Awareness of discourse organizers and comprehension of academic lectures: The effect of using concordancers

Previous research shows that discourse organizers facilitate the students’ comprehension of lectures. Importance markers are considered a crucial part of discourse organization. It is not clear, however, whether understanding of importance markers boosts the students’ understanding of lectures. Besides, it is not clear whether using corpora and concordancers in the classroom aids their comprehension. To this end, a total of 206 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) university students (108 males and 98 females, aged from 18 to 23), studying medicine, humanities, engineering, and basic sciences at three major universities in Iran, whose command of English was pretested on a piloted test of Preliminary English Test (PET), were selected for participation in the study. They were then equally divided into a control and experimental group. Learners in the control group attended 15 one-hour general English training sessions (five weeks, three sessions a week) without specific focus on identifying organizational features of lectures, while students in the experimental group attended 15 one-hour sessions (five weeks, three sessions a week) of instruction on importance marking in English academic lectures, using the British Academic Spoken English corpus (BASE) with a concordancer, namely Sketch Engine. Presentation and practice tasks which were developed based on authentic concordance lines which were derived from the BASE corpus were used for the experimental group. Analysis of the scores of participants on a comprehension test of important points of English academic lectures showed that concordancer-based instruction of importance markers enhances EFL learners’ identification and comprehension of important points in English academic lectures.