Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
English as the Medium of Instruction in Turkish Higher Education: Policy, Practice and Progress , Yasemin Kırkgöz,Ali Karakaş, Editör, Springer Nature, London, ss.233-256, 2022
The
discourse marker okay has multi-functions within classroom discourse
paving the way for interpersonal communication and creating dialogic space.
Considering the importance of teaching through English-medium instruction (EMI)
in the Turkish context, the purpose of this study is to explore the use and
functions of okay by a lecturer at an
EMI university in Turkey. To this end, using corpus linguistics and
conversation analysis methodologies, we investigated a relatively small
specialized corpus of lectures in the field of mathematics offered at
undergraduate level. The analyses of okay
in the corpus resulted in a range of key findings with respect to the
particular uses of the device in an EMI lecture.
The talk of
the lecturer constituting the body of the course involved highly frequent use
of okay in an engaging and meaningful
manner to achieve educational and interactional goals in the class. To
illustrate, the findings suggest that the lecturer employed okay to attract
students’ attention to the announcement of an upcoming significant point. In
addition to this unique function, we found that okay was used just
before providing a translation of an unknown word/concept in the target
language. With detailed excerpts focusing on the marker okay from our dataset, we also discuss the ways in which the lecturer
promotes and manages his teaching and the classroom. The study contributes to
the growing body of research on the use of DMs (particularly in teacher talk)
and shows how a dialogic space can be created by the deployment of okay in EMI classrooms.