| Summary: | 碩士 === 元智大學 === 應用外語學系 === 101 === In the field of English for academic purposes (EAP), the spoken genre of academic lectures has become the focus of an ever increasing number of studies. This is due to an increase in the availability of corpora of spoken academic English, the increased use of English as a medium of instruction in tertiary educational institutes in ESL/EFL countries, and the importance of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in the academic realm. In this important academic genre, researchers have explored possible generic features of lectures, and linguistic features and devices that aid in students’ lecture comprehension.
The linguistic feature of metadiscourse is one of the features that have been the foci of EAP studies in recent years. However, the majority of EAP studies have investigated metadiscourse in the written academic genres, while very few have investigated its use in the spoken academic genre of lectures. Even fewer studies have made a comparison of the use of metadiscourse in lectures given by non-native English speaking lecturers using ELF (ELF lecturers) and native English speaking lecturers (NES lecturers). Thus, this study aims to provide a deeper understanding of metadiscourse in academic lectures by comparing the similarities and differences in the use of metadiscoursal functions in six engineering lectures given by ELF lectures and six engineering lectures given by NES lecturers.
The results indicate that metadiscourse is fairly prevalent in academic lectures and that there is a strong tendency for lecturers to favor metadiscourse that is discourse-oriented. Comparing the ELF and NES lecturers’ functional use of metadiscourse, it is found that there are marked similarities in terms of preferred functions of metadiscourse, and small differences in terms of the relative frequencies of functions of metadiscourse. The similarities of preferred functions are argued to result from the strong influence of the major communicative purpose of the lecture genre, whereas the differences in relative frequency of the individual functions are argued to be influenced by the native language of audience, the language background of the lecturer, and the use of computer technology in the classroom by the lecturer.
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