Genre awareness and academic lecture comprehension: The impact of teaching importance markers

This paper explores the impact of teaching importance marking expressions on EFL learners' comprehension of main points in English academic lectures. The participants of the study were 100 EFL learners (53 males and 47 females) studying medicine at a major university in Iran. Half of the participants were assigned to the experimental group and the other half were put in the control group. The learners in the experimental group received explicit instruction in importance markers within 15 one-hour sessions, whereas the students in the control group participated only in the classes of their regular major-related courses, one of which was a course on English for the students of medicine. A test of the comprehension of important points in English academic lectures was developed and used as a post-test to measure the students' comprehension of important points. The results of t-test showed that knowledge of how importance marking is done in English academic lectures improves the EFL learners' comprehension of the main points of lectures. This was taken to mean that genre awareness or an understanding of the discourse structure of academic lectures improves the students' comprehension of the main points of lectures.