Evaluative and speaker-positioning function bundles in spoken academic English. English as a Medium of Instruction at UNIBO

Lexical bundles, “the most frequent recurring lexical sequences in a register” (Biber et al 1999, ch. 13) have been investigated across a range of different genres. They have been found to mark ideology in political debate (Partington & Morley 2004), while possibly register-idiosyncratic variations have been found in argumentative discourse (Miller & Johnson, 2014a, 2014b, 2009). Morley (2004) and Murphy and Morley (2006) examine their discourse-marking function of introducing the writer’s evaluation in newspaper editorials, also with the aid of patterns of metaphors in newspaper editorials and news reports. In the field of academic English, mastery of lexical bundles has been recognised as essential for fluent speech (Hyland 2012). The frequency of certain lexical bundles has been compared in different genres and registers (conversation and academic prose: Biber & Conrad 1999), while Biber et al (2004) and Biber and Barbieri (2007) have compared them in university spoken and written registers, and DeCarrico and Nattinger (1988, 1992) and Nesi and Basturkmen (2006) have focussed on lexical bundles in spoken academic registers among native speakers of English. Following Miller and Johnson’s investigations of lexical bundles such as we must, it is time and it is + ADJ (2014a, 2014b, 2009) in argumentative discourse typical of parliamentary proceedings, where some register-idiosyncratic variation emerged, this paper aims to investigate other evaluative and speaker-positioning function bundles (Halliday 1985). Instead of parliamentary discourse, however, the present study focuses on the spoken Academic English of non-native English-speaking Italian native lecturers during lectures at an Italian University. While both academic genres, lectures and office hours are different on a level of interaction, with interaction being an inherent characteristic of the latter, while the former, particularly in the Italian academic context, still tends to be monologic with little space for participation from students. Lecturer discourse in the two genres is scrutinised in relation to the function bundles used, particularly those indicating the stance towards or opinion of the speaker towards a particular proposition, for example the likelihood of it taking place, its importance, or its necessity (Biber et al. 2004, Biber & Barbieri 2007), and occurring in the phraseology It v-link ADJ (+ that/to…). Selected lectures and office hours from the macro-areas of Physical Sciences and Social Sciences were recorded and transcribed to form the EmiBO corpus (Johnson & Picciuolo 2022) of nearly 240,000 words. A comparative corpus investigation was performed using SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004) to compare frequent phraseology across macro-areas and genres. The aim of this study is to reveal patterns in usage of this particular phraseology across macro disciplinary area (Physical Sciences compared with Social Sciences subjects), and subgenre (lecture vs office hour sessions). The most frequent adjective in this phrase in argumentative discourse in Miller and Johnson (2009) was important and its synonyms. Investigation will show whether the same holds true for the academic context, in particular as regards production by non native speakers. Groom’s (2005) semantic divisions for categorising the evaluators are used. My hypothesis is that this phrase, an example of ‘explicit’ stance marking, is mainly used to further the informational content of the lecture, signalling the lecturer’s opinion of the importance or relevance of the information to follow. Appropriate use of lexical bundles is an essential component of fluent spoken and written academic production, making it possible to distinguish between the novice and expert user (Nesi & Basturkmen 2006; Hyland 2012). This is particularly relevant in the Italian university context, where English as a Medium of Instruction is a fairly recent phenomenon and many Italian lecturers do not have a high level of English language proficiency (Campagna & Pulcini 2014: 180). While competent English language speakers have a greater reserve of options to draw on, including both implicit and explicit markers (Deroey 2018), less confident speakers might tend to overuse or misuse this phrase. In order to investigate this, corpus findings were tested against a corpus of academic spoken English produced by native speaking lecturers (BASE). Biber, D. & Barbieri, F. (2007). Lexical bundles in university spoken and written registers. English for Specific Purposes, 26 (3), pp. 263–286. 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