Analyzing Teaching Skill Contest as A Genre System to Decode the Code of Excellent Pedagogies: A Comprehensive Functional Perspective of Realization, Instantiation, Individuation, and Genesis

Abstract

Discourse is a process resulting in a communicative act which takes the form of a text (Chimombo & Roseberry, 1998, p. ix). Ingested by this view, every discourse type demonstrates the role relations among social groups on the one end, and how these relations manifest in language on the other end. A teaching skill contest is a multi-party social process of putting forward alternative pedagogies, evaluating these pedagogies and propagandizing excellent pedagogies. From a discourse perspective, this process manifests in texts constructed throughout the contest. However, the discourse features of a teaching skill contest are rarely observed. This paper therefore starts a discussion to fill in this vacancy.

Within the theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics, this paper raises the question of mapping the SFLEP national college English teaching contest (finals) (http://nfltc.sflep.com/) held in China as a genre system (Martin & Rose, 2008, p. 17). Focusing on the role of the SFLEP contest in screening excellent Chinese tertiary EFL pedagogies, this paper also puts forward an analytic framework for the system which integrates four SFL complementary perspectives of discourse semantics, viz. realization, instantiation, individuation, and genesis (Martin, 2010a). Specifically, it mainly addresses the following questions: (a) What is the nature of the SFLEP contest genre system? (b) How can we employ SFL theories of discourse semantics to observe the role of this genre system in refining excellent pedagogies?

Besides proving the feasibility and application significance of SFL genre theories and discourse semantics, this paper also proposes a paradigm of the contest genre system which is worth further developing.