SpringerBriefs in Education

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.