A corpus-assisted genre analysis of the Tunisian Lecture Corpus: An exploratory study

Multimodal, specialized corpora of academic lectures represent authentic classroom data that practitioners can draw on to design academic listening resources that would help students attend lectures. These corpora can also act as reflective practice corpora for teacher training or professional development programs with the objective of raising awareness of lecturing practices. Despite their contribution in shaping the type and quality of the learning that takes place in classrooms, multimodal lecture corpora are scarce, particularly in the Arab world. This paper addresses this research gap by designing and collecting a corpus of academic lectures delivered in English in Tunisia. The corpus was explored using a Systemic Functional Linguistics and English for Specific Purposes integrated genre analysis framework. A three-layered model of analysis was used to manually code various rhetorical functions as well as their realizations. Major findings include the pervasiveness of metadiscursive functions when compared to discourse functions, the identification of context-specific metadiscursive strategies, and the absence of verbal or non-verbal signaling of some rhetorical functions. Implications relate to the necessity of compiling and/or using lecture corpora that are multimodal, the value of adopting function-first approaches to explore these, particularly in non-native contexts, and the design of professional development programs and learning materials that would better account for local academic needs.