This chapter explores features of academic spoken discourse based on a genre analysis of lectures. Academic listening often requires students to understand the gist of a longer and professional talk. Here, metadiscourse markers (MDMs) would assist listeners’ top-down processing by explicitly signaling the functional development of the delivered information or the speakers’ attitude toward given propositions. However, compared to massive research on their usage in the academic written discourse (e.g., research papers), relatively few studies have examined how such MDMs are devised in the academic spoken domain. To uncover discourse-oriented functions of lectures, the study reported in this chapter conducted a frequency analysis of 450 types of MDMs that appeared in 62 lectures from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). It was found that basic and short expressions (e.g., but, well) were preferred to conventionally taught phrases (e.g., on the other hand, at this point). Furthermore, the usage of pronouns and verbs illustrated essential speech acts of lecturing. This chapter will discuss pedagogical implications that utilize more “authentic” signaling cues to encourage students’ global understanding of academic spoken discourse.