Katrien Deroey

University of Luxembourg · University of Luxembourg Language Centre; English Studies

This chapter reports on the design, delivery and evaluation of an online research article writing course for doctoral students. The course format was a response to COVID-19 but was designed to be sustainable through enabling flexible, interactive, personalised and independent learning. Its five major components are independent learning tasks, onlin...

This paper surveys English medium instruction (EMI) lecturer training worldwide in order to inform decisions by practitioners tasked with its design and delivery. The survey encompasses 25 articles which included information about EMI lecturer training and support initiatives in 18 countries. These were analysed for their content components and del...

This talk will provide insights into designing and delivering English Medium Instruction (EMI) lecturer training by surveying published initiatives worldwide (Deroey, 2021). Although EMI is not a recent phenomenon, many higher education institutions are only now beginning to organize specific support for EMI lecturers. EAP practitioners are often t...

An important role lecturers perform is guiding students’ perceptions of the relative importance of lecture points. This discourse structuring can benefit both attention and note-taking and so help students appreciate the relative significance of lecture discourse for their discipline and assessment. To prepare students for their degree lectures, EA...

This talk has a dual purpose. In addition to mapping the use of one type of metadiscourse, viz. importance markers, across ‘native’ and ‘English Medium Instruction’ (EMI) lecture corpora, we elaborate on analytical issues related to studying metadiscourse in spoken and disciplinary discourse. ‘Importance markers’ (Deroey & Taverniers, 2012) are lex...

This workshop will provide insights into designing and delivering English Medium Instruction (EMI) lecturer training. Although universities have been slow to organize EMI lecturer support, an increasing awareness of the challenges faced by EMI lecturers and their students now appears to be boosting the demand for EMI lecturer training and support i...

This paper describes and evaluates an online research article writing course at the University of Luxembourg. Participants were self-referred PhD students from different disciplines. The aim of the ten-week course is to improve insight into the structural, stylistic and rhetorical features of research articles as well as the writing and publication...

A presentation of the rationale, design and delivery of an online research article writing course for doctoral students at the University of Luxembourg.

This paper reports on two multilingual courses developed and taught at the University of Luxembourg Language Centre. The Language Centre offers academic language support in English, French and German across the universities three faculties, where most study programmes are bi- or trilingual. The question of how to use existing multilingual resourc...

In this talk I sketch the development of an EAP curriculum at the University of Luxembourg Language Centre that takes into account multilingualism, needs analysis, insights into EAP teaching and materials, discussions with stakeholders, and human resources. I argue for an EAP curriculum approach that trains a set of core skills and enables discipli...

In this presentation we focus on how lecturers mark important information in their lectures. Being able to identify important information is fundamental to the learning process (Benson, 1989, p. 437), and the different levels of information in a lecture may be highlighted through a careful choice of language, including explicit macro markers (Chaud...

The multilingual University of Luxembourg has three official teaching languages: German, English and French. All Bachelor programmes and almost half of the Master programmes are at least bilingual. Students must be proficient enough in their programme’s teaching languages to understand content and produce written and oral academic texts. The Unive...

This paper reports on the use of bracketed text in a large corpus of student writing. The function of bracketing has been neglected in academic writing research and coursebooks. Yet it is closely related to important text construction issues such as information packaging, coherence, clarity, conciseness, intertextual framing and sourcing. With a vi...

The internationalization of higher education has led to a variety of contexts in which native and non-native speakers of English teach students with different cultural, educational and linguistic backgrounds through the medium of English. In this talk, I will survey the key issues associated with ‘English Medium Instruction’ for lecturers and stude...

In this talk, I show how lecturers verbally mark comparatively (un)important points in a large corpus of lectures (British Academic Spoken English corpus). This kind of discourse organization is thought to be beneficial to students’ note-taking, comprehension and recall. We’ll see that lecturers use a wide variety of lexicogrammatical importance m...

This paper examines 25 lecture listening coursebooks for their representativeness of ‘real’ lectures with a view to helping EAP practitioners make informed decisions about materials selection and development. The aspects of representativeness examined are language, lecture authenticity and research-informedness. The representativeness of language w...

Lecture listening is a common component of EAP training. In deciding which coursebook to adopt, a key consideration is arguably whether it prepares students for real lectures. Yet, lecture listening coursebooks have been criticised for their lack of realistic lecture models. Research on lecture corpora such as the British Academic Spoken English (B...

This paper confronts language use in the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus with the representation of lectures in 25 listening coursebooks (Deroey, submitted; Deroey, 2017). Following key tenets such as authenticity, specificity and needs analysis, English for Academic Purposes (EAP) materials development should be guided by an understa...

Keywords: discourse organization, evaluation, importance marking, lecture discourse This paper surveys how less important lecture discourse is marked lexicogrammatically in the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus (Deroey and Taverniers, 2012; Deroey, 2014). Such interpersonal, metadiscursive devices combine discourse organization with eva...

This paper surveys how relative importance is marked lexicogrammatically in lectures (cf. Deroey and Taverniers, 2012; Deroey, 2014; Deroey, 2015). Markers of (lesser) importance (e.g. the point is, remember, anyway, briefly) are metadiscursive devices combining discourse organization with evaluation along a ‘parameter of importance or relevance’ (...

This talk aims to engender discussion about how EAP tutors can support non-native speaker lecturers in an EMI context. I will first review research on EMI lecture discourse, including my study about discourse organizational signals in native and non-native lecturer speech (cf. Deroey, 2015). Next I will present the results of an extensive needs ana...

This paper reports on a multilingual course developed and taught at the University of Luxembourg Language Centre in 2015. The Language Centre offers academic language support in English, French and German across the universities three faculties, where most study programmes are bi- or trilingual. The question of how to use existing multilingual reso...

Multilingualism at the University of Luxembourg: policy, practice and attitudes Katrien Deroey, Birgit Huemer, Eve Lejot Multilingualism is a key feature of the identity and development strategy of the University of Luxembourg. This is reflected in its slogan: ‘University of Luxembourg. Multilingual, personalized, connected’. The University Langu...

Lecture listening and note-taking classes are a common component of EAP programmes and the list of listening course books is accordingly long. In deciding which of these to use, a key consideration is arguably whether it prepares students for lectures. In this regard, the availability of spoken academic corpora (e.g. BASE, MICASE, ELFA) and the res...

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical markers of important lecture points and proposes a classification in terms of their interactive and textual orientation. The importance markers were extracted from the British Academic Spoken English corpus using corpus-driven and corpus-based methods. The classification is based on...

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) co...

De internationalisering van het hoger onderwijs gaat vaak gepaard met de invoering van het Engels als onderwijstaal. Hoe effectief het doceren en leren in deze vreemde taal verloopt, staat nog niet vast. Wél is al gebleken dat zowel docenten als studenten hierbij problemen ondervinden. Een duidelijk gestructureerd college helpt studenten bij het be...

Importance marking organises lecture discourse by signalling key points (e.g. the point is; remember; that is important). Comparing how this is achieved by native and non-native speakers of English sheds light on the generalisability of genre findings across users of the same language and can inform lecturer training and lecture comprehension cours...

To assess how representative discourse organisational cues in EAP listening books are, I compared importance marking cues with those I retrieved from the BASE lectures using corpus-based and corpus-driven methods. The corpus investigation revealed a large variety of importance markers, the most common of which (e.g. the point is; remember; anyway;...

1. Introduction In this paper I will discuss the extent to which lecture listening textbooks reflect authentic lecture language. I will also demonstrate Sketch Engine, which allows you to easily retrieve target language from (academic) corpora, and FileMaker Pro, a database programme which I find extremely useful in processing concordances. The deg...

This paper explores the lexicogrammatical marking of less relevant or less important points in lecture discourse. The attested markers of lesser relevance derive from a close reading of 40 lectures from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus and their use is documented with evidence from the whole BASE corpus of 160 lectures. Five basic...

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical devices which highlight important or relevant points in lectures. Despite the established usefulness of discourse organizational cues for lecture comprehension and note-taking, very little is known about the marking of relevance in this genre. The current overview of lexicogrammatica...

This paper reports findings from a study on the discourse functions of basic wh-clefts such as what our brains do is complicated information processing in 160 lectures drawn from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. Like much linguistic research on this academic genre, the investigation is motivated by the need to gain a better unders...

Despite the importance of lectures in higher education, relatively little is known about lecture discourse. To contribute to our understanding of this genre, this paper presents a comprehensive overview of lecture functions, i.e. what lecturers use language for. The functional overview is based on a qualitative analysis of lectures from the British...

Increasing student and lecturer mobility along with the spread of English as an academic lingua franca (Mauranen, 2006) means a growing number of university lecturers in Europe are delivering at least some lectures in English. Well-designed English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses can help lecturers whose first language is not English in meeting...

Increasing student and lecturer mobility along with the spread of English as an academic lingua franca (Mauranen, 2006) means a growing number of university lecturers in Europe are delivering at least some lectures in English. Well-designed English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses can help lecturers whose first language is not English in meeting...