Does ‘okay’ mean different things in lectures delivered by teachers using English as an academic lingua franca and those using English as an L1?

Abstract

This study aims to contribute to the understanding of academic lectures delivered in the context of English as an academic lingua franca through an investigation of one of the most frequently used discourse markers (DMs) – okay, in English mediated lectures delivered by native Chinese-speaking teachers, compared with usage in lectures delivered by native English-speaking teachers. The data examined include 6 lectures selected from the Taiwanese Lecture Corpus and 6 from the British Academic Spoken English Corpus, comprising a total of 148,310 words. The categories of okay functions in lectures (Looney, Jia, & Kimura, 2017; Othman, 2010; Schleef, 2008) are adapted to analyse the data. These show that several core features of lectures are shared between native Chinese-speaking and native English-speaking teachers in their use of okay, while others reflect their local academic culture contextual differences, as well as the influence of Chinese as a first language. The findings contribute to the field of English as an academic lingua franca in spoken discourse, particularly the use of DMs, and the implications for English for academic purposes at university level are discussed.