Modal density in structuring segments containing organizational metadiscourse versus content sequences

Abstract

Organizational metadiscourse in lectures helps to facilitate comprehension and is frequently found in structuring segments placed in between content sequences. In contrast, content sequences are those parts of the discourse which carry the main ideas to be developed in the lecture. Although there is ample literature that explores the use of metadiscourse in lectures, to the best of our knowledge, no previous research has compared both parts of the monological classroom discourse with regard to the semiotic resources used by lecturers. Thus, this paper aims to compare and contrast structuring segments and content sequences with a focus on the use of multimodal resources. In order to do so, six structuring segments with a high number of organizational metadiscourse instances and six content sequences from six different lectures have been selected. These lectures are face-to-face recorded sessions that belong to Humanities courses at Yale University OpenCourseWare. Through the observation of short clips and multimodal transcriptions using the software Multimodal Analysis Video, I present quantitative and qualitative data that provides evidence that organizational metadiscourse is most often co-expressed with non-verbal resources in structuring segments, which contributes to emphasizing the connections across the contents, and to engaging the audience. In other words, structuring segments appear to be more modally dense than content sequences.