Blurring ESL Pedagogic Genre in Mock Teaching Discourse

The aim of the present chapter is to discuss the generic difference between Mock Teaching discourse and the particular pedagogic genre of the ESL classroom. The research findings of the present chapter can be summarized as follows: (1) Although both discourses have the stages of Opening, Activity Cycle, and Closing, the sub-stages which constitute Opening and Closing are more frequent in the ESL pedagogic genre than those in the Mock Teaching discourse, and the sub-stages which constitute Activity Cycle are more frequent in the Mock Teaching discourse than in the ESL pedagogic genre. (2) Though both discourses have same sub-stages and phases which constitute their genres, the register features of these constituting semantic chunks in the Mock Teaching are more diversified than those in the ESL pedagogic genre. These results suggest that the winning Mock Teaching discourses chosen from the SFLEP contest represent a particular generic structure which orients to pedagogic performance rather than education. Moreover, they also suggest that the ESL pedagogic genre is blurred in the Mock Teaching discourse. By “blurring”, we mean to say that some constituting parts of the genre are maintained while the others are adapted because it is brought into and in fact mimicked in a new context. The rest of the chapter discusses how “blurring” is represented by the changes of frequencies of Stages, Sub-stages, and Phases of ESL pedagogic genre in the Mock Teaching discourse.