Metadiscourse in EMI lectures: Reflections on a Small Corpus of Spoken Academic Discourse

This paper presents an initial study of an aspect of EMI spoken discourse that deserves attention, namely, metadiscourse. We analyse a corpus of four EMI lessons to observe how the lecturers structure their discourse, with particular focus on connectives, framing markers, code glosses and self-mentions. The study details how the range of metadiscursive types used to organise the lectures is rather narrow, and that self-mentions occur frequently as a strategy to render the lecture less formal. It suggests that EMI lecturers could benefit from some training in the area of metadiscourse markers to enhance the clarity of their discourse, and enliven and vary their oral production.