Listening for needles in haystacks: how lecturers

Listening for needles in haystacks: how lecturers introduce key terms Ron Martinez, Svenja Adolphs, and Ronald Carter

Introduction

Students from non-English-speaking academic backgrounds face a number of challenges when attending courses in countries in which the main language of instruction is English. Even when those students’ proficiency is assessed as being high (by tests like TOEFL and IELTS, for example), there are often issues in lectures, not directly related to matters of grammar or vocabulary but to do with things such as convention and style. In countries like the United States and Britain, for example, students may encounter a lecture style that is comparatively much more extemporaneous than they are generally accustomed to in their home university contexts (such as China and Saudi Arabia), particularly within disciplines related to the humanities and social sciences (Powers 1985). Such relative spontaneity in speech also often carries with it challenges that students unfamiliar with this style may find themselves ill prepared to deal with, irrespective of tested level of proficiency. In an academic lecture that models itself after a formal written style—or, indeed, one that is actually written in advance—there is likely to be a strict or relatively strict adherence to an introduction, followed by a delineation of the structure of the lecture to follow, and then a sequential presentation of the outlined points through to a well-defined conclusion. In more extemporized lectures, students are less likely to find such clear structure, but instead will hear key points made interspersed with examples, anecdotes, rhetorical questions, and even jokes that students unaccustomed to such a style may struggle to find relevant (Benson 1989). ELT Journal Volume 67/3 July 2013; doi:10.1093/elt/cct020

© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. Advance Access publication April 19, 2013

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The present paper reports on a corpus-based study of university lecture discourse aimed at identifying linguistic patterns that may be useful for students to notice when taking notes. One of the most ubiquitous patterns, found following a qualitative analysis of lexical bundles (i.e. multi-word strings) extracted from the corpus relates to the function of introducing key terms and concepts in lectures. It was found that while some formulae seem to help students notice when a lecturer is defining a key term or concept, there are still many other devices employed by teachers when realizing the same function that students are likely to miss, or which could possibly be confusing.

As Lynch (2011) pointed out, there is a relative dearth of research on L2 English listening in general, and that paucity is greater still in the area of EAP listening. Much of the literature related to academic listening to date has focused on the structure of lectures (Thompson 2003), and relatively little empirical research exists on EAP listening sub-skills (Buck 2001). Although Buck and Tatsuoka (1998) found ‘identifying relevant information without explicit markers’ and ‘recognizing and exploiting redundancy’ as two of the most important skills involved in successful listening comprehension (ibid.: 141–2), there has been very little corpus-informed investigation into the ways in which such information and redundancies are actually delivered in university lecture settings.

Ultimately, the goal of such research is often exploratory, designed to identify, through empirical evidence, language patterns that may merit attention and/or further investigation. To that extent, our research follows very much in the same vein. Where our methodology differed somewhat was, first of all, in not assuming that the lexical bundles we found necessarily had pedagogical value per se, and secondly, in using the extracted lexical bundles as a starting point, and not a final product, to identify further related words and multi-word strings with pedagogical relevance. In other words, if for example the bundles in question were ‘if you look at’ and ‘take a look at’, rather than simply list and/or attempt a functional categorization of those lexical strings, we went a step further to try to understand if there were other n-grams with the word ‘look’ in them, and then whether interesting (i.e. pedagogically useful) extrapolations might be drawn from those data. As outlined below, the qualitative analysis carried out by the researchers led us to identify a function that was apparently ubiquitous in the 314

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This paucity was discovered upon carrying out a corpus-based study that aimed to identify the most common and useful discourse patterns found in lectures recorded in a British university.1 The purpose of this investigation was to inform the development of a new web-delivered course aimed at improving the listening skills of new students arriving at UK institutions of higher education from countries where English is not used as the main language of instruction (particularly from China in the case of the institution in which the new course would be deployed). Like many of the corpus-informed studies that preceded our own (for example Biber, Conrad, and Cortes 2004; Walsh, Morton, and O’Keeffe 2011), specialized software was used in order to identify recurring strings of words, otherwise known as lexical bundles or ‘n-grams’. Lists of lexical bundles are often extracted by researchers from a corpus or corpora in order to identify certain patterns. For example, one of the most common lexical bundles identified in the Biber et al. (ibid.) study was ‘if you look at’, identified among the spoken corpora of university lecture discourse the researchers compiled for their study (op.cit.: 386). This lexical bundle (along with, for example, ‘what do you think’ and ‘take a look at’) was categorized under the discourse sub-function of ‘topic introduction/focus’, which Biber et al. determined should come under the main function category of ‘discourse organizers’.

corpus—that of introducing new terminology and concepts—and it was also found that the variation through which this function was realized by the different teachers could cause students to miss important points in the lectures. This paper aims to present our main findings as they relate to this common function in academic discourse, describing what we believe are potential challenges students may face, including some pedagogical implications and directions for further research. A list of recurring word strings (i.e. spanning 2–6 words, occurring at least twice in at least two different corpus files), found to be noticeably more common in lectures when compared with general spoken language,2 was extracted from a corpus comprised of 1.7 million words of business-oriented lectures originating in UK universities.3 Since we aimed to identify some of what seem to be the most pedagogically relevant patterns (see below) in the discourse analysed, corpus software, with its ability to comb through copious amounts of data at a keystroke, initially facilitated this task. However, rather than assume that the corpus-derived lexical bundles themselves were of pedagogical relevance, the list was further analysed manually line by line in order to arrive at formulaic sequences (Wray 2002) that were clearly meaningful (i.e. not devoid of propositional content) and which could be considered pedagogically relevant (i.e. not immediately obvious to students due to the items’ semantic transparency, cf. Martinez and Schmitt 2012), as exemplified in Table 1. This more qualitative analysis ascertained the most commonly recurring words in the phraseological patterns identified for retention from the corpus-derived list of lexical bundles. The procedure for identifying the most often recurring words (i.e. recurring the most in different n-grams) was simply carried out by inserting the narroweddown list of n-grams into WordSmith Tools (Version 5.0) to extract an unlemmatized frequency word list, shown in Table 2 in alphabetical order.4 Although examination of each of the words in Table 2 in the original corpus revealed a great number of different discourse functions (for example exemplifying, referring to academic literature, hedging, highlighting, and so on), one that eventually revealed itself to be particularly interesting due to both its relative ubiquity and, especially, its novelty in the descriptive literature on spoken academic discourse, was that of introducing new terms and concepts during lectures. This function was discovered through the study of such words as Selected for inclusion in other words the notion of in the literature table 1 over time Sample of phrases as you’ll see retained from original lexical bundles list versus area of research for example those excluded

How lecturers introduce key terms

Excluded er this is a of um of the of the um and in er the order okay um in the 315


Identifying the function of introducing key terms and concepts in lectures

table 2 Alphabetized list of the most commonly repeated words from the final lexical bundles list

IMPORTANT(LY) INCLINED INCREASE/INCREASINGLY ISSUES JUST KEY LINK LITERATURE LOOK/LOOKED/LOOKING MAKE/MAKES/MADE/MAKING MEAN/MEANS/MEANING/MEANT MIGHT MIND NATURE NECESSARILY NOW OFTEN OKAY PERSPECTIVES POSITION PROBABLY RATHER RELATE(S)/RELATED RELATIVELY REMEMBER RESEARCH

RIGHT SAY/SAYS/SAID/SAYING SEE/SEEN/SEEING SEEMS SENSE SHARE SHIFT SIMPLY SO STRATEGIC/STRATEGY STUFF SUGGEST(S) TAKE/TAKING TALK/TALKS/TALKED/TALKING TEND TERM(S) THEREFORE THINKING TIME ULTIMATELY UNDERSTAND VENTURE VIEW(S) WE/WE’RE/WE’VE WHILST YOU’LL/YOUR/YOU’VE

‘basically’, ‘call’, ‘essentially’, and ‘mean’, outlined in greater detail in the sections that follow. Furthermore, the analysis ultimately uncovered the complexity of the ways in which this function was realized by the various lecturers: a ‘haystack’-like complexity that we believe may make recognizing when new terminology and concepts are being defined particularly challenging for EAP listeners.

Results of the analysis of academic lectures

The recurrence of certain words in our corpora like ‘call’ and ‘mean’ (especially) led us eventually to identify a common and heretofore under-described function in the EAP literature: that of introducing and defining key terminology and concepts during university lectures. What we found was that there was no one particular way in which this function was realized in the discourse, but that there was instead great complexity. We did find, however, that more ‘obvious’ linguistic markers of that function were actually relatively rare, increasing the likelihood that L2 students might not recognize that the function was even occurring in real-time spoken discourse. The more common markers, we feel, are far more subtle. Both types are exemplified below, introduced in order of increasing level of relative frequency, followed by illustrations of the quite complex (but often understated and nuanced) nature in which this common function was realized in the analysed corpora.

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ACTUALLY AGAIN ALRIGHT ARGUABLY BACK BASICALLY BROADLY CALL/CALLED CASE CLEARLY CONVENTIONAL CRITICISM DIFFERENT ELEMENT EMPHASIZE ESSENTIALLY EXAMPLE EXTENT GENERALLY GOING TO/GONNA HAPPEN/HAPPENED/HAPPENS HAVE/HAS/HAD/HAVING HEART HIGHLIGHT IF

The more obvious (but less frequent)

In a number of cases, the phraseology used by lecturers when introducing key terminology and concepts could be considered relatively transparent. Such is the case for many of the n-grams in which ‘call’ and ‘mean’ occurred (lemmatized frequencies of 31 and 47, respectively). For instance, many formulaic sequences around the verb ‘call’ were found in the corpus, including the following examples: ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■

Simply by virtue of including a word that can be considered a cataphoric signal that a term is to follow (‘call’), there is a reasonable chance that students might put pen to paper in anticipation of that point (assuming they hear the n-gram in the discourse). Such phrases can therefore be regarded as more conducive to students noticing when key points and terminology are being introduced. Another common example of what could be considered comparatively transparent surrounds the verb ‘mean’: ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■

... what do we mean by ... ... what I mean by this is ... ... what does that mean? It means ... ... by which I mean ... ... what that means is that ... ... well, what does it mean? ... that word means ... ... that’s what’s meant by ... ... explain what I mean by that ... .

The examples of language used to introduce key terms and concepts in lectures presented in the paper so far have been both cataphoric (in the case of ‘call’), and anaphoric (in the examples that include ‘mean’), as the former are uttered before the actual term or concept is spoken, as opposed to the latter, which involve elaboration after the word/ phrase/concept has already been spoken. To that extent, an argument can be made that the more anaphoric linguistic defining/paraphrastic expressions present more of a challenge as, unless the term/concept is repeated by the lecturer, the student must recall what the actual name was of what is suddenly being articulated in real time (Gernsbacher and Jescheniak 1995). However, that relative advantage of cataphoric reference assumes that the cataphora have indeed been detected by the listener, an assumption that may not be valid, in particular with the shorter, rather less obvious linguistic expressions used to introduce key terms and concepts, as described in greater detail in the following sections.


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■■

... what theorists call ... ... what we call ... ... what we might call ... ... what are called ... ... what he calls ... ... you might call it ... ... the so-called ... ... is often called ... ... a thing called ... .

The less obvious (but more common)

The expressions we determined to less evidently introduce terms and concepts are those that do not include verbs like ‘mean’, ‘call’, or ‘define’, which help signal that such elaboration is taking place in the discourse. For example, in many instances found in the corpus the adverbs ‘basically’ (frequency of 341) and ‘essentially’ (frequency of 229) signal this function: ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■ ■■

However, consider the following example, which can be considered typical of the sort of discourse found in the corpus: ... a second driver ... net operating profit margin after tax. [pause] And essentially this is about the margin of sales relative to costs. As can be seen, one can imagine that a student, hearing this sentence in real time, might miss that there is a key term to be paid attention to at all. The term in this case, ‘net operating profit margin’, appears on the lecturer’s slide (embedded within other surrounding text); however, there is no run-up to the phrase, nothing like ‘now I will talk about net operating profit margin’. Hence, the listener must somehow manage to work out (or remember) that the ‘this’ that the lecturer utters refers back to ‘net operating profit margin’. It is not a big stretch to imagine that there may be students (even native speakers) who may miss what has just occurred: a key term both introduced and defined.

The ‘haystacks’

The discovery of the ubiquity of the ‘introducing and defining key terminology’ function occurred mostly through qualitative analysis of the results of the quantitatively extracted n-gram data; that is, the analysis required us to look at each lexical item/phrase in the source data (i.e. transcribed lectures), and this process led us to notice the complex nature in which the function is actually realized in the discourse. For example, one phenomenon encountered in the analysis was a delaying of the definition of a term, arriving at an explication only obliquely, and often after some digression: ‘utility’ What we need to understand is, why do we consume? So to do that we’re gonna use a framework called ‘utility’. Okay? And it’s er it’s a phrase that goes back into erm the eighteenth century, utility, and John Stuart Mill, a very famous thinker in the in the eighteenth century, he talked about utility and it’s a phrase we’ve used in economics ever since. Well, essentially it answers or it tries to address a particular question: Why do we consume goods and services? Why is it that we actually bother consuming?

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■■

... which are basically ... ... is basically the view that ... ... and what this basically says is ... ... what it’s basically saying is that ... ... which is essentially ... ... so it’s essentially ... ... essentially this is about ... ... which essentially says that ... .

‘shareholder value’ I’m gonna talk about it at a conceptual level, what shareholder value means. And, essentially, [[1]] it’s a measure that’s based on cash flow into the organisation. Alright? Free cash flow. [[2]] What is the organisation earning now and in the future? Alright? So, shareholder value, [[3]] or value back to the owners of a company, [[4]] is based on the potential of that organisation to generate positive income over time. This is an important point. [[5]] Shareholder value is not just about this year, it’s about this year, next year and so onwards. So it’s about a future income stream. Alright? And it’s based on the argument that the value of a company like the value of any other asset depends upon its future earnings potential. Alright? [[6]] So the more a company is able to earn, the higher its current value. As in the previous example (‘utility’), the definition of ‘shareholder value’ is signalled by the adverb ‘essentially’, yet we found that pinning down a single defining point to be elusive, even as native speakers carefully reading the transcription. In fact, although there seem to be six sub-points raised in the elaboration of the term ‘shareholder value’ by the lecturer, in reality, all six are related. However, the lecturer never provides one, clear, succinct definition to tie them all together. This is apparently left to the student, and would likely be a challenge even for learners for whom English is a first language, never mind L2 listeners who are more inclined to interpret each point as new, rather than connected to the preceding ones (Field 2011). The sample above also shows how the analysed data were often fraught with a complexity of subtle markers that might be easily missed, such as ‘or’ (at point [[3]] in the passage). The conjunction ‘or’ is generally learnt as implying some kind of choice (for example ‘soup or salad’); this is clearly not the case in the particular function exemplified here, but it is not unreasonable to think that students listening to the lecture may simply not think that the conjunction marks the rephrasing of


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As was often the case in the data, the actual definition really only starts after the adverb ‘essentially’, as discussed in the previous section. However, the ‘run-up’ to the definition is perhaps obscured by the arguably tangential information that precedes it, and research has shown that students tend to look out for ‘main points’ in a lecture (Benson op.cit.: 437); a student will not note down a definition, obviously, if she or he does not even realize that one is taking place. Furthermore, although the language used to define and introduce new terms and concepts in our corpus has been presented separately for the purposes of clarity and description in the present paper, in much of the text analysed for this study, there was actually an array of linguistic devices employed in combination. While this combination might instinctively seem conducive to the noticing of key points in a lecture, the redundancies created by paraphrasing may instead make the discerning of one succinct definition an onerous process for students. As an example, the definitions of ‘shareholder value’ in the extract below have been numbered in square brackets:

the term that preceded it. Consider the following additional example, spoken by a different lecturer: So shareholder value, or value back to the owners of a company, is based on the potential of that organisation to generate positive income over time. Used in this way, ‘or’ is more akin in function to ‘in other words’, but one can imagine that this meaning may not be derived when listening to a lecture in progress while trying to synthesize the discourse into notes.

‘economics’ So [[1]] economics is the study of how people and society end up choosing with or without the use of money to employ scarce resources that could have alternative uses. Okay? [[2]] To produce various commodities and distribute them for consumption now or in the future, so it’s not just about today it’s what happens tomorrow as well among various persons and groups in society. [[3]] It analyses the costs and benefits of improving patterns of resource allocation. Okay? That’s quite a mouthful. But what I really want to emphasise, not surprisingly, are the words in red. [[4]] It’s around choosing how to employ scarce resources because those scarce resources could be used in a lot of different ways. There are lots of ways in which we can allocate resources, we can’t do them all, so we have to make choices okay? Now if you were to pin me down—it wouldn’t be very pleasant—but if you were to pin me down, the one word I would say economics comes down to is choice. [[5]] It’s the study of choice okay? It’s not the study of money, it’s the study of choice. Because ultimately there are lots of ways we would like to allocate resources there are lots of things we would like to do, we cannot do them all, so we have to make choices. So the definition we use in the textbook is slightly shorter, and [[6]] economics is the study of how people and societies deal with scarcity. Here again there seems to be some confusion as to the main definition that the lecturer wishes to convey. However, it would seem that the most important, most relevant, information has been reserved for the end: ‘... economics is the study of how people and societies deal with scarcity’.

Conclusion

In the process of identifying patterns that would be useful for students to be aware of in the context of academic listening, the researchers have found that a very common function (that of introducing key terminology and concepts in lectures) was under-described in the extant literature. The corpus-informed analysis revealed great variation and complexity in the

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One trait that both the ‘utility’ and ‘shareholder value’ passages above share is a kind of apparent train-of-thought building to and culminating in a main point, the bottom line of what the lecturer wants to convey about the term or concept. Another example of this ‘back-loading’ of key information in the introduction of terminology and concepts is provided below. Notice how the most succinct definition of ‘economics’ seems to be saved until the end of the thought process:

way this function was realized, and found that many of the words used to define, such as ‘or’ and ‘essentially’ or ‘basically’ carry pragmatic meaning rather than literal meaning; this potentially obscures the identification of the function of ‘defining’ as it occurs in real-time spoken discourse.

A good lecturer often stresses the importance of a main point by repeating it in a paraphrased form. Playing selected examples of this paraphrasing is a useful way of reassuring learners that a point they have missed may recur; but it also draws attention to the potential pitfall in the danger of interpreting a reiterated point as a new one. (Field op.cit.: 110) As noted and exemplified throughout this paper, students should learn that lecturers often define concepts in a number of ways, often subtle, and often in succession, and that it is in many cases the last definition or wording—the one the teacher leaves off with—that is the one they should probably be especially careful to put in their notes. Another point of pedagogical relevance involves the multimodal way in which lectures are increasingly presented. All the teachers recorded for this study used PowerPoint slides to complement their lecture delivery. Instinctively, one might imagine that lecturers’ (increasingly ubiquitous) use of PowerPoint slides in which key terminology can be succinctly displayed may mitigate potential confusions. However, as pointed out in Field (op.cit.: 106), experienced lecturers tend to avoid the ‘bad presentational practice’ of reading their slides verbatim, but such good intentions may be counterproductive since students may not make the connection that the elaboration the lecturer is providing is related to the content on the screen (cf. Benson op.cit.). Since such an entrenched practice is not likely to be easily broken (and indeed perhaps it should not), explicit verbal cues along the lines of ‘to elaborate on the definition on the slide, …’ may be helpful, and more research into the extent to which such transparent devices facilitate students’ note-taking would be another useful way forward. Clearly, much more research is still needed in order to establish the ease or difficulty with which the features of lecture discourse described


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Although the present study is far from comprehensive, it is intended to help prompt continued investigation into the effects that the various elements of discourse presented in this paper have on different students. Even though the research is still at an exploratory stage, some pedagogical suggestions can be made solely on the basis of the findings thus far. As has long been advocated in the relevant literature (for example Lebauer 1984), EAP students can benefit from analysing lecture transcripts for particular features of discourse that may go unnoticed in the absence of such explicit awareness raising. It would seem that the function described in this paper merits such analysis, with special attention drawn to, for example, some of the relatively subtle markers described in this paper, such as ‘basically’ and ‘essentially’. Moreover, it may be especially beneficial to students that they hear—rather than read—the subtle ways in which explication of key terms and concepts is constructed over several connected points in lectures:

Final version received February 2013

Notes 1 Research carried out with the support of ESRC grant RES-189-25-0146. 2 Found using the log likelihood procedure (McEnery, Xiao, and Tono 2006: 55–6), which yielded a total of 4,324 key n-grams. A span of 2–6 words was chosen as formulaic sequences of greater length are rare. 3 The corpus analysed actually consisted of two corpora. The first corpus contained 1.7 million words of UK university lectures from a range of subject areas taken from the British National Corpus (BNC), the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE), the Cambridge and Nottingham Spoken Business English Corpus (CANBEC), the British Academic Spoken English corpus (BASE), and the Nottingham Multi-Modal Corpus (NMMC). As this research formed part of a larger project on Business English, the corpus also includes just over five hours of business lectures collected from three different professors at a British university, totalling 33,000 words. (It is from this corpus that the examples for analysis were extracted for this paper.) A reference corpus of spoken English was also created that totalled 16 million words. This corpus comprised the remaining sections of the BNC spoken, CANBEC, and CANCODE as well as the spoken component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). 322

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4 The list is specifically presented alphabetically in order to not misrepresent any frequency data. For example, the lemma ‘case’ can variously occur in phrases like ‘just in case’, ‘in any case’, and ‘if that’s the case’, which all obviously serve very different functions in discourse. We believe that conflating such items into a single lemma is potentially misleading. Indeed, each item really should be subjected to the type of thorough qualitative analysis that was conducted for the function that was ultimately identified for this study (i.e. an investigation of ‘call’, ‘mean’, etc.).

References Benson, M. J. 1989. ‘The academic listening task: a case study’. TESOL Quarterly 23/3: 421–45. Biber, D., S. Conrad, and V. Cortes. 2004. ‘If you look at ...: lexical bundles in university teaching and textbooks’. Applied Linguistics 25/3: 371–405. Buck, G. 2001. Assessing Listening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buck, G. and K. Tatsuoka. 1998. ‘Application of the rule-space procedure to language testing: examining attributes of a free response listening test’. Language Testing 15/2: 119–57. Field, J. 2011. ‘Into the mind of the academic listener’. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 10/2: 102–12.


in this paper are processed by students (or indeed if they are noticed at all), and the effect they may have on note-taking and even the retention of key information. Moreover, it is likely that the ways in which information is commonly ‘packaged’ by lecturers will affect different learners within different cultures in widely different ways. While it can be argued that ‘any course, any ESL student, and any teacher will, on close examination, turn out to be unrepresentative’ (Benson op.cit.: 439), until the actual effect the discourse features have on students’ notes is explored qualitatively among diverse EAP populations, and from data sourced beyond only British lecturers of business-oriented content, the putative challenges these features may pose to students remain more theoretical than empirical. None the less, it is hoped that at the very least this article and the data presented in it first of all provoke reflection on how you, the reader, introduce key terminology and concepts in your lessons, and secondly provide the rationale and stimulus for further inquiry into an important function which hitherto seems to have been under-described in the literature.

The authors Ron Martinez is Assistant Professor of English at San Francisco State University, where he teaches on the MA TESOL programme. He is also the author/co-author of a number of ELT textbooks, including Conversation Lessons (Heinle ELT) and Taboos and Issues (Heinle ELT). Email: [email protected] Svenja Adolphs is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests are in the areas of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, particularly in the study of linguistic patterns in spoken corpora from an applied perspective. Email: [email protected] Ronald Carter is Professor of Modern English Language at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on applied linguistics and ELT, including The Cambridge Grammar of English (with Michael McCarthy, Cambridge University Press 2006) and an A–Z for intermediate learners English Grammar Today (Cambridge University Press 2011). Email: [email protected]


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Gernsbacher, M. A. and J. D. Jescheniak. 1995. ‘Cataphoric devices in spoken discourse’. Cognitive Psychology 29/1: 24–58. Lebauer, R. S. 1984. ‘Using lecture transcripts in EAP lecture comprehension courses’. TESOL Quarterly 18/1: 41–54. Lynch, T. 2011. ‘Academic listening in the 21st century: reviewing a decade of research’. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 10/2: 79–88. Martinez, R. and N. Schmitt. 2012. ‘A phrasal expressions list’. Applied Linguistics 33/3: 299–320. McEnery, T., R. Xiao, and Y. Tono. 2006. Corpusbased Language Studies: An Advanced Resource Book. London: Routledge. Powers, D. E. 1985. A Survey of Academic Demands Related to Listening Skills. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service. Thompson, S. E. 2003. ‘Text-structuring metadiscourse, intonation and the signalling of organisation in academic lectures’. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 2/1: 5–20. Walsh, S., T. Morton, and A. O’Keeffe. 2011. ‘Analysing university spoken interaction: a CL/ CA approach’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 16/3: 325–44. Wray, A. 2002. Formulaic Language and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.