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Pragmatics and Society: Online-First Articles

‘Like to comment on that?’

Student-oriented questions in British and Montenegrin university linguistics lectures

ORCID logo | Univerzitet Crne Gore Nikšić
| Univerzitet Crne Gore Nikšić
Questions are powerful interactional devices which academic lecturers may use to facilitate learning, engage students and add to a lecture’s interactivity. This contrastive and corpus-based study examines student-oriented questions, i.e. those initiating a student response, in British and Montenegrin university linguistics lectures. It aims to answer research questions regarding what forms of this question category are employed; how frequent they are, what functions they commonly perform, and whether there are any similarities and differences in these respects between the two groups of lectures. The data include 12 lectures in linguistics from several British academic corpora and a specially created corpus of 12 Montenegrin linguistics lectures. We combine quantitative and qualitative approaches to arrive at results which point to certain similarities and differences between the corpora. Some of these might be explained by the language differences between English and BCMS (Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian), while others seem to have stemmed from academic lecturing style differences. The findings add to the literature on questions in academic lectures and, together with other contrastive studies, may contribute to revealing the universal and culturally-specific discourse features of academic lectures across academic cultures, as well as be pedagogically useful for lecturers, particularly novices, who are teaching linguistics in English and BCMS.
Keywords: university lectures, linguistics lectures, student-oriented questions, academic discourse, lecture interactivity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Studies on questions in academic lectures
  • 3.Academic culture
  • 4.Research questions
  • 5.Methodology
    • 5.1The corpus
    • 5.2Analytical steps
  • 6.Results and analysis
    • 6.1Imperatives
    • 6.2Incomplete declarative + a pause
    • 6.3Wh-interrogatives
    • 6.4Yes/No interrogatives
    • 6.5Multiple interrogatives
    • 6.6Incomplete interrogatives
    • 6.7Declaratives with a question word/phrase at the end
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
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