Besides German and French, English serves as the medium of classroom discussions in content-based dual-language secondary classes in Hungary. Several aspects of teaching and learning have been researched in these classrooms. For example, Duff (1995) investigated types of teacher-student interaction in a Hungarian school, and Rosen and Sasser (1997) took the teacher’s perspective and proposed a learner-centred approach to content-based classrooms exploring the idea of modifying content delivery for second language learners.

In addition to the secondary classroom context, several teachers and researchers report on various aspects of content-based instruction in post-secondary instructional settings (Snow & Brinton, 1997). In these settings in Hungary as well as elsewhere in Europe, administrators need to implement programs to cater for not only the local audience but also for the students attending these schools from all over the world. Hence, it has become common practice that post-secondary institutions in Hungary and throughout Europe offer their lectures in English besides the country’s native language. In addition, students from Hungary take the opportunity to travel abroad for their studies.

Partly due to the specialised language of lectures and talks in the academic contexts, understanding lectures and talks in a foreign language require extra effort in listening comprehension techniques. Not only students, but also lecturers need to be prepared to give presentations in a foreign language both in the university environment and at professional conferences. Producing academic discourse for lectures in a foreign language - whether at a professional conference or in a higher educational setting - puts tremendous pressure on the lecturer. However, only a few studies have reported on what goes on in these situations.

Studies investigating academic language have limited their focus to the analysis of written discourse. The various schools of studies have focused on different aspects of academic prose. For example, Biber’s work (1988, 1995; Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad & Finegan, 1999) shed light on features of academic prose in relation to other registers. Grabe (1987) took a genre-specific perspective and distinguished expository prose as a major text genre compared to other, “non-expository texts such as narratives and correspondence” (p. 133). Swales (1990) analysed particular academic texts through rhetorical text analysis and gave an overview of the textual studies of research articles written in English (pp.131-132). Leki (1991) summarised the issues related to text analysis and the writing pedagogies of the past twenty-five years from a perspective that contrasts different patterns of writing in various cultures. As a disciplinary perspective, in her search for variation within academic prose, Conrad (1996) compared professional texts in two diverse academic disciplinary areas (history and biology) and showed differences in the “use of narration, overt argumentation, and impersonal style” (p. 257). Another group of studies in this area relate to student writing. For example, through linguistic analyses, Conrad (1996) compared student writing to professional texts. Finally, while Grabe and Kaplan (1996) developed a theory of second language writing and suggested ways to teach academic writing to an international audience, Johns (1997) discussed the teaching of academic literacy for successful university studies in the United States (Csomay, 2000a).

Although a number of studies have researched academic prose, comparatively few have dealt with academic spoken discourse. The motivation for most of the studies dealing with academic spoken discourse has been to help second language learners who may have difficulties understanding academic lectures. Waters (1996) provides a comprehensive summary of research done in relation to second language learners’ listening comprehension and academic discourse. Linguistic analyses have been carried out by Chaudron and Richards (1986), DeCarrico and Nattinger (1988), Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992), Olsen and Huckin (1990), Dudley-Evans (1994), Hansen (1994), and Young (1994). These studies focus on particular discourse, lexical and topical patterns in lectures. Finally, Young and Fitzgerald (1982) and Ruetten (1986) attempted to design instructional materials to help students in their understanding of academic lectures.

Although many studies have carried out linguistic analyses in connection with second language comprehension issues, there is a lack of a broad linguistic description of academic lectures. To describe the linguistic characteristics of academic lectures through a quantitative, empirical investigation and through naturalistic studies “that look at academic listening as it actually occurs in real rather than experimental settings” (Waters, 1996, p. 26) is essential. As a first step, academic lectures should be compared to the linguistic characteristics of other registers. The present study describes a small-scale investigation in this respect.

Academic lectures as a hybrid register

Lectures are especially interesting for they can be considered as a register at the interface of an oral/literate continuum where ‘oral’ refers to stereotypical speaking such as conversation, and ‘literate’ refers to stereotypical writing as in academic prose (Biber, 1988, 1995). In terms of their purpose, similar to academic prose, lectures are highly informational. At the same time, they are delivered under on-line production circumstances. These two situational characteristics create a ‘hybrid’ register standing on a continuum between academic prose with high informational load and face-to-face exchanges displaying features of spoken discourse.

Lectures seem to share several situational characteristics of both academic prose and face-to-face conversations (Biber, 1995). As mentioned before, a typical feature of academic prose is the high informational load. Further, specific features include a) information being conveyed in an explicit and abstract manner, b) the outcome being a result of planned discourse, and c) the source for discussion is written prose. Academic lectures share several situational features with academic prose in their domain characteristics. They are both characterised by high informational focus and comparatively low interactivity, and they both involve advance planning. On the other hand, lectures also resemble face-to-face conversations because both registers are interactive. In addition, similar to face-to-face conversations, academic lectures are also produced in the spoken mode, with the addresser and the addressee sharing time and space. Although they exhibit features of planned discourse, academic lectures are delivered on-line, the addresser sharing the time and space relations with the addressee.

The aim of the present study is to investigate the linguistic characteristics of academic lectures overall, describing the extent to which this register shares linguistic features of conversation and academic prose. A corpus-based approach to analysing academic lectures is adopted to achieve this aim. In the following section, I describe the corpus and the methods I used for analysis. Based on Biber’s (1988) study of variation across speech and writing, I identify several linguistic features associated with academic prose and face-to-face conversation. These linguistic features are grouped into five parameters: 1) informational focus, 2) involved production, 3) explicit, elaborated reference, 4) abstract style, and 5) on-line informational elaboration (for explanation of these terms see Table 1 on page 35). These categories serve as the basis for comparing academic lectures to the other two registers mentioned above. The results gained can advance our understanding of this register and may assist in anticipating teaching implications, which I discuss in the last section.

Research methodology

Design of the study

Corpus

Academic lectures in the present study constitute university classrooms ranging from frontal, lecture-type ones, where the teacher is addressing a larger audience, to seminar-like sessions, where discussions are more in focus. A total of 174 academic lectures (about 1.2 million words) were selected from the T2K-SWAL Corpus (Biber, Reppen, Clark, & Walter, in press): a large, 2.7 million word corpus on academic discourse collected at five universities in the United States.1 All lectures were audio-recorded with a tape-recorder placed at the front of the classroom near the lecturer. Prior to the recording, every lecturer was asked both in writing and orally for permission to record their lectures. All recordings were transcribed based on pre-defined transcribing conventions. Following the transcription, all texts were tagged for grammatical features using Biber’s (1988) grammatical tagger.

Linguistic features selected for analysis

Biber’s (1988) analysis of variation across speech and writing served as the basis for the linguistic investigations. According to Biber (1988, 1995), in determining the continuum in the variation across speech and writing, particular grammatical forms can be associated with particular language functions that he called ‘dimensions’. He identified six dimensions (1988) through which he characterised a variety of registers. Given the situational analysis described in the previous section, the most appropriate dimensions for academic lectures are those containing linguistic features that relate to the informational load apparent in the academic context, and those that reflect the on-line, planned nature of academic lectures. For the purposes of the present study, selected features of the following five dimensions, especially relevant to academic lectures, are discussed in detail: 1) informational focus 2) involved production, 3) situation-dependent versus elaborated reference (explicit discourse), 4) abstract versus non-abstract information (abstract style), and 5) on-line informational elaboration. In the present study, instead of the term ‘dimensions’, I will call the different linguistic groups ‘feature groups’ because they are not a complete set of linguistic features as presented in Biber’s (1988, 1995) work. The most important linguistic features selected for analysis are summarised in Table 1.

Analysis

Computer program

After the texts were run through a grammatical tagger, I developed Delphi Pascal computer programs to count and display the characteristic linguistic features in the present study. First, a program was developed to do the counts of the grammatical features specified in the previous section. A second program was developed to select and write out relevant excerpts from lectures. Two kinds of counts are reported in this study: 1) total counts for individual linguistic features within each feature group, and 2) total counts for each feature group.

Counts and statistical analysis

Lectures ranged from an average of five to ten thousand words. All feature counts were normed to 1,000 words (total count of each feature divided by number of words, multiplied by one thousand). This procedure compensates for differences in the length of lectures and provides equal opportunity for the linguistic features to occur.

For the statistical analysis, the computer program SPSS 9.0 was used. Descriptive statistics showed the means and standard deviation measures for each lecture and for lectures overall. Since Biber (1988) does not report individual text scores for academic prose and face-to-face conversation, the comparison of the three registers was done using methods of descriptive statistics that rely on overall mean scores and standard deviation measures.

Table 1 Linguistic features associated with functional categories
 

Dimension	Feature group	Associated linguistic features
1	Informational focus - "with communicative situations that require a high informational focus and provide ample opportunity for careful integration of information and precise lexical choice" (Biber, 1988, p. 104).	noun  preposition  attributive adjective passive
2	Involved production - "fragmented, generalized packaging of content with an affective, interpersonal focus" and "on-line production circumstances" (Biber, 1995, p.145).	present tense  private verbs2 that -deletions contractions first person pronouns second person pronouns ‘be’ as copula
3	Explicit discourse (elaborated reference) - "referentially explicit discourse" (Biber 1995, p. 156).	wh relative object position wh relative subject position phrasal co-ordination
4	Abstract style - "especially prominent in the academic sub-register of technical and engineering prose …all spoken registers are marked by the absence of this" (Biber, 1995, p. 165).	agentless-passive  by-passive  post-nominal past participial
5	On-line informational elaboration - "used in spoken, on-line registers … provide informational elaboration while explicitly presenting the speaker’s stance or attitudes towards the proposition" (Biber, 1995, p. 167).	that verb complement  that adjective complement demonstrative pronouns existential 'there'

Results and discussion

As I outlined earlier, the aim of the present study was to investigate the extent to which lectures share linguistic features of both conversations and academic prose.

Lectures compared to academic prose and face to face conversation

Based on the previously discussed situational characteristics that academic lectures share with academic prose and face-to-face conversation, it is reasonable to predict that academic lectures exhibit linguistic features of both of these registers. The extent to which these linguistic characteristics are similar or different in lectures is discussed in this section. First, an overview is given of the five feature groups in the five dimensions described in Table 1, followed by a detailed discussion of each feature group in the following order: informational focus, involved production, explicit discourse, abstract style, and on-line informational elaboration.

Academic lectures are unique in the extent to which they exhibit the five feature groups investigated. Compared to the two registers mentioned above, in one dimension lectures are very similar to conversations (involved production), in two dimensions (informational focus and explicit discourse) they resemble academic prose, and finally, they are unique in the way they exhibit features of on-line elaboration. Table 2 shows the frequency counts for each feature group.
 

It is not surprising that academic lectures use informational linguistic features similar to academic prose. The primary purpose of the academic setting, hence the main purpose of academic classrooms is a discussion, introduction and exemplification of specific content areas. This purpose is reinforced by the way explicit discourse manifests itself in academic lectures. Discourse in this setting is characterised by features of academic prose such as “context-independent reference” rather than by “situation-dependent reference” that is common in conversations (Biber, 1995, p. 156).

As regards abstract style and involved production, academic lectures seem to resemble face-to-face conversations rather than academic prose. It has to be noted however, that given the topical focus and informational purpose of the academic context, the mean scores for abstract style in lectures are slightly higher than for actual conversations. At the same time, academic lectures show slightly less involvement than face-to-face conversations. This might also be due to the difference between how face-to-face conversations and academic lectures take place. In a face-to-face situation, the interlocutors have the chance to take the floor at any point in time of the conversation, while in a lecture situation, question-time may be allocated at certain intervals and specific times only.

Finally, on-line elaboration denotes a special, on-line situation (where both the speaker and listener share time and space relations) with an informational focus. As Biber (1995) indicates, on-line elaboration is typical of spoken registers that have “a primary informational, rather than interpersonal focus” and of spoken registers that are “produced under real-time constraints” often “overtly marking the speaker’s stance in combination with the informational focus” (p. 168). Academic lectures seem to be particularly marked for these features.

Informational focus

The mean frequency counts for the particular linguistic features included in the dimension of informational focus vary (see Table 3 overleaf). For example, the high number of nouns in academic lectures reflects very dense informational packaging; in fact, nearly as dense as in academic prose. Prepositions and passive constructions are used more often in lectures than in conversations, however, lectures do not resemble academic prose as closely in this respect as in the use of nouns. Nonetheless, the numbers suggest a higher informational packaging in lectures than in conversations also in this regard . The low occurrence of passive constructions and the relatively low occurence of prepositions in academic lectures may be related to on-line production circumstances and to the fact that the text of lectures cannot be revised once produced. In terms of the way adjectives are used, lectures are unique because they resemble neither academic prose nor face-to-face conversation.
 

The frequent use of nouns and prepositions is required for producing carefully planned (or revised) discourse with dense, phrasal informational packaging, which is a characteristic of academic prose. However, the finding that fewer attributive adjectives occur in lectures than in conversations is unexpected. Classification of the types of attributive adjectives in future research may help further specify the nature of information density in academic lectures (Biber et al., 1999). The linguistic features listed in Table 3 are illustrated in Extract 1, below.

Extract 1

1: So it’s (Toobuckuhmahdoo) the second. The descendent of the uh, the rebel Inca, who held out in (Milkabomba) in the eighteenth century rises up, forms an enormous movement, uh, that uh doesn’t just stay within his own province. It covers the whole Bolivian and, and Peruvian um, highlands. And he even has communications with the chiefs in um, in Ecuador. And they also rise up, but they’re not, they’re not coordinated with the southern movement but there is this communication takes place and, the same, problems, or, you know are are motivating them, uh, to revolt as well. (Hilgn117)

Involved production

According to Biber (1988; 1995), involved production is characterised by the use of present tense, private verbs (e.g., think, feel), first and second person pronouns, contractions, ‘be’ used as copula, and ‘that’ deletion. These features are especially characteristic of conversations that focus on the “immediate circumstance and personal attitudes or feelings” (Biber, 1995, p. 143), and reflect direct interaction and high personal involvement. In conversation, present tense, private verbs, and ‘be’ as copula together reflect “an active, verbal style” (Biber, 1995, p. 143). In academic lectures, we find a high number of both present tense markers and the copula; even in a higher number than in conversations. At the same time, the frequency of private verbs in lectures places lectures between academic prose and face-to-face conversations. In academic lectures fewer first person pronouns are used than in face-to-face conversations, but almost as many second person pronouns are used in lectures as in conversations. Nonetheless, these features tend to be more characteristic of lectures than of academic prose. Table 4 (overleaf) provides the mean scores for each grammatical feature in involved production. My results also show that in academic lectures a similar number of contractions can be found as in face-to-face conversations. At the same time, ‘that’ deletion in lectures appears nearly as frequently as in conversations. The following text sample (Extract 2) illustrates the grammatical features associated with the dimension of involved production.

Extract 2

1: [4 sylls] there’s an underlying assumption that I understand see in a sense the reason why you guys argue and I always notice that my biggest argument is when I’m right and the other person is right . you know because then those arguments go on forever because both people are right , and [1 syll] what it is that you’ve really got you know venture money, venture dollars, sources come from two big areas in the in internet e-commerce ventures . they talk , they come from e-commerce IPOs or you know uh you know just internet junkies and those kind of folks. (Mglgg105)

Explicit discourse

Both wh-relative constructions and phrasal co-ordination are characteristic features of pre-planned, highly informational registers such as academic prose. More specifically, wh-relative clauses expand on the information provided in a more explicit and elaborate way. Phrasal co-ordination also indicates tight information packaging versus a loose, conversational style. Not surprisingly, lectures exhibit similar patterns to conversational style. Table 5 below shows the distribution (mean scores and standard deviations) of the three types of relativization patterns and the frequency of phrasal co-ordination in the three registers.

The number of wh-relatives in subject position places lectures between academic prose and face-to-face conversations. An interesting question for further research is the extent to which planning or on-line production circumstances may influence the use of these relativization measures. Further research might also shed light on relativization patterns with ‘that’ as relative pronoun in lectures versus wh-relative clauses. The example below (Extract 3) illustrates the way these features are used in academic lectures.

Extract 3

1: Uh but most of the elements we’re using were they’re in the older uh versions of Java and it’s a little more universal in terms of putting it on the web and so forth uh to use these older uh more standard components. And so I sort of switched to that. Uh .. we start by creating a (scores) output class which extends output and then it’s going to do what? OK. So that’s .. it’s extending output as a subclass of output which we’ve seen before. It’s going to implement two different interfaces because all the items that I choose from, that would include the choice element up there, of choosing the speed uh the check box group where I picked the suit color and the check box to either sleep uh sleep the yo-yo or not sleep the yo-yo. Those all uh .. need the item listener uh interface. you know they are all in essence listening for the choice of an item of some kind. OK? (Cslgn212)

Abstract style

Abstract style is associated with the use of passive constructions (by- and agentless passive, and post-nominal past participial constructions). Academic prose is the most marked for passive constructions. My results show that in academic lectures passive constructions are used slightly more frequently than in conversations (cf., Table 6 overleaf). At the same time, post-nominal passive constructions are much more frequent in lectures than in face-to-face conversations, which again indicates more dense information packaging in academic lectures.
 

An illustration of these features in a lecture is as follows:

Extract 4

it ‘s a hard thing to overcome . uh , when you are , come from , something that is looked at negatively by the broader or more dominant culture or dominant groups which you admire , or perhaps control your access , into the upper levels of power and privilege and influence . all right secondly , the groups, supposedly mistreated or oppressed are uh, supposedly oppressed by some dominant group . maybe different means it may be institutional, legal, intellectual, even linguistic, in terms of how, one feels, uh conveys . (Polun177)

On-line elaboration

In the fifth feature group, on-line elaboration, which characterises situations where both the speaker and listener share time and space relations, the analysis has shown that as regards the use of adjective complements, lectures tend to resemble academic prose (see Table 7). The extremely high number of verb complements suggests that this grammatical feature is unique in academic lectures. The high number of demonstrative pronouns and of the existential ‘there’ also indicates that lectures are a special register in which the speakers refer to the ‘here and now’ while engaging in verbalising their thoughts on a given topic, on-line, marking their stance. Another study might show the kinds of lexical items that are in service to weave the high informational focus, i.e., the content, together in these situations. The following text extract is taken from the corpus and illustrates the four grammatical features listed above. The numbers in the Extracts indicate the speakers’ and their turn-taking patterns: 1 stands for the teacher speaking, 2 for only one student in the class, and 3 for more than one students in the class talking at the same time.

Extract 5

1: OK two [1 syll] one , I thought [that0]* you were going in a different [unclear word] with the question . if dividends are irrelevant, then why do we say that the value of the firm why (would) we say that P zero is D one over K S minus G ? good question, right ? that’s your question . here’s why we say that . when we’re doing this analysis , what is it that’s going to drive dividends

3: earnings

1: OK that’s [1 syll] OK I’m sorry, other way . [writing on the board] earnings are going to drive dividends , what is it that’s going to drive earnings ?

2: growth

1: well growth ultimately what’s going to generate those earnings ? I think [that0] it’s going to be the assets . and what is it that’s going to generate the choice of assets ? (Filgg2)

* That deletion

The difference between Extract 5 and Extract 4 (above) is the way in which the linguistic features are present. In Extract 4, the number of passive constructions is higher than in face-to-face conversations, although it does not reach the frequency of this feature in academic prose. On the other hand, in Extract 5 there are a lot of ‘that’-s as demonstrative pronouns and as complementizers of complement clauses (although at times ‘that’ as complementizer is omitted).

Conclusion and implications for teaching

The present study was carried out to investigate the linguistic features of academic lectures in comparison to face-to-face conversation and academic prose. The findings showed that academic lectures indeed represent a unique register exhibiting features of both conversation and academic prose. A shared feature with academic prose is that academic lectures exhibit a high informational load mainly represented by the high number of nouns used. At the same time, because academic lectures are delivered in the spoken mode and under on-line production circumstances, grammatical features associated with on-line production circumstances are more frequently used in lectures than in conversations. My results indicate that in academic lectures ‘that’ complement clauses, existential ‘there’ and demonstrative pronouns, which are all characteristic of on-line elaboration, are particularly frequent. Another unique feature of academic lecture is that attributive adjectives are used much less frequently than in the other two registers.

Given the findings of the present study, various areas need further exploration. First, additional grammatical features need to be examined for more refined analyses in the various feature groups. Second, a complete multi-dimensional analysis of lectures is needed to see their position on a continuum of registers. Finally, the non-linguistic characteristics of academic lectures, for example the perceived purpose of lectures, need to be investigated in greater detail. This analysis might shed further light on why particular lectures or particular levels of instruction are more or less interactive in nature, and how those differences correspond to systematic patterns of linguistic differences represented by the various grammatical features present in them (Csomay, 2000b).

The implications of the present findings for teaching are numerous and multi-levelled. Due to space limitations, only a few are mentioned here from two points of view: a) how content and/or language teachers could prepare their students better for the academic environment and b) how lecturers in the higher-educational settings could make their content more accessible for their students and/or for their audience.

First, while doing listening comprehension exercises, preparing students to ‘hear’ the different parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs) is at least as important as (if not more important than) making them aware of the fillers and hesitation devices apparent in oral discourse. Note-taking is part of making sense of content. Therefore, developing note-taking skills early on could pave the way to academic success. Starting the process at beginner’s levels and also early on in the student’s academic life could make a difference in the learning habits, which may then influence academic results. Grabe and Kaplan (1996) provide superb ideas on how to get started or how to develop and then finally synthesise content-knowledge into coherent pieces of writing.

Second, while preparing your talk for a conference, for your lecture, or for your content-based classes, as teachers, be aware of the dense information load that you are trying to get across to your audience. Imagine, that your speech is similar to any reading material, except for one aspect: the students are not allowed to go back and re-read lines if they did not manage to understand the text because your lecture is on-line. In other words, students can take note of your words only on-line, which can be rather demanding. Your lecture should clearly not be written as academic prose and read out to the audience. While keeping the informational load of the text you can and you should utilise those features of academic lectures which bring them closer to face-to-face conversations and thus make it easier for the audience to follow your talk.

Notes

1. I am indebted to Educational Testing Services (ETS) for permission to use the corpus of TOEFL 2000 (T2K) for research purposes.[back]

2.  “Private verbs are used for the overt expression of private attitudes, thoughts and emotions” (Biber, 1988, p. 105) For the list of private verbs and their characteristics see Biber (1988), or Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech & Svartvik (1985).[back]

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