Investigating higher education seminar talk

Abstract

In this paper, we consider how a combined corpus linguistics and conversation analysis methodology can reveal new insights into the relationship between interaction patterns, language use, and learning. The context of the paper is higher education small group teaching sessions and our data are drawn from a one million-word corpus, the Limerick-Belfast Corpus of Academic Spoken English (LI-BEL CASE). In this study, our analysis is based on 500,000 words of the corpus). Our methodology combines corpus linguistics (CL) and applied conversation analysis (CA), enabling quantitative findings to be elaborated by more close-up qualitative analysis of sequences of interaction. This CL-CA approach offers a fuller, richer description of small group teaching talk than would be found using either CA or CL alone. We suggest that awareness among practitioners of these relationships would help facilitate interactions which are more conducive to learning and in which students feel more engaged and involved.