Structural Variation of Directives in University Classroom Discourse: A Corpus-Based Investigation

ABSTRACT The present study examines structural variation of directives1 across different situational contexts in university lectures. The data comes from the lecture component of a large corpus of university discourse2. The following analytical steps were taken: 1) possible linguistic patterns of directives were manually identified in sample lectures; 2) five most-frequent lexico-grammatically explicit structural types of directives were selected for automatic analysis; 3)Python scripts were written to automatically identify directives with the five structural types; 4) structural variation of directives was analyzed in relation to three situational variables: level of interaction, level of instruction, and discipline. Results show that situational variables affect the use of directives in important ways.