Reconceptualising Space in Academic Lectures: Face-to-Face, Blended and Online Lecturer Discourse in the Context of English-Medium Instruction

Spatial deixis (SD) is critical to students' comprehension as it allows the lecturer to direct students' attention towards purposeful objects in the classroom space in order to clarify meanings. Facilitating student comprehension has long been a concern for English-Medium Instruction (EMI) lecturers. However, the recent shift to online teaching has further challenged them, while EMI in online settings is still largely unexplored. Focusing on variations in lecturer's use of lexical SD in face-to-face (F2F), online , blended learning settings, this study investigates EMI lecturer discourse from a multimodal perspective. A corpus of six EMI lectures delivered by the same lecturer - two for each lecture modality - was used to investigate how patterns of lexical SD co-occurring with gestures and technology-mediated actions are deployed to accomplish specific communicative functions in different lecture modalities. Findings showed that although the lecturer preferred the proximal SD this and here in all teaching modalities, in F2F they often co-occurred with pointing gestures, whereas in synchronous video lecture (SVL) they were more frequently accompanied by a wider range of technology-mediated actions. Furthermore, in SVL these actional multimodal SD patterns often co-occurred with visual words for introducing specialized vocabulary, which is likely to facilitate students' comprehension. Findings lend support to the integration of pedagogy, language and ICT tools in EMI lecturer training programmes.