The role of questions in English Academic lectures

Abstract

In recent times, researchers have shown an increased interest in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). One outstanding genre within spoken academic English is lectures; whose different linguistic and discoursal features of this discourse have already received the attention of some scholars. One aspect studied in the research of academic lectures is the strategies employed to enhance the speaker-audience relationship. Among them, the use of questions has been a recurrent feature of investigation. The aim of this study is to make a revision of three previously proposed fuctional classifications of teacher's questions (Fortanet 2004, Thompson 1998, and Tsui 1992), in an attempt to look for common ground that permits their integration. To achieve this, I have analyzed six lectures from the MICASE (The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English), a total of 51,523 words of two disciplines Biological and Health Science, and Humanities and Arts. The results provide a single taxonomy where the categories proposed by these authors are included, some changes are suggested, and new groups of questions are provided