A corpus-based analysis of discourse strategy use by English-Medium Instruction university lecturers in Turkey

This article reports a descriptive study that analyzed the discourse strategies used by Turkish university lecturers when delivering academic content in English. Through non-participant observation of English-Medium Instruction (EMI) lessons delivered by seven lecturers from five universities, a corpus of 13 h of recorded data was constructed. The lecturers' strategic language behaviors were identified and categorized based on the taxonomy developed by Dörnyei and Scott (1995), later elaborated by Sánchez-García, (2019). Corpus-based analysis revealed that the lecturers employed a wide range of discourse strategies, the majority of which were fillers, self-rephrasing, and code-switching. Thematic analysis showed that these discourse strategies offered two chief functions: (i) to cope with linguistic issues and (ii) to further students' comprehension. The results also revealed that most strategies only have medium communicative potential. This study highlights the necessity and significance of lecturer professional development to enhance the quality of EMI provision through the employment of discourse strategies that warrant greater communicative potential. •a small corpus-based study that analyzed the discourse strategy use by Turkish EMI lecturers.•Lecturers used a wide range of strategies such as use of fillers, self-rephrasing, code-switching.•Main functions of strategies were to cope with language issues and to help students' comprehension.•vast majority of strategies only have medium communicative potential.