Language and Education

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Browsing Language and Education by Author "Askarizadeh, Amin"

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    Patterns of lecturing style and interactiveness in science and engineering lectures
    (Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 2018) Askarizadeh, Amin
    Interactional features and lecturing style are two important factors which affect lecture comprehension, but there is hardly any study on these two aspects in the context of Malaysian university lectures which use English as a medium of instruction. Therefore, it is important that lectures should be delivered interactively so to improve lecture comprehension. Due to these aspects, this research investigated the level of interactiveness, interactive features, and lecturing style as well as the relationship between the level of interactiveness and interactive features, and the relationship between the level of interactiveness and the lecturing style of undergraduate science and engineering lectures at a Malaysian university. 13 lectures from science and engineering disciplines were video recorded, transcribed and analysed. The level of interactiveness of each lecture was calculated based on Biber, Conrad, Reppen, Byrd and Helt’s framework. Different types of interactive features including referential questions, indirect questions, rhetorical questions, display questions, clarification requests, confirmation checks, comprehension checks, repetitions and directives were tagged. The linguistic elements of each identified feature were elicited and consequently their frequency was calculated and compared with the level of interactiveness. Saroyan and Snell’s framework which was designed to identify the lecturing style for medical science discipline was then integrated and consequently the lecturing styles of all lectures were calculated and compared with the level of interactiveness. The results show that the level of interactiveness of lectures in the science discipline ranges from low to high, but the level of interactiveness in the engineering discipline is at least at a medium level. Among various types of interactive features used, engineering lecturers employed indirect questions more frequently than other types, while science lecturers used rhetorical questions the most. Lectures with low to medium level of interactiveness mostly featured self-repetitions, rhetorical questions, and indirect questions, while those with high level of interactiveness showed indirect questions, confirmation checks and comprehension checks. The results also show that content-driven lecturing style is more common in the science discipline, whereas content, context or pedagogy-driven style is more common in the engineering lectures. In terms of the relationship between level of interactiveness and lecturing style, pedagogy and context-driven lectures have either medium or high level of interactiveness, whereas content-driven lectures can either have low, medium or high level of interactiveness. These findings could be useful for instructional training programs that help prepare lecturers to deliver more comprehensible lectures in English at tertiary level