Gender and Language: Signalling Importance in English Academic Lectures

Document Type : research article

Author

Kosar University of Bojnord

Abstract

This paper reports on a study which explored importance marking in English academic lectures by male and female faculty members. The purpose of study was to investigate importance marking across gender. The method of study was corpus-driven, mixed-methods, and discourse analytic. Importance marking was investigated in the 160 English academic lectures of the BASE corpus. The results of the study showed that, regardless of the gender of the lecturer, importance marking takes place through (1) organizing the lecture into points and non-points, (2) using evaluative adjectives and adverbs such as important and more importantly, (3) indicating the extended coverage of topics, (4) relating the content of the lecture to exam and assessment, and (5) interaction with the audience. Additionally, it was found that importance marking does not necessarily involve using evaluative adjectives and adverbs. It can be done both explicitly and implicitly. Moreover, it was observed that orientation of the importance marker depends on its function. Finally, female lecturers were found to involve the audience more frequently than male lecturers.

Keywords


منابع
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