How to write a hypothetical story

Why do we have lectures, rather than delivering syllabus content in written texts and using all contact sessions for practice and application? It is probably because lectures have additional pedagogical strengths that written course materials do not share. Their seemingly spontaneous nature makes lectures a more social activity, more open to the expression of the educator's own personal attitudes, and perhaps with greater power to engage. The British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus, for example, contains conversation-like behaviours such as gossip, found to encourage intra-organizational cooperation (see, for example, Wittek et al., 2000). In lectures these kinds of behaviour are used to capture attention, establish disciplinary norms, and involve listeners in a shared endeavour (Nesi, 2012); their presence is a strong indication that lectures fulfil a broader range of purposes than simply the transmission of information.

Humans are naturally disposed to interpret experiences in story form (Bruner 1990), and interpret the world through character, action and interaction (McNett, 2016). Much of the research into story production in Higher Education has focussed on student retellings of personal experiences (e.g. Sherwood, 2019), or interviews, blogs, and acknowledgements which provide details of academic lives (e.g. Hyland, 2018, p. 31). Stories produced by academics in their lectures are sometimes treated solely as entertaining interludes, for example by Berk (1996). However Simpson-Vlach and Leicher (2006) count storytelling as one of the pragmatic functions of lectures in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), and there have been a small number of studies of lecturers’ use of stories, undertaken both from a genre and discourse analysis perspective (e.g. Alsop et al., 2013; Dyer & Keller-Cohen, 2000; Easton, 2016) and from an educational perspective (e.g. Andrews et al., 2009; Flanagan, 2015; McNett, 2016).

These studies point to the many advantages of story use, apart from the ‘time-out’ benefit which gives learners the chance to pause and reflect on the knowledge transmitted in other parts of the lecture (Flanagan, 2015). Stories are thought to help learners engage with and remember lecture content (Easton, 2016; Flanagan, 2015; McNett, 2016), because references to familiar everyday contexts provide a ‘hook’ for new experiences, as pointed out by Easton (2016), and enable participants to see the connection between real-life practice and academic theory (Flanagan, 2015; McNett, 2016). Stories can also simulate social encounters and increase learners' empathy and compassion by offering interpretations of events from other people's perspectives (Easton, 2016). Easton found that stories in medical science lectures helped learners to become “legitimate peripheral participants” in the professional medical community, in terms of Wenger's theory of communities of practice (Wenger, 2008; Easton, 2016, p. 7).

Various research methods have been used to examine the discourse of stories in lectures, drawing on conversation analysis (Dyer & Keller-Cohen, 2000), Labovian story structure (Easton, 2016), or genre systems from Systemic Functional Linguistics (Alsop et al., 2013). Dyer and Keller-Cohen (2000) report on the way lecturers projected their own personal and professional identities in their stories, and achieved an uneasy balance between the expression of expertise and the expression of equality with their listeners. Easton (2016) pays particular attention to narratives of the kind described by Labov and Waletsky (1967) and Scholes (1982). In Labov and Waletzky's model, stories have an orientation, a complicating action, a resolution, an evaluation, and an optional coda which is “a functional device for returning the verbal perspective to the present moment” (Labov & Waletsky, 1967, p. 100). Scholes (1982) presents a similar structure: stories must contain “at least three basic elements: 1) a situation involving some predicament, conflict or struggle, 2) an animate protagonist who engages with this situation for a purpose, 3) a plot during which the predicament is somehow resolved” (1982: 59).

Alsop et al. (2013) worked with Martin's genre system (2008) illustrated in Fig. 1, which is a development of Labov and Waletzky's model. All four of Martin's story genres present sequences of events, but only the ‘narrative’ genre is associated with a complicating action and a resolution. Stories belonging to Martin's ‘recount’ category are not resolved and are not evaluated, and are simply strings of events without any complicating action. Anecdotes elicit emotional empathy, whereas exempla elicit a “moral judgment” (Martin, 2008: 44), perhaps better understood in lecture discourse as a judgement on the protagonist's capacity (competence and ability) or propriety (appropriate behaviour), as described in Martin and White's Appraisal Framework (2005). When considering lecture discourse we might add the possibility that the evaluation is not of a person but of a concept, product or process (termed Appreciation in Martin and White's Appraisal Framework). Evaluations typically occur in codas to exempla.

Of the 170 stories Alsop et al. (2013) identified in the half million word Engineering Lecture Corpus (ELC), narratives were the most frequent genre, followed by exempla, and then anecdotes. Recounts, which do nothing more than report a sequence of events, were the least frequent. In some cases the same pedagogical point was found to be made through a narrative in one lecture, and through an exemplum in another lecture delivered in another context. The narrative structure appeals to listeners’ expectations for a story structure, while the exemplum places greater emphasis on the pedagogical purpose of the story.

In most discourse and corpus studies of story elements in lecture discourse, stories have been formally identified by the presence of a temporal sequence, which according to Labov and Waletsky (1967, pp. 12–44, pp. 81, 84) is “the defining feature of narrative”, because it can “recapitulate past experience in the same order as the original events”. Martin (2008: 41) is less emphatic about this, but implies that temporal sequence is important: “I focus on how narrative genres organise time in relation to value, drawing on functional linguistic models of temporality and evaluation”. When identifying stories in MICASE, Simpson-Vlach and Leicher looked for “two or more sequential clauses using the past tense or the historical present” (2006: 69). Deroey and Taverniers (2011: 6) looked for sections in lectures in the BASE corpus where “the lecturer presents information about past actions, events or situations”.

However, some studies of lecture discourse have taken a much broader view of what identifies a stretch of discourse as a story. Sequences without consistent past tense progression were recognised as stories by Alsop et al. (2013), if they fitted into Martin's (2008) genre scheme. Example 1 from the ELC was counted as an exemplum in their study, and has a judgement on bad engineering and bad captaincy in the coda which relates a hypothetical situation (the listeners' over-loading of a ship) to the present real-world situation (“these things have happened in the past and they do happen …. “).

if you're loading a ship up you do not want the centre of gravity to get above the metacentre in fact you don't even want to get it close if you get it above as that ships sails off it's going to turn over and these things have happened in the past and they do happen due to bad engineering and sometimes bad captaincy (ELC 3021)

Example 2 is a ‘character-driven’ story identified by Easton (2016) which recounts the different phases of sleep by means of an imagined everyday situation, expressed in the present tense and including a coda with a positive evaluation, summing up the current relevance:

So if you watch somebody on the tube, you'll see them start to lose that postural muscle activity as they fall asleep. And their head goes (lecturer pretends to nod off to sleep) and you'll also see them lose their ocular eye muscle activity and their eyes will start to roll—they'll do this (lecturer rolls eyes). But in Stage I sleep you're still responsive to sound, so when he gets to South Kensington you'll see them do this as they sit up and then as you go through the different stages of sleep and you become less responsive to sensory stimuli so when you get down here into deep sleep you're less responsive. So this is the one that you see slumped in the corner of the circle line then dribbling and all bets are off (audience laughter). And that's deep sleep and that's the stuff that makes you feel better—it is the deep sleep that makes you feel restored and vital and healthy.

The if-clauses in the two examples above, “if you're loading a ship up” and “if you watch somebody on the tube”, are a typical linguistic feature of some passages which might be counted as stories. Warchał (2010, p. 140) regards the use of the conditional as “a rhetorical device for establishing a dialogue between the author and the reader of an academic text in search for shared understanding and consensus”. She would consider these two if-clauses as ‘content conditionals’, because they convey “a condition which, if fulfilled, ensures the truth of the proposition in the main clause” (Warchał, 2010, p. 143).

Ädel, 2012, Ädel, 2010 would probably class these two stories as ‘Imagining Scenarios’, a lecturer strategy she describes as “a mutual thought experiment between the addresser and the addressee, taking place in the shared world of discourse rather than in the ‘real world’” (2010: 89). Ädel notes that scenarios often add “a narrative flavour” to the lecture (2012: 117), although many of the scenarios she identifies from MICASE data do not present a sequence of past events, and do not fit the organizational patterns identified by Labov and Waletsky (1967), Scholes (1982) or Martin (2008). It is perhaps for this reason that Imagining Scenarios have been neglected in the literature, as noted by Ädel (2012:117). Ädel's work starts to redress this imbalance, but she focuses on metadiscoursal features rather than the structure of longer stretches of text. Her scenarios are limited to those containing explicit references to audience members, and they only form a small subcategory within her taxonomy of metadiscourse in academic English.

McNett (2016) considers the possibility that entire classes or even courses might revolve around an ongoing narrative, developing the idea of ‘narrative-based instruction’ proposed by Andrews et al. (2009). His teaching method includes injecting drama, conflict, characterisation and even theatrics into course materials. As examples of this method he recalls a lecturer in ecology “who calmly explained the complexities of thermoregulation while on all fours on a lecture table”, and a lecturer who “dressed as a queen on the day she explained the complex topic of the Red Queen Hypothesis in evolutionary biology” (McNett, 2016, p. 187). One of McNett's narrative genres is the ‘fictional letter’ written by various hypothetical insect authors who describe their anatomical and evolutionary predicaments in anthropomorphic terms. McNett argues that “[T]he letters provide an emotional element, engage the students, and provide my lectures with a framework that taps into the natural human disposition for story” (2016: 184):

It was the second day of my insect biology class when I described to my students a letter I had received. The letter was signed “Twisted in Tallahassee,” and the writer spoke of insufferable pain he had experienced from a lifelong identity crisis. He described feelings of isolation, low self-esteem, and a poor body image. He simply did not fit in with others of his kind, and to be perfectly honest, few could disagree. He was a very strange sight indeed. As a twisted-wing parasite, he is one of the most bizarre-looking insects one could imagine. (McNett, 2016: 184)

McNett is not concerned with the generic structure or linguistic features of narratives, so he does not reproduce or analyse the language used in incidents such as these. However some of the content seems similar to that in examples identified by Ädel, 2012, Ädel, 2010 in MICASE, and by Alsop et al. (2013) in ELC and BASE, where lecturers develop a hypothetical scenario which seems designed to achieve the same sort of benefits as a conventional story genre, but belongs in the world of discourse rather than the ‘real world’.

The aim of this paper is to provide a more complete account of the purposes and linguistic characteristics of these scenarios in lecture discourse, with a view to raising learners’ awareness of their use and supporting EMI lecturers who wish to use scenarios in their own teaching. When lecturing in a less-familiar language it is tempting to keep to the textbook facts, reserving fantasy talk (about unlikely hypothetical events) for time spent outside academia. Nevertheless, like more conventional story-telling, scenario-telling is a valuable skill for lecturers to acquire, as it has the potential to help learners engage with difficult concepts, and to help them respond to course content in discipline-appropriate ways.

Our research questions are:

What is the distribution of scenarios in lecture corpora compiled in different contexts?

What purposes do scenarios seem to serve?

What are the linguistic features of scenarios?

Hilary Nesi is Professor in English Language at Coventry University. Her research activities largely concern corpus development and analysis, the discourse of English for academic purposes, and the design and use of dictionaries and reference tools for academic contexts. She was principal investigator for the project to create the BASE corpus of British Academic Spoken English, and for the project to create the BAWE corpus: ‘An Investigation of Genres of Assessed Writing in British Higher