Abstract:

As English-medium instruction (EMI) spreads in higher education throughout the world, the number of undergraduate and graduate programs accepting students from abroad is rapidly increasing. As a result, in contrast to the uniform cultural background that can be expected in classrooms designed by and for the mainstream local culture, classrooms in EMI programs that attract students from many different countries are inevitably multicultural and multilingual. In order to support instructors and students who are non-native speakers of English (NNS) in preparing for delivering or attending lectures in English, we started the OnCAL project in 2010, and built a corpus that now contains 430 transcripts of science and engineering lectures, delivered at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Stanford University, two leading institutions in the United States. We analyzed the corpus and identified pedagogical functions that were important in the discourse of science and engineering lectures. The purpose was to offer abundant examples of utterances for familiarizing NNS instructors and students with the English used to realize each pedagogical purpose. OnCAL (http://www.oncal.sci.waseda.ac.jp/) has been successful in raising awareness of the pedagogical relevance of linguistic features, but we now realize that raising awareness of the diversity in learning styles of students coming from different cultural backgrounds also needs to be considered in order to raise the effectiveness of lecture discourse. Providing examples of utterances from instructors teaching with a single cultural background in mind would probably not be sufficient. This led us to extend OnCAL to include lectures delivered in Japanese, in order to find concrete examples of differences in teaching styles in Japanese and American classrooms. By “Japanese classroom” we mean one in which almost all students are Japanese native speakers who entered university following secondary education at a Japanese high school. We assume that such a Japanese classroom would be an example of a group having members that share a uniform cultural background. We hypothesized that teaching styles reflect differences in learning styles, and can thus reveal differences between mainstream Japanese and American contexts. Knowledge of such differences should help instructors become aware of the diversity of learning styles of their audience and encourage adaptation of classroom discourse to meet the needs of a diverse audience. The corpus of Japanese lectures contains, as of December 2016, 44 lectures related to three subjects in the field of information science delivered by a Japanese professor. Although the Japanese corpus is still under construction, it already allows us to search for examples of expressions revealing cultural diversity.

Keywords:

EMI.