ABSTRACT
Recent research indicates that lecturers in EMI settings often attend to vocabulary issues in language-related episodes (LREs) that arise incidentally during classroom interaction. Such LREs appear to provide windows of opportunity for students to notice disciplinary uses of language and potentially extend their disciplinary linguistic repertoire, and they thus serve as an important means by which lecturers can support their students’ learning of disciplinary vocabulary. To date, limited information has been available about which aspects of vocabulary knowledge LREs typically address. In other words, when lecturers address vocabulary incidentally during classroom interaction, which aspects of vocabulary do they focus on – meaning only or use of vocabulary in collocations and specific contexts, for example? This chapter reviews the literature on LREs in classroom interaction and provides illustrations of the various kinds of episodes that can arise. The chapter presents a new classification framework for the analysis of vocabulary-focused LREs and illustrates the use of categories from the framework in an analysis of data from accounting and mathematics lectures in a university setting in South Korea. The chapter ends with suggestions for ways the framework can be used in research and EMI teacher education.
