1. Introduction

This chapter introduces the concept of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and emphasizes lecture listening comprehension as a crucial aspect of academic learning. It discusses the importance of lecture notetaking and the role of metadiscursive elements in guiding students' comprehension and notetaking. The chapter also highlights the lack of research on metadiscourse in interdisciplinary lectures and proposes Genre-Based Instruction (GBI) as a potential approach to developing students' awareness of interdisciplinary genres and metadiscourse features. Finally, it outlines the research objectives of the study, which include analyzing the rhetorical functions in interdisciplinary lectures, identifying metadiscourse functions, and developing a GBI model for notetaking.

2. Theoretical Background

The theoretical background introduces related literature on interdisciplinary discourse, metadiscourse, and genre, emphasizing the importance of studying these in relation to interdisciplinary academic lectures and notetaking. It discusses interdisciplinary discourse in higher education, focusing on the need for EAP research to explore how language influences understanding of interdisciplinary academic lectures. The chapter also delves into metadiscursive features of academic lectures, including broad and narrow approaches to metadiscourse conceptualization, and the significance of metadiscourse for spoken academic discourse. Additionally, it touches on the generic features of academic lectures, particularly rhetorical functions, as studied through the ESP approach to Genre Analysis.

3. Method

This chapter describes the method used in the study, which involved utilizing corpus linguistics methods to analyze genre structure and metadiscursive elements in interdisciplinary academic lectures from both natural and social sciences. A corpus was formed of MIT lectures on interdisciplinary subjects, including video recordings of authentic lectures from the classroom environment. The analysis of the corpus data was conducted in three successive steps: genre analysis, analysis of metadiscourse items with the narrow approach, and analysis of metadiscourse items with the broad approach. The findings from these analyses led to the development of a GBI model.

4. Findings

The chapter presents the findings of the analysis of interdisciplinary academic lectures, focusing on moves and steps in the introduction, content, evaluation, and closing sections. The analysis identified a total of 1066 segments representing rhetorical functions which were most prevalent in the content section. The moves and steps for each section were then broken down by lecture, with the most frequent moves and steps identified for each section. Additionally, metadiscursive elements organizing discourse were identified and their co-occurrences with rhetorical functions were analyzed. The most frequent rhetorical functions were previewing and reviewing, and their co-occurrences with different rhetorical functions were identified.

5. Discussion

The present research explored the metadiscursive features in the interdisciplinary academic lectures through genre analysis. The findings showed differences in the occurrence of moves in the introduction and content sections between lectures from natural and social sciences. The evaluation section suggests a need for further evaluation of context-specific factors. Additionally, the use of metadiscursive elements showed no differences between natural and social science lectures. The study also found a relationship between rhetorical functions and metadiscourse features, indicating the potential for informing notetaking instruction significantly. Further research is necessary for designing a more discipline-specific EAP course on notetaking.

6. Conclusion, Implications and Limitations

This chapter discusses the conclusions, implications for GBI, and limitations of the study. The analysis indicates that the generic structures of lectures do not vary significantly between natural and social sciences. It was found that lecturers don't follow a fixed move sequence pattern. The study also highlighted the association between generic and metadiscursive features, which provides learners with clues about content when taking notes. However, the research has limitations due to the limited number of lectures analyzed and missing information related to the audience. The paper offers implications for GBI model for notetaking instruction. The proposed GBI model consists of four stages for teaching students about cognitive and physical processes involved in lecture genre, as well as practical aspects of notetaking. It provides an adaptation of the framework offered for teaching writing for specific purposes by combining the two GBI models developed by Osman (2004). Additionally, the paper includes appendices which provide helpful coding scheme for rhetorical functions and a taxonomy of metadiscourse in academic English.