Role Switch in Lecturer-Students Classroom Interaction: A Corpus-Based Study of Self-Referential Personal Pronouns

In classroom lectures, lecturers alternate roles to present appropriate disciplinary ethos to students. Hence, this corpus-based study examines lecturers' roles through self-referential personal pronouns (SRPPs) across disciplines to further emphasize PPs as key rhetorical features for participant positioning in academic lectures. Lectures from L2 lecturers, who were all Ghanaians, were recorded from two Ghanaian public universities. The recorded lectures were manually transcribed and processed into a computer-readable format. Afterward, the concordance tool in AntConc was used to search for all instances of I, we and you. The PPs that explicitly referred to the lecturers were analyzed to determine their discoursal roles. Drawing on the modified version of Tang and John's (Engl Specif Purp 18:23--29, 1999) model of the discourse functions of SRPPs, the study found specificities and differences in the roles across the three broad knowledge domains (i.e. Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences). The findings support the common core and specificity positions on disciplinary variation, which respectively assert that disciplines share similar and different lexical and rhetorical choices.