A multimodal source to teach lecturing skills in english at universitya

Abstract

Lectures at university have changed dramatically in recent years. We can see how ICTs are central even in more traditional face to face settings. Moreover, an important step forward in this regard is the fact that nowadays many academic institutions are moving towards an open culture. Some top world universities, such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (http://ocw.mit.edu) or Yales University (http://oyc.yale.edu/), provide free and open access to a selection of courses from different departments. The consequences of this openness are inestimable from a sociocultural and educational perspective. On the other hand, bilingualism and multilingualism is promoted in Europe. Given this picture, the need to teach in English at university has become a central aspect for many subject, or content, teachers who are not native speakers of that language. In this study, we present a pedagogical applications of these video lectures to teach CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) teachers at university level how to teach in English. They are an excellent source of authentic examples that goes beyond the linguistic component, to present teachers’ performance in class. We took a multimodal discourse analysis approach to see how interaction with students unfolds in English. With this aim we complied a video corpus of 36 lectures from a course in Chemistry (available at MIT open courseware), and annotated it with the software ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator) (http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/). The multimodal annotated corpus can become a useful tool for online and face to face lessons. It provides video examples and the linguistic transcriptions of the lectures’ communicative strategies to clarify and reinforce students’ understanding.