An ELF-Oriented Corpus-Based Analysis into the EMI Lecturers’ Use of Spatial Deixis across Two Different Teaching Media

Abstract

In the last two decades, English-Medium Instruction (EMI) has fast increased in non-Anglophone universities, with the result that non-native English speaker (NNES) lecturers are increasingly using English as a lingua franca (ELF) to interact with their NNES students in the classroom. As such, EMI represents “a prototypical ELF scenario” (Smit 2017, 387). This paper identifies and describes language variations that occurred in EMI lecturers’ talk in a comparable corpus of six EMI engineering lectures taught in two different teaching modalities: in-person and virtual synchronous classrooms. By means of a corpus-based methodology, this study particularly focuses on lexical spatial deixis as it allows the lecturer to direct students’ attention towards a common referent so as to ensure students’ comprehension and participation (Hyland 2005). The findings indicate that the use of proximal deictics differs according to the context, with interactional and pedagogical implications beyond EMI.