Systemic Functional Linguistics and Language and Literacy education

For almost half a century, educational and applied linguists have been drawing on the insights of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as they strive to achieve better outcomes in language teaching and literacy development. On the basis of these insights, they have developed pedagogies applicable to language learning at all levels, from the earliest years of schooling through to advanced tertiary literacies. In this workshop we will examine some of these insights and discuss issues around their language-educational applications. In broad terms this will involve a consideration of what are termed “genre” and “register” in SFL, and the relevance of these notions for language and literacy educators. In narrower terms it will involve firstly a discussion of SFL-based proposals as to the repertoires of genres (types of text) which typically operated in educational settings and how these genres should be explicitly modelled for students via a carefully structured teaching-and-learning cycle. Secondly it will explore the SFL proposal that the styles of language (the registers) associated with these genres can be best described and taught via the notion that there are three primary modes of meaning-making, one associated with representing experience, one associated with the negotiation of interpersonal relations and one associated with constructing of coherent and cohesive texts. Specifically, we will explore register and genre variation associated with different patterns in what in SFL is termed “Theme and Rheme” structure, different patterns of use of conjunctive relations, and different patterns in the use of nominalisations. It is recommended that participants at the workshop have some background knowledge of SFL. Those not familiar with SFL, might, by way of preparation, read Geoff Thompson’s “Introducing Functional Grammar” (specifically chapters 6, 7 and 9) or they might usefully look over Donna Miller’s free, e-book, “Language as Purposeful: Functional Varieties of Texts”, downloadable from http://amsacta.unibo.it/866/1/language_as_purposeful-donna_miller.pdf