Formulación Hamiltoniana

As more and more students have started to study in the medium of English, especially at tertiary level, the ability to comprehend academic lectures has been a challenge for those students (Flowerdew and Miller, 1992). A lecture, among other instructional media, is considered to be a central instructional activity (Flowerdew, 1994) and is the most common means of conveying the content knowledge to students in Sri Lankan universities.

Boyle (1984) identified three major factors that influence ESL students’ listening ability, these are: listener factors, speaker factors and factors in the material and medium. While Boyle’s classification is suitable for ESL classes, in content classes problems in lecture comprehension occur for several reasons. They may occur as a result of the existing mismatch between students’ and lecturers’ expectations, lack of understanding of students’ problems, strategies lecturers adopt (Flowerdew et al., 2000). They also occur due to reasons that are related to lecturers’ personal attributes such as speed of delivery, accent, interpersonal factors, etc. as well as students’ poor

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linguistic abilities such as poor vocabulary skills, and poor listening skills (Yousif, 2006) including failure to understand discourse organization (Chaudron and Richards, 1986).

Some lecture comprehension studies have focused mainly on the textual aspects of the lecture discourse such as discourse markers (Chaudron and Richard, 1986; Flowerdew and Tauroza, 1995) and note taking (Dunkel, 1988; Dunkel, Mishra and Berlina, 1989; Chaudron, Loschky and Cook, 1994). Focus on the importance of interpersonal features in lecture comprehension has gained momentum in the recent past from an interactive perspective (Rounds, 1987; Northcott, 2001; Crawford Camiciottoli, 2004, 2005; Fortanet, 2004; Morell, 2004, 2007; Webber, 2005). For example, Morell identified four features as interpersonal. They are personal pronouns, discourse markers, display and referential questions, and the presence of negotiation of meaning, while Crawford Camiciottoli (2005) identifies first and second person pronouns, questions, and asides as interpersonal features. These studies claim that the use of interpersonal features can enhance the closeness between students and lecturers in classes and enhance the interaction between them. Interaction, in turn, is believed to contribute to lecture comprehension, as is argued in this thesis.

The studies that investigated lecture comprehension problems from the point of view of students’ and lecturers’ perceptions adopted an ethnographic approach and focused on students’ problems and strategies in lecture comprehension (Benson, 1989; Flowerdew and Miller, 1992, 1996b; Flowerdew, Miller and Li, 2000). Of these lecture comprehension studies, Benson (1989) studied a single non-native student’s actual listening activities during one academic year using a descriptive ethnography, in which primary materials were gathered by participant observation, as well as key-

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informant interviews with both the teacher and the student. Secondary sources such as the teacher’s class outline and the student’s written work were also studied. Though the sample was only a single student in that study, Benson was able to collect a considerable quantity of data and was also able to show how the learning requirement pushed the ESL student’s whole attitude toward the course, how content should be treated to train the ESL students, how different skills should be handled to train the students, and finally how ESL students should be trained to be actively involved in oral activities.

Flowerdew and colleagues (1992, 1996b and 2000) conducted a series of studies of second language lecture comprehension among a group of Hong Kong Chinese students. They used observation, questionnaire, self-rating of perception, diary study, interview, etc. to collect data on perception of lectures, problems and strategies based on an actual lecture course. Of these three studies, the first one identified students’ problems in lecture comprehension. It was found that, among other reasons, speed of the lecture and new terminology and concepts affected students’ lecture comprehension. The other two studies that investigated the lecturers’ perceptions of students’ problems found that students had problems mainly with vocabulary. In addition, the lecturers reported that developing a participatory style of lecturing was difficult due to poor student cooperation.

The only study to have investigated students’ lecture comprehension in the Sri Lankan ESL (English as a Second Language) context is that of Sally (1985). Sally exposed Engineering undergraduates to an experimental course in listening comprehension. After exposing students for eight weeks to different lectures, when their comprehension was measured it was found that the students had difficulties in

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understanding vocabulary, prepositional phrases and phrasal verbs, which in turn affected their lecture comprehension. Though the researcher claims that exposure to these experimental lectures enhanced the students’ lecture comprehension (e.g. at the beginning only two students understood the lectures, while at the end nearly all were able to understand the lectures), this study suffers from several methodological drawbacks. For example, it is not stated how the researcher measured the comprehension of students, nor were the listening passages for the pre- and post-tests of listening comprehension comparable. In addition, no statistical procedures were used to measure comprehension, despite her claim that it was an experimental study.

There is only one other study (Yousif, 2006) that investigates the reasons for lecture comprehension problems in an English as Foreign Language (EFL) context that I am aware of, even though there are studies that investigate the influence of specific features on lecture comprehension (e.g. Eslami and Eslami-Rasekh (2007) studied the influence of discourse markers on lecture comprehension). In this study, conducted among Saudi Arabian students majoring in English, Yousif found that five kinds of problems affect students’ lecture comprehension. They are linguistic and conceptual variables (e.g. terminology), discourse variables (e.g. difficulty in understanding longer sentences), acoustic variables (e.g. speed of lecture), environmental variables (e.g. noisy classrooms) and psychological variables (e.g. boredom).

The studies described above were conducted in different contexts. Benson dealt with NS lecturers with NNS students in an English speaking country, Flowerdew and colleagues focused on both NS and NNS lecturers and NNS students who learnt their secondary education in both English and their mother tongue, and Yousif did not specify the lecturers, while her students were NNS students who study English as a

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foreign language. On the other hand, at FAS this study deals with NNS students who learn English as a second language, and some of them are non-proficient too. In addition, the problems science students face may be different from the humanities students studied by Yousif or Flowerdew and colleagues.

Previous lecture perception studies bring out the problems and strategies of both lecturers and students as reported by themselves, but one problem with perception studies is that the self-reported problems and strategies may be different from the real situation that exists. In this regard, Tauroza (2001) warns that ‘listeners’ perceptions can be distorted or totally erroneous’ (p. 362), as subjects can overestimate or hide their problems, when we collect information based on self-reports. Therefore, there is a need to have a closer look at the practice too. Flowerdew et al. (2000) tried to observe the lectures for their study in order to triangulate the perception and the practice, but they did not go to the extent of having a detailed analysis of lecture discourse to find whether lectures were delivered in a suitable manner to assist students in understanding lectures. Nor did they investigate if the strategies reported by lecturers were really adopted in the lectures.

On the other hand, the data collected through observation and systematic recording and transcription has more advantages than the data obtained through perception only. The detailed analysis of lecture discourse made possible through this systematic analysis can identify the favourable discourse elements (e.g. interactive/dialogic) that can involve students in classroom interaction to help their content as well as language development. Moreover, Mercer (2001: 255) states:

recordings and transcriptions of classroom talk, analyzed from a socio-cultural perspective, offer us glimpses of the social, cultural, communicative process of education being pursued and, with varying degrees of success, accomplished. They may capture illustrations of the best practice [….].

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Therefore, this study would be one among the few to investigate lecture comprehension problems and go further to analyse lecture discourse too.

The foregoing review indicates that only a few studies have investigated L2 students’ lecture comprehension problems, while the reasons for lecture comprehension problems also vary. In addition, these studies have investigated the problem from the perception point of view only but failed to study the classroom, observing real lecture delivery. Therefore, studies are required to investigate students’ lecture comprehension problems focussing on both perception and classroom practice in a context like Sri Lanka where only one known study exists, urging future research with more emphasis on classroom practice.

Having identified a gap in the research in lecture comprehension studies with an emphasis on lecture discourse, I now move on to the argument that lecturer-student interaction or teacher-learner interaction can favour comprehension and language development based on ESL, immersion and CBI classes. Though the review seems to move away from the theme of content classes to a review of ESL, immersion and CBI classes, the focus on these contexts is necessary in order to establish the background to the argument, as mentioned earlier.