“Bear in mind that”: Enhancing lecture comprehension through signaling importance markers

Abstract The present study attempts to propose a taxonomy for the discourse functions of importance markers in English academic lectures and examine their effects on ESL learners’ comprehension of important points in lectures. To this end, a corpus of 160 lecture transcripts from the BASE corpus was analyzed to identify and classify the main functions of words and expressions that mark importance in them. It was found that importance is indicated by the following lecture-specific devices and attributes: 1) student involvements, 2) topic announcers, 3) exam-related markers, 4) discourse clarifiers, 5) hedging markers, and 6) message promoters. A total of 62 Malaysian ESL students (38 females and 24 males) participated in this study and were divided into an experimental group and a control group, both of them of the same size. Through 12 forty-minute sessions of explicit instruction, the participants in the experimental group were instructed the discourse functions of importance markers in university lectures, whereas those in the control group did not receive such instruction. The result of the posttest of comprehension of important points indicated that familiarity with how importance is marked in lectures can boost ESL students’ understanding of main topics. The findings suggest that both novice lecturers and ESL/EFL students may profit from instruction as to how importance is indicated by native speaker lecturers through several lecture-specific discourse functions.