The Present Study

The previous summary in 2.2.3 has pointed out the limitations of the existing studies on the move structures of academic lectures, including the restricted analyses on move structures of certain phases in academic lectures, the underexplored issue of potential disciplinary influence on the move structure of academic lectures, and the limited number of lectures investigated in the existing studies. These issues and limitations have motivated the present study to more extensively research the move structure of academic lectures and to address the issues point by point.

To address the first issue that the exiting studies only investigated the move structure of certain phases, such as lecture introductions (Lee, 2009; Thompson, 1994), and lecture closings (Chang, 2012), the present study thus attempts to analyze the move structure of academic lectures in their entirety. That is, the move structure of entire academic lectures, including the beginning, the main body, and the ending phases are analyzed in the present study. In doing so, a framework of the move structure of academic lectures in their entirety can be generated, which can be further adopted to facilitate EAP teaching and learning, as well as teacher education. For example, EAP students can be taught how academic lectures are rhetorically

organized with different moves and learn how to recognize them, which in turn could improve students’ lecture comprehension. For teacher education, the proposed move

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structure could provide non-native or novice lecturers with an outline to organize their lectures, which could facilitate their lesson-planning process. Also, the proposed move structure can also serve as a reference for future studies on larger-scaled analysis of the move structure of academic lectures.

In terms of the second issue that the existing studies only investigated a very limited number of lectures to generate move structure of academic lectures, the present study thus aims to collect a larger number of academic lectures for the present analysis of move structure. The number of academic lectures for the present analysis is higher than the existing studies, including the eighteen lectures analyzed by Thompson (1994), the ten lectures analyzed by Lee (2009), and the four lectures analyzed by Samraj and Petrovic (2015). With a larger number of lectures analyzed in their entirety in terms of the move structure, this study has the potential to expand the current understanding of the move structure of academic lectures and to demonstrate more details regarding the rhetorical strategies applied by lecturers in academic lectures.

Lastly, the issue that needs to be further addressed is the potential disciplinary variations in terms of the move structure of academic lectures. The existing studies either only focus on rhetorical move structures in lectures of one specific discipline, such as Petrovic and Samraj (2015) on four law lectures, or on lectures from various

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disciplines without considering possible disciplinary variations in terms of rhetorical move structures, such as Thompson’s (1994) research on eighteen lectures from the disciplines of applied linguistics, engineering, and medicine, and Lee’s (2009) research on ten lectures from a variety of disciplines, such as biology, history, psychology, and literature.

However, disciplinary variations have been found in academic written genres in terms of the use of lexical bundles and their discourse functions (Cortes, 2013;

Durrant, 2017). Differences across disciplines have also been revealed in academic lectures, in terms of teaching styles, patterns of class structures, the use of questions, attribution expressions, and lecture functions (e.g., Ädel 2008; Brown & Bakhtar, 1988; Chang, 2012; Deroey & Taverniers, 2011; Dudley-Evans, 1994; Flowerdew &

Miller, 1995; Neumann, 2001). Whether there are disciplinary variations in terms of move structures across different disciplines should also be further investigated in order to more extensively understand the lecture genre.

To address this issue and explore whether academic discipline could influence the move structure of academic lectures, the present study thus primarily targets on two disciplines, with one from the soft science and the other from the hard science disciplines, to explore whether there are disciplinary variations in terms of move structure of academic lectures. To make the data collection process more objective

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and systematic, the present study also established a number of selection criteria for lectures for analysis, such as the length of lecture and the position of lecturer.

Such exploration could provide pedagogical insights into teaching lecture comprehension to EAP students from different disciplinary fields. If the rhetorical move structures in lectures vary greatly across disciplines, EAP teachers may need to take students’ disciplinary fields into consideration and provide discipline-specific instructions on lecture comprehension to students of different disciplinary fields.

In addition to examining the lecture genre from a top-down perspective in terms of its overall move structure to improve non-native students’ lecture comprehension and knowledge of the lecture genre, frequently-occurring bottom-up linguistic

features are as important. Previous studies (Biber & Barbieri, 2007; Biber et al., 2004) indicate that lexical bundles are one of the prevalent, frequently-appearing linguistic features in academic lectures which also play important roles in organizing the lecture discourse by performing a variety of discourse functions. They are also essential to students’ listening comprehension (Neely & Cortes, 2009), because they can serve as discourse signals for students to “predict the nature of upcoming ideas and

information” (Nesi & Basturkmen, 2006, p. 301) and help students to follow the overall structure of a lecture more easily (Neely & Cortes, 2009; Csomay & Cortes, 2010). Unable to recognize them or understand their functions in lectures could affect

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students’ overall lecture comprehension (Goh, 2013), as well as influence how successfully they can deal with various language situations in the university context (Biber & Barbieri, 2007). Without doubt, lexical bundles are essential to students’

lecture comprehension since they can serve as signals for students to better see the structure of a lecture and organize the received information. It is thus worth examining the frequent lexical bundles in different phases of academic lectures to equip students with linguistic clues so they will be more likely to recognize the lecture structure and construct their own mental map for better lecture comprehension.

Therefore, the present study also attempts to identify the frequent lexical bundles in academic lectures and explores how they help structure different lecture phases.

Although there have been some studies on lexical bundles in academic lectures, they mainly focus on the local functions that lexical bundles perform on a sentence level.

How they help structure academic lectures in a global level have been underexplored.

Thus, the present study also explores the role of lexical bundles in structuring

different lecture phases. The finding could have the potential to provide pedagogically useful implication through providing a list of the lexical bundles frequently occurring in different phases. It would be easier for non-native students to recognize the move structure in a lecture after learning the frequent lexical bundles in different lecture phases.

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Overall, the present study aims to address the issues of the existing studies on rhetorical move structure of academic lectures as well as explore the role of lexical bundles in structuring academic lectures by analyzing a larger number of academic lectures of different disciplines. In addition to the potential insights the present study could provide into genre analysis of academic lectures, lexical studies on lexical bundles, EAP teaching and learning, and teacher education, moreover, this study may also have the potential to shed light on EMI instruction.

Previous studies on EMI teachers’ language use in lectures (Chen, 2017;

Gustafsson, 2018) have identified many language functions and rhetorical strategies, such as clarifying and eliciting factual knowledge, accomplished by a phrase or a stretch of discourse. Some of them are in fact quite similar to the functions of some move/step categories identified, such as the function “clarifying” (Gustafsson, 2018) and the step “explain the topic” (Samraj & Petrovic, 2015), the strategy “explain lesson aim” (Chen, 2017) and the step “presenting the aims” (Lee, 2009; Thompson, 1994), and the strategy “remind students what they should already know, or relate the lesson to prior knowledge” (Chen, 2017), and the step “relating ‘new’ to ‘given’”

(Lee, 2009; Thompson, 1994). These parallel examples suggest that the rhetorical functions appearing in EMI lectures and academic lectures are similar to some extent.

That is, the move structure identified in the present study may also have the potential

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to help EMI teachers to see more potential rhetorical functions in lectures and how they can be rhetorically structured, in turn facilitating EMI teachers’ lesson planning.

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