Corpus-based materials design for EAP listening: the road less travelled

To assess how representative discourse organisational cues in EAP listening books are, I compared importance marking cues with those I retrieved from the BASE lectures using corpus-based and corpus-driven methods.
The corpus investigation revealed a large variety of importance markers, the most common of which (e.g. the point is; remember; anyway; not talk about) differ from those which usually appear in EAP materials. More specifically, the predominant markers in the corpus were multifunctional and less explicit than their far less frequently used prototypical counterparts (e.g. the important point is; you should note; that’s an aside; that’s irrelevant) (cf. Deroey 2013; Deroey & Taverniers 2012a; Deroey & Taverniers 2012b). However, the EAP books I examined vary widely in their inclusion of importance markers and mostly provide fairly prototypical, explicit examples. Most are also not (obviously) based on corpus research. In short, much remains to be done to ensure that corpus evidence informs lecture listening materials so that students are better prepared for the demands of their course lectures.
Deroey, K. L. B. (published online 2013). Marking importance in lectures: Interactive and textual orientation. Applied Linguistics. doi: 10.1093/applin/amt029
Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012a). ‘Just remember this’: Lexicogrammatical relevance markers in lectures. English for Specific Purposes, 31 (4), 221-233.
Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012b). ‘Ignore that ‘cause it’s totally irrelevant’: Marking lesser relevance in lectures. Journal of Pragmatics, 44 (14), 2085-2099.