Elaborating Explanations during Open CourseWare Humanities Lectures: The Interplay of Verbal and Nonverbal Strategies

As a defining feature of academic lectures, explanations help learners grasp complex and challenging disciplinary concepts. This chapter focuses on the multimodal dimension of explanations in an instructional setting where visual input has an important role: online video-recorded lectures. Using corpus techniques and multimodal annotation software, I analyzed the linguistic features of explanations in OpenCourseWare humanities lectures, as well as accompanying nonverbal signals (i.e., prosodic stress, gaze and gestures). The findings suggest that the humanities lecturers prefer complex argumentative forms over simpler explanatory devices (e.g., exemplification) and use nonverbal signals in a synergistic way to facilitate and reinforce comprehension.