Teaching Styles in North American University Classrooms: A Corpus-Driven Linguistic Analysis

Although university teaching styles have been investigated in both educational and applied linguistic research, a comprehensive linguistic analysis of teaching styles has yet to be explored. Previous educational studies have relied on perceptual measures (e.g. class observations or questionnaires) while linguistic studies have analyzed small sets of narrowly defined class sessions (e.g. monologic delivery style) or associated linguistic variation with discourse structure. While these studies have provided valuable insights into classroom teaching, they lack generalizable findings for this context. This study takes an empirical approach to identifying teaching styles based on language behavior in university classrooms. The study uses a corpus of 194 recorded university classrooms at six universities in the USA (1.45 million words). We first apply a novel multidimensional (MD) analysis to identify language variation in university class sessions and then, through cluster analytical methods, we identify text types that we interpret as teaching styles. Four main styles are recognized and functionally interpreted by reference to the co-occurring linguistic features identified in each cluster. Implications are also provided.