Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
International Conference of the Association for Language Awareness, Karlsruhe, Almanya, 7 - 10 Temmuz 2024, ss.1-10
Triggered by the notion of globalization, the phenomenon of the spread
of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) enhances the use of English Medium
Instruction (EMI) especially in tertiary contexts all around the world. The
studies conducted on this ever-growing research field reveal that there are
several pros and cons regarding the implementation of EMI in institutions. The
implementation of EMI can be illuminated by observing and investigating
actual classroom discourse of EMI settings. However, the existing body of
research concerning EMI discourse is not all-inclusive, which creates a number
of gaps in the field. Driven by this, the main aim of the current study is to
investigate the use of cognitive discourse functions in Turkish tertiary EMI
context. To this end, a corpus collected from 32 hours of non-participant
classroom observation was compiled. The participants of this study are three
EMI lecturers delivering content in various science disciplines at tertiary
context. The transcribed data collected from their classes were coded in
accordance with the cognitive discourse functions (CDF) construct offered by
Dalton-Puffer (2013, 2016). As for the data analysis process of this qualitative
study, a discourse analysis approach was adopted regarding the collected
corpus. It was revealed that CDF were utilized by all participant lecturers
reflected by the linguistic manifestations of their thought processes in the
delivery of content. It was found out that the CDF “Define” and “Explain” were
the most frequently employed types in the observed classes. Regarding the
linguistic realization of those functions, common linguistic patterns each type of
CDF were detected. Besides, the ways of achieving the key competences of the
observed EMI lectures through the use of CDF was investigated and a number
of occasions in which those functions were used to meet those competences were
observed. Taken all together, this study emphasizes the importance of the use of
CDF construct to promote the quality of EMI discourse.
Keywords: English-medium instruction, classroom discourse, cognitive discourse
functions, tertiary context