Identifying discourse markers for academic listening in teaching Turkish as a second/foreign language

With the increase in the number of the international students who pursue higher education in Turkish medium programs and the recent recognition of the problems these students face as well as their needs, the importance of academic Turkish has recently been acknowledged in the field of teaching Turkish as a second language. Within this context, for students to have an academic language competence, they need to be familiar with the features of academic genres and academic discourse in Turkish and conventions of academic settings as well as employing their reading, listening, writing and speaking skills efficiently in relevant contexts. However, when the studies in the literature and the printed course materials are examined, it is seen that while the focus is mostly on reading and writing, listening skill remains unattended, and the coursebooks which have a section for listening usually contains only comprehension practice, lacking any awareness raising activities regarding spoken academic discourse or listening strategy training. What lies in the background of this situation is thought to be the lack of sufficient linguistic studies that would inform teaching of academic listening or the fact that the connections between various linguistic phenomena and pedagogical goals remain undiscovered. In the literature, there are studies that establish such a connection and reveal the positive effect of the existence of metadiscourse in spoken academic discourse in the field of second language teaching and the positive effect of awareness-raising studies on metadiscourse in teaching contexts. In the second language acquisition literature, there are studies that establish such a connection, revealing the positive effect of the existence of metadiscourse in spoken academic discourse and awareness-raising activities regarding metadiscourse in academic listening in teaching contexts. Drawing on this connection, a qualitative and genre-based textual discourse analysis study was designed, which aims to describe the metadiscourse markers used in university lectures and to investigate their relationship with academic listening micro-skills. To this end, with the aim of listing academic listening micro-skills, first, a list was created through content analysis of the lists presented in the literature and the relevant tables in the reference texts, and then the list was improved based on the data. On the other hand, a specialized corpus was created following the maximum variety sampling technique from twelve one-way university lectures in Turkish from various scientific fields, which are conducted face-to-face, synchronously or asynchronously on a web-based platform. By manually analyzing this corpus on the data analysis program called MAXQDA, metadiscourse markers in the lectures were determined and paired with academic listening micro-skills, and made available for the use of language instructors and material developers. It is hoped that this inventory will contribute to efforts in increasing the quality of academic listening instruction in Turkish.