Cultural Representations in EFL and ESP Teachers Talk: A Comparative Study

The present study was conducted to identify the cultural representations in ESP and EFL teachers’ spoken discourse, using Lazar’s (1993) framework. Particularly, it aimed to examine if there is any difference in cultural representations between the two disciplines. To this end, a corpus, entailing 15,000 words was prepared by recording and transcribing some EFL classes in private language institutes in Iran. This corpus was then compared and contrasted with around 14,000-word-corpus in the ESP context collected from engineering classes to find similarities and differences between the two contexts. To analyze the data, frequency counts and descriptive statistics were employed and the findings revealed that cultural items existed in both corpora. It also demonstrated that the cultural objects and products (CO) category was used more than others in both EFL and ESP classes and the item referring to belief and superstitions (BS) was used the least. However, EFL teachers’ use of CO was around 20% more than that of ESP teachers. Moreover, the EFL teachers’ use of proverbs and expressions was much more (ESP around 2% vs. EFL around 15%). The findings of this study can be of benefit to both EFL and ESP teachers, and those interested in cultural studies.