Topic Signaling Metadiscourse Devices in the Tunisian Lecture Corpus

Identifying main topics is a major academic listening skill that students should develop to efficiently follow and learn from lectures. They should construct a coherent cognitive map of the lecture that they can use to understand and discuss its content. This paper examines topic signaling metadiscourse devices (MDs) in the Tunisian Lecture Corpus (TLC), a corpus of academic lectures delivered in English in the disciplines of Applied Linguistics, Cultural Studies, and Literature. The approach adopted was both qualitative and quantitative relying on the manual coding of the data following three major stages: the design of topic hierarchies, the coding of discourse structuring phases, and the identification of MDs used to signal topics. One finding was the variety of MDs used to introduce topics in TLC. Phenomena related to the use of these devices were also reported and reflected an audience-oriented approach. Potential issues uncovered included absence and ambiguity of marking as well as embedding. These findings are discussed particularly with reference to their pedagogical implications, as the data and its analysis can be used to design professional development programs for lecturers and academic materials to support English majors when attending lectures in Tunisia.