Multimodality for comprehensive communication in the classroom: Questions in guest lectures

Abstract

In recent years there have been many studies about the discourse of lectures (Pérez-Llantada & Ferguson, 2006; Csomay, 2007; Deroey & Taverniers, 2011). Lecturing is the most common speech event in most university classrooms in the world. Bamford (2005) defines lectures’ styles as conversational, stressing the interactive nature of the lecture, the main goal of which is to establish contact with the students, and the co-option of the students into a discourse community. However, most of the studies published up to this moment have focused exclusively on the language used by the lecturer and little attention has been paid to the role of multimodality in this particular genre. In our research, we try to identify the non-verbal behaviour that can be of special relevance for the comprehensive communication in the classroom, focusing on questions in two guest lectures in English delivered for a group of Spanish students. Results indicate that both lecturers use different verbal and non-verbal strategies to foster interaction, adapting to the characteristics of their audience. The final objective of this study is twofold: i) to use the results in our courses for training Spanish lecturers on teaching in English; and ii) to use these results for EAP undergraduate courses, as it has been observed that body language needs awareness raising in order to facilitate transfer from mother tongue to another language.