Listening for needles in haystacks: how lecturers introduce key terms

The present paper reports on a corpus-based study of university lecture discourse aimed at identifying linguistic patterns that may be useful for students to notice when taking notes. One of the most ubiquitous patterns, found following a qualitative analysis of lexical bundles (i.e. multi-word strings) extracted from the corpus relates to the function of introducing key terms and concepts in lectures. It was found that while some formulae seem to help students notice when a lecturer is defining a key term or concept, there are still many other devices employed by teachers when realizing the same function that students are likely to miss, or which could possibly be confusing. Adapted from the source document