Students’ Academic Speech Events as Seen by Students and Teachers in a Hungarian EFL Setting

Abstract

This paper is a report on a research project with two major aims. One of these was to determine the types, the frequency and the perceived importance of academic speech events in the language specialisation courses of the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of Pázmány Péter Catholic University. The other aim was to juxtapose practice and needs in connection with the academic oral repertoire of these courses in the light of the discourse arising from the classroom observations and created by the participating teachers themselves. Three research tools were used: a 25-item questionnaire based on academic speech event categories identified by Ferris and Tag (1996), semi-structured interviews and classroom observations. The most frequently occurring academic events were, in order, note-taking, questions asked by students in class, students initiating/leading discussions, group work, and questions asked by students outside class. There seemed to be a high degree of consciousness on the teachers’ part to reconcile the objectives of content-based instruction with the diverse aspects of communicative ESP teaching.