Teaching a Foreign Language: Descriptive Contributions of Oral Academic Discourse

Abstract

The aim of this study is to describe oral academic discourse on the basis of the analysis of educational videos in English. Educational videos can be defined as audiovisual material specially designed by an expert on a given disciplinary field, which is intended to teach a specific topic and which is published on the Internet. Four educational videos related to specific engineering topics were selected and analyzed. This study focuses on oral academic discourse and it includes not only the description of educational videos in terms of genre analysis, but also an analysis and discussion of the linguistic resources typically selected in this kind of oral production.