“THIS IS FOR SURE A QUESTION AT YOUR EXAMS”: ASSESSMENT REFERENCES IN EMI AND L1 ENGINEERING LECTURES

This paper focuses on assessment-related expressions used to mark out important content in lecture discourse. Relevant to Higher Education (HE) contexts generally, such markers are even more necessary in English Mediated Instruction (EMI) contexts where students are mostly non-native English speakers. So far, little research has compared usage of those expressions by native and non-native English-speaking lecturers. A specialised corpus of engineering lectures delivered by native and non-native speakers of English was compiled. Selected query markers were used to extract references to assessment made by the lecturer. The frequency of individual markers such as the words ‘question’ and ‘exam’ and the wider discourse moves which encompass them were analyzed in terms of their positioning with respect to the lecture content, the degree of probability involved, and typical phraseology. Those frequencies were then compared between native and non-native lecturers. Content of particular importance to students should be well marked. We might therefore expect assessment references to be particularly frequent and clearly marked especially when lecturers and students are non-native English speakers. However, findings suggest that a clear distinction between native and non-native speakers of English is not always easy to make and thus have relevance for pedagogical practices and for the professional development of teachers.