Marking importance in lectures: Interactive and textual orientation

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical markers of
important lecture points and proposes a classification in terms of their interactive
and textual orientation. The importance markers were extracted from the British
Academic Spoken English corpus using corpus-driven and corpus-based
methods. The classification is based on the markers’ constituents and cotext.
Most markers are interactively oriented towards the content (e.g. the point is)
or listeners (e.g. you should remember) rather than the speaker (e.g. I should stress)
or speaker and listeners jointly (e.g. I want you to notice). Many content-oriented
markers also have secondary listener orientation (e.g. these are the things to take
home). As regards their textual orientation, markers typically occur before the
highlighted point. The analysis aims to reveal how the realizations of this
metadiscursive feature reflect key characteristics of the lecture genre and suggests
factors that may affect the efficacy of importance marking. The findings are
useful for lecture listening and note-taking courses, lecturer training, and
educational research assessing the efficacy of such discourse organizational cues.