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Analyzing Discourse in EMI Courses from an ELF Perspective

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English as a Lingua Franca in Japan

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Abstract

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

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The authors are aware that the corpus represents norms of L1 speakers’ English, but the corpus-based approach is relevant to and useful for the current study.

  2. 2.

    An n-gram is used in corpus linguistics to predict the next vocabulary item in a sequence in the form of n − 1. For example, in a sample sequence applied linguistics is fun, one-gram sequence consists of applied, linguistics, is, fun, two-gram sequence of applied linguistics, linguistics is, is fun, and three-gram sequence of applied linguistics is, linguistics is fun.

  3. 3.

    Table 4 shows that explanation was more frequently used, but since we coded the utterances other than paraphrase, example, repetition, confirmation as explanation, which we usually expect to be frequent in academic lectures, we did not include explanation in the discussion here.

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Acknowledgements

This study has been supported by the Waseda Institute for Advanced Studies in Education (General Committee on IASE Research Projects, B-11 for 2018 and B-01 for 2019), and jointly done with Prof. Yasuyo Sawaki in the Faculty of Education and Integrated Arts and Sciences and Ms. Kana Matsumura in the Graduate School of Education. We thank the three instructors for allowing us to observe and videotape their lectures.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education and Integrated Arts and Sciences, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan

    Tetsuo Harada

  2. Graduate School of Education, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan

    Ryo Moriya

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  1. Tetsuo Harada
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  2. Ryo Moriya
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Correspondence to Tetsuo Harada .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, Kanda University of International Studies, Chiba, Japan

    Mayu Konakahara

  2. International College of Arts and Sciences, Yokohama City University, Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan

    Keiko Tsuchiya

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Harada, T., Moriya, R. (2020). Analyzing Discourse in EMI Courses from an ELF Perspective. In: Konakahara, M., Tsuchiya, K. (eds) English as a Lingua Franca in Japan. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33288-4_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33288-4_7

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