphors found in the BSTM compared to the BSLC, thus indicating a higher level of creativity in the use of metaphor in the spoken lectures compared to the written text materials.

6.7 Summary of findings This chapter has shown that the BSLC does indeed reflect the multi-disciplinary nature of the business studies curriculum posited by previous studies (MacFarlane 1997, Bhatia 2002). The various types of analysis undertaken suggest that this multiplicity emerges in different ways. On the level of content, the lectures draw from various disciplines, beyond the core areas of economics and business to include law and quantitative methods. Moreover, the lecturers chose different ways to develop content, ranging from the description and interpretation of real-world phenomena to the analysis and discussion of theoretical concepts and models. On the epistemological level, the lectures show linguistic evidence of the hypothetical reasoning and argumentation typically associated with the construction of knowledge in economics. Imperatives, if-then patterns and meta-argumentative devices were more prominent in the BSLC compared to the MDLC, and therefore appear to be discipline-oriented. The fact that these features were found across all the lectures of the corpus further attests to their key role in the discourse of the discipline. This has particularly important implications in L2 settings where learners often have considerable difficulty in distinguishing fact from hypothesis and in interpreting the positions of experts in the field. At the same time, the frequent recourse to authentic data to explain business and economic trends highlights the practical orientation of business education which encourages learners to analyze problems and develop strategies to apply in real-world situations. Several lectures integrate both approaches, which further emphasizes the eclectic nature of business studies, but also the awareness of their complementarity on the part of the lecturers. The investigation of the specialized lexis of the corpus using both quantitative and qualitative procedures resulted in a set of 174 items (Appendix B) that can be seen as its ‘core’. As could be expected in an educational setting, there is quite a lot of theory-oriented lexis (e.g., model, retirement, utility) alongside more concrete terms such as firm, product and market. However, the specialized lexis of the BSLC also mirrors the language used in the professional business world. A comparison with the BEC corpus of English in professional business settings showed that numerous lexical items overlapped with the core specialized lexis of the BSLC (e.g.,



Chapter 6.  Teaching the discipline and the profession 

strategic, technology, investment). Thus, the lexical choices of the BSLC lecturers seem to be influenced not only by the immediate instructional context, but also by the broader community of practice that they bring into the classroom. Additional analyses targeted some creative uses of language by the lecturers. In comparison to written business studies materials, there was a wider variety of domain-specific compound words in the BSLC, with some forms apparently being ‘invented’ in the context of certain topics (e.g., leisure-equal-to-one). The more pronounced variation and creativity of compounds in the spoken lectures suggests that they perform an interpersonal function to enhance the lecturer-audience relationship. Some of the BSLC lecturers used buzzwords which have become fashionable in the business world. Although these did not appear in high frequencies, they nonetheless play an important role in the lectures because they link them closely to the community of practice The strong presence of domain-specific metaphors in the BSLC confirms their key role. The BSLC lecturers used same types of metaphors (organic, mechanical, liquid, warfare and sports) already widely recognized in studies based on written texts of the discipline. However, in comparison with the BSTM, the lecturers used a wider variety of metaphors within these categories, once again indicating that face-to-face interaction invites more creative uses of language. The vast majority of novel word compounds, business buzzwords and metaphors appeared in the speech of the NSs of the BSLC, suggesting that the NNSs had less familiarity with them and therefore used more literal language to express meanings. In the same vein, such creative usage may be opaque to many L2 learners and thus contribute to lecture comprehension difficulties. For this reason, it is important to pay special attention to these expressions in English for business studies courses, as L2 learners are very likely to encounter them sooner or later in their academic and professional careers. All of the discipline-related features of the BSLC analyzed in this chapter must be interpreted within a framework of situated learning, where “learning is a way of being in the social world, not a way of coming to know about it” (Hanks 1991: 24). These features are manifestations of the community of practice into which the learners are being inducted. When learners interact with lecturers whose lexicogrammatical choices draw from both the academic discipline and the professional world, they experience how members of the community exist and practice through its language. Indeed, learners can only access and establish their own identities within the community if they become competent in using its language, which therefore carries out a sort of gate-keeping function. With this chapter, I conclude my investigation of the strictly linguistic dimension of the BSLC, which began with aspects related to the spoken mode of delivery (Chapter 4) and continued with the interactional features of the instructional setting (Chapter

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

5). The next chapter will deal with the extra-linguistic dimension or more specifically, the visual and nonverbal features of the BSLC. These cannot be ignored if we are to come away from this study with a reasonably complete picture of these events.

Notes 1. The size of the MDLC was slightly expanded for the keyword analysis (as was the BSTM to be discussed later in this section) because in this procedure, the reference corpus must be larger than the corpus under investigation. 2. The lemmatization process was important for the global analysis of specialized lexis in the BSLC described in the previous section. However, it was neither feasible (nor seemed particularly illuminating) to lemmatize the much more voluminous wordlist of the MDLC for the sole purpose of comparing two lemmatized wordlists. 3.

See Nelson (2000) for a complete list of the top 100 positive keywords in the BEC.

4. http://www.amanet.org 5. The item flat line was not in the original search list. It emerged during analysis in concomitance with resuscitate and seems to be an interesting hybrid of mechanical and organic metaphors in that it refers to an organic state measured by a machine. I am grateful to Julia Bamford for this observation.

chapter 7

Beyond speaking Multimodal aspects It is no longer possible to understand language and its uses without understanding the effect of all modes of communication that are copresent in any text. (Kress 2000: 337)

7.1 Introduction The bold statement above reflects one of the most recent trends in the field of linguistics: multimodal discourse analysis. According to Thibault, Multimodal texts are texts which combine and integrate the meaning-making resources of more that one semiotic modality – for example language, gesture, movement, visual images, sound and so on – in order to produce a text-specific meaning. (2000: 311)

Traditionally, language research has focused on speech and writing from a monomodal perspective. Aspects of language are typically studied with reference to its mode, which in systemic functional linguistics is the register variable that distinguishes a text as being either written or spoken. For example, one may concentrate on structural features stemming from the written mode, or prosodic features generated by the spoken mode. In contrast, the multimodal perspective zooms out to a wider angle where language is considered to be only one of many modes (as mentioned in the quote above) that are available to make meaning. Speech and writing are no longer seen as the two dominant modes of communication, but as two different media through which one mode (language) is realized (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001). Going a step further in this direction, Lemke (1998b) points out that speech and writing are in themselves multimodal. Speech deploys not just verbal resources, but also paralinguistic ones (e.g., prosodic features) and often extra-linguistic ones (e.g., gestures) as well. Writing always entails graphological or typographical features linked to the visual mode. From this new vantage point, some linguists have begun to investigate how other semiotic resources beyond language contribute to meaning-making in social practices. Working with images

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

from a variety of sources ranging from children’s drawing to the mass media, Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) describe a grammar of visual design based on features such as colour, perspective and composition, which encodes meaning much in the same way as functional grammar in language. In his analysis of scientific writing, using a systemic-functional framework Lemke (1998b) shows how visuals are jointly co-deployed with the verbal text to complete the meaning according to the established conventions of the community of practice. Ochs et al.’s (1996) analysis of physicists’ speech found frequent episodes where indeterminate utterances are integrated with both gestures and graphic representations to interpret research activities and findings. A major impetus for interest in the multimodal dimension of discourse has certainly been the rapid acceleration in technological progress. In particular, digital technology and increasingly user-friendly software applications have provided us with tools to more easily access and investigate the features of multimodal texts, such as films and videos, which were previously beyond the reach of many linguists. Two scholars, Anthony Baldry and Paul J. Thibault, have made an especially important contribution in this area by developing innovative methods for analyzing texts that incorporate a range of modalities: linguistic, visual, audio and gestural. For example, it is possible to produce a multimodal transcription of a film segment by breaking it down into individual frames which can then be analyzed according to all their constituent parts. These include not only the visual image, but also the kinesic action, the soundtrack and the dialogue (Baldry 2000a). This technique has been used to analyze various types of multimodal texts. Thibault (2000) produced a multimodal transcript of a television advertisement that incorporates action, sound and images. He then interpreted them metafunctionally to socially contextualize the communicative act, serving as a blueprint for other multimodal discourse studies. Similarly, Baldry (2000b) used multimodal transcriptions of films and lectures to show how the three Hallidayan metafunctions are encoded not only in the verbal text, but also in gestures and visual images. In the area of translation, multimodal transcription can be a useful method for professionals of film subtitling (Baldry and Taylor 2004). In addition, it is an important component in the development of self-access tools for students of text analysis, translation and subtitling, particularly in e-learning contexts (Baldry 2002). Thus, multimodal transcription and text analysis (Baldry and Thibault 2006) has farreaching applications for research, profession and education. Technological advances have also given us new types of media through which discourse may be transmitted. When different media are integrated, as for instance during a webcast conference, we often speak of a multimedia text. In effect, the concepts of multimediality and multimodality seem to overlap to some extent, i.e., the term ‘multimodality’ often conjures up images of very high-tech applications.



Chapter 7.  Beyond speaking: multimodal aspects 

Yet, following Baldry (2000) and Kress and van Leeuwen (2001), it is important to recognize that multimodality refers to the integration of semiotic resources on the production end, while multimediality refers to the integration of technologies on the distribution end. A heightened awareness of the multimodal side of communication has also been carried over into education. Classrooms are particularly fertile environments to exploit a variety of semiotic resources to help learners make meaning (Stein 2000). In L2 settings, the ability to integrate verbal messages with meanings derived from other communicative modes can be a crucial factor in comprehension. For this reason, it is important to gain a better understanding of how other semiotic resources are deployed in business studies lectures and how they contribute to meaning in this particular context. In the next two sections of this chapter, I will explore two semiotic resources beyond speech that come into play in the business studies lectures: the visual images presented during the course of the lecture and the lecturers’ nonverbal behaviours.

7.2 The visual mode While verbal language is good at making meaning according to categorical or typological distinctions, visual representations are better resources for conveying dynamic or topological variations of degree, quantity or proportion that can be placed along a cline (Lemke 1998b). For example, as a topological resource, a bar graph will allow us to understand trends and patterns in a much more direct way than a verbal description (and of course there is always the old saying ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’). Because of this capacity, visual representations (e.g., graphs, tables, diagrams, drawings, photos and mathematical equations) play a prominent role in scientific writing where it is often necessary to go beyond verbal concepts. More specifically, visuals are not mere illustrations of text, but carry out their own distinct cognitive and rhetorical functions. They can be seen as organizational, presentational and orientational (Lemke 1998b), but also as rhetorical by allowing readers to access knowledge more directly and thereby rendering it more convincing (Miller 1998). Given these qualities, it is not surprising that over the years visual representations have become an increasingly important component of academic prose in general (Swales 2004a). Some researchers have looked at the impact of visuals in academic speech. In an early study, Dubois (1980) recognized the importance of slides in biomedical speeches to reinforce key concepts and provide visual interest for audiences, beyond the presentation of data via tables or graphs. Rowley-Jolivet (2002) carried out a very comprehensive descriptive study of visuals in conference presentations

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

in the fields of geology, medicine and physics. Visuals were three times more frequent in spoken presentations compared to their written counterparts, thus attesting to their essential contribution to scientific presentations. In terms of function, she found that conference visuals were used not only to present information, but also as discourse-structuring and interactional devices. A few studies have looked at visuals in the university classroom. King (1994) found that slides and transparencies, along with handouts and the chalkboard, were used extensively in engineering lecturers to structure the discourse and complement ongoing speech. The visuals presented information, which was then evaluated verbally by the lecturers, thus resulting in a characteristic interplay between the visual and the verbal. Roth and Bowen (2000) concluded that graphs projected as transparencies in ecology lectures were dual-functional in both explaining phenomenon and providing evidence. Bamford (2004a) found a wide variety of visuals used in university lectures. In science-oriented subjects they tended to introduce abstract concepts that would be more difficult to understand verbally, while in the humanities they were used in a more illustrative way. These studies indicate that visuals are indeed an important component of the lecture experience and that they carry out a range of functions linked to their discipline. To gain insight into how business academics utilize the visual channel in their lectures, I will now analyze the visuals of the BSLC as semiotic resources in their own right. 7.2.1 The analytical framework Although the term visuals tends to be associated with electronic forms of transmission (e.g., slides, transparencies, videos and more recently Microsoft PowerPointTM software), in lectures visual representations can be extremely ‘low-tech’ (e.g., a diagram reproduced in a handout or mathematical formulae written on a chalkboard). In fact, we must remember that visual actually refers to the mode of communication and not to the instrument of transmission. Therefore, I will adopt a framework that analyzes visuals in terms of mode as more central to meaning-making, rather than medium (which may, however, contribute some meaning of its own, as we shall see later). From an initial overview of the corpus and field notes taken during some of the lectures, the variety of visuals used seems to correspond rather well to RowleyJolivet’s (2002) typology of visuals found in conference presentations, which is articulated into four categories and summarized in Table 7.1.



Chapter 7.  Beyond speaking: multimodal aspects 

Table 7.1  A framework for analyzing visuals in academic speech (Rowley-Jolivet 2002) Visual type

Form

Main Functions

Scriptural

Text

Numerical Graphical Figurative

Equations, formulae, tables Graphs, diagrams, maps Photos, images

Structuring discourse/engaging the audience Representing abstract concepts Representing abstract concepts Structuring discourse/engaging the audience

Scriptural visuals are made up of mainly text, which is often sequentially or hierarchically structured by means of numbered or bulleted lists. They are typically used to structure discourse (e.g., introducing the topics to be covered, organizing important points), but may also have an interactional function to engage the audience. Numerical visuals refer to tables (which may also include brief textual elements) and mathematical expressions, such as equations, formulae and models. They convey abstract information of a topological nature with input that may be structured vertically and horizontally to reflect specific meanings (Lemke 1998b). Graphical visuals represent abstract concepts, but are constructed to communicate an unambiguous meaning. For example, the trend in unemployment over several years can be interpreted unambiguously by the points along a line graph corresponding to specific values. Figurative visuals, such as photographs or images can instead be ambiguous unless further information is provided about what they represent. In conference presentations, figurative visuals were found to perform the interactional function of arousing the audience’s attention (e.g., an image projected at the beginning of a talk), but also a discourse-structuring function as boundaries between sections (Rowley-Jolivet 2002). Numerical, graphical and figurative visuals tend to be closely linked to the verbal discourse by means of deixis and gesture, while scriptural visuals may require less explicit verbal reference. 7.2.2 The analysis An investigation of the visual component of the BSLC required a different approach with respect to the verbal component based on recordings and transcriptions. It was necessary either to gain access to the visuals used in the lectures, or to adequately ‘reconstruct’ them in some way. In all six L2 guest lectures, visuals were clearly visible from the video tapes and were also distributed as hard copies in two cases. Two of the six L1 classroom lectures had accompanying slides that were freely available online and had been produced using PowerPoint software. I did not have direct access to the visuals in the remaining four L1 classroom lectures.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

However, thanks to careful transcription mark-up and the availability of the audio recordings, it was possible to achieve a relatively accurate picture of how visuals were used in these lectures as well. As an initial step, I analyzed the visuals of each lecture according to frequency and media of transmission. This general overview is shown in Table 7.2. Table 7.2  Overview of visuals in the BSLC Lecture

Source/Setting

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest EBM/L2 guest MICASE/L1 class MICASE/L1 class NYU/L1 class NYU/L1 class Iowa/L1 class Ohio/L1 class

Number 13 22 26 30 13 34 5 12 5 3 41 23

Media Transparency + handout Transparency/Hard copy Transparency Transparency Transparency Transparency/Hard copy Slide + Handout Board + Handout Board Board PowerPoint slides PowerPoint slides

Colour/BW Colour/BW BW BW BW Colour/BW BW – – – – Colour BW

As can be seen, all the lecturers used visuals, but there was considerable variation in both frequency and media of transmission. The number of visuals per lecture ranged from a minimum of three to a maximum of 41. Among the six L2 guest lectures, Lectures 1 and 5 had about half as many visuals as the other four lectures, but we must remember that they were also considerably shorter. Therefore, the periodicity of the visuals is a more accurate measure of the extent of their use. Visuals were transmitted at a rate that ranged from one every 2.2 minutes to one every 3.5 minutes, which does not seem to be a particularly noticeable difference from the audience’s standpoint. The media used to transmit the visuals was probably a homogenizing factor. Almost all the visuals were presented as transparencies on the overhead projector. Only Lecturer 1 distributed a handout with a few additional visuals, while Lecturers 2 and 5 distributed hardcopies to students of the same transparencies that they projected. Perhaps the page-size format of individual transparencies tends to regulate the amount of material that can be effectively covered on it. Among the L1 classroom lectures, there was much higher variation in the number of visuals, which seems to be strongly linked to the media used. The ease of producing and transmitting PowerPoint slides likely contributed to their much



Chapter 7.  Beyond speaking: multimodal aspects 

higher number in Lecture 11 (n=41). On the other hand, the real-time production of visuals on a board would tend to reduce their frequency. The effect of media can also be seen in the periodicity of the visuals in the L1 classroom lectures, which ranged widely from one visual every 1.1 minutes (Lecture 11 – PowerPoint slides) to one every 17.3 minutes (Lecture 10 – board). Lectures 7 and 8 included handouts to which I did not have access. These lecturers made no specific verbal references to visuals in the handouts. However, because they could have contained some visuals, the frequency data here need to be interpreted with caution. Overall, most of the lecturers used some form of technology to prepare visuals in advance with relatively more or less ease (i.e., PowerPoint slides vs. transparencies produced with word processing software or other means). Moreover, the number of visuals seems to be influenced somewhat by the effort and time needed to create them. The highest number of visuals was found in one of the PowerPoint lectures, while the board-only lectures had very few. Roth and Lawless (2002) found an average of 25 inscriptions (i.e., charts, graphs, diagrams, photographs, maps) per lecture in an undergraduate ecology course. They do not indicate either the duration of the lectures or the medium of transmission, so it is difficult to compare their findings with mine. However, because the figure is similar to several of the lectures in the BSLC, it can perhaps serve as a broad indicator of the number of visuals that one might expect to find in lectures. Although visuals were generally less numerous in the lectures than in conference papers, where periodicity ranged from one visual every 15 seconds to one every 3.5 minutes (RowleyJolivet 2002), they were not necessarily less important. In fact, their presence in all the lectures at slower periodicities suggests a key pedagogic function; lecturers need to spend more time on each visual to explain the content to students. The use of colour in the visuals seems to be linked to the availability of more technologically sophisticated instruments. One PowerPoint lecture made extensive use of colour and a few transparencies in two lectures were in colour. In Lecture 1, the colour transparencies appeared to be exact reproductions of PowerPoint slides. Lecture 5 contained some transparencies of colour photographs. It is possible that coloured slides, chalk or whiteboard pens were used in lectures 7–10, although without access to these visuals I was not able to verify this. I believe that the use of colour in the visuals I could access served primarily to make them more attractive and lively to audiences, thus representing an important interactional strategy (Rowley-Jolivet 2002). However, in one of the PowerPoint lectures, colour was also used to structure the discourse (e.g., slide titles in one colour vs. text in another) and for coding purposes when different concepts and phenomena were assigned different colours.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

7.2.2.1 Visual typologies in the BSLC For a more accurate understanding of how visuals are used in the BSLC, we must also consider their underlying semiotic resources. Table 7.3 illustrates this analysis based on Rowley-Jolivet’s (2002) typology articulated into four fundamental categories (scriptural, numerical, graphical and figurative). Table 7.3  Distribution of visual typologies in the BSLC Lecture

Scriptural

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Subtotal

9 14 1 12 1 20 – – – – 10 23 –

Total

90

Numerical

Graphical

Figurative

Table

Formula

Graph

Diag.

Map

4 – 15 12 2 10 – – – – 1 – 44

– – – 1

– 7 10 1 1 2

– 1

– –

– – 1

– 2 – – – 23

2 3 – 12 – 19

4 1 1 – – – – – – 6

– – – 3 – –

48

11

– 5 10 – 3 15 – 34 78

– –

8 –

From the data in the table, we can see that scriptural visuals were the most frequent (n=90), but were conspicuously absent from the lectures that did not use electronic means of transmission (lectures 8–10) and from lecture 7, with a few slides that contained models (information recovered from the transcripts and audio recordings).1 In some board-only lectures, the board seemed to be used somewhat ‘scripturally’. From the recordings of these lectures, I detected prosodic emphasis on specific terms in stretches of texts that had been marked up in the transcripts with the contextual cue “writing on the board”. Because there was no explicit reference to a model, graph or diagram, the lecturer was probably writing the words on the board to emphasize their importance. However, on the whole, scriptural visuals were closely linked to some form of electronic projection and thus appear to be media-dependent. In line with Rowley-Jolivet’s (2002) study on conference paper visuals, the scriptural visuals in the lectures carried out an interactional/discourse-structuring function, frequently serving to give an overview of



Chapter 7.  Beyond speaking: multimodal aspects 

the content, organize specific topics and summarize main points (see Figure 7.1 below). However, they were also used to illustrate the development of an argument. The scriptural visual reproduced in Figure 7.2 below traces how a particular problem was dealt with in the Japanese economic crisis and then provides an evaluative comment, thus moving in parallel with the verbal message. This suggests that scriptural visuals may also be used for explanatory and argumentative purposes. Of further interest was the fact that four out of six L2 guest lecturers made frequent use of scriptural visuals compared to only two L1 classroom lecturers. They seemed to prefer a ‘presentation’ style, rather than using more traditional classroom media (e.g., handouts, board) which might be perceived as old-fashioned or even boring. Furthermore, two of the lecturers distributed hardcopies that duplicated the transparencies containing scriptural visuals. This practice is more typical of conference presentations than lectures, and thus lends further support to the presentational approach of the guest speakers. On the other hand, the L1 classroom lecturers had had the opportunity to establish a rapport with the students and may not have felt the need to give such a ‘polished performance’ in every lecture. In addition, in ongoing courses, students normally have textbooks, course packets and handouts, which would presumably reduce the need for scriptural visuals during lectures. Overview – Forms of Ownership Types of Companies Details of Corporations Corporate Rules Stocks and Bonds

Figure 7.1  Scriptural visual in the BSLC (Lecture 12)

What Went Wrong - An Alternative Approach IP futile? Yet admits "success" Problem = lack of coordination with other agencies, not MlTl's policy MITI policy started "going wrong" in 1970s - captured by giant firms Deregulated outward FDI before other agencies deregulated imports in ID sector Sequencing? Critical Mistake

Figure 7.2  Scriptural visual in the BSLC (Lecture 2)

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

With a total of 78, numerical visuals were the second most frequent type in the corpus, which is not surprising given the paramount importance of this kind of data within the discipline. What is interesting though is the very clear alignment of the two sub-types. Tables dominated in the L2 guest lectures (see Figure 7.3 below for an example), while mathematical formulae were found almost exclusively in the L1 classroom lectures. One explanation is that the L2 guest lectures were designed to introduce students to aspects of business and economics in other countries and were therefore more descriptive than theoretical. Hence, there was more presentation of data rather than explanation of theory which was instead found in the L1 classroom lectures. As discussed in Chapter 6, as a discipline business studies comprises both the ‘real world’ (marketing, management, industrial organization) and the ‘hypothetical world’ (devising and testing economic models). This distinction is most clearly seen in the greater presence of mathematical formulae in lectures 7, 8, 10 and 11 which were more economics-oriented compared to lectures 1–6 and lecture 12 which were more business-oriented.2 Table 2.  Percentage of businesses, employment and turnover by size of business, start 1999. Size (number of employees) Micro (0–9) Small (9–45) Medium (50–249) Large (>249)

Businesses %

Employment %

Turnover %

89.8 9.4 0.7 0.1

30.3 14.5 12.1 43.1

22.1 13.5 17.2 47.2

Source: UK Department of Trade and Industry

Figure 7.3  Numerical visual in the BSLC (Lecture 1)

Graphical visuals were also quite common (n=48). Graphs depicting trends were the most frequent, particularly in the L2 guest lectures, again in line with the ‘real world’ orientation of the ‘business side’ of business studies (see Figure 7.4 below). In keeping with their focus on business trends and the economies of geographical areas, three of the L2 guest lectures projected territorial maps. On the other hand, diagrams were favoured by the L1 classroom lectures and usually referred to theoretical curves (e.g., supply and demand). Although the main function of graphical visuals is to represent abstract concepts, in one PowerPoint lecture (n. 11), a graphical visual was instead used as a boundary between sections, thus carrying out both discourse-structuring and interactional functions (Figure 7.5).3 Such cross-functionality can be attributed to the ease of producing and mixing different forms of visual representation offered by the software application itself.



Chapter 7.  Beyond speaking: multimodal aspects  Fig. 1-3-7 Trend in overseas production ratio Acceleration of overseas production

(% ) 14

12.4 11.6

12 10

12.9

8.6

8 6 4

13.1

3.2

4.0

4.9

5.7

7.4

6.4 6.0

9.0

6.2

2 3.0 0 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 Source: METI Basic Survey of Overseas Business Activities

(Year)

Figure 7.4  Graphical visual in the BSLC (Lecture 2)

Figure 7.5  Graphical visual in the BSLC (Lecture 11)

Only two of the lecturers presented figurative visuals. In Lecture 5, a series of attractive photographs (both B&W and colour) of various historical landmarks of the geographical area in question were projected as transparencies on the overhead projector. This occurred at the end of a very short introductory lecture before the students went on to work on a task, apparently to both arouse interest and signal a transition. This seems to corroborate Rowley-Jolivet’s (2002) findings where figurative visuals devoid of scientific meaning were used in conference papers as attractive elements and as boundary devices. In Lecture 11, figurative visuals were incorporated into some of the PowerPoint slides. As suggested above, the technological features of this application open

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

up new options for visual representation in lectures. For example, the figurative category can comprise computer-generated illustrations, as well as photographs and images. These illustrations are iconic, but they must also be interpreted within a particular context in order to avoid ambiguity. The example shown in Figure 7.6 below was used as a boundary device to introduce the discussion of a new topic in the lecture. Another advantage of PowerPoint technology is the possibility to easily create composite visuals containing multiple features. The visual reproduced in Figure 7.7 below integrates the scriptural, graphical and figurative typologies and its meaning is derived from the synergy among them.

Figure 7.6  Figurative visual in the BSLC (Lecture 11)

Figure 7.7  Figurative visual in the BSLC (Lecture 11)

The presence of two PowerPoint lectures in the corpus brings us back to an issue that was raised at the beginning of this analysis, i.e., that medium contributes meaning and therefore has its own semiotic potential (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001). A lecture delivered via PowerPoint parallels the current cultural shift away from print and speech towards the visual and technological. By choosing this medium instead of



Chapter 7.  Beyond speaking: multimodal aspects 

others, the lecturer reinforces this trend while promoting visual and computer literacy among students at the same time. However, Myers (2000) suggests that the PowerPoint lecturer becomes more of an animator rather than the source of the content, and the focus of interaction may shift from student-to-lecturer to studentto-screen. It is probably up to the individual lecturer to strike an effective balance between the pros and cons of using PowerPoint. Judging from personal experience, more and more lecturers are using PowerPoint as they become increasingly computer-savvy and perhaps respond to pressure to deliver more ‘high-tech’ and multimodal lectures (Myers 2000). In a similar vein, Curtis and Najarian (2000) argue that lecturers need to incorporate more sophisticated visual and graphic images if they are to successfully compete with the mass media to make a lasting sensory impression on contemporary students. Bhatia (2004) notes that many business studies students have come to expect professional-style PowerPoint lessons and seem disappointed with traditional academic visual supports such as handouts. The interview with one of the lecturers who had used PowerPoint supports this idea. He noted that other instructors ‘complained’ to him because their own students were beginning to press them to use PowerPoint as well. He also observed that PowerPoint-based teaching instruments allow students to know exactly what the course content is and that they will remind lecturers when slides are left out, skipped or hurried over. At any rate, since PowerPoint was originally created for business presentations, it will no doubt become an increasingly important characteristic of business studies lectures in the years to come. 7.2.2.2 Comparative analysis Because I did not have access to any of the visuals in the MDLC, it was not possible to carry out a comprehensive comparative analysis. However, by searching the corpus for the items slide, transparency, figure, graph, diagram, table, model, equation and studying the output for explicit references to visuals, I was able to obtain some broad indications about the media and types of visuals used in these multidisciplinary lectures with respect to the BSLC. First of all, there was a similar variety of media used for transmission, including the board, handouts and electronic means. Explicit references were made to transparencies, whereas slide was ambiguous and could have referred to the overhead projector, slide projector or PowerPoint. Concerning typologies, if there were any scriptural visuals, they could not be detected through the co-text of the concordance lines. As we know, scriptural visuals may not have explicit verbal reference. On the other hand, the presence of deictic words enabled me to determine that numerical and graphical visuals (e.g., models, equations, diagrams, graphs) were largely aligned with the scientific disciplines (examples 7.1–7.2), while figurative visuals (e.g., slides accompanied by verbal descriptions of the images) were found in the humanities-oriented lectures

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

(examples 7.3–7.4). There were, however, no references that could be linked to tables of numerical data, which were instead very frequent in the BSLC. Therefore, the use of tables to presentation of real-world information in a topological visual format in order to show relationships and trends would seem to be a distinctive characteristic of business studies. (7.1) So here you see experimental proof of the diagram that I have drawn here. (MDLC – Physics) (7.2) So now I go back and I cal- can calculate a storage coefficient from this equation. (MDLC – Ground Hydrology) (7.3) One of my favorite students insisted that I show this in my slide show to show you a fast track Pacific Rim woman who’s rollerblading okay? (MDLC – Women’s Studies) (7.4) We’re missing the slide on the right but we can look at this one in the meantime. The picture is full of paradoxes […] Manet then goes out of his way to stress to us that this painting is unreal. (MDLC – Art History)

On the other hand, it was possible to carry out a more systematic comparison of the visuals in the BSLC with those found in written business studies texts, since the latter were easily accessible in both the print and online materials that comprise the BSTM corpus. Yet this comparison must also be seen as broadly indicative due to a certain incomparability of the discourse units involved. More specifically, it is difficult to determine what one lecture would correspond to in written format – a textbook chapter, or a section of a textbook chapter? In the case of online materials, the correspondence is even less clear – to only one web page or also to all the links that may appear on the page? Therefore, to overcome the problem, I opted to compare the two corpora as ‘whole texts’, whose corresponding word counts could give at least a general idea of any differences and similarities in how visuals are used. The results are shown in Table 7.4. Table 7.4  Visual typologies in BSLC vs. BSTM Scriptural

BSLC BSTM

90 4

Numerical

Graphical

Table

Form.

Graph.

Diag.

Map

44 22

34 20

23 36

19 10

6 1

Figurative

Total

11 12

227 105

As the data illustrate, on the whole visuals were more frequent in the BSLC with a total of 227, compared to the BSTM with a total of 105. However, by comparing the



Chapter 7.  Beyond speaking: multimodal aspects 

various typologies, we see that much of the overall difference can be traced to scriptural visuals (n=90 vs. n=4). These clearly play an important role in lectures, where some textual content, albeit in synthetic form, is apparently needed to carry out an instructional function that is similar to textbook passages. In fact, we should remember that among all four visual typologies, scriptural visuals were the most frequent, which further attests to their important pedagogic function. Yet considering the greater financial and technological resources available to textbook publishers and online text developers, together with the general rise of visuals in university textbooks over the past few decades (Myers 1997), it is somewhat surprising to find a proportionally lower number of visuals in the written materials overall. Perhaps the lecturers are aware that listening to content in real time can require more visual support than reading content in textbooks which can be digested at one’s own pace and read repeatedly at will. This, together with increasingly accessible self-production tools, could explain the higher number of visuals found in the BSLC. Colour visuals were found in almost all the written text materials (both online and print), with the exception of the graduate level textbook that was published in black and white only. This was to be expected since these materials were all commercially or professionally produced compared to the ‘hand-made’ lecture visuals. In general, during lectures visuals are presented to audiences in a deliberate and conscious way as instruments, or products, aimed towards achieving certain objectives. In contrast, the next section of this chapter will deal with another mode of communication linked instead to the process of lecturing, which may be manifested intentionally or not, but is nonetheless part and parcel of every lecture experience.

7.3 The nonverbal mode In a broad sense, nonverbal communication (hereinafter NVC) might be considered as anything that is not communicated verbally, i.e., by written or spoken language. However, in reviewing the literature on this topic, it becomes clear that defining NVC is not quite so simple. According to some studies, nonverbal behaviours encompass aspects of paralanguage such as pitch, stress, intonation and the emotional tone of speech, in addition to body-related phenomena such as gesturing, gaze direction and interpersonal distance (Scherer 1982; Soudek and Soudek 1985). Others consider it important to distinguish between the vocal and the non-vocal, and thus NVC refers to behaviours that involve body parts other than the vocal cords (Argyle 1975; Lörscher 2003). In the same vein, Poyatos (1982: 236) has described human communication as taking place according to a “Basic Triple Structure”, making a distinction between the verbal, the paralinguistic (nonverbal/vocal) and the kinesic (i.e., extra-linguistic or nonverbal/nonvocal). From an investigative viewpoint, it is

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

perhaps more manageable to focus either on paralinguistic or extra-linguistic features, given the complexities involved in both categories of behaviours. In this study, I follow the latter interpretation, using the term NVC to refer to body movements and orientations, and not to vocal/nonverbal or paralinguistic phenomena. Studies in NVC have a long history, but not in the field of linguistics. In fact, the groundwork for our understanding of this particular form of interaction lies in pioneering studies carried out in other disciplines. As far back as the nineteenth century, Darwin (1890/1989) investigated patterns of facial expressions and gestures. In the 1940’s, the social scientist Efron (1941/1972) carried out a milestone study on the gestures of Jewish and Italian immigrants in New York as a way to refute the Nazi ideology of racial determinism. He devised the methodological approach of naturalistic observation which is still at the core of modern NVC research. Working in the field of anthropology, Birdwhistell (1970) developed the idea of kinesics. This refers to bodily motion ranging from small-scale eye and facial movements, to larger scale hand/arm gestures and posture orientation. He identified various iconic gestural units (kinemes), which acquire meaning according to different situations, much in the same way as phonemes in linguistics. The term proxemics was coined by Hall (1966), referring instead to how people use body posturing and spatial orientation in a physical setting to communicate nonverbally. He recognized that spatial behaviours are encoded and decoded in terms of interpersonal attitudes, and can vary considerably according to culture. From an interactional perspective, the social psychologist Argyle (1975) affirms that both kinetic and spatial behaviours serve two main purposes: to support speech and to express interpersonal attitudes. Moreover, he maintains that when there is a discrepancy between a verbal message and an accompanying nonverbal signal, it is the latter that is interpreted predominantly, thus making a greater contribution to meaning. Taking inspiration from these seminal works, over the years there has been a great deal of experimental research on NVC in anthropology, sociology, communication sciences, social psychology and clinical psychiatry, attesting to its key role in human interaction. Because of the traditional focus on written and spoken language, in the field of linguistics there has been much less emphasis on NVC. One exception, however, is conversation analysis. Goodwin (1979) shows how gaze direction contributes to the reshaping of utterances as they unfold during face-to-face interaction. Using timemotion analysis of films, Kendon (1990) found listeners’ body movements to be carefully synchronized with speakers’ utterances (e.g., a shift in posture prior to responding). Heath (1985) shows how both gaze and posture shifts are sequentially combined with speech to display recipiency towards co-participants and to elicit speech from them. The microanalytical approach of conversation analysis perhaps lends itself more easily to the investigation of NVC compared to other methodolo-



Chapter 7.  Beyond speaking: multimodal aspects 

gies used in linguistic research. This may be the main reason why there has been little work on NVC in spoken discourse analysis that takes a more global approach. In educational settings, NVC has similarly received little attention, most likely due to the complexity of the variables involved and the well-known problems in accessing this elusive type of data in the field. Two studies have investigated NVC in general classroom discourse. Roth and Lawless (2002) found that body orientation and gestures were systematically integrated with speech to explain visual images presented during seventh-grade science lectures. In a study on the relationship of metaphorical language and gestures, Corts and Pollio (1999) found that they were often combined to present novel aspects of content, but also used in a discourse-structuring capacity to guide the audience through university lectures. In the area of L2 pedagogy, several researchers have recognized the need to take a closer look at the role of NVC. Because nonverbal signals often replicate verbal messages, they reduce ambiguity and therefore enhance understanding, particularly among lower proficiency L2 learners who may not completely grasp verbal meaning (Kellerman 1992, Antes 1996). In an analysis of one ESL instructor’s gestures, Lazaraton (2004) showed how they were effectively incorporated with speech during unplanned explanations of vocabulary. Yet NVC is equally important at higher proficiency levels. Harris (2003) found that gestures are used not only to replicate verbal meanings, but also to extend them beyond words. For example, he notes that a pulling-off gesture observed in a video clip where a speaker talks about a tendon injury communicates the seriousness of the injury in a way that only the words “pull off the bone” could not. Thus, learners who do not have difficulties understanding verbal input still need to interpret accompanying nonverbal cues for complete and accurate comprehension. Moreover, NVC, especially eye contact and gesture, can be used to stress the importance of certain utterances, thereby assisting learners to prioritize content (Lörscher 2003). In a study of ongoing interaction between an ESL teacher and a NNS graduate student, McCafferty (2002) found that gestures were used not only to promote language learning, but also helped to establish a positive relationship in which the participants jointly constructed a shared social space. NVC has also become an important issue in L2 teaching materials. Many of these are based on language input that utilizes only the auditory channel (e.g., audio recordings), and therefore deprive learners of the possibility of exploiting the nonverbal component, which instead is present in the authentic interaction in which they will engage (von Raffler-Engel 1980) – lectures being a case in point. For this reason, there has been a call to incorporate more materials with video clips of speakers. Fortunately, thanks to improved video technology and Internet resources, such materials may become more common in language teaching. All of the above studies highlight the importance of NVC in instructional interaction. Despite the recently increased awareness of its impact in L2 pedagogy in

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

particular, work in this area is still sorely lacking. In the following sections of this chapter, I will analyze selected parts of the BSLC to gain a better understanding of the role of NVC in lectures to business studies students in international settings. However, before moving on to the analysis proper, I will review some of the important methodological issues involved in investigating NVC, which are radically different from those used in linguistics. 7.3.1 Methodology in nonverbal studies According to Scherer and Ekman (1982), in NVC studies the methodological approach is often linked to underlying epistemological traditions and to the focus of the research, either on one individual or on interaction between individuals. In the fields of biology and psychology, the main concern is the nonverbal behaviour of the individual and studies tend to privilege experimental methods using quantitative techniques. The setting of this type of research is typically in the laboratory where behaviours can be manipulated according to the aims of the study. In contrast, in anthropology and sociology, the emphasis is normally on naturally-occurring nonverbal behaviours in an interactional context. Research tends to be conducted either in the field, or in settings arranged to observe non-manipulated behaviours, and uses qualitative methods to describe them. However, as the authors point out, the two approaches are not necessarily contradictory and can in fact be used in a complementary way depending, of course, on the aims and design of the research. The analysis of NVC is based on observation, either direct during real-time events, or indirect by means of films or video recordings. Once it has been decided which nonverbal phenomena are to be studied in which participant(s), the issue of how to measure the behaviour must be addressed. If the research deals with minute features that require close-up analysis, video recording equipment can provide valuable options, such as slow motion or frame-by-frame analysis. Thanks to technology, today we also have sophisticated devices to analyze filmed motion according to spatial coordinates and to measure body motion by means of computerized graphical input. However, as pointed out by Rosenfeld (1982), researchers working with a low budget can accurately measure NVC with something as simple as paper and pencil. Multi-column checklists can be prepared on the basis on pre-defined categories of NVC. These allow the researcher to closely follow the subject while recording the presence of the nonverbal behaviour under study as it occurs. NVC can also be measured with qualitative instruments, such as running verbal or written descriptions of NVC observed. These are often more indicated for behaviours involving larger body parts or the body as a whole. What is important is that the behaviours of interest can be observed systematically, recorded accurately and interpreted meaningfully. Observation is a two-fold process: to describe what is seen



Chapter 7.  Beyond speaking: multimodal aspects 

and to interpret the meaning. The extent to which the research requires interpretation in addition to description again depends upon the objectives of the study. 7.3.2 The analysis This investigation focuses on the nonverbal behaviours of individual speakers, but only as they manifest themselves within the interactional context of naturally-occurring lectures. Thus, the analysis can be seen as a combination of the two broad approaches traditionally found in NVC studies which here have been implemented in a complementary way. A similar integration of quantitative and qualitative techniques has been adopted to measure nonverbal behaviours. Frequency counts were used for small-scale discrete features, while qualitative descriptions were used for larger-scale nonverbal phenomena. In addition, in keeping with much NVC research, I conduct a micro-analysis of the nonverbal behaviours of one lecturer from a short video sequence. The analysis of NVC in the BSLC is limited to the lectures from the L2 guest lecture component of the corpus that were both audio and video recorded. This is due to the fact that during the first two years of the project under which this study began, there was sufficient funding to professionally video record the five lectures that were collected in that period. Unfortunately, in the next two years of the project, these funds were no longer available. The remaining seven lectures in the corpus were audio recorded only and therefore could not be included in this part of my study. Of the five lectures that were filmed, two were delivered by native speakers of British English (Lectures 1 and 3) and three by native speakers of Spanish, German and Italian (Lectures 4, 5, and 6, respectively). The average class attendance was about twenty students, including both Italian and international exchange students from Germany, Austria, Britain, Spain, France, Slovakia, the United States and Australia. The video camera was focused primarily on the lecturers. It was positioned about three meters away and manoeuvred to follow their movements, thus resulting in good quality videos for successive viewing. As previously discussed, in instructional contexts nonverbal signals are important tools for reinforcing and focusing attention on the verbal message. Therefore, the major thrust of this particular analysis is on the relationship between the verbal and the nonverbal, i.e., nonverbal signals that co-occur with moments of verbal interaction between the lecturers and their audiences. Consequently, the analysis was undertaken in several steps. First of all, I identified some particularly salient moments of interaction in the five lectures. Then, I analyzed the lecturers’ nonverbal behaviours, with special attention to those that co-occurred with these moments. Finally, I zoomed in on the nonverbal behaviours that accompanied the speech of one lecturer in a microanalysis of a brief video segment.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

7.3.2.1 Interpersonal episodes In Chapter 5, I investigated three forms of lecturer-audience interaction (questions, comprehension checks and dialogic episodes). In this part of the study, I will focus on another type of interaction that is perhaps less overt, but nonetheless contributes greatly to establishing lecturer-audience solidarity to create a learnerfriendly environment. Here I will use the term interpersonal episode inspired by Flowerdew and Miller’s (1997) study of interpersonal strategies in lectures. Interpersonal episodes often do not correspond to discrete linguistic forms and may stretch over more than one utterance. Thus, they can only be distinguished by careful reading of the transcripts. Drawing from some preliminary work with the first lectures collected (Walsh and Crawford Camiciottoli 2001), six types of interpersonal episodes were identified. They are shown in Table 7.5 along with examples from the transcripts. Interview data from one of the lecturers revealed some interesting follow-up to interpersonal episodes 2 and 6 which make connections with the world of the students. When I asked the lecturer if he had planned these sorts of comments in advance, he replied that he had and added that it was an attempt to make the content more accessible to the students. Table 7.5  Types of interpersonal episodes in the five lectures Interpersonal episodes

Example

1. Learning about the students

Now everybody I need your cooperation. Who is Italian and who is not Italian? (Lecture 4)

2. Relating the lecture to students

I used to come to Italy a great deal in the early eighties late eighties and then I used to get twenty two hundred lire to the pound. (Lecture 3)

3. Presenting the lecture in a non-threatening way Don’t worry about the index. It’s very long but my idea is to be flexible on it. (Lecture 4) 4. Creating a here and now context

So (noise from outside window) this is very difficult I have to say (laughs). I feel quite distracted (xx) if you are distracted also. (Lecture 6)

5. Creating an informal atmosphere

None of you been to Coventry? It was snowing on Tuesday. It was colder on Tuesday than it’s been all year all winter. (Lecture 1)

6. Establishing a shared background

So Aachen is very like Florence historic city and you find rests of the walls here in Florence as well and so here and there in Aachen we have rests. (Lecture 5)



Chapter 7.  Beyond speaking: multimodal aspects 

Table 7.6 illustrates the use of interpersonal episodes across the five lectures. As can be seen, there is quite a lot of variation in frequency. However, since the lectures varied in length, calculations were performed on the frequencies of interpersonal episodes in relation to the total word counts of each lecture. These yielded percentages of interpersonal episodes that allowed for a more accurate comparison. Lectures 1, 4 and 5 had proportionally more interpersonal episodes than Lectures 3 and 6. Here an interesting parallel emerges with the analysis of other interactional devices (questions, comprehension checks and dialogic episodes) undertaken in Chapter 5. As can be seen in Table 5.12, Lectures 1 and 4 also had the highest frequencies of these items, thereby suggesting that these two speakers have a markedly interactional style of lecturing. Table 7.6  Distribution of interpersonal episodes in the five lectures

Lecture 1 Lecture 3 Lecture 4 Lecture 5 Lecture 6 Total

N. of interpersonal episodes

% of interpersonal episodes

20 10 46 13 15 104

0.36 0.10 0.31 0.35 0.12

7.3.2.2 Nonverbal behaviours of the lecturers Once the interpersonal episodes had been analyzed, the next step was to determine which type of nonverbal behaviours might accompany them. I carried out a preliminary viewing of the five videos to determine which type of nonverbal behaviours could be systematically observed. These were: a. b. c. d. e.

gaze hand and arm gestures body posture proximity to audiences movement within the classroom space.

The first three entail movements of body parts and can therefore be considered kinesic, while the last two are instead proxemic since they involve distal and spatial orientations. Although determining the direction, frequency and duration of gaze is a notoriously complex task (Exline and Fehr 1982), the quality of the recordings and the fact that I was interested only in one-way and not mutual gaze enabled me to investigate this small-scale phenomenon. Hand and arm gestures were clearly visible, as was body posture. The two proxemic behaviours refer to

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

how close or far the lecturers positioned themselves from the students and whether they stayed in one position or moved around the room. Two kinesic behaviours (i.e., gesturing and gaze) could be observed in co-occurrence with the interpersonal episodes previously identified in the five lectures. To measure the frequency, I used a performance indicator grid (Glickman et al. 1995). This is a checklist that allows the analyst to record the occurrences of behaviours during direct observation or while viewing recordings. A separate multi-page grid was prepared for each of the five lectures. Each grid listed all the interpersonal episodes (IE) in the order in which they had been labelled on the transcripts. The grids provide adjacent spaces to check off whether gesturing or gaze co-occurs or not. There is also a space for descriptive comments, i.e., intensity of gaze (steady or fleeting) and gesturing (type and prominence). An example of a grid can be seen in Table 7.7. I then filled out the grids while viewing the videos. In some cases, multiple viewings were necessary to obtain accurate measurements. Once all the grids were completed, for each lecture frequency counts were taken of the interpersonal episodes that co-occurred with and without gesturing and gaze. The results are reported in Table 7.8. Since all observable gesturing was always accompanied by gaze towards students, the two behaviours have been grouped together. Table 7.7  Sample of performance indicator grid Interpersonal episode IE/1 IE/2 IE/3 IE/4 IE/5 IE/6 IE/7 Continues ↓

Gesturing Y __ Y __ Y __ Y __ Y __ Y __ Y __ Continues ↓

Gaze towards students N __ N __ N __ N __ N __ N __ N __ Continues ↓

Y __ Y __ Y __ Y __ Y __ Y __ Y __ Continues ↓

Comments

N __ N __ N __ N __ N __ N __ N __ Continues ↓

The data show that gesturing and gaze directed towards students co-occurred quite consistently with interpersonal episodes. Out of a total of 104 interpersonal episodes, 89 co-occurred without gesturing and gaze, while only 15 did not. These relatively few instances occurred when speakers were focused on transparencies or the blackboard, or momentarily faced away from the audience (e.g., during movement) and did not vary significantly across the lectures. Thus, we can conclude that gesturing and gaze are important tools to reinforce interpersonal episodes aimed at enhancing the lecturer-audience relationship. Although this sheds some



Chapter 7.  Beyond speaking: multimodal aspects 

light on the function of these two nonverbal behaviours, we must recognize that the speakers themselves are likely to be totally unaware of how they ‘use’ them. Table 7.8  Interpersonal episodes and gesturing/gaze in the five lectures

Lecture 1 Lecture 3 Lecture 4 Lecture 5 Lecture 6 Total

Interpersonal episodes with gesturing/gaze

Interpersonal episodes without gesturing/gaze

17 7 42 10 13 89

3 3 4 3 2 15

The information recorded under Comments in the performance grid (see Table 7.7) provided some additional insight about gesturing and gaze on a qualitative level. On the basis of these comments, I produced open-ended descriptions of each lecturer. Gesturing was described according to Ekman’s (1980) and McNeill’s (1992) gesture classification schemes: a. Iconic gestures are related to content and often to specific lexical items. They may be kinetographic to describe a particular movement or action (e.g., drinking or eating) or pictographic to depict the shape of the referent in the air (e.g., drawing a circle). b. Metaphoric gestures represent ideas or abstract concepts rather than actions or objects. They may also be kinetographic (hands rapidly circulating to convey the idea of fast movement) or pictographic (fist clenched to express the concept of strength). c. Deictic gestures point to some referent, either physically present or removed spatially or temporally (e.g., hand movement to indicate some other place or time in the past or future). d. Beats/underliners are vague rhythmic hand movements to accent words or regulate speech flow. They have the same form regardless of the semantic content of speech. e. Emblems, unlike the above four, are not necessarily used in concomitance with speech as they carry meaning on their own (e.g., thumb up/down sign, ‘V’ with fingers for victory). Emblems may be culturally-specific. For example, in the US the suicide emblem is a hand held in the shape of a gun pointing to the temple, while in Japan it is a hand depicting a sword penetrating the abdomen.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

Gaze was described with reference to how frequently the lecturer looked at audiences and the intensity of their gaze (i.e., fleeting or fixed). The descriptions of each lecture are shown in Table 7.9. Table 7.9  Qualitative comparison of gesturing and gaze in the five lectures Lecture

Gesturing

Gaze

1

Frequent gestures with both hands and arms; mostly vague beats and underliners, some iconic and metaphoric gestures, deictic gestures to refer to transparencies

Frequently gazes at audience; mostly fixed, some fleeting

3

Frequent small hand gestures of vague beats and underliners; deictic gestures to refer to transparencies

Frequently gazes at audience; some fixed, but often fleeting

4

Very frequent gestures with both hands and arms; many iconic, metaphoric gestures; emblems; deictic gestures to refer to transparencies

Frequently gazes at audience; almost always fixed

5

Frequent gestures with both hands and arms; mostly vague beats, some iconic and metaphoric gestures; deictic gestures to refer to transparencies

Frequently gazes at audience; mostly fixed, some fleeting

6

Frequent gestures with both hands and arms; many iconic and metaphoric gestures; emblems; deictic gestures to refer to transparencies

Frequently gazes at audience; some fixed, but often fleeting

As the table shows, gesturing and gaze vary considerably among the five lecturers. While all gazed frequently at the audiences, the intensity was more marked in some (Lecturers 1, 4, and 5) than in others (Lecturers 3 and 6). Similarly, although gesturing was frequent in all the lectures, especially deictic gestures to exophoric references, the type of gesturing used showed a great deal of variation. The much richer repertoires in Lecturers 4 and 6, and the larger scale in Lecturers 1 and 5 (using both hands and arms) render their gestures much more pronounced compared to Lecturer 3, whose gestures were of a smaller scale and with little variation. Examples of the various gesture types within the context of use are provided below. Following Lazaraton’s (2004) transcription method, a description of gestures has been integrated into the verbal text and set off by parentheses and italics, while the lexical item of reference is underlined. Examples 7.5 and 7.6 contain iconic pictographs to depict the lexical items picture and second point, while example 7.7 is an iconic kinetograph to illustrate the action of talking. The metaphoric gestures in examples 7.8–7.9 show how the lecturers’ gestures can be creative and instructional



Chapter 7.  Beyond speaking: multimodal aspects 

at the same time. In example 7.8, the gesture used to explain spill-over assists the L2 students in understanding a potentially unknown word. In example 7.9, the lecturer’s gesture helps the students understand his personalized use of fantasy. Deictic gestures (examples 7.10–7.12) were present in all the lectures and ranged from large scale (arm and fingers) to small scale (only fingers), depending on the speaker’s distance from the reference. In example 7.12, the lecturer’s gesture points the referent classics back to the past. Beats and underliners, as shown in examples 7.13–7.14, were usually linked to specific lexical items which were also emphasized prosodically. Finally, two of the most ‘gestural’ speakers, also made use of some emblems (examples 7.15–7.16), in addition to speech-accompanied types of gesturing. (7.5) And it’s the first time regions have been recognized as part of the picture (repeatedly draws a rectangular shape) as part of the jigsaw picture of policy making. (Lecture 6/NNS) (7.6) Then the second point (holds two fingers up) of focus more specifically is the industrial activities in Spain. (Lecture 4/NNS) (7.7) I’m not going to talk (hand movements outward from the mouth) to you for two hours you’ll be pleased to know. (Lecture 1/NS) (7.8) And the examples of Scotland definitely eh about Silicon Glen definitely proved that spill-overs (arms held in front of body with hands opening up in a downward movement) in R&D that were expected from attracting FDIs Japanese and high tech didn’t really take place. (Lecture 6/NNS) (7.9) The case study is not a fantasy (slight shaking of open hand raised to temple) product and for me it’s a real existing company. (Lecture 5/NNS) (7.10) Now since- since I should say 1991 these dark these dark lines (arm extended up toward transparency) are when we are carried out our surveys. (Lecture 3/NS) (7.11) So it’s really a specific location (finger repeatedly points to transparency) where the city of Aachen is er situated. (Lecture 5/NNS) (7.12) So it could be interesting to go further and to analyze what determines location of activities Okay? And to have a look at economical theory to the classics. (hand waving in backward motion over shoulder). (Lecture 4/NNS) (7.13) So out there the predators are looking for successful firms and often- they often acquire smaller firms independent firms with innovation. (vague downward movement of hand) (Lecture 3/NS) (7.14) Starting with a definition cuz it’s always been a problem (vague downward motion of both hands) of how to define small and medium sized enterprises and what we actually mean by it. (Lecture 1/NS)

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

(7.15) What is the point of giving funding to a foreign company investing in the UK when you deny the same kind of support to an indigenous company? (draws question mark in the air) (Lecture 6/NNS) (7.16) Ah (draws two parentheses in the air) if I’m going in a hurry please call me pst huh? (Lecture 4/NNS)

The remaining three features that were observable from the videos (i.e., body posture, proximity to students and spatial movements) were much larger in scale. Therefore, unlike gesture and gaze, they could not always be pinpointed to specific moments of verbal interaction. Yet these behaviours seemed to make an important contribution to the overall nonverbal dimension of the lectures. I viewed the videos again focusing on these behaviours and produced open-ended commentaries for each lecturer, which are summarized in Table 7.10. Table 7.10  Qualitative comparison of body posture, proximity and spatial movement in the five lectures Lecture

Body posture

Proximity

Spatial movement

1

Usually open with hands freely hanging, sometimes folds arms across chest, stands, leans on desk, sits on bench tops

Very close – often moves in front of desk and OHP, moves to sit on bench tops close to students

Dynamic with large range around the room; circulates among groups of students working on a task

3

Open – arms freely hanging, stands only

Distant – stays behind desk and OHP

Static – reaches only to place transparencies on OHP

4

Open – arms freely hanging, stands, leans against desk top

Close – often moves in front of desk and OHP

Dynamic with limited range in the front of the room

5

Open – arms freely hanging, stands only

Close – often moves in front of desk and OHP

Dynamic with large range around the room

6

Closed – often keeps arms folded across body, stands, leans against desktop

Close – often moves in front of desk and OHP

Dynamic with limited range in front of the room

These short descriptions indicate that, like gesturing and gaze, body posture, proximity and spatial movements also varied quite a bit among the lecturers. Most of them assumed a relatively open body posture and tended to position themselves closer to students. Spatial movement ranged from fixed in one place to dynamic movement around the entire classroom. However, the general trend appears to



Chapter 7.  Beyond speaking: multimodal aspects 

veer away from the traditional podium-style lecture often associated with higher education. While the differences in these three behaviours are certainly influenced by individual personality and style, they could also be culturally-related. Anthropological studies (Hall 1966) suggest that national cultural groups can be classified as high gesture and close space (Latin and Arab cultures) or low gesture and distant space (Anglo-Saxon and Nordic cultures). This distinction can be seen in these findings to some extent: Lecturer 4 is Spanish, while Lecturer 3 is British. Yet in educational settings, we also need to consider the impact of ‘academic’ culture. For example, in Anglo-Saxon cultures teachers often act as facilitators who work closely with students on a personal level, rather than dispensers of knowledge who position themselves fixedly at the front of the classroom. This could explain the very close proximity of Lecturer 1, which would appear to be in contrast with what is considered typical of Anglo-Saxon cultures. To wrap up this analysis of NVC across the five lectures, it is interesting to compare these results with those in Table 7.6 in order to shed some light on the possible relationship between verbal and nonverbal interaction. Lecturers 1 and 4 who had the most pronounced nonverbal behaviours (considering both the kinesic and proxemic behaviours in Tables 7.9 and 7.10, respectively) also had the highest percentages of verbal interaction in their speech. On the other hand, Lecturers 3 and 6 whose nonverbal behaviours were less pronounced had the lowest percentages of verbal interaction. Thus, it would seem that a more or less ‘interactional’ lecture style is manifested both verbally and nonverbally. 7.3.2.3 A microanalysis of one lecturer’s nonverbal behaviours To complement the previous sections that looked at NVC across the five lectures, this section will be dedicated to a detailed microanalysis of one lecturer’s nonverbal behaviours. In NVC studies, microanalyses can give an accurate picture of numerous and multi-faceted variables that are difficult to ‘capture’ and distinguish. Because this kind of minute analysis is extremely time-consuming and clearly not feasible for studies involving large populations, case studies based on very brief samples of an individual’s behaviour are commonly used. Of course, this approach involves a methodological trade-off. The findings cannot be generalized to other populations, but they can provide unique insights not only about the participant, but also about the social practices of the community which he or she represents, particularly when the research is set in a specific interactional context. For the microanalysis, I selected Lecturer 4, whose lecture was characterized by the most pronounced use of NVC, considering frequency, intensity and variety of behaviours.4 Digital technology was used to capture a series of frames from a 24-second segment of video footage, corresponding to what Corts and Pollio (1999: 97) refer to as a “gestural burst” in which many gestures are concentrated

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

together in order to act out an event or describe a phenomenon.5 Following Baldry (2000b)and Thibault (2000), the frames were then incorporated into a multimodal transcription (see Table 7.11 below). Alongside each frame of the visual image there is the corresponding verbal text and an interpretive description of the accompanying nonverbal behaviours. In this video fragment, the lecturer is engaging in an interpersonal episode to relate the content of the lecture to the world of the students (see Table 7.5), by talking about olive oil production and marketing in Spain and Italy. In the verbal text, she refers to the fact that Spain exports a lot of olive oil to Italy, and that Italian producers are very apt at marketing it under their own label. She then concedes that Spanish olive oil may not be as high quality as Italian olive oil. Table 7.11  A multimodal transcription of a lecture video sequence Visual image

Verbal text

Nonverbal behaviours/interpretation

1

I know that Spain exports a lot of olive oil to Italy and then in Italy because you are the best on these things

Steady gaze towards audience. Metaphoric pictograph: fingers touching in front of body to focus attention.

2

Put this olive oil in the bottles

Steady gaze towards audience. Iconic kinetograph: sweeping downward gesture to describe the bottling of oil.

3

4

Iconic pictograph: one hand inside the other to describe oil inside the bottle.



Chapter 7.  Beyond speaking: multimodal aspects 

Visual image

Verbal text

Nonverbal behaviours/interpretation

5

Put a fantastic label saying

Steady gaze towards audience. Iconic pictograph of label. Iconic kinetograph of application on a bottle.

6

Olive oil tradition good for health made in?

Steady gaze towards audience. Iconic kinetograph: large sweeping gesture to give an exaggerated presentation.

7

Pum and export okay?

Steady gaze towards audience. Metaphoric kinetograph: rapid upward scissors-like gesture suggests the end of the bottling process and departure from the factory.

But anyway Spain produces a lot of olive oil

Steady gaze towards audience. Metaphoric kinetograph: sideward movement of hands to shift topic (‘but anyway’).

8

9

10

Steady gaze towards audience. Iconic pictograph: separates hands to express the quantity ‘a lot’.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

Visual image 11

Verbal text

Nonverbal behaviours/interpretation

I don’t want to say as good quality as your olive oil but we produce a lot

Steady gaze towards audience. Metaphoric pictograph: shrugs shoulders to express concession.

Source: Crawford Camiciottoli 2004d

The multimodal transcription allows us to see how the nonverbal behaviours that accompany the verbal text make an important contribution to meaning beyond the mere replication of the semantic content. First of all, throughout this episode, the lecturer gazes steadily at the audience without looking away, thus focusing their attention on this point. This is further reinforced in frame 1 with a metaphoric pictograph of the concept of focus, which seems to function much in the same way as textual metadiscourse to signal the importance of what is about to come. In frames 2–7, she re-enacts of the bottling, labelling and exporting procedures and mimics an exaggerated presentation of the product through a series of iconic and metaphoric gestures. In this way, on the interpersonal level, she reinforces her positive evaluation of the promotional expertise of Italian olive oil exporters. However, at the same time, her parody serves as a way to cleverly underline the fact that it is actually Spanish olive oil inside the bottle. Thus, in accordance with Harris (2003), the extended meaning here can only be understood through the nonverbal gestures. In frames 8–9, her metaphoric kinetograph of “but anyway” shifts to topic and signals the end of the previous series of utterances, while the iconic pictographic of “a lot” reaffirms her statement about Spain’s high level of olive oil production. In the last frame, she shrugs her shoulders in a metaphoric pictograph to concede that Italian olive oil may be of superior quality. To sum up, the numerous nonverbal behaviours found in this short video fragment not only reinforce the ideational content of the verbal message, but they also carry key interpersonal and textual meanings. Thus, from a Hallidayan perspective, they encompass all three metafunctions of traditional verbal language. In addition, the global effect of such pronounced gesturing may enhance the lectureraudience relationship. Judging from the attentiveness and amused interest shown by students during this episode (recovered from my field notes), this would seem to be the case.



Chapter 7.  Beyond speaking: multimodal aspects 

7.4 Summary of findings Kress and van Leeuwen state that […] in the age of digitisation, the different modes have technically become the same at some level of representation, and they can be operated by one multiskilled person, using one interface, one mode of physical manipulation so that he or she can ask at every point: ‘Shall I express this with sound or music? Shall I say this visually or verbally?’, and so on. (2001: 2).

The use of visuals in the BSLC seems to be a good example of this idea. All of the lecturers made choices about when and how to communicate visually and verbally. Visuals were integrated into all the lectures and were found in greater numbers compared to corresponding business studies written text materials, which underlines their key role in lecture discourse. This corroborates Bamford’s (2004a) finding that visuals, particularly numerical and graphical, were strongly present across all the lectures in her corpus of economics lectures. However, there was considerable variation in the frequency and typology of visuals found, which seems to be influenced by medium of transmission, instructional setting and specific disciplinary slant. The lectures with electronically produced and transmitted visuals prepared in advance had higher overall frequencies compared to the board-based lectures, suggesting that the easier it is to produce visuals, the more there are likely to be. This is further supported by the fact that the lecture with the most visuals was delivered with PowerPoint. With reference to instructional setting, the L2 guest lectures used a relatively high number of visuals and appeared to privilege a ‘presentational’ approach, while several L1 lectures had a more traditional classroom approach and consequently fewer visuals. Scriptural visuals were the most frequent type, particularly in lectures that relied on electronic media, and carried out important discourse-structuring and explanatory functions. Graphical and numerical visuals showed strong disciplinary alignments. Tables and graphs were predominant in the real-world business-oriented lectures, while formulae and diagrams characterized the theoretical economics-oriented lectures. The relatively few figurative visuals were used mainly to arouse audience interest. Some of these were found in one of the PowerPoint lectures, which facilitates the incorporation of figurative images, as well as the creation of composite visuals containing more than one typology. Although only two lectures were produced and delivered by this medium, they reveal an important trend towards the integration of the production and distribution of visual media used during lectures – a trend that is likely to accelerate in our increasingly visual society. The analysis of NVC was limited to selected lectures of the corpus that had been video-recorded. Nonetheless, it highlights some interesting aspects of NVC,

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

especially in terms of lecturer-audience interaction. Particularly meaningful interactional moments (i.e., interpersonal episodes) were consistently accompanied by gaze towards the audience and gesturing. Therefore, these behaviours appeared to be used (though probably unconsciously) to focus the audience’s attention on important content, but also to enhance the lecturer-audience relationship and create an inclusive atmosphere that is conducive to learning. As to be expected, there was quite a lot of variation in the nonverbal behaviours of the lecturers. As Goffman (1981) suggests, in addition to the topic, the lecturer inevitably brings him or herself to the lecture. Similarly, Galloway (1972: 11) states that “a nonverbal cue may manifest itself because of a personal characteristic, perceived role or situation”. Yet in addition to individual proclivity, both national and academic culture may have some impact. The lecturers from highgesture cultures (4/Spanish and 6/Italian) seemed to conform to this characterization. On the other hand, lecturers representing distant-proximity cultures (1/British and 5/German) maintained relatively close spatial contacts with students. Therefore, in instructional settings, academic culture may override national culture. In order to distinguish the influence of all these factors, clearly it would be necessary to film and analyze many more lectures. As we have seen, this is quite problematic and not always feasible in NVC studies. Yet this obstacle can be overcome if we view this type of small-scale research as leading to “discovery” and “illustration”, rather than “proof ” (Scherer and Ekman 1982: 15), which still yields valuable insights about this relatively unexplored dimension of lecture discourse.

Notes 1. This lecture also had a handout which possibly contained scriptural-like visuals. However, without access to it, this could not be determined. 2. Incidentally, the real vs. hypothetical orientations of business and economics is paralleled in visuals found in academic research articles. Articles from business journals tend to contain more tables and graphs, while those in economics journals have more models and diagrams. I am grateful to Marc Silver for this insight. 3. All examples of the PowerPoint visuals from Lecture 11 were found on http://www.biz. uiowa.edu/class/6e002/audio/index.html (accessed May 10, 2003). 4. I wish to express my sincerest gratitude to Elisabet Viladecans Marsals, Professor of Economics at the University of Barcelona (Spain) for allowing me to reproduce her image within the context of this research. 5.

I would like to thank Antonio Malacarne for his expert technical support in this procedure.

chapter 8

Final remarks What the learners really need is the competence to handle several types of literacy, which may not be a simple extension of previously acquired communicative competence. (Bhatia 2000: 81)

8.1 Introduction This book aimed to provide a comprehensive description of lectures given by business studies academics in university settings. To reach this objective, it was necessary to analyze the lectures from multiple perspectives: their linguistic and extralinguistic features, the institutional context, and the characteristics, goals and relationships of the participants involved. In this way, the study has brought into focus the spoken, academic, disciplinary and professional dimensions of business studies lectures as a speech event in which novices and experts come together to negotiate knowledge and establish their social identities. The following sections of this chapter will explain how this has been achieved. I will first return to the aims of the study outlined in Chapter 1 and show how they have been met through a targeted review of the main findings, integrated with a discussion of their pedagogical implications for language teachers, content lecturers and business studies students. For the latter, the focus will be on how the findings can be utilized to help learners acquire the multiple literacies they need for both academic and professional experiences. Along the way, prospects for future research will be suggested. I will then offer some insights that have emerged from the multi-pronged methodological approach used in the study. Finally, I will conclude by revisiting the concept of interdiscursivity as reflected in the business studies lectures.

8.2 Aims, findings, pedagogical implications and research prospects Chapter 4 sought to answer the question: How does the language of business studies lectures reflect the spoken mode? The results of the analyses showed that the lectures contain numerous and varied features typically associated with everyday

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

speaking, thus corroborating findings by Swales and Burke (2003) and Biber (2003). These include discourse dysfluencies, phonological reduction, vagueness, idiomatic expressions and syntactic informality, all of which reflect a largely informal and interactional style of lecturing. This has important implications for L2 business studies students who need to be adequately prepared for experiences which may be in net contrast with their idea of the ‘typical’ university lecture. In some cultures, lectures are seen as relatively formal events and interactional features tend to be less prominent (Flowerdew and Miller 1996; Fortanet, personal communication). Although EAP practitioners who produce lecture comprehension materials now recognize the importance of providing authentic language and some audio components contain dysfluencies, repetition and impromptu speech (Kissingler 1994; Dunkel and Pialorsi 2005), excerpts tend to be unrealistically short and the language still appears to be rather ‘standard’, without the level of idiomaticity, vagueness or lexical/syntactic informality that was found in these lectures. One notable exception is a recent academic listening skills book by Salehzadeh (2006) which includes the authentic versions of full-length lectures from the MICASE corpus with unedited and richly interactional language (e.g., hedging, incomplete utterances, idioms). Because the lectures examined in this study present many of the same features, the findings lend further support to the value of corpus-based research for the development materials and methodologies that will be more effective in helping L2 learners acquire the ‘interactional literacy’ they need for successful lecture comprehension. Indeed, additional corpus-based studies dealing with other speech-oriented features that have not been addressed in this study (e.g., slang, humour, anecdotes) would no doubt yield important insights into the kind of language that needs to be presented in lecture listening textbooks. There was some evidence that the L2 guest lecturers attempted to reduce their speech rate to facilitate understanding. In the era of globalized university education when an increasing number of content lecturers have the opportunity to work with international audiences, it is important to increase lecturers’ awareness of the need to make adjustments for L2 learners, e.g., speaking at a slower pace. To explore this issue further, it would be very useful to conduct surveys among content lecturers to seek answers to some key questions: Is it important to accommodate lectures for international audiences? Do lecturers attempt to do so? If so, how and to what extent? This type of information would provide vital input for the development of effective training programmes designed for university staff who will be lecturing to L2 audiences (Lynch 1994). Although lecture methodology courses are sometimes offered to NNS teaching assistants who will be lecturing to NS students, it is doubtful that parallel programmes are routinely available to content lecturers who will be teaching in L2 settings. In this study, two L2 guest lecturers confirmed that they had never undergone any specific training to lecture abroad.



Chapter 8.  Final remarks 

One noted that he had relied only on informal advice from colleagues concerning reduced speech rate (Crawford Camiciottoli 2005). Chapter 5 aimed to respond to the question: How do the lecturers use language to interact with audiences to facilitate learning? The speakers made frequent use of several key interactional features: discourse structuring to organize content and provide signposts for listeners, evaluative expressions to help students prioritize information and decipher stance, and more overtly interactive features to engage students (e.g., questions and dialogic episodes). Some interactional strategies seemed to assume particular significance in L2 settings. On the whole, the L2 guest lecturers used macromarkers to signal upcoming discourse more frequently than their L1 classroom counterparts, implying a greater awareness of their L2 audiences’ needs and confirming discourse structuring as a key skill to be mastered when lecturing to international audiences. While most lecture comprehension materials include tasks to help students learn to exploit discourse markers, they have paid much less attention to evaluative language. This needs to be remedied because L2 listeners often have difficulties understanding the more ‘creative’ evaluative items that pepper the speech of NS lecturers and even distinguishing exactly what is being evaluated. Similarly, greater coverage of question forms and dialogue would alert L2 students to the more interactive nature of many of the lectures to which they will be exposed. Thus, it is hoped that these findings will also find fruitful application in the production of lecture comprehension materials that provide international students with a more authentic learning experience. Chapters 4 and 5 focused on selected linguistic features and the findings have been interpreted within the context of their usage, leading to the implications for learning contexts discussed above. However, another issue still remains. What effect does the presence (or absence) of these features actually have on comprehension? Answers to this question can only come from carefully designed experimental studies in which variables can be artificially manipulated within differentiated treatments and effects can be measured by instruments such as post-lecture tests, questionnaires or interviews. Although such experimental research is clearly beyond the scope of this study, it would be very worthwhile, especially in areas where previous experimental work has produced inconsistent results (e.g., speech rate1, discourse markers2) or is lacking (e.g., syntactic informality, vagueness, evaluative expressions, visuals, non-verbal cues). Towards this aim, the findings of this study could be exploited to devise instruments for new experiments. For example, they can serve as indicators of what needs to be included or removed from lecture extracts in studies aiming to study the effect of a given variable. In this way, it would be possible to determine whether the presence or absence of the variable renders the lectures more or less effective in terms of audience comprehension. Another

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

application would be to use the data from the field notes and the informal discussions with students who attended the lectures as a basis for formulating questionnaires or interview questions that could more accurately probe students’ views on lectures. These could then be implemented in follow-up or other similar studies. In Chapter 6, I addressed the question: How do the lectures reflect the disciplinary and professional orientations of the community of practice? The analysis of the contents and selected features associated with the transmission of disciplinary knowledge revealed an intertwining of epistemological approaches. Indeed, the disciplinary profile of business studies lectures can be described as both theory and practice-oriented, thus combining discipline and profession. This dual nature requires students to acquire competence in multiple literacies. For example, students need well-developed numerical literacy to work through theoretical models, as well as strong visual literacy to interpret real-world data often presented in graphical form. They also need advanced verbal skills in order to follow the argumentative patterns and hypothetical reasoning involved in the construction of knowledge within the discipline. English courses for international business students have traditionally focused on developing vocabulary and language skills that will allow learners to communicate successfully in business settings. While such communicative competence is clearly fundamental, it is perhaps no longer sufficient in the increasingly competitive business world. Methods and materials used in English for business studies courses should begin to place more emphasis on literacies that go beyond basic communicative skills. According to Johns (1997: 2), “many students argue that content, especially vocabulary understanding is their greatest obstacle to developing academic literacies”. The investigation of specialized lexis in this chapter was undertaken with this problem in mind, producing what may be described as a core vocabulary of business studies lectures, as well as an interesting array of more ‘creative’ types of lexical items (e.g., domain-specific metaphors, novel word compounds and business buzzwords), drawing from both the disciplinary and professional spheres of influence.3 This lexical profile of business studies lectures can be used to help learners acquire the language competence they need to become members of the community of practice. Following Lave and Wenger (1991: 85) “Language is part of practice, and it is in practice that people learn”. These findings are also of value to ESP practitioners and materials producers working in the area of English for Business Studies to gauge the appropriateness of the vocabulary covered in their materials and update it where necessary. For instance, White (2003) points out that these materials do not adequately cover metaphorical expressions which are known to create difficulties for L2 learners (Littlemore 2001). The single disciplinary focus of this study has shown us many distinctive characteristics of business studies lectures, thanks also to comparative analyses with



Chapter 8.  Final remarks 

the MDLC corpus of multi-disciplinary lectures. However, more insights could be gained by comparing business studies lectures with lectures from another single disciplinary domain. For example, a comparison of business and law lectures would enable the identification of differences and similarities between disciplines often found in interdisciplinary degree programmes. This knowledge could then be applied towards helping learners better distinguish the concerns and practices of the two disciplinary communities (Bhatia 2004). Chapter 7 was dedicated to the question: How do the lecturers exploit the visual and gestural modes for instructional purposes? All of the lecturers relied on visual instructional tools to accompany and reinforce the verbal message, thus confirming the increasing importance of visual literacy in our society. Moreover, the more technologically-sophisticated visuals often had other types of literacies (e.g., numerical, graphical) embedded within them, again raising the issue of developing multiple literacies. Most current ESP materials for business and economics are based largely on text extracts, accompanied by attractively laid out colour photos and drawings, according to modern trends in commercial textbook publishing. Numerical and graphical visuals usually have a minor role, perhaps because they are considered less ‘visually interesting’. However, the findings of this study suggest that greater emphasis should be given to numerical and graphical visuals in these materials to help learners consolidate other literacies that are fundamental to the business community. The analysis of nonverbal behaviours in this chapter confirmed the important role of this often ignored component of the lecture experience. A wide range of nonverbal behaviours was observed across all five lectures included in this part of the study and some (i.e., gaze towards audience and gesturing) consistently accompanied interpersonal verbal episodes, attesting to their crucial interactional function in this instructional setting. Therefore, these findings support the view that lecture comprehension materials should include both audio and visual input so that learners can take advantage of nonverbal cues for a fuller understanding. Thanks to advances in video technology, some recent academic listening materials have been able to achieve this goal (Salehzadeh 2006; Dunkle and Pialorsi 2005). To wrap up this discussion that has brought together the aims, findings and implications of the study, I would like to briefly touch on another issue: how can lectures become more effective in transforming novices into full-fledged members of the business community? Clearly, a proper answer to this question would require a different type of study (e.g., an extensive survey, longitudinal/ethnographic research). Yet these findings do trigger some ideas to this regard. Throughout the lectures, interaction could be identified as an overriding feature. It could be seen in linguistic choices, extra-linguistic behaviours, content orientations, pedagogic strategies and lecturing styles. All of these forms of interaction, more or less

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

pronounced, allowed the lecturers to engage with the learners in order to negotiate disciplinary knowledge. However, interaction was most evident in the participatory-style lectures that incorporated extended episodes during which students and lecturers worked together to solve real-world problems. The field notes taken during these lectures showed that students responded positively and were able to accomplish their tasks, even if they had not previously experienced this highly interactive approach to learning. Thus, it could be that increasing the level of student participation in lectures not only improves their effectiveness, but also involves learners in a process of social co-participation that transforms them into members of the community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991).

8.3 Methodological insights The results discussed in the previous section emerged from the integration of several different research methodologies. Therefore, it seems useful to now reflect on what we can learn from this approach and how it might be developed and applied in other research. Representing the core methodology of this study, corpus techniques proved to be an extremely effective way to obtain empirical data that could be accurately analyzed and compared to other discourses of interest. In this way, it was possible to establish the most distinctive linguistic features of business studies lectures, not only in terms of their frequencies, but also their patterning (via concordance lines) and distribution (via dispersion plots). Automated part-of-speech tagging enabled the investigation of features such as lexical density and descriptive adjectives that would have otherwise been impossible. Yet the quantitative methods alone did not allow for a meaningful interpretation of the findings. It was only through follow-up qualitative analysis of texts that light could be shed on the underlying motivations for linguistic choices. This was feasible due to the relatively small size of the corpus allowing for direct ‘hands-on’ work as amply illustrated by the numerous examples presented and discussed throughout the book. Thus, when focusing on language as socially-situated discourse, a combined quantitative-qualitative approach based on a ‘readable’ corpus would seem to offer the most comprehensive description. To investigate the use of visuals and gestures, it was necessary to step outside language-oriented methodologies and incorporate observational techniques. Therefore, it is important to have some form of visual access when studying spoken genres, either through video recording or direct participation in the event on the part of researchers. In many cases, this may be quite problematic for a number of reasons, ranging from participant reluctance to logistical and/or cost-related issues. However, even partial access (as in this study) can yield insights into the



Chapter 8.  Final remarks 

role of other communicative modes. Hopefully, the increasing availability of innovative technologies and software to process digital films at lower costs will render this type of data more accessible to language researchers. This could also benefit researchers working with other interactional spoken genres where visuals and nonverbal communication constitute key elements, such as professional presentations, academic conferences, business meetings and press events. This study has highlighted the importance of participant feedback not only to verify findings, but also to interpret them from a fresh perspective. For example, one lecturer confirmed that real world examples were of strategic importance to encourage students to exploit their background knowledge, while adding that they are especially useful for business studies students who can assimilate them into future plans to start up their own businesses. In largely corpus-oriented studies, researchers may encounter problems in systematically collecting feedback from discourse participants similar to those involved in accessing the visual dimension of the events. Ideally, the possibility of retrieving such feedback could be one of the criteria for selecting events to be included in the corpus. However, given the wellknown difficulties in collecting spoken discourse, again, even partial data of this type can serve to illuminate findings. Finally, the broad methodological approach made it necessary to select only certain features for analysis, giving priority to those that come into play in L2 lecture comprehension. Similarly, the degree of analytical detail had to be somewhat limited given the large number of variables involved across the entire study. As readers will recognize, some of the features investigated have been the topics of books in their own right (e.g., discourse markers, evaluation, metaphor, economics discourse) and others could easily be expanded into book-length studies (e.g., phonological reduction, nonverbal aspects, business lexis – just to mention a few). Nevertheless, even if the analysis cannot be described as completely exhaustive, using different methodologies to join together ‘pieces’ from various communicative facets in a mosaic-like process has resulted in a full-circle account of business studies lectures that could not have been otherwise accomplished.

8.4 Business studies lectures and interdiscursivity revisited The final research question of this study was: How do the spoken, academic, disciplinary and professional dimensions converge in the lectures? We are now in a position to answer this question that reiterates the key concept of interdiscursivity. At the end of Chapter 2, I proposed a visual image to hypothesize the interdiscursivity of business studies lectures. I would now like to return to this model (reproduced below as Figure 8.1) to draw some final conclusions.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

Spoken Discourse

Academic Discourse

Professional Discourse Business Discourse

Disciplinary Discourse Economics Discourse

Business Studies Lectures

Figure 8.1  The interdiscursive nature of business studies lectures (revisited)

In the figure, business studies lectures are depicted as embedded within a cluster of different discourses, aiming to convey the idea that each discourse makes its own essential contribution which then merges with the others to create this unique variety of language. I will now ‘walk through’ the model, using the findings of the study to illustrate this interdiscursivity. As a spoken genre, business studies lectures are obviously placed within the over-arching category of spoken discourse. The numerous conversation-like features found throughout the lectures render their spoken dimension particularly important, shifting them distinctly away from other relatively formal spoken genres that actually have more in common with written language. As they spoke, the lecturers used various strategies to interact with students in order to facilitate understanding, which are commonly found in academic contexts (e.g., discourse markers, evaluative expressions, questions, nonverbal behaviours to reinforce the verbal message, visuals). The lecturers taught disciplinary concepts using the theoretical models, hypothetical examples and argumentative strategies that are typical of the field of economics. The professional dimension of the lectures emerged instead from the more practical side of the discipline that is closely linked to the world of business. This was seen in the use of real world data, problem-solving tasks and presentation-style visuals. Moreover, the lecturers’ speech was sprinkled with buzzwords and other lexical items that are highly characteristic of business settings. This convergence of the language of business studies lectures and professional business discourse is perhaps influenced by the multiple identities of busi-



Chapter 8.  Final remarks 

ness academics: university professors, corporate consultants, private/public sector researchers, members of advisory boards – perhaps even all at the same time. In conclusion, this study has shown that business studies lectures are characterized by an extremely rich repertoire of features, both linguistic and extra-linguistic, and that these draw on several discourses which each reflect a key aspect of the interactional context and the community of practice. However, it is the synergic relationship among these discourses that transforms business studies lectures into a distinctively dynamic spoken genre, which undoubtedly contributes to the growing popularity of this field of study among learners worldwide.

Notes 1.

Derwing and Munro (2001) vs. Zhao (1997).

2. Chaudron and Richards (1986) vs. Flowerdew and Tauroza (1995). 3. In the late nineties, Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998: 65) observed that a “core” lexis of business English had not yet been identified. Hopefully, this study, together with Nelson (2000) and McCarthy and Handford (2004), constitute a significant step in this direction.

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 The Language of Business Studies Lectures Thompson, S. 2002. “As the story unfolds: The uses of narratives in research presentations.” In The Language of Conferencing, E. Ventola, C. Shalom and S. Thompson (eds), 147–167. Bern: Peter Lang. Thompson, S.E. 2003. “Text-structuring metadiscourse, intonation and the signalling of organisation in academic lectures.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 2 (1): 5–20. Tognini-Bonelli, E. 2001. Corpus Linguistics at Work. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Tracy, K. 1997. Colloquium: Dilemmas of Academic Discourse. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Trosborg, A. 2000. “The inaugural address.” In Analysing Professional Genres, A. Trosborg (ed), 121–144. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Tyler, A.E., Jefferies, A.A. and Davies, C.E. 1988. “The effect of discourse structuring devices on listener perceptions of coherence in non-native university teacher’s spoken discourse.” World Englishes 7 (2): 101–110. Ure, J. 1971. “Lexical density and register differentiation.” In Applications in Linguistics, G.E. Perren and J.L.M. Trim (eds), 443–452. London: Cambridge University Press. Van Duzer, C. 1997. “Improving ESL learners’ listening skills: At the workplace and beyond.” National Clearinghouse for ESL Literacy Education. ERIC Document 406855. van Nus, M. 1999. “Can we count on your bookings of potatoes to Madeira? Corporate context and discourse practices in direct sales letters.” In Writing Business: Genre, Media and Discourses, F. Bargiela-Chiappini and C. Nickerson (eds), 181–205. Essex: Pearson Educational Limited. Ventola, E. 1996. “Packing and unpacking of information in academic texts.” In Academic Writing: Intercultural and Textual Issues, E. Ventola and A. Mauranen (eds), 153–194. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Ventola, E. 1987. The Structure of Social Interaction: A Systematic Approach to the Semiotics of Service Encounters. London: Francis Pinter. Verplaetse, H. 2003. “What you and I want: A functional approach to verbal complementation of the modal want to.” In Modality in Contemporary English, R. Facchinetti, M.S. Krug and F.R. Palmer (eds), 151–189. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Vogel Sosa, A. 2000. “Phonological reduction in frequency-based constituents units: The alternation of English ‘of ’.” Paper presented at the Third Annual High Desert Linguistics Society Conference, April 7–9, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. von Raffler-Engel, W. 1980. “Kinesics and paralinguistics: A neglected factor in second language research and teaching.” Canadian Modern Language Review 36 (2): 225–237. Walsh, P. 2004a. “A complex interplay of voices: First and second person pronouns in university lectures.” In Evaluation in Oral and Written Academic Discourse, L. Anderson and J. Bamford (eds), 31–52. Rome: Officina Edizioni. Walsh, P. 2004b. “Investigating prediction in financial news articles.” In English Modality in Perspective. Genre Analysis and Contrastive Studies, R. Facchinetti and F. Palmer (eds), 81–100. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Walsh, P. and Crawford Camiciottoli, B. 2001. “Lecturing to an unfamiliar audience: Some functions of interaction in business lectures by visiting academics.” Quaderni del Dipartimento di Linguistica dell’Università degli Studi di Firenze 11: 171–183. Webber, P. 2004. “Negotiation in linguistics papers.” In Academic Discourse. New Insights into Evaluation, G. Del Lungo Camiciotti and E. Tognini Bonelli (eds), 181–202. Bern: Peter Lang. Wee, L. 2005. “Class-inclusion and correspondence models as discourse types: A framework for approaching metaphorical discourse.” Language in Society 34 (2): 219–238.



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Weissberg, B. 1993. “The graduate seminar: Another research-process genre.” English for Specific Purposes 12 (1): 23–35. White, M. 2003. “Metaphor and economics: The case of growth.” English for Specific Purposes 22 (2): 131–151. Williams, J. 1992. “Planning, discourse marking and the comprehensibility of international teaching assistants.” TESOL Quarterly 26 (4): 693–711. Wray, A. 2000. “Formulaic sequences in second language teaching: Principle and practice.” Applied Linguistics 21 (4): 463–489. Yamashita, J. 1994. “An analysis of relative clauses in the Lancaster/IBM Spoken English Corpus.” English Studies 75 (1): 73–84. Young, L. 1990. Language as Behaviour, Language as Code. A Study of Academic English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Young, L. 1994. “University lectures – macro-structure and micro-features.” In Academic Listening. Research Perspectives, J. Flowerdew (ed), 159–176. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zhao, Y. 1997. “The effects of listeners’ control of speech rate on second language comprehension.” Applied Linguistics 18 (1): 49–68. Zorzi, D. 1999. “University lectures: Informational and interpersonal aspects of asides.” In ��� Le Forme della Comunicazione Accademica. Ricerche Linguistiche sulla Didattica Universitaria in Ambito Umanistico, A. Ciliberti and L. Anderson (eds), 64–83. Milan: Franco Angeli.

Appendix A Transcript samples from the twelve lectures of the BSLC

<EBM Lecture Series – April 6, 2000 – Lecture 1/L2/NS > Right so good afternoon Erm just a brief sort of overview of what I intend trying to cover the next two nights it’s nice there’s a small group (.) I’m not gonna to talk to you for six hours you’ll be pleased to know Erm what I’m gonna to do tonight is to give you erm start off with an overview of the role of small and small and medium sized enterprises within the UK economy Okay? And starting with a definition cuz it’s always- it’s always a problem of how to define small and medium sized what we actually mean by it And then say to give you some erm some figures some indications a general overview of the position within the er UK economy of small and medium sized enterprises (.) And following on from that I’m gonna give you something to do Er now I’ve got like a set of erm clippings from newspapers from various places about er certain issues relating to small and medium sized enterprises erm within the UK context so that’s- that’s an exercise for you to do and then report back Okay? And then I’ve got some more general sort of windup sessions for tonight What I intend to do tomorrow is to actually cover a case study in some detail which brings out several sort of erm (.) generic sort of features of SMEs within the UK Erm and it’s based on- it’s an imaginary company but it’s quite a good case study I used it last year in this session I think it went down um quite well Okay? And I’ll finish off tomorrow night with just some general overview of some of the government help which is provided So that’s the sort of general plan of action erm

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

As I say I’m not gonna to stand here and talk all the time but as a way of introduction let’s just begin while we’re waiting for some photocopied material to come down erm with transparencies (..) Welcome



Appendix A 

<EBM Lecture Series – November 25, 2002 – Lecture 2/L2/NS> Thanks very much Okay thank you uh nice to meet you all And um thank you for coming out this evening I know it’s very late So uh I’ll try and keep it as short as possible Uh my name is I’m a lecturer in industrial economics at the University of I don’t claim to be an expert on Japan but I’ve been studying industrial development policy in different countries for the last ten years and so I’ve developed a particular interest in Japan as a kind of side- side interest really to my main work What I’d like to do today is- is talk with you about changes taking place in the Japanese economy And how the economy’s undergoing change what that means the dimensions of the change and what particular problems that’s throwing up And in particular I’d like to look at its impacts on small firms given that that’s the focus on your European Business Module So we’ll be saying something about uh the impact on small firms and in so doing talk about what types of clusters of small firms exist in Japan And that will link in with what uh professor uh will talk to you about on Thursday and Friday I think? (EBM tutor) yes Okay So that’s who I am those are my contact details (.) Um please get in touch if there’s any- if you have any questions or if you’re interested in Japan or whatever (.) If as I go along I’m speaking too quickly or if anything is not clear please stop me or if you’ve just got any questions um we tend to lecture in a much more informal style in England than on the continent so we normally end up just having a discussion but please just ask me any questions as we go along (..) I’ve given you a handout and on the second page of the handout there are some uh learning objectives for this session So for example I’d like to give you an overview of the current state of the Japanese economy ) Do you have one?

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

<EBM Lecture Series – May 10, 2001 – Lecture 3/L2/NS > Thank you thank you very much What- what I’d like to do is to- is to talk to you about how and I’ll do it slowly we get the information on small businesses the way we survey companies and then go through some- some of the key results from our latest one (.) Now since- since I should say 1991 these dark these dark lines are when we are carried out our surveys Since 1991 we’ve car- carried out regular surveys- surveys of small and medium sized businesses um (.) You’ll also notice that they tend take place at different times in the cycle And if you concentrate on the un- unemployment um and prices and increase in GDP you’ll see our first survey took place in a recession when the um level actually is declining um and unemployment was growing rapidly But since then the three um surveys we’ve carried out were- took place in a- in a recovery and growth phase of the cycle So when interpreting these results we have to take these things into account (..) Now (.) this- this- this slide shows the sorts of companies we’ve surveyed We concentrated on manufacturing (.) and on business services advertising management technical and professional consultancy and telecom service So there were relatively fine grade um management um business services and manufacturing And we classified them they were all independent companies None of them owned by any- anybody else Um so they were all independent companies free-standing companies Um (.) and we classified them according to the E- EU classification So micro firms were less than nine less than ten employees the small firms were between ten to ninety-nine employees and the- the medium firms were from a hundred to four hundred ninety-nine we excluded any companies over that- over that size um (.)



Appendix A 

<EBM Lecture Series – May 18, 2000 – Lecture 4/L2/NNS> Okay (.) let’s go Okay so er thank you for the audience As er Professora told you I’m from the University of And I will be the person who teach you the session from today and tomorrow afternoon The topic is as you can read er local productive systems in Spain location and competitiveness This is the main topic Er I see the programme you have done in your European programme see some things about it Local productive systems perhaps this is special it comes to Spain what’s that? Well in the Italian sense that’s the industrial districts So it’s more or less a lot of things you have seen or read or listened along this course (.) Then I will er show you the index of the session Don’t worry about the index it’s very long But my idea is to be flexible on it If you have more interest in one point then we can increase explanation and you say no no no it’s not interesting so we can go on to another point My aim is to see a little bit of these six points First point it’s about the Spanish economy I know that last week you had a profe- you had a professor from Spain from Siviglia talking about Spanish economy so I don’t want to repeat I don’t want to say the same But I want to focus on the things that I’m interested on You’ll know if you want to follow the rest of the session so don’t worry about this it’s not a repetition it’s something that I want to focus on especially Then the second point of focus more specifically is the industrial activities in Spain That’s a little bit newer I hope huh? We will talk about the size is it- is the industrial activity big in Spain? Is it small? Has it changed a lot with time or not?

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

<EBM Lecture Series – May 24, 2001 – Lecture 4/L2/NNS> Yeah professor thank you very much for introducing me to the audience As you see from this logo over there I can even stay in Florence feel at home because uh we are staying in that subject which is called in different participating institutions all over Eu Europe European Business Studies Module EBM Several years ago it was I think 1995 when we got this idea to create such a thing which should be spread around Europe with the same content the- the same organisational structure so that it is possible to exchange professors and student groups between the different systems (.) So at the moment we are running this module in Aachen it is well run in Siviglia it’s obviously well run over here in Florence and uh the people in Dublin are working on it They want to start it in autumn and people in Coventry in England are interested to establish it So all these institutions you see there are more Oestresund in Sweden another one Coventry Edinburgh as well they are working to establish it- it’s- uh it’s an interesting module (..) All use English as the language as communication means in it and all of them concentrate on the sector which is called the SME the small and medium sized companies or enterprises sector (.) So it was the idea in 1995 to have something in common between the different areas of Europe and uh yes you see what a profit is coming out of it and uh I welcome very much that uh professor took over this idea over here in Florence establishing it in English which is not so easy especially in the countries speaking Italian or Spanish And uh but on the other hand we had a lot of debate about this on the other hand everybody in Europe on the background of integration process has to be aware of the fact that we cannot speak twelve different languages when we are going to cooperate so we have to be agreed upon a communication means (.) It mustn’t be too perfect we are not trained over here to- to use uh Cambridge English or something like that It may be an accent because that’s the sign of culture the person is coming from



Appendix A 

<EBM Lecture Series – April 14, 2000 – Lecture 6/L2/NNS> Are we ready to start? (.) Um (.) well actually I want to start with the blackboard so (..) Okay (.) What we’re going to do today is to carry on what we discussed about yesterday If you remember whatever I’m going to talk about today is actually still in this in the overhead in the handout that I gave you yesterday Uh so we’ll just carry on as we where- where we- we left Let me just recap the main points that I really wanted to make yesterday The first point is that there is a competitive competitiveness gap in the UK (..) <WRITES ON BOARD> The second point is that there is a productivity gap (..) <WRITES ON BOARD> And both are actually present in sectors wh- where the UK is exporting (..) <WRITES ON BOARD> The second point which I’m not sure I pledge uh from the government is to create a knowledge economy (..) <WRITES ON BOARD> And also to move to high tech and R&D intensive sectors (..) <WRITES ON BOARD> Now all this has had (xx) Which are the causes of this competitiveness gap and on the productivity gap (..) Well the main causes can be found first of all in underinvestment (..) <WRITES ON BOARD> We saw yesterday we saw yesterday as for example there was underinvestment in R&D especially from the government But also businesses are not really improving uh rising government investment in the last decade (.) So one of the first reasons for that for all these is somehow uh underinvestment The second was definitely a lack of incentives (..) <WRITES ON BOARD> from the government’s point of view towards businesses (.) And the third element I want to suggest is a macroeconomic uh mismanagement (..) <WRITES ON BOARD>

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

<MICASE – March 13, 2001 – Lecture 7/L1/NS> S1: okay on focus? alright? i’ve discovered you guys are all much more sensitive to that than i am so, uh okay, we’ve been talking about uh formal structural models of the retirement process. uh, we did the Gustman and Steinmeier, model last class and today, um, guess we’ll spend all the time on so-called option value models Lumsdaine, Stock and Wise, although we’ll get a small head start in thinking about uh, dynamic programming models as well because part of what they do is compare their preferred model, to one that is still the more elaborate. uh... basically the the, theme of the paper, um is to compare, three models of increasing complexity, using exactly the same data. and, just as a general... point about doing research, buon the same data, is a really nice feature of this paper. because normally what happens when you try to teach a course like this, is that you have, researchers and models, and data, and you hope that the differences and conclusions are not due to the researchers, but you’re never really sure how much they’re due to the models and how much they’re due to the data. okay so if you have model one, estimated on data set A and model, two estimated on data set B and they get different results, um you’re never really sure whether the results are due to differences in the model or due to differences in the data. and so [S2: (excuse me) ] it’s a it’s a good idea, and it’s a remarkably_ yeah? S2: today we we have no... handout? S1: oh i’m sorry, (xx) handouts. [SU-M: thanks ] so i- it’s you know, you wouldn’t think this would be an issue. i mean you stop and think about it for a minute. um when you’re in the second paper in a field, not only, presenting you’re pr- pr- preferred model. uh but also kind of... estimating or re-estimating earlier models on your data, it would seem to be an obvious thing to do. and it helps people like me trying to teach the stuff because now we can compare model against model, holding data constant, uh which is in some sense the right way to evaluate the model. um as you probably discovered from just, earlier rendi- you know earlier topics in the course, it’s remarkably rare, that one actually sees that. um oftentimes people just go off and estimate their model on their data, and don’t think about the poor, uh six-twenty-two teacher who’s trying to make sense of the literature. uh so having all three models estimated on the same data, uh gives, you know, it seems like something you wouldn’t need to praise or you shouldn’t need to praise um



Appendix A 

<MICASE – January 19, 1999 – Lecture 8/L1/NS> S1: model, which uh, we started talking about last time so the idea is to uh, to bring in uh, the world economy... after i finish this, uh i wanna start talking about what’s called the Static Neoclassical Model. and, then next time i wanna, begin working on the second page of roman numeral one. so on the second page there’s an article on the m- on the uh Multiplier Accelerator Model that’s really what the first problem in the problem set is about. uh on Thursday, i want to uh, talk about the Lucas Model, which has a paper and a little bit of reading in the textbook. and then uh next week on Tuesday i wanna spend one lecture on the Phillip’s Curve, there’s a handout on that there’s a little bit of reading in the textbook, uh, that introduces some ideas about differential equations, and then uh next Thursday i wanna finish up, talking about the Dornbusch Model which is an elaboration on the Mundell-Flemming Model... alright. so, we had new behavioral functions uh, last time <WRITING ON BOARD> we used these stars for desired, we had uh desired net exports... and they were gonna depend on the home real G-D-P on the foreign G-D-P, and on the real interest rate... let me just, signify the signs of the partial derivatives by putting a sign here. partial derivative with respect to the first argument was gonna be negative, positive, positive by as- these were assumptions. second, new behavioral functions, behavioral function, i want, C-F star to be real, uh desired, net foreign financial investment in the U-S. so we’d started talking about this last time let me write it like that with two arguments, depends on the home nominal interest rate, depends on the sum of the foreign nominal interest rate, and the uh, i did this wrong, it should depend on, the sum of the foreign nominal interest rate, and the uh anticipated, uh, rate of change in E. the nominal exchange rate. so dot means time derivative. E dot over E, is like the, percentage, rate of change, in E, in the nominal exchange rate. use the A for, anticipator. alright. the as- the assumptions i wanna make here, are that the uh... that the sign here is negative, and here is positive... let me talk for a minute though, about this. so we’re talking about financial investment. so you can uh, take your uh dollar saving put it, in a savings bank in the U-S or you could, send it over to England.

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

Alright That- that- that’s- y- you’re absolutely right You can’t- you can’t reduce everything to- to um a- a- to a pecuniary reward And- but- see what uh to a certain extent uh you- you can um put a money value on- on the non-pecuniary as- aspects in a job But is like uh- uh somebody who is a social worker they may very much likely interact with people So you see that’s really uh I mean I agree with you that that would be degrading their compassionate nature I mean and altruistic nature by saying that we could put a- a- a money value to it But um I- I it is certainly something um the- that the- actually you asked a very good question you know you can’t uh- uh- uh really be an economic determinist and say put everything in- in that- those terms. Y- you could just say that it’s- it’s a factor and that- that it’s- it’s a- it’s a- it’s for some a very dominant factor And- and- but it’s certainly a very important factor for everyone For some more so than others and- and that’s how the economic system works I think that would be fair to say that it’s not that it’s a dominant force in society at large (..) Alright now N- next thing we’d like to do is uh to um to- to look at the various government interventions in the market systems the- these are called ad hoc interventions and we can show that they’re not- they’re very misguided. And- and they often do not achieve the objectives that they want to achieve This is- we show this by the supply and demand diagrams so like(Student) (xx) Excuse me? (Student) How do you spell it? AdAd hoc



Appendix A 

I’ll take up a few uh additional points a- about Kirzner’s theory of um (.) uh alertness entrepreneurship and its relation to the issue of the justice of uh distributive shares And I wanna say a few things about the number of issues in uh the Sen book Ethics and Economics which (.) uh we really didn’t get have time to get to but I just wanna say a few things about some of the issues that he mentions. Alright Um Kirzner um I believe last time (.) we (.) briefly outlined uh the rational for Kirzner’s approach or the rational Kirzner’s approach to entrepreneurship um and uh what profit in his system refers to Now let me just review a few of tho- highlights from that Um the most important thing for our purposes is to contrast Kirzner’s view of entrepreneurship and profit with the Knight’s view of entrepreneurship and profit We saw that in- uh well after all you- you didn’t see the other class saw it. But anyway it’s as if okay Um in Knight’s- it would be so much easier if- if all- if you took all my courses and then I wouldn’t have to worry about when I- when I say what when you know all the time Alright Knight Uh some of you may have uh heard uh Knight’s uh theory is built on the concept of uncertainty <WRITING ON BOARD> Knight thinks of entrepreneurs as bearers of uncertainty. (.) <WRITING ON BOARD> Alright? (.) But this is a very passive view of entrepreneurship Because for Knight uncertainty uh is (.) belongs to the realm of the absolutely unpredictable And that’s to say things which are not even predictable in a probabilistic sense That’s the famous distinction between uh uncertainty and risk <WRITING ON BOARD> Risk refers to things which are predictable probabilistically So for example we can predict uh in terms of uh objective frequencies uh the probability of a person- a man aged to forty-five with certain characteristics dying in the next year

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

So here are four concepts that are very easy to confuse (.) Okay? And I’ve already been told that this first one is the most confusing thing that you’ve heard so far this semester GDP is gross domestic product It’s supposed to be a measure of the output produced by the economy (.) In order to calculate GDP we need to add up quantities of things that are very different We need to be able to add up automobile production with apple production The way we do that adding is by using dollar bills as an index of the value of those products So we’re gonna add up the dollar value of all of the things that get produced in the United States (.) If we add up the quantities that get produced valued at the price they get exchanged for this year we call that concept nominal GDP It’s the total quantity of GDP that you produced this year valued at the prices for this year If we try to measure the quantity controlling for the fact that prices may change over time we call that idea real GDP And I’m gonna do an example in a minute that I hope clarifies the difference between nominal and real for you (..) In order to measure GDP we need to have some idea about prices And along with that idea about prices are questions about how you measure aggregate behaviour of prices in the economy as a whole There are many many kinds of different price indices that you will hear talked about on the news There are two in particular that we’re gonna think about One is the CPI the consumer price index the other is the GDP deflator The CPI is created as an indication of what it costs the average consumer to buy a market basket full of goods in a particular year So it’s what it costs you to buy the things that you would necessarily buy over the course of the year The GDP deflator on the other hand is measure of all of the prices of all of the goods that our economy produces So it’s much broader than the CPI (.) What I wanna do is an example (..)



Appendix A 

Well there it is June fourth (.) And this is OPM two twenty two Next to the last day of uh classes here (.) And uh today I passed out a number of things chapter twenty four twenty five twenty six and just to take a peak at this last thing that I just- look at the very last page that I set out hot off the press uh May thirty first last Friday (..) Orders in US factories grows one point two percent in April the biggest increase in six months business productivity the first quarter grew at its strongest pace in nineteen years Here they’re talking about productivity (xx) but I think yeah the- uh the third paragraph down Productivity grew at an annual rate of eight point four percent in the January to March quarter That’s hard pressed companies worked more with fewer workers And I thought it was nice but they even put in here somewhere (.) if you look down to the third the fourth from the bottom of the first page there In the long run productivity gains are good for workers for the economy and for companies whose profits get hit during the slump gains in productivity allow companies to pay workers more without raising prices which would eat up those wage gains and productivity gains permit the company to grow faster without triggering inflation So how bout that you even get a little OPM two twenty two course in there which I thought was very nice by uh Jeanine (xx) the associated press writer that she actually explains that cause what’s the first thing people think of when they say that the uh- uh you know they make- they’re- you know what’d they say you know they’re gonna make more stuff with fewer workers says ah I’m gonna get laid off no you can actually get paid more without raising prices and stay competitive So I thought I’d throw that in there Very current (..) And that’s uh- uh you know that’s the first that’s the biggest gain in nineteen years? And just to give you an idea of uh what uh what uh recession where our recession was in 2001 on the back page for all of 2002 productivity grew at one point nine percent (.)

Appendix B Specialized lexis in the BSLC ranked according to frequency (number of tokens in parentheses)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

firm (423) companies (378) product (362) economy (292) price (235) percent (231) work (223) market (189) retire (186) investment (176) model (174) industry (168) dollar (160) employ (159) policy (157) sector (154) growth (149) value (144) rate (139) business (135) pay (120) stock (120) GDP (117) money (111) profit (107) wage (103) innovate (108) manufacturing (104)

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

competition (100) service (97) bank (96) interest (96) increase (91) corporate (83) bond (78) data (76) cost (73) labour (70) rent (70) develop (68) finance (68) tech (68) capital (67) income (66) foreign (63) figure (62) export (61) quantity (60) measure (59) sell (59) equilibrium (57) supply (56) fund (55) utility (55) index (51) spend (50)

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

collaborate (47) exchange (46) objective (46) option (45) buy (44) partner (44) union (44) unit (44) tax (43) saving (42) nominal (39) overseas (38) average (37) decline (37) derivative (37) goods (37) job (37) SME (37) demand (36) management (36) trade (35) net (34) bucks (33) structural (32) curve (31) enterprise (30) fixed (30) number (30) calculate (29) risk (29) share (29) alertness (28) output (28) quality (28) transnational (28) cluster (27) inflation (27) input (27) basket (24) consumption (24)

97 household (24) 98 aggregate (23) 99 worth (23) 100 fiscal (22) 101 assets (21) 102 domestic (21) 103 fail (21) 104 research (21) 105 strategic (21) 106 dynamic (20) 107 equation (20) 108 group (20) 109 turnover (20) 110 deal (19) 111 discount (19) 112 entrepreneur (19) 113 housing (19) 114 international (19) 115 monetary (19) 116 pension (19) 117 technology (19) 118 yen (19) 119 account (18) 120 recession (18) 121 windfall (18) 122 deflator (17) 123 range (17) 124 skill (17) 125 board (16) 126 impact (16) 127 pounds (16) 128 probability (16) 129 divide (15) 130 estimate (15) 131 institution (15) 132 parameter (15) 133 reduce (15) 134 borrow (14) 135 credit (14) 136 gain (14)



137 gross (14) 138 raise (14) 139 survey (14) 140 earnings (13) 141 falling (13) 142 horizontal (13) 143 organisation (13) 144 proportion (13) 145 variable (13) 146 drop (12) 147 inefficient (12) 148 owners (12) 149 package (12) 150 statistics (12) 151 surplus (12) 152 capacity (11) 153 cooperation (11) 154 database (11) 155 euro (11)

Appendix B 

156 exogenous (11) 157 expand (11) 158 expenditure (11) 159 external (11) 160 flowing (11) 161 loss (11) 162 meeting (11) 163 micro (11) 164 minus (11) 165 report (11) 166 residual (11) 167 security (11) 168 dividend (10) 169 ethical (10) 170 flexible (10) 171 liability (10) 172 maximize (10) 173 opportunity (10) 174 sample (10)

Name index A Ädel A.  96 Aguilar M.  17 Akar D.  16, 26 Allison D.  46, 47, 48, 79, 81 Anderson L.  14 Anderson-Hsieh J.  46 Antes T.A.  167 Argondizzo C.  11 Argyle M.  165, 166 Askehave I.  29 B Backhouse R.E.  23 Bakhtin M.M.  13, 15, 16, 28 Baldry A.  152, 153, 178 Bamford J.  4, 24, 25, 37, 50, 92, 96, 105–107, 124, 143, 150, 154, 181 Bargiela-Chiappini F.  11, 20, 25, 27 Barton E.L.  94, 95 Basturkmen H.  11 Bazerman C.  24 Benson M.J.  18, 50 Berber Sardinha A.P.  73, 75 Berkenkotter C.  17 Bernstein B.  2 Bhatia V.K.  5, 7, 16, 128, 148, 163, 181, 187 Biber D.  10, 12, 13, 15, 20–22, 35, 52, 55, 58, 62, 66, 69, 78, 87, 95, 100, 105, 122, 139, 184 Birdwhistell R.L.  166 Black M.  143 Bligh D.  3 Bloor M.  17 Bloor T.  24 Boers F.  143 Bolitho R.  127 Bondi M.  23, 24, 43, 59, 83, 88, 90, 106, 123, 125 Bourdieu P.  3 Bowen G.M.  154 Brinton L.J.  89 Brown G.  2

Brown J.D.  54 Bucholtz M.  37 Bunton D.  17 Burke A.  19, 95, 97, 101, 103, 184 Butler C.S.  78

Dubois B.L.  153 Dudley-Evans T.  16, 17, 22–24, 26, 27, 50, 79, 81, 191 Dunkel P.A.  184 Dyer J.  18

C Cameron D.  38 Candlin C.N.  2, 28, 80 Carrell P.L.  80 Carson D.  44 Carter R.  12, 31, 58, 62, 65, 66, 68 Carter-Thomas S.  17 Chafe W.L. 10,  38 Chang Y-Y.  21 Channell J.  58, 59 Charles Maggie  22 Charles Mirjalisa  25 Charteris-Black J.  143 Chaudron C.  80, 84, 89, 191 Collins H.  25, 127 Connor U.  17 Conrad L.  46 Cook G.  37, 39 Corder C.  119 Corradi Fiumara G.  142 Corts D.P.  84, 167, 177 Coulthard M.  11 Crawford Camiciottoli B.  ix, 4, 33, 40, 78, 108, 170, 180, 185 Creer S.  36 Cropley A.J.  3 Csomay E.  20, 22, 109, 110 Curtis R.  163 Cutting J.  35 Czinkota M.  44

E Edwards J.A.  37 Efron D.  166 Eggins S.  11, 73 Ekman P.  42, 168, 173, 182 Exline R.V.  171

D Darwin C.  166 David C.  26, 143 De Groot E.  26 DeCarrico J.  80 Del Lungo Camiciotti G.  ix, 24, 43 Derwing T.  46, 191 Diani G.  17 Drew P.  14, 16, 127

F Fairclough N.  28, 51 Farr F.  19 Fedoulenkova T.  143 Fehr B.J.  171 Ferris D.  4, 15 Firth J.R.  11 Flowerdew J.  4, 18, 45, 46, 50, 75, 79, 80, 81, 83, 89, 90, 99, 100, 170, 184, 191 Fortanet-Gómez I.  ix, 3, 4, 44, 84, 95, 184 Francis G.  11, 96 Frederick P.J.  51 Freire P.  4, 15, 79 G Galloway C.M.  42, 182 Gavioli L.  14, 44 Gee J.P.  9 Gibbs R.W.  143 Gimenez J.C.  26 Giménez Moreno R.  8 Givón T.  10 Glickman C.D.  172 Goatly A.  142 Goddard C.  143 Goffman E.  13, 14, 45, 49, 50, 182 Gold J.R.  3 Goodwin C.  166 Gotti M.  2, 21, 24, 138, 141 Greatbatch D.  14 Griffiths R.  46 Gunnarsson B-L.  13

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures Guthrie A.M.  18 H Haarman L.  41 Hall E.T.  166, 177 Halliday M.A.K.  10–12, 37, 66, 73, 74, 95, 127, 143, 152, 180 Hamp-Lyons L.  5, 21 Handford M.  26, 137, 191 Hanks W.F.  149 Hansen C.  109 Harris S.J.  11, 20, 25 Harris T.  167, 180 Hartnett C.G.  73 Hasan R.  66 Heath C.  14, 166 Henderson W.  23, 24, 122, 143 Henrichsen L.E.  57 Henry A.  20, 32, 40 Heritage J.  14, 16, 127 Hewings A.  24, 122, 123 Hilferty A.  54 Hodges M.  54 Hoey M.  104 Holmes J.  35 Holmes R.  21 Huckin T.N.  2, 17, 79, 81, 115 Hunston S.  11, 94–98 Hyland K.  5, 17, 20–22, 26, 78, 80, 88, 90, 95, 96, 98, 100, 119 Hymes D.  28 J Jackson J.  120 Jefferson G.  14 Jensen C.  109 Jensen R.  36 Jesperson O.  68 Johns A.M.  186 Johnson D.W.  3 Johnson Mark  142, 143 Johnson Michael  141 Jucker A.H.  80 Jung E.H.  69, 84 Jung Y.  26 K Keller-Cohen D.  18 Kellerman S.  167 Kelly P.  74 Kendon A.  166 Kennedy C.  127 Keynes J.M.  23, 24 Khuwaileh A.A.  43, 80, 84 King D.  44

King P.  154 Kirkpatrick A.  2, 114, 115 Kissingler E.  184 Klamer A.  23 Knapper C.K.  3 Koehler K.  46 Koshik I.  15 Kress G.  151–153, 162, 181 Krug M.G.  85 Kusel P.A.  17 L Labov W.  35 Lakoff G.  142, 143 Lave J.  3–5, 28, 43, 51, 119, 186, 188 Lawless D.V.  157, 167 Lazaraton A.  167, 174 Leech G.  31, 36, 54, 85 Lemke J.L.  98, 151–153, 155 Levinson S.C.  14, 96 Lipsey R.  24 Littlemore J.  186 Lombardo L.  14 Lörscher W.  165, 167 Louhiala-Salminen L.  2, 11, 16, 26 Love A.  17 Lucy J.A.  125 Lynch T.  184 M Macfarlane B.  1, 27, 119, 120, 148 Malczewski B.  19, 80, 89, 90–93 Maley Y.  28 Martin J.R.  11, 95, 100 Mason A.  50 Mason M.  24 Matoesian G.M.  14 Mauranen A.  17, 19, 20, 29, 58, 60, 61, 84, 85, 95, 103 McCafferty S.G.  167 McCarthy M.J.  12, 26, 31, 32, 36, 58, 62, 65, 66, 68–73, 137, 191 McCloskey D.N.  23, 143 McHoul A.W.  14 McNeill A.  73 McNeill D.  173 Mendis D.  19, 58, 62, 63, 65 Merlini L.  24 Miller L.  18, 46, 50, 79–81, 83, 170, 184 Miller T.  153 Montgomery M.  11

Moon R.  62 Morell T.  4, 15, 50, 109 Morgan J.L.  143 Motta-Roth D.  17, 22, 123 Mulligan D.  2, 114, 115 Munro M.J.  46, 191 Murphy D.F.  80 Myers G.  163, 165 N Najarian J.P.  163 Nattinger J.R.  80 Neil W.  68 Nelson M.  26, 128, 135, 150, 191 Nesi H.  4, 48, 74, 75 Nickerson C.  2, 25–27 Nordhaus W.  24 Northcott J.  50, 100, 109 O O’Loughlin K.  73, 74 Ochs E.  10, 37, 152 Okamura A.  17 Olsen L.A.  2, 79, 81, 115 Ortony A.  142 P Paltridge B.  17 Parkin M.  44 Partington A.  ix, 32, 41, 143 Passeron J.C.  3 Pearson J.  31, 32, 42 Pialorsi F.  184 Piazza R.  14 Pindi M.  24 Plastina A.F.  11 Pollio H.R.  84, 167, 177 Poncini G.  14, 25, 26, 29, 128 Poos D.  22, 58, 60, 61 Poppi F.  95 Powers D.E.  45 Poyatos F.  165 Q Quirk R.  68, 105 R Rayson P.  44, 54 Richards J.  80, 84, 89, 191 Rilling S.  84 Roberts C.  37, 39 Rogers P.S.  26 Roos E.  138 Roseberry R.L.  20, 32, 40 Rosenfeld H.M.  168

Rost M.  74 Roth W-M.  154, 157, 167 Rounds P.L.  4, 84 Rowley-Jolivet E.  17, 153–155, 157, 158, 161 Rumelhart D.E.  80 S Sacks H.  14 Salehzadeh J.  184, 187 Samad A.A.  76 Samraj B.  17, 22 Samuels W.J.  23 Samuelson P.  24 Schachter S.  54 Schegloff E.A.  14 Scherer K.R.  42, 165, 168, 182 Schiffrin D.  80, 89, 92, 94 Scott M.  25, 40, 127 Shalom C.  17 Shaw P.  17, 95 Simpson R.C.  19, 22, 41, 58, 60–63, 65 Sinclair J. Mc.  11, 29, 31, 39–41, 96, 98 Soudek L.I.  65 Soudek M.  65 St. John M.J.  17, 26, 27, 191 Stein P.  153

Name index  Stubbs M.  10, 12, 13, 31, 73, 75 Swales J.M.  ix, 13, 16, 17, 19–22, 24, 26, 28, 29, 58, 63, 65, 66, 68, 80, 89–93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 153, 184 Swan M.  68 Swann J.  36, 37 T Tadros A.  123 Tagg T.  4, 15 Tannen D.  10 Tao H.  12, 68–72 Tauroza S.  46–48, 50, 79–81, 89, 90, 191 Taylor C.  152 Thibault P.J.  151, 152, 178 Thompson G.  94, 95 Thompson P.  36 Thompson S.  2, 17, 69, 81, 105, 106, 108–110, 115 Thompson S.E.  80 Tognini-Bonelli E.  40 Tracy K.  18 Trosborg A.  16 Tyler A.E.  84 U Ure J.  73, 75

V Van Duzer C.  57 van Leeuwen T.  151–153, 162, 181 van Nus M.  26 Ventola E.  11, 73 Verplaetse H.  85 Vogel Sosa A.  54 von Raffler-Engel W.  43, 167 W Walsh P.  ix, 4, 18, 24, 32, 33, 40, 170 Webber P.  95 Wee L.  142 Weissberg B.  17 Wenger E.  3–5, 28, 43, 51, 119, 186, 188 White M.  143, 186 Williams J.  84 Wray A.  62, 78 Y Yamashita J.  68 Young L.  22, 79, 81, 108, 117, 124 Z Zhao Y.  46, 191 Ziv Y.  80 Zorzi D.  4

Subject index A appraisal  95 approximators  59, 60, 77 asides  4, 19, 100 B BEC corpus  135, 136, 137, 148, 190 body posture  94, 166, 171, 176 business studies, defined  1 C CANBEC corpus  26, 137 CANCODE corpus  12, 68, 69, 72, 73 clusters of words  19, 84, 93, 131, 146 communities business  5, 51, 141, 187 discourse  16, 18, 20, 22, 33, 24, 27, 28 of practice  3, 5, 6, 24, 26, 28, 43, 116, 138, 141, 149, 152, 186, 188, 191 speech  33, 49 concordances  52–54, 56, 57, 60, 61, 63, 70, 71, 74, 85, 90, 97, 98, 101, 106, 108, 109, 118, 123, 130, 138, 141, 144, 147, 163, 188 corpora, types general  31 monogeneric vs. heterogeneric  32 readable  40, 188 reference  32, 131, 132, 137, 150 special purpose vs. special  32 specialized  6, 32, 40 subcorpora  42, 66, 74 corpus based vs. corpus-driven  40 corpus design external vs. internal criteria  32 opportunistic  32

D deixis  11, 14, 96, 97, 155, 163, 173, 174, 175 dialogic approach to education  4, 15, 79 digressions  50, 72, 115 discourse, types business  6, 9, 25–27, 29, 137, 143, 190 economics  9, 23–25, 29, 122, 189, 190 institutional  16, 25 instructional  2 pedagogic  2, 147 regulative  2 socially-situated  188 specialized  21, 141 discourse analysis, approaches conversation analysis  14, 15, 18, 166 ethnographic  5, 18, 20, 187 interactional socio-linguistic  18, 62 discourse patterns claim-justification  83 initiation-response-feedback  11 problem-solution  22 situation-problem-responseevaluation  104 discourse reflexivity  19, 84, 95, 96, 125 dispersion plots  52, 53, 55–57, 87, 88, 99, 100, 104, 107, 117, 130, 188

F false starts  10, 38, 45, 50, 52–54, 70 footing  14, 18, 135

E European Business Module (EBM)  33 evidentials  14, 94 exemplification  22, 81–84, 115, 135 extra-linguistic features  5, 37, 38, 42, 94, 150, 151, 165, 166, 187, 191

K keyness  131–134 keywords  25, 131–134, 136, 137, 150 kinesics  152, 165, 166, 171, 172, 177

G gaze  94, 108, 165, 166, 171–174, 176, 178–180, 182, 187 genre defined  11, 16 based-studies  3, 16–22, 24, 26, 81, 95-96 chain  13 potential  11 subgenre  62 gestures  5, 94, 151, 152, 155, 165–167, 171–182, 187–188 gestures types beat/underliners  173–175 deictic  173–175 emblems  173–175 iconic  166, 173–174, 178–180 metaphoric  173–174, 178–180 H hard vs. soft knowledge  22, 119, 120 I if-then patterns  123, 124, 148 imperative forms  123–125 interdisciplinary studies  1, 7, 187 interdiscursivity  7, 28–29, 183, 189–190 intertextuality  13, 26, 51, 77 manifest intertextuality  51

L learning styles  3

 The Language of Business Studies Lectures lecture comprehension difficulties for L2 learners  4, 7, 18, 32, 38, 45, 46, 65, 69, 74, 80, 81, 84, 85, 87, 89, 114, 141, 149, 153, 167, 189 way to improve effectiveness  3, 4, 6, 51, 184, 185, 187 lecture listening materials  115, 167, 184–187 lecture styles isolated vs. integrated  33 conversational  50, 52, 53, 57, 76 reading  50 rhetorical  50 impersonal  49 informal  49, 50, 57, 90, 194 interactive  4, 50, 51, 106, 109, 112, 117, 171, 177, 185, 188 participatory  50, 51, 79, 188 podium  117, 177 presentation  159, 190 lemmatization  125, 128, 133, 144, 150 lexical variation  73-74, 76 lexis creative  60, 116, 138, 139, 141, 142, 148, 149, 185, 186 semi-technical  45, 127, 133 technical  23, 45, 127 literacies computer  163 multiple  183, 186, 187 interactional  184 numerical  24, 186, 187 oral  24 visual  25, 163, 186, 187 M meta-argumentative expressions  125–127, 148 metadiscourse  19, 20, 24, 80, 81, 84, 85, 88, 96, 180 metafunctions  11, 95, 127, 143, 152, 180 metaphors liquid  143–147 mechanical  143–150 organic  143–147, 149, 150 root  143, 144, 146, 147 sports  26, 143–147, 149 up/down  143–147, 149 warfare  26, 143–147, 149

metapragmatic expressions  61, 125 MICASE corpus  19, 20, 22, 34, 39, 41, 53, 60–63, 66, 84, 89, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 184 models, mathematical  22, 23, 71, 77, 121–124, 148, 155, 158, 160, 163, 182, 186 move analysis  11, 12, 17, 20, 21, 22, 81 multi-dimensional analysis  13, 20, 22 multi-disciplinary studies  119, 120, 148 multimodality vs. multimediality  152, 153 O orders of discourse  28 P paralinguistic features  37, 94, 151, 165, 166 participant roles  14 participation framework  13, 14 pause fillers  38, 52–54, 74, 78, 89 performance indicator grid  172 phases (lecture structure)  79, 81, 109, 117 phonological reduction  20, 45, 54–56, 184, 189 Powerpoint  4, 154–157, 160, 162, 163, 181, 182 prosody  37, 105, 151, 158, 175 proxemics  166, 171, 177 Q questions audience-oriented vs. content-oriented  105 rhetorical  105 R registers  11, 12, 15, 69, 151 S schema theory  80, 64 scientism  23 situated learning  5, 149 speech genre  15 secondary speech genre  28 speech event  28, 34, 125, 182 speech vs. writing  10–13, 20, 31, 73–76

spoken genres  28, 188, 189, 190, 191 spoken grammar  65 stance  13, 20, 22, 26, 69, 94–96, 185 systemic functional approach  11, 16, 151, 152 T tagging of corpora  41, 42, 44, 74, 75, 100, 101, 188 training for lecturers  184 transactional language  78 transcription multimodal  152, 178, 180 reflexive  37 mark-up  36, 38, 39, 156 T2K-SWAL corpus  20, 22 typological vs. topological  153, 155, 164 V visual periodicity  156, 157 visual typologies figurative  155, 158, 161–164, 181 graphical  155, 158, 160–164, 181, 187 numerical  155, 158, 160, 163, 164, 181, 187 scriptural  155, 158, 159, 162–165, 181, 182 voice recognition technology  36 W word lists  128, 131, 133

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series A complete list of titles in this series can be found on the publishers’ website, www.benjamins.com 163 Lytra, Vally: Play Frames and Social Identities. Contact encounters in a Greek primary school. 2007. 162 Fetzer, Anita (ed.): Context and Appropriateness. Micro meets macro. vi, 260 pp. + index. Expected September 2007 161 Celle, Agnès and Ruth Huart (eds.): Connectives as Discourse Landmarks. viii, 210 pp. + index. Expected August 2007 160 Fetzer, Anita and Gerda Eva Lauerbach (eds.): Political Discourse in the Media. Cross-cultural perspectives. viii, 376 pp. + index. Expected July 2007 159 Maynard, Senko K.: Linguistic Creativity in Japanese Discourse. Exploring the multiplicity of self, perspective, and voice. xiv, 354 pp. + index. Expected July 2007 158 Walker, Terry: Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues. Trials, depositions, and drama comedy. xx, 336 pp. + index. Expected June 2007 157 Crawford Camiciottoli, Belinda: The Language of Business Studies Lectures. A corpus-assisted analysis. 2007. xv, 236 pp. 156 Vega Moreno, Rosa E.: Creativity and Convention. The pragmatics of everyday figurative speech. xii, 243 pp. + index. Expected July 2007 155 Hedberg, Nancy and Ron Zacharski (eds.): The Grammar–Pragmatics Interface. Essays in honor of Jeanette K. Gundel. viii, 435 pp. Expected May 2007 154 Hübler, Axel: The Nonverbal Shift in Early Modern English Conversation. 2007. x, 281 pp. 153 Arnovick, Leslie K.: Written Reliquaries. The resonance of orality in medieval English texts. 2006. xii, 292 pp. 152 Warren, Martin: Features of Naturalness in Conversation. 2006. x, 272 pp. 151 Suzuki, Satoko (ed.): Emotive Communication in Japanese. 2006. x, 234 pp. 150 Busse, Beatrix: Vocative Constructions in the Language of Shakespeare. 2006. xviii, 525 pp. 149 Locher, Miriam A.: Advice Online. Advice-giving in an American Internet health column. 2006. xvi, 277 pp. 148 Fløttum, Kjersti, Trine Dahl and Torodd Kinn: Academic Voices. Across languages and disciplines. 2006. x, 309 pp. 147 Hinrichs, Lars: Codeswitching on the Web. English and Jamaican Creole in e-mail communication. 2006. x, 302 pp. 146 Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa: Collaborating towards Coherence. Lexical cohesion in English discourse. 2006. ix, 192 pp. 145 Kurhila, Salla: Second Language Interaction. 2006. vii, 257 pp. 144 Bührig, Kristin and Jan D. ten Thije (eds.): Beyond Misunderstanding. Linguistic analyses of intercultural communication. 2006. vi, 339 pp. 143 Baker, Carolyn, Michael Emmison and Alan Firth (eds.): Calling for Help. Language and social interaction in telephone helplines. 2005. xviii, 352 pp. 142 Sidnell, Jack: Talk and Practical Epistemology. The social life of knowledge in a Caribbean community. 2005. xvi, 255 pp. 141 Zhu, Yunxia: Written Communication across Cultures. A sociocognitive perspective on business genres. 2005. xviii, 216 pp. 140 Butler, Christopher S., María de los Ángeles Gómez-González and Susana M. Doval-Suárez (eds.): The Dynamics of Language Use. Functional and contrastive perspectives. 2005. xvi, 413 pp. 139 Lakoff, Robin T. and Sachiko Ide (eds.): Broadening the Horizon of Linguistic Politeness. 2005. xii, 342 pp. 138 Müller, Simone: Discourse Markers in Native and Non-native English Discourse. 2005. xviii, 290 pp. 137 Morita, Emi: Negotiation of Contingent Talk. The Japanese interactional particles ne and sa. 2005. xvi, 240 pp. 136 Sassen, Claudia: Linguistic Dimensions of Crisis Talk. Formalising structures in a controlled language. 2005. ix, 230 pp. 135 Archer, Dawn: Questions and Answers in the English Courtroom (1640–1760). A sociopragmatic analysis. 2005. xiv, 374 pp.

134 Skaffari, Janne, Matti Peikola, Ruth Carroll, Risto Hiltunen and Brita Wårvik (eds.): Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past. 2005. x, 418 pp. 133 Marnette, Sophie: Speech and Thought Presentation in French. Concepts and strategies. 2005. xiv, 379 pp. 132 Onodera, Noriko O.: Japanese Discourse Markers. Synchronic and diachronic discourse analysis. 2004. xiv, 253 pp. 131 Janoschka, Anja: Web Advertising. New forms of communication on the Internet. 2004. xiv, 230 pp. 130 Halmari, Helena and Tuija Virtanen (eds.): Persuasion Across Genres. A linguistic approach. 2005. x, 257 pp. 129 Taboada, María Teresa: Building Coherence and Cohesion. Task-oriented dialogue in English and Spanish. 2004. xvii, 264 pp. 128 Cordella, Marisa: The Dynamic Consultation. A discourse analytical study of doctor–patient communication. 2004. xvi, 254 pp. 127 Brisard, Frank, Michael Meeuwis and Bart Vandenabeele (eds.): Seduction, Community, Speech. A Festschrift for Herman Parret. 2004. vi, 202 pp. 126 Wu, Yi’an: Spatial Demonstratives in English and Chinese. Text and Cognition. 2004. xviii, 236 pp. 125 Lerner, Gene H. (ed.): Conversation Analysis. Studies from the first generation. 2004. x, 302 pp. 124 Vine, Bernadette: Getting Things Done at Work. The discourse of power in workplace interaction. 2004. x, 278 pp. 123 Márquez Reiter, Rosina and María Elena Placencia (eds.): Current Trends in the Pragmatics of Spanish. 2004. xvi, 383 pp. 122 González, Montserrat: Pragmatic Markers in Oral Narrative. The case of English and Catalan. 2004. xvi, 410 pp. 121 Fetzer, Anita: Recontextualizing Context. Grammaticality meets appropriateness. 2004. x, 272 pp. 120 Aijmer, Karin and Anna-Brita Stenström (eds.): Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora. 2004. viii, 279 pp. 119 Hiltunen, Risto and Janne Skaffari (eds.): Discourse Perspectives on English. Medieval to modern. 2003. viii, 243 pp. 118 Cheng, Winnie: Intercultural Conversation. 2003. xii, 279 pp. 117 Wu, Ruey-Jiuan Regina: Stance in Talk. A conversation analysis of Mandarin final particles. 2004. xvi, 260 pp. 116 Grant, Colin B. (ed.): Rethinking Communicative Interaction. New interdisciplinary horizons. 2003. viii, 330 pp. 115 Kärkkäinen, Elise: Epistemic Stance in English Conversation. A description of its interactional functions, with a focus on I think. 2003. xii, 213 pp. 114 Kühnlein, Peter, Hannes Rieser and Henk Zeevat (eds.): Perspectives on Dialogue in the New Millennium. 2003. xii, 400 pp. 113 Panther, Klaus-Uwe and Linda L. Thornburg (eds.): Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing. 2003. xii, 285 pp. 112 Lenz, Friedrich (ed.): Deictic Conceptualisation of Space, Time and Person. 2003. xiv, 279 pp. 111 Ensink, Titus and Christoph Sauer (eds.): Framing and Perspectivising in Discourse. 2003. viii, 227 pp. 110 Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. and Alexandra Georgakopoulou (eds.): Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. 2003. viii, 343 pp. 109 Mayes, Patricia: Language, Social Structure, and Culture. A genre analysis of cooking classes in Japan and America. 2003. xiv, 228 pp. 108 Barron, Anne: Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics. Learning how to do things with words in a study abroad context. 2003. xviii, 403 pp. 107 Taavitsainen, Irma and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.): Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. 2003. viii, 446 pp. 106 Busse, Ulrich: Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus. Morpho-syntactic variability of second person pronouns. 2002. xiv, 344 pp. 105 Blackwell, Sarah E.: Implicatures in Discourse. The case of Spanish NP anaphora. 2003. xvi, 303 pp. 104 Beeching, Kate: Gender, Politeness and Pragmatic Particles in French. 2002. x, 251 pp. 103 Fetzer, Anita and Christiane Meierkord (eds.): Rethinking Sequentiality. Linguistics meets conversational interaction. 2002. vi, 300 pp.

102 Leafgren, John: Degrees of Explicitness. Information structure and the packaging of Bulgarian subjects and objects. 2002. xii, 252 pp. 101 Luke, K. K. and Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou (eds.): Telephone Calls. Unity and diversity in conversational structure across languages and cultures. 2002. x, 295 pp. 100 Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. and Ken Turner (eds.): Meaning Through Language Contrast. Volume 2. 2003. viii, 496 pp. 99 Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. and Ken Turner (eds.): Meaning Through Language Contrast. Volume 1. 2003. xii, 388 pp. 98 Duszak, Anna (ed.): Us and Others. Social identities across languages, discourses and cultures. 2002. viii, 522 pp. 97 Maynard, Senko K.: Linguistic Emotivity. Centrality of place, the topic-comment dynamic, and an ideology of pathos in Japanese discourse. 2002. xiv, 481 pp. 96 Haverkate, Henk: The Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Spanish Mood. 2002. vi, 241 pp. 95 Fitzmaurice, Susan M.: The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English. A pragmatic approach. 2002. viii, 263 pp. 94 McIlvenny, Paul (ed.): Talking Gender and Sexuality. 2002. x, 332 pp. 93 Baron, Bettina and Helga Kotthoff (eds.): Gender in Interaction. Perspectives on femininity and masculinity in ethnography and discourse. 2002. xxiv, 357 pp. 92 Gardner, Rod: When Listeners Talk. Response tokens and listener stance. 2001. xxii, 281 pp. 91 Gross, Joan: Speaking in Other Voices. An ethnography of Walloon puppet theaters. 2001. xxviii, 341 pp. 90 Kenesei, István and Robert M. Harnish (eds.): Perspectives on Semantics, Pragmatics, and Discourse. A Festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer. 2001. xxii, 352 pp. 89 Itakura, Hiroko: Conversational Dominance and Gender. A study of Japanese speakers in first and second language contexts. 2001. xviii, 231 pp. 88 Bayraktaroğlu, Arın and Maria Sifianou (eds.): Linguistic Politeness Across Boundaries. The case of Greek and Turkish. 2001. xiv, 439 pp. 87 Mushin, Ilana: Evidentiality and Epistemological Stance. Narrative Retelling. 2001. xviii, 244 pp. 86 Ifantidou, Elly: Evidentials and Relevance. 2001. xii, 225 pp. 85 Collins, Daniel E.: Reanimated Voices. Speech reporting in a historical-pragmatic perspective. 2001. xx, 384 pp. 84 Andersen, Gisle: Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation. A relevance-theoretic approach to the language of adolescents. 2001. ix, 352 pp. 83 Márquez Reiter, Rosina: Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay. A contrastive study of requests and apologies. 2000. xviii, 225 pp. 82 Khalil, Esam N.: Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse. 2000. x, 274 pp. 81 Di Luzio, Aldo, Susanne Günthner and Franca Orletti (eds.): Culture in Communication. Analyses of intercultural situations. 2001. xvi, 341 pp. 80 Ungerer, Friedrich (ed.): English Media Texts – Past and Present. Language and textual structure. 2000. xiv, 286 pp. 79 Andersen, Gisle and Thorstein Fretheim (eds.): Pragmatic Markers and Propositional Attitude. 2000. viii, 273 pp. 78 Sell, Roger D.: Literature as Communication. The foundations of mediating criticism. 2000. xiv, 348 pp. 77 Vanderveken, Daniel and Susumu Kubo (eds.): Essays in Speech Act Theory. 2002. vi, 328 pp. 76 Matsui, Tomoko: Bridging and Relevance. 2000. xii, 251 pp. 75 Pilkington, Adrian: Poetic Effects. A relevance theory perspective. 2000. xiv, 214 pp. 74 Trosborg, Anna (ed.): Analysing Professional Genres. 2000. xvi, 256 pp. 73 Hester, Stephen K. and David Francis (eds.): Local Educational Order. Ethnomethodological studies of knowledge in action. 2000. viii, 326 pp. 72 Marmaridou, Sophia S.A.: Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition. 2000. xii, 322 pp. 71 Gómez-González, María de los Ángeles: The Theme–Topic Interface. Evidence from English. 2001. xxiv, 438 pp. 70 Sorjonen, Marja-Leena: Responding in Conversation. A study of response particles in Finnish. 2001. x, 330 pp. 69 Noh, Eun-Ju: Metarepresentation. A relevance-theory approach. 2000. xii, 242 pp.

68 Arnovick, Leslie K.: Diachronic Pragmatics. Seven case studies in English illocutionary development. 2000. xii, 196 pp. 67 Taavitsainen, Irma, Gunnel Melchers and Päivi Pahta (eds.): Writing in Nonstandard English. 2000. viii, 404 pp. 66 Jucker, Andreas H., Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.): Historical Dialogue Analysis. 1999. viii, 478 pp. 65 Cooren, François: The Organizing Property of Communication. 2000. xvi, 272 pp. 64 Svennevig, Jan: Getting Acquainted in Conversation. A study of initial interactions. 2000. x, 384 pp. 63 Bublitz, Wolfram, Uta Lenk and Eija Ventola (eds.): Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse. How to create it and how to describe it. Selected papers from the International Workshop on Coherence, Augsburg, 24-27 April 1997. 1999. xiv, 300 pp. 62 Tzanne, Angeliki: Talking at Cross-Purposes. The dynamics of miscommunication. 2000. xiv, 263 pp. 61 Mills, Margaret H. (ed.): Slavic Gender Linguistics. 1999. xviii, 251 pp. 60 Jacobs, Geert: Preformulating the News. An analysis of the metapragmatics of press releases. 1999. xviii, 428 pp. 59 Kamio, Akio and Ken-ichi Takami (eds.): Function and Structure. In honor of Susumu Kuno. 1999. x, 398 pp. 58 Rouchota, Villy and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.): Current Issues in Relevance Theory. 1998. xii, 368 pp. 57 Jucker, Andreas H. and Yael Ziv (eds.): Discourse Markers. Descriptions and theory. 1998. x, 363 pp. 56 Tanaka, Hiroko: Turn-Taking in Japanese Conversation. A Study in Grammar and Interaction. 2000. xiv, 242 pp. 55 Allwood, Jens and Peter Gärdenfors (eds.): Cognitive Semantics. Meaning and cognition. 1999. x, 201 pp. 54 Hyland, Ken: Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. 1998. x, 308 pp. 53 Mosegaard Hansen, Maj-Britt: The Function of Discourse Particles. A study with special reference to spoken standard French. 1998. xii, 418 pp. 52 Gillis, Steven and Annick De Houwer (eds.): The Acquisition of Dutch. With a Preface by Catherine E. Snow. 1998. xvi, 444 pp. 51 Boulima, Jamila: Negotiated Interaction in Target Language Classroom Discourse. 1999. xiv, 338 pp. 50 Grenoble, Lenore A.: Deixis and Information Packaging in Russian Discourse. 1998. xviii, 338 pp. 49 Kurzon, Dennis: Discourse of Silence. 1998. vi, 162 pp. 48 Kamio, Akio: Territory of Information. 1997. xiv, 227 pp. 47 Chesterman, Andrew: Contrastive Functional Analysis. 1998. viii, 230 pp. 46 Georgakopoulou, Alexandra: Narrative Performances. A study of Modern Greek storytelling. 1997. xvii, 282 pp. 45 Paltridge, Brian: Genre, Frames and Writing in Research Settings. 1997. x, 192 pp. 44 Bargiela-Chiappini, Francesca and Sandra J. Harris: Managing Language. The discourse of corporate meetings. 1997. ix, 295 pp. 43 Janssen, Theo and Wim van der Wurff (eds.): Reported Speech. Forms and functions of the verb. 1996. x, 312 pp. 42 Kotthoff, Helga and Ruth Wodak (eds.): Communicating Gender in Context. 1997. xxvi, 424 pp. 41 Ventola, Eija and Anna Mauranen (eds.): Academic Writing. Intercultural and textual issues. 1996. xiv, 258 pp. 40 Diamond, Julie: Status and Power in Verbal Interaction. A study of discourse in a close-knit social network. 1996. viii, 184 pp. 39 Herring, Susan C. (ed.): Computer-Mediated Communication. Linguistic, social, and cross-cultural perspectives. 1996. viii, 326 pp. 38 Fretheim, Thorstein and Jeanette K. Gundel (eds.): Reference and Referent Accessibility. 1996. xii, 312 pp. 37 Carston, Robyn and Seiji Uchida (eds.): Relevance Theory. Applications and implications. 1998. x, 300 pp. 36 Chilton, Paul, Mikhail V. Ilyin and Jacob L. Mey (eds.): Political Discourse in Transition in Europe 1989–1991. 1998. xi, 272 pp.