'Anyway, the point I'm making is': lexicogrammatical relevance marking in lectures

Drawing on the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus, this paper presents an overview of how lecturers mark important and less important discourse using verbal cues. Such relevance markers (e.g. the point is, remember, that is important, essentially) and markers of lesser relevance (e.g. anyway, a little bit, not go into, not write down) combine discourse organisation with evaluation and can help students discern the relative importance of points, thus aiding comprehension, note-taking and retention. However, until the research reported here was undertaken little was known about this metadiscursive feature of lecture discourse and markers found in the existing literature and EAP materials were rather few and typically not based on corpus linguistic evidence. Combining corpus-based and corpus-driven methods, the research started from a close reading of 40 lectures to identify candidate markers. These were next retrieved from the whole corpus and in the case of relevance markers supplemented with other approaches yielding further markers. Relevance markers were mainly classified into lexicogrammatical verb, noun, adjective and adverb patterns, while the markers of lesser relevance were classified pragmatically as indications of message status, topic treatment, lecturer knowledge, assessment, and attention and note-taking directives. This account of relevance marking is valuable for EAP practitioners, will interest lecturer trainers, and provides input for experimental research on lecture listening, note-taking and lecture effectiveness. Furthermore, the paper offers insights into the use of discourse markers such as “the thing is”, “anyway”, “I don’t know” and “et cetera” and illuminates the understudied linguistic phenomenon of relevance marking. Finally, it illustrates the importance of corpus linguistic research and touches upon some difficulties pertaining to assigning discourse functions based on an examination of transcripts only