ABSTRACT
The lecture, presented to hundreds of students in a lecture theatre, is the standard model of academic teaching.Academic staff in the UK are called lecturers and readers, terms deriving from the Latin lectare meaning ‘to read aloud’. The technique goes back many hundreds of years, to the monasteries of Europe before the use of printed books, where scholars would travel miles to gain access to specific texts. In a scriptorium a monk at a lectern would read out a book and the scholars would copy it down word for word. One wonders whether much has changed since then as the activity of copying down the lecturer’s notes is still one of the main functions of lecturing in higher education.
