The Use of Metadiscourse Markers in the Spoken Discourse of Different EMI Disciplines

Abstract

Metadiscourse (MD) allows instructors to organize classroom discourse and reflect their own style while delivering the content. MD has been studied for years, especially with a focus on written contexts even though the number of studies conducted on spoken contexts in different educational settings has a tendency to increase. With the increasing spread of English medium instruction (EMI) across the world, the role of MD in EMI classroom discourse has become a field of research that is worth investigating. Concerning the Turkish context, MD has recently been a popular research area, but there are limited number of studies conducted the examination of MD in spoken interactions in the Turkish context. To this end, the current study aims to investigate the distribution and lexicogrammatical realizations of metadiscourse markers employed by the lecturers in the spoken discourse of different EMI courses. A corpus-based discourse analysis was carried out by referring to Ädel’s (2010) framework of metadiscourse. The qualitative and quantitative analyses of the corpus collected from 36 hours of lesson observation have revealed some variations in both the distribution and realization of metadiscursive categories in different EMI courses.