1
PhD student inTeaching, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran
2
Associate in Teaching , University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran
3
Assistant in Teaching , University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran
Abstract
Academic lecturing has tuned into the major teaching method in higher education. Due to the excess of verbal and visual information presented in a lecture and the importance of some of these information in the final assessment of a course, an understanding of how unimportant information is marked in lectures is useful. The present investigation was an attempt to investigate how lecturers mark unimportant information in Persian academic lectures. More specifically, this study was aimed to investigate the discourse functions of markers of lesser importance. Based on a mixed-methods approach, markers of lesser importance were extracted from the transcripts of the 60 academic lectures of the Persian corpus of SOKHAN. The derived markers of lesser importance were then analyzed in terms of their discourse functions. Five discourse functions, including discourse organization, audience engagement, subject status, topic treatment, and relating to exam were found. In addition, topic treatment, followed by subject status, accounted for most of the discourse functions of the markers of lesser importance. Moreover, audience engagement, discourse organization, and relating to exam were found to be the least frequent discourse functions. On the whole, the findings suggested that marking lesser importance does not necessarily involves orientation to the audience or organizing the discourse into points and asides. Instead, marking lesser importance most often necessitates using expressions that explicitly or implicitly demarcate boundaries between what the lecturer wishes to talk about, does not intend to go through, or tends to cover briefly.
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Zare,J. , Eslami-Rasekh,A. and Dabaghi,A. (2016). Signaling Lesser Importance in Persian Academic Lectures: Categorization in Terms of Discourse Functions. Language Related Research, 7(7), 51-71.
MLA
Zare,J. , Eslami-Rasekh,A. , and Dabaghi,A. . "Signaling Lesser Importance in Persian Academic Lectures: Categorization in Terms of Discourse Functions", Language Related Research, 7, 7, 2016, 51-71.
HARVARD
Zare,J.,Eslami-Rasekh,A.,Dabaghi,A. (2016). 'Signaling Lesser Importance in Persian Academic Lectures: Categorization in Terms of Discourse Functions', Language Related Research, 7(7), pp. 51-71.
CHICAGO
J. Zare, A. Eslami-Rasekh and A. Dabaghi, "Signaling Lesser Importance in Persian Academic Lectures: Categorization in Terms of Discourse Functions," Language Related Research, 7 7 (2016): 51-71,
VANCOUVER
Zare,J.,Eslami-Rasekh,A.,Dabaghi,A. Signaling Lesser Importance in Persian Academic Lectures: Categorization in Terms of Discourse Functions. Language Related Research, 2016; 7(7): 51-71.
Language Related Research