This article examines the language-related challenges that first-year students face when adjusting to the demands of English-medium higher education in Hong Kong. The article is based on the findings of a longitudinal study which tracked the university careers of 28 students from a range of backgrounds via in-depth, semi-structured interviews…

This study investigated whether undergraduate non-native speakers of English had difficulties comprehending information in a science lecture whose discourse organization went beyond a basic problem-solution structure. It found that the comprehension difficulties of the non-native speakers were also found among many of the native speakers. (25…

This study examined notes taken by 29 undergraduate native and non-native speakers of English during a lecture on commercial law. It found that native speakers took more detailed notes and more accurately recorded the hierarchical structure and principal elements of the lecture than non-native speakers. (48 references) (MDM)

Fourteen non-native speaking graduate and undergraduate students watched an authentic 16-minute videotaped engineering lecture and were asked to provide immediate recall summaries. It is concluded that students should be taught to listen to lectures in a more rhetorical and strategic way.(Author/VWL)

Explores the usefulness of the criterion of authenticity for the selection and evaluation of English for academic purposes materials. Using a student questionnaire and techniques of discourse analysis based on Halliday's concepts of field, tenor, and mode, the levels of difficulty and relevance of materials using four media was investigated.…

Strategic support is needed for nonnative speakers of English to understand university lectures better. The application of the techniques of genre analysis to a corpus of lecture introductions is reported. Teaching implications are considered. (25 references) (Author/LB)

Demonstrates the difficulty that English-as-a-second-language students experience in comprehending academic lectures, explores the lexical phrases that occur in several representative academic lectures and categorizes them in terms of the discourse functions they perform, and suggests ways of teaching such lexical phrases and functional categories…

Presents a range of insights that can be gained for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) listening comprehension pedagogy from the analysis of an authentic lecture. Notes that the salient features identified in the lecture are absent from academic listening textbooks surveyed and argues that EAP listening instructors need to supplement their texts…