The use of questions posed by professors in English and Montenegrin academic lectures

Abstract

Abstract Although questions are considered as important linguistic devices employed by lecturers to communicate facts and ideas to students and facilitate the learning process, they have not been a topic of extensive research. With that in mind, this paper explores the types and functions of questions asked by British and Montenegrin lecturers. It examines similarities and differences between two corpora – standard British academic corpora and a specially created corpus of Montenegrin lectures. Both quantitative and qualitative methodologies were used to conduct a contrastive analysis of lecturers’ questions. The results demonstrate that the differences in frequency, forms and functions of questions prevail over the similarities, which could be the impact of two different linguistic backgrounds and national academic cultures. The findings of this study could be useful in designing lecture-listening and note-taking courses for students in which they can get familiar with the forms and purpose of questions posed by professors. Research findings could be applied in training courses for novice lecturers and might also be useful to professors who give lectures to students with diverse linguistic backgrounds.