Looking into English-medium instruction teachers’ metadiscourse: An ELF perspective

Abstract

Metadiscourse plays a key role in teachers’ attempts to ease and maximize knowledge transmission. This role is particularly important in the context of English-medium instruction (EMI), where teachers face the challenge of transmitting knowledge to students via a foreign language in an accessible way and students tend to find their lectures difficult to understand.

The present study addresses the use of spoken interactive metadiscourse markers by EMI non-native teachers from an English as a lingua franca perspective (ELF), an innovative approach in contrast to previous studies that tended to include native English as the reference language and model. The study compares Chinese and Spanish lecturers, and aims to analyze how teachers organize and construct knowledge through interactive metadiscourse in their classes so that it becomes accessible for their students. Four history teachers at a Spanish university were videorecorded and their use of interactive metadiscourse resources compared following the same procedure used by Zhang and Lo (2021) in the Chinese context. Our study revealed that the teachers followed a similar general trend in the use of metadiscourse patterns regardless of the context. However, noticeable differences in the specific linguistic realizations were also attested depending on the teachers’ L1.