Building Successful Communication in EMI Contexts: A Multimodal Approach to Organizational Metadiscourse in Intercultural Lectures

Abstract

Higher education (HE) has experienced a swift internationalization process in the last decade, introducing English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in many universities. This new reality brings about novel challenges for content lecturers as they adapt to a new way of teaching in English for intercultural audiences. Following Ädel’s (2010) taxonomy of metadiscourse, this paper aims to explore the use of organizational metadiscourse in EMI lectures to foster successful communicative interaction and engagement. Assuming that all communication is multimodal, i.e., meaning is conveyed through the combination of several semiotic resources, this paper sets out to go beyond traditional linguistic studies in order to examine the multimodal use of organizational metadiscourse in lectures. To carry out this analysis, three 90-minute-long videorecorded EMI lectures taught at Universitat Jaume I (Spain) were selected, transcribed and manually inspected to account for all instances of organizational metadiscourse. Next, six structuring segments were chosen, i. e. sections within the lectures in which the contents are being organized. Using the software Multimodal Analysis Video, interactions between speech (organizational metadiscourse) and paralanguage, gestures, gaze, proxemics, head movement and facial expression were examined. Finally, the findings were presented to the lecturers in the recordings to obtain an insight perspective. Results show the active utilization of complex multimodal ensembles co-occurring with organizational metadiscourse. These ensembles reveal an underlying aim of achieving successful communication, by accommodating language to a non-native intercultural audience, and engaging the audience. Lastly, these results are interpreted and pedagogical implications for teacher training are put forward.