A corpus-based study of lecture functions

Abstract

Despite the importance of lectures in higher education, relatively little is known about lecture discourse. To contribute to our understanding of this genre, we present a comprehensive overview of lecture functions, i.e. what lecturers use language for. The functional overview is based on a qualitative analysis of lectures from the British Academic Spoken English Corpus and findings from existing research. Six main functions were identified: informing, elaborating, evaluating, organizing discourse, interacting and managing the class. This functional analysis of the lecture genre should be of interest to both genre analysts in the field of academic discourse and English for Academic Purposes practitioners.