It is not surprising therefore that I heartily welcome ASp's emphasis on "Teaching practices in ESP" given the disciplinary and personal histories that I have alluded to in the preceding paragraphs. More particularly, in this case we have Dacia Dressen-Hammouda's account of reconfiguring an established course in professional spoken genres into, as she says, "a multimodal video-based activity". This remarkable account addresses the needs, concerns and interests of a large undergraduate class, rather than (as is more common) much smaller groups of doctoral students, as in recent articles by the likes of An Cheng, Lisa McGrath and Rafaella Negretti. I should mention, I suppose, that I was Dacia's PhD advisor, when her research interests lay in geological writing and its acquisition, and wherein her main scholarly reputation resides. So it is gratifying to see her extend her ambit of publications to carefully-crafted exemplars of "Teaching practices in ESP". Her students, in this piece, were being trained to produce "explainer videos", those short instructional explanations of how to do things; in my latest case, how to stop the wretched fire-alarm in the basement from beeping like "The cricket in the Hearth". But I am not going to comment on the technical details of this paper since I am one of the last surviving members of the Analog tribe in the academic universe. Rather, I close by congratulating more generally the journal on its applied initiative and, more specifically, Dr Dressen-Hammouda for responding to the opportunity to bring her "repurposed" course design initiative and its complex rubrics to a wider audience.
