| The notion of academic discourse has traditionally been narrowly defined as academic writing. Little attention has been paid to the investigation and description of academic speaking, particularly from a discourse analytic perspective. This study examines the nature of discussion in the context of a graduate seminar. Seven and a half hours of seminar discussion on second language literacy were audiotaped and transcribed. A conceptual framework of seminar strategies is proposed, which divides seminar strategies into conversational management strategies, topic management strategies, and social strategies. Each strategy is analyzed in terms of its verbal construction, the sequential environments in which it occurs, and the speech actions it performs. The goal is to better understand how members of a graduate seminar use discourse strategies to manage the floor, construct understandings, and maintain group cohesiveness. The findings of this study (1) contribute to a relatively new literature on discourse in academic settings, (2) generate a rich research agenda in which the patterns of academic speaking can be explored, (3) provide a data-based account of how seminar strategies work for materials designers, classroom instructors and oral proficiency testers to refer to or draw upon, and finally, (4) foster the notion that academic speaking is systematically patterned and potentially learnable, as is academic writing. |
