Kim, Miran, Seo, Minjeong, Kim, Namjoong & Koo, Ok Kyung. 2018. A Quantitative
Analysis of Conjunctive Discourse Markers in Spoken Lectures. Language Information
27, 45-68. EMI (English as a Medium Instruction) classes have been expanding for
all university fields with the increasing demand of the language ability to use academic
English. In this line of demands, effective academic lectures with a special focus on
Discourse Markers (DMs) have recently been researched as one of the important features
for learners’ effective comprehension in a foreign language setting since the ability
to use DMs naturalistically can signal learners’ potential development of interactional
skills. In this paper, we investigate distributional characteristics of DMs found in general
(TED talks) and academic lectures (MICASE) and provide insights to facilitate DMs
for academic listening comprehension in higher education. Our findings show firstly
that spoken lectures use a limited group of DMs (out of 120 items) whose lexical
load is further localized to few items, such as “and, so, but.” Secondly, more
interpersonal DMs are found in general lectures than in academic ones. Finally, certain
interpersonal DMs seem to characterize a lecture style whether it is monologic or
interactional. The findings reported in this paper have some pedagogical implications
for English learners as well as lecturers designing EMI courses.

Key words: Discourse Markers (DMs), Conjunctive cohesion, Spoken lecture corpus,
EMI lectures, Lexical Frequency, Discourse competence, TED, Michigan Corpus of
Academic Spoken English (MICASE)