The uses of storytelling in university engineering lectures

The Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC) is a growing corpus of English-medium lectures from across the world, currently including transcripts from Malaysia, New Zealand and the UK (www.coventry.ac.uk/elc). Unusually, the ELC encodes functions that recur across large numbers of transcripts, using what we call ‘pragmatic annotation’. Recurrent functions in ELC transcripts have been found to include ‘storytelling’, ‘housekeeping’, ‘summarizing’ and ‘defining’. Sub-categories have been assigned to some of these functions; for example storytelling is marked as either an ‘anecdote’, ‘exemplum’, ‘narrative’ or ‘recount’ (cf. Martin 2008). The paper argues that although engineering lecturers around the world may use a common language to deliver the same kind of syllabus for the same broad purpose, engineering lectures are likely to remain both contextand culture-specific. Lectures of all kinds often include story elements, to entertain, instruct, and make key information more memorable. The way stories are presented varies from place to place, however, and regional differences may represent a challenge both to those who attend lectures and to those who deliver them. Such variation should be taken into account when designing ESP and staff development programmes. The analysis looks at the purposes of storytelling in Engineering lectures, and the ways in which various types of stories are realized linguistically. The discussion draws on Labov & Waletzky’s (1967) structural model for oral narratives of personal experience, and Martin’s (2008) four categories of ‘story’. moment” (ibid.: 100). Figure 1 illustrates these stages in an excerpt from our Engineering Lecture Corpus. Martin (2008) has developed Labov & Waletzky’s notion of the narrative, identifying a network of possible pathways through the events to differentiate four possible story genres, as shown in Figure 2. In Martin’s system only the ‘narrative’ genre is associated with disturbed and restored equilibrium, as described in the Labovian model. ‘Recounts’ narrate unproblematic events, and ‘anecdotes’ and ‘exempla’ narrate problematic events which are not resolved. Table 1 illustrates Martin’s (ibid. 2008: 43) model of the different story genres, and his claim that “the structure and function of the different stories derives from the relations between events and feelings”. 8 SIâN AlSoP, EmmA morEtoN & HIlAry NESI ESP Across Cultures 10 2013 · ISBN 978-88-7228-721-7 © Edipuglia s.r.l. www.edipuglia.it once there was a really great story it happened in my in this class in the first year a student said to me well I said to the students I said I was talking about DC motors and I said you can't make a DC motor which doesn't have a commutator it has to have segments to make it work we'll see about that in the second semester and a student said well he came to me the next week and he said I don't think that's true what you said last week and he um showed me a diagram and I said oh that will never work that's no good the next week he turns up and he's built one and he says look and um take it into the lab and sure enough he was right I was wrong and it was a completely new idea that he'd thought of and it turned over it worked and if he'd get a patent on it that's an amazing story ! Figure 1. An example of a Labovian narrative (NZ 3010) THE USES OF STORYTELLING IN UNIVERSITY ENGINEERING LECTURES 9 This model suggests that storytelling might realize a variety of pedagogical purposes, and indeed a number of researchers have identified the story as an important pedagogical feature in spoken academic discourse (Dyer & Keller-Cohen 2000; Simpson-Vlach & Leicher 2006; Maynard & Leicher 2007; Deroey & Taverniers 2011). Neither the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus nor the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) has been systematically annotated for textual functions, but attempts have been made to isolate and define story elements in small samples taken from both these corpora; Deroey & Taverniers (2011) consider ‘recounts’ in their functional analysis of 12 BASE lectures, for example, and Maynard & Leicher (2007) include ‘narrative’ as a pedagogically interesting pragmatic feature to encode in the header metadata for a small selection of MICASE speech events. According to Labov & Waletzky (1967: 81, 84) strict temporal sequence is “the defining feature of narrative”, because it can “recapitulate past experience in the same order as the original events”. Temporal sequence is thus often used as a formal means of identifying story elements within larger units of discourse such as the lecture. Simpson-Vlach & Leicher (2006: 69) define ‘narrative’ in MICASE as a “story of two or more sequential clauses using the past tense or the historical present”, and Deroey & Taverniers (2011: 6) class as ‘recounts’ those sections of the lecture where, often using past tenses and time indications, “the lecturer presents information about past actions, events or situations”. Stories can also be described in terms of the speaker’s role. Story elements in the lectures analysed by Dyer & Keller-Cohen (2000), for example, are defined not only as reports of events in the past, but also as reports of events in which ESP Across Cultures 10 2013 · ISBN 978-88-7228-721-7 © Edipuglia s.r.l. www.edipuglia.it ! ! ! ! ! Figure 2. Comparing story genres – a choice network (Martin 2008: 45) Genre Events Reaction recount unproblematic running commentary anecdote unexpected disruption emotional empathy exemplum noteworthy incident moral judgement narrative complication resolved build and release tension ! ! Table 1. Martin’s table of events and feelings in four story genres (2008: 44) the lecturer (the first person narrator) partook. Dyer & Keller-Cohen describe such narratives as a means by which lecturers position themselves as experts, and distance themselves from non-expert ‘other’ characters. This paper describes our attempts to identify, categorize and analyse story elements in an international Engineering Lecture Corpus (the ELC), drawing on the prior studies of narrative in academic and non-academic contexts.