The building blocks of speech: spontaneity, pre-packaging and the genre structuring of university lectures.

This paper considers issues related to the textual organization of university lectures and the degree to which they are comprised of conventionalized text-organizational schema or genre stagings. It utilizes a dataset of video recordings and transcripts of four social science lectures which were delivered by two lecturers at a university in Japan in 2003, and offers findings which demonstrate that lecturers draw on a range of ready-made genres of the type which have been described in the so-called Sydney school genre literature and combine these conventionalized genres into genre complexes, which appear not to be conventionally or predictably ordered. The paper also offers some insights into at least one aspect of the distinction between online (spontaneous/spoken) versus offline (prepared/written) language. Specifically, it shows that lectures, as instances of spoken, apparently extemporaneous language do, to a significant degree, rely on pre-fabricated and culturally recurrent textual arrangements which the speakers draw on as they spontaneously produce the current communicative event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]