Approaching grammar in speech genres: reflections upon ESP teaching

Reflections upon Teaching a Poorly-Conceived Lesson

Using a “failed” mathematics lesson as a mini-case study, I explore some of the challenges inherent in teaching an inquiry-style mathematics lesson. The ensuing discussion centers around two issues: the preparation and subsequent scaffolding involved in guiding students to desired understandings, along with the tension inherent in “telling” and “not telling” in an inquiry-style pedagogy. I reso...

Reflections about Grammar and its Role in Applied Linguistics: introduction to the RBLA thematic issue on grammar teaching and learning

Challenges in Teaching ESP at Medical Universities of Iran from ESP Stakeholders' Perspectives

The status of teaching ESP has been studied both internationally and locally. However, it seems that the challenges of teaching ESP in medical universities of Iran have not been studiedappropriately. The main objective of the present study was to explore the main challenges of teaching ESP in medical universities of Iran. Due to the nature of the study, a qualitative res earch design (Phenomeno...

Grammar Teaching Revisited: EFL Teachers between Grammar Abstinence and Formal Grammar Teaching

The study of English language teachers’ cognitions and its relationship to teachers’ classroom practices have recently been the focus of language teaching and teacher education (Borg, 2006 & 2010). However, rarely have the studies delved into teachers’ knowledge about grammar (reviewed by Borg, 2001) or investigated the relationships between teachers’ knowledge about grammar and teachers’ actio...

Investigation of morph-based speech recognition improvements across speech genres

The improvement achieved by changing the basis of speech recognition from words to morphs (various sub-word units) varies greatly across tasks and languages. We make an attempt to explore the source of this variability by the investigation of three LVCSR tasks corresponding to three speech genres of a highly agglutinative language. Novel, press conference and broadcast news transcription result...