Genre Changes and Privileged Pedagogic Identity in Teaching Contest Discourse

This book analyzes how the English as a Second Language (ESL) pedagogic genre has been re-contextualized in the Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press National College English Teaching Contest (SFLEP) for presentation to the contest judges and audience. Departing from prior research on contest discourse, it focuses on the role of teaching contests in re-contextualizing educational practices. Moreover, it addresses the processes of genre blurring and solidification at work in new discourse events.
The results presented here serve to frame teaching contest discourse in a fuller contextual configuration and will help contest sponsors, participants, and audience members better understand this popular social event and its relations to real-world teaching practices, while simultaneously helping teachers to understand the relevance of such contest practice. Moreover, the research methods will benefit those linguists who are interested in researchingother types of event discourses.

Dr. Ning Liu graduated from the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, where the focus of his doctoral work was on contest discourse studies and systemic functional linguistics. The present work is also based on personal experience, as he has participated in several teaching competitions, providing him insight on these discourse events from an insider’s perspective and strengthened by contextual and analytical approaches. His previous publications focus on English language education in the Chinese context.
Dr. Derek Irwin is an Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He specializes in systemic functional linguistics and applied linguistics in general. His most recent critical work focuses on language modelling, grammatical resources for lexical movement across languages, pedagogical applications of genre theory, and literary textual analysis. He is also a co-author of several writing guides for post-secondary students.