Interaction in spoken academic discourse in an EMI context: the use of questions

Studies on metadiscourse (Hyland 2005) have focussed on engagement as interaction. An example of engagement is asking questions (Hyland 2009: 112) and indeed the importance of questioning for content learning has been researched extensively in pedagogical studies as fundamental in coconstructing meaning (Dafouz Milne & Sanchez Garcia 2013: 130). Research in an English Mediated Instruction (EMI) context found that teachers’ usage of questions in the classroom was affected by low levels of language competence and in these cases, strategies such as questioning could easily be underused or even misused, thus affecting the teaching and learning of content (Drljaca Margic & Vodopija-Krstanovic 2018: 32). Our study examines lecturer questioning at an Italian University by triangulating face-to-face surveys of lecturers, student questionnaires, and transcribed lecture recordings. Findings have practical applications for providing targeted coaching for non-native EMI lecturers with regard to appropriate linguistic strategies to encourage interaction, and also have implications for research into linguistic strategies used within EMI.