Abstract
Taking its departure point from an overview of existing studies on academic discourse, the paper discusses some results of an ongoing research focussing on lectures in a multiligual setting. The analysis, based on a corpus videorecorded at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, examines a number of discursive and linguistic phenomena characterizing lecturers’ monologic talk, considered for their possible role in supporting comprehension and in shaping the relationship with students. The use of one or more languages within lectures is also observed and commented upon, while final considerations are devoted to research perspectives for the study of lectures as dialogic and multimodal face-to-face communicative events.