Teaching lecture comprehension skills through OpenCourseWare video-recorded lectures: A research-informed classroom application

Lecture comprehension is a complex process that involves not only the decoding of the phonological, lexical, and syntactic features of speech, but also the interpretation of pragmatic and cultural meanings that may emerge. This combination can create considerable challenges for L2 learners. Moreover, there may be difficulties caused by unfamiliar prosodic patterns or accents of lecturers, as well as facial expressions and gesturing whose meanings may escape L2 students. To address all of these potential obstacles, lecture comprehension activities should make use of materials prepared from authentic classroom lectures. The aim of this article is to illustrate how video-recorded lectures can be analysed to gain insights into their multifaceted nature and how the findings can be used to inform classroom activities to improve lecture comprehension. The article provides 1) a description of how video clips cut from OpenCourseWare lectures can be prepared for research and practice, 2) an overview of two case studies performed on video clips that highlight the use of multimodal ensembles integrating verbal and non-verbal features (e.g., idioms, humour, stance markers, culture-specific references, prosodic patterns, gesturing), and 3) a detailed lesson plan to exemplify how video clips from OCW lectures can be used to facilitate lecture comprehension.