Classroom Research: Questions from the Audience in a University Lecture Course (Discourse Strategy, Processing, Functional Description, Empirical Study, Academic).

Abstract

Designing an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course that deals with discourse factors of extended monologues in situated speech is difficult. This is due, at least in part, to the complex relationship of text to context in academic communities. Classroom research in these communities can provide empirical descriptions for teaching purposes. This work is such an empirical description. It describes first the research setting and the heuristic fashioned for the interpretation and description of classroom data. It then describes the rhetorical context for the questions: i.e. an introductory lecture course on the technology of the production of the sounds of speech. Here the focus is on two major ways of instructing: dialectic and rhetoric. The main focus in this work is on the structure of the questions and the relationship of the structure to the context in this academic community. From this examination conclusions can be drawn about discourse processes in the forming of community. The final section describes these processes and discusses implications from this work for teaching EAP.