The important point is: highlighting information in lectures

Using the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) lecture corpus, this study investigates what lexicogrammatical devices lecturers employ to signal important lecture discourse and how this varies across disciplines and lecturers. The research aims to inform the design of academic speaking and listening courses for lecturers and students who are non-native speakers of English.
Lexicogrammatical patterns listed as ‘relevance markers’ in Crawford Camiciottoli (2007) (e.g. ‘that is the key question’, ‘the thing is’) were extracted from the corpus of 160 lectures. Findings largely confirm those of previous research on highlighting in lectures and the conversational features of this genre (Biber 2006; Crawford Camiciottoli 2004, 2007; Swales 2001). In addition, a subcorpus of forty lectures was searched for other relevance markers (e.g. ‘remember’, ‘i want to emphasize this’) and their frequency in the BASE corpus was subsequently determined. Conclusions highlight recurrent patterns as well as idiolectic and disciplinary variation. The use of these findings to English for Academic Purposes teaching is also discussed.

Biber, D. (2006). University language: a corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. Studies in Corpus Linguistics 23. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Crawford Camiciottoli, B. (2004). Audience-oriented relevance markers in business studies lectures. In Del Lungo Camiciotti, G. and Tognini Bonelli, E. (Eds.). Academic discourse-new insights into evaluation. (81-98). Bern: Peter Lang.
Crawford Camiciottoli, B. (2007). The language of business studies lectures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Swales, J. M. (2001) Metatalk in American academic talk: the cases of point and thing. Journal of English Linguistics 29 (1): 34-54.