DESPACHO DE ENERGÍA

Academia is a world of its own with identifiable genres. In reference to studies on academic discourses, it is necessary to note that there are “no native speakers of academic discourses”

(Mauranen et al., 2010: 8). Once the students have been socialized into academia, prior knowledge and genre (see Section 2.1) provide the scaffolding which helps the students with comprehension. Naturally, the topics and general issues discussed in lectures, group work, seminars, and other academic events are also partially known to most, if not all, participants, which further fosters understanding.

ELF in academia has been investigated through several approaches. The more holistic, comprehension-related studies (Klaassen, 2001; Airey, 2009; Hellekjaer, 2010) offer contradicting results. While Klaassen concluded that after a year of having studied in a program where the instruction was conducted in ELF, the students had adapted to EMI, both Airey and Hellekjaer pointed out several disadvantages of EMI and how students should be provided English instruction regarding lecture structure and other aspects of lectures for better lecture comprehension while lecturers need guidance on delivering well-structured lectures. Hellekjaer’s study showed that students often employ various strategies to succeed in EMI. These strategies include asking questions after the lecture (as students feel apprehensive speaking English during the lecture), reading on the lecture topic, perhaps the lecture notes, prior to the lecture, as well as after the lecture. All these appear to be the type of strategies we would encourage all students to engage in, regardless of the lecturing language, to allow for a deeper understanding of the lectured topic.

To further review the studies conducted on EMI and ELF, Björkman (2010) found that lecturers in a large technical university in Sweden did not use pragmatic strategies, such as repetition, questions, and commenting, to the extent students in the same university did.

Naturally, the students’ language use situations were different from lectures, which influences these results. Several studies have also shown that since the use of pragmatic strategies is seen as useful for enhancing understanding and preventing misunderstanding, the presence of these strategies in discourse is beneficial to its success (Mauranen, 2006;

Kaur, 2009; Cogo, 2009).

Björkman (2010) further pointed out that, for example, the frequency of questions in her technical university data is low, which is similar to findings by Thompson (1998), who compared the presence of questions in NS academic monologues in two different disciplines, linguistics and applied science, and found that the latter contained far fewer questions. Although Thompson’s study concerned NS lecturers, the similarity in the use of pragmatic strategies in similar disciplines is interesting. Based on Thompson’s study and her own findings, Björkman drew a conclusion that the use of pragmatic strategies, such as questions, is uncommon in engineering lectures held in ELF (in her data).

Comprehension of lectures has been investigated to a large extent in situations where lecturers are NSs. Most of these studies (Thompson, 1998; Mulligan and Kirkpatrick, 2000;

Morell, 2004; Bamford, 2005; Flowerdew and Miller, 1997) examine how the NNS students manage in the lectures held by NSs. The ways in which lecture comprehension is measured include note taking and evaluation of the notes, on-line summaries, multiple-choice and cloze tests, written recollection of the lecture, and identifying the main points of the lecture.

To investigate an example of these NS lecturer studies in more detail, I reviewed Mulligan and Kirkpatrick’s (2000) study. They examined lecture comprehension of both NS and NNS students in an Australian university Mulligan and Kirkpatrick also included in-class observations, student questionnaires, and interviews, while the above mentioned studies did not include student perception of the lectures. The class-observation focused on students’

note-taking while questionnaires and interviews provided students’ perception of the situation. The NNS students felt that the lecturers’ speech rate was high and that cultural issues, such as idioms and references to culturally biased examples, interfered with comprehension of the lectures. When contrasting this situation with a NNS lecturer, these types of problems may have been non-existent. Naturally, when students first enter the university they have to be socialized into academia, but that remains the case regardless of the language and cultural background.

The above mentioned studies tend to rely on right and wrong responses (e.g. multiple choice, cloze tests) as well as on memory (on-line summaries, note taking). These types of

measurements focus their evaluation on surface rather than deeper comprehension (Biggs, 1999) and may provide results which do not reflect the actual comprehension scenario. It is problematic to find a way in which to measure comprehension. An approach which draws on students’ own perception of comprehension may provide a more reliable view on students’ comprehension of lectures since even quizzes or exams on the content of the lecture may not render a completely truthful picture of student comprehension.

This section reviewed what ELF is and how it is used both in general and in academia.

Especially due to the ever increasing internationalization, investigating ELF in general and in academia is pertinent. This is reflected in the foci of the most recent studies which, for the academia, tend to be conducted in the Nordic countries while the more generally oriented studies are also conducted elsewhere.

To summarize how genre, interaction, and ELF are approached in the present study, Figure 2.5 below attempts to conceptualize this.

Figure 2.5 Genre, Interaction and ELF as Approached in the Present Study

There are several genres within academia and, for the sake of clarity, this illustration shows only the ones discussed here. The lecture genre is the stage or the platform which is the focus of interest in the present study; more specifically, lectures held in ELF and linguistic features in them. Genre is viewed as a combination of Swales’s (1990) and Mauranen’s (1993) views: it is formed by both the members of the discourse community as well as defined by the genre itself.

Interaction¹² is approached from a Bakhtinian (1986) aspect, i.e. all language use is seen to be dialogic. Finally, ELF is viewed in its strict sense: as a lingua franca among those who do not share a common language. A presence of a few native speakers, however, is not seen to change the ELF communication into EIL or some other communication.

All of these have been the focus of interest in various studies. Genre has the longest history as a topic of investigations while ELF is the most recent of them. For the purpose of the present study, these three concepts set a scene: genre is where something occurs while interaction is what is being investigated and ELF is the medium through which the interaction occurs.

12 Interaction is discussed here as part of the conceptual framework, although the focus on it was a result of the phasal study of the present Master’s Program.