The I-you Connection in Humanities and Social Sciences Lectures: Multimodal Insights

Research on the interpersonal features of lecture discourse has shown that lecturers’ use of the personal pronouns I and you are important linguistic means of establishing and maintaining rapport with student audiences, while rendering largely monologic discourse more dialogic in nature. This study builds on this knowledge by expanding the analysis of the I-you connection in university lectures in humanities and social sciences disciplines to encompass the non-verbal dimension. I-you patterns were investigated in a dataset of six video-recorded lectures by integrating corpus methods and multimodal annotation software. Results showed that lecturers used I-you patterns (e.g. I want you, I’m going to tell you) to engage with the audience towards enhanced understanding and overall lecture experience. The verbal production of I-you patterns also co-occurred with other semiotic resources (e.g., prosodic stress, gaze direction, and hand gestures) in rich multimodal ensembles to shape and reinforce interpersonal meanings. No clear discipline-related trends in the lecturers’ use of I-you patterns were detected. The findings can be applied in EAP/ESP settings to help L2 students to improve their lecture comprehension by becoming more aware of how disciplinary experts convey interpersonal meanings, also in the context of the specialized discourse communities to which they aspire in their post-academic careers.