Since it was developed by Michael Halliday more than 40 years ago, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has become increasingly influential in discourse analytic and educational studies. Readers interested in this approach will find illustrations of the theory and its applications in this product of the International Systemic Functional Linguistics Association meeting in 1999 in Singapore. SFL, a theory of language that links meaning with form and describes language in terms of its role in social contexts, offers researchers interested in language in society theoretically grounded ways of focusing on the meaning-making resources of language. These SFL studies, in contexts that span the years of schooling and focus on a range of disciplinary contexts, including mathematics, history, science, and language arts, highlight the power of classroom discourse and the role of language in construing ideologies.
Foley's introduction suggests that awareness of language can help teachers be “more open to the knowledge and skills pupils bring to their learning and more aware of the new roles they are asking learners to take on” (pp. 2–3). Forms of “thinking” such as generalizing, abstracting, and making logical inferences are “not a natural mental activity, but in fact learned in the experience of instructional discourse, characteristically associated with schooling” (5). These points are taken up by the contributors to the volume, with key chapters by Michael Halliday and the prominent SFL researchers Ruquaiya Hasan, Frances Christie, and James R. Martin.
Halliday's chapter recapitulates and extends his work on children's early language, suggesting that we see the value of children's “acts of meaning” both in terms of the particular instantial meaning of these acts and in terms of their status in the child's development over time – what he calls a focus on the moment and the momentum (19). He discusses the interaction of the material and the semiotic in the shaping of the brain's development and shows how children are continually increasing their meaning potential as they move into their mother tongues. His argument about the functionality of language renders complex the notion of arbitrariness in linguistics and highlights the role of memory and consciousness of self in language development. He dismisses the notion that child language development is a movement toward a fixed and defined goal, and calls for bringing together understanding of the physical, the biological, and the social in a research agenda on child language.
Hasan's chapter highlights the role of social positioning in what we recognize as significant elements of a situation and in figuring out what practice the situation implies. Analyzing transcripts of classroom interaction located in different social contexts, Hasan illustrates how children are expected to draw inferences that match those of the teacher, in spite of the fact that classroom discourses are not heard the same way by all children, since the experience of everyday living shapes the ways children experience school. Hasan points out that the shaping of “intelligence,” or the “foundation of theoretical thinking,” takes place at school. Consciousness is selective, she maintains, and she illustrates how single lessons are not adequate to change what seem like “natural” responses on the part of students. Hasan draws on Bernstein, firmly grounding theories of social positioning in social class relations. She calls for a more “multivocal” classroom, where teachers are able to follow up and hear students' perspectives.
Christie has consistently argued for recognizing the role of the teacher in shaping the consciousness of students and for providing teachers with knowledge about language that can enable them to talk with students about the ways language constructs meaning in the subjects they teach. Here she reviews theories of child language development that inform different approaches to teaching about language and provides interesting background on the development and critiques of the “genre school” in Australia. She describes her experience introducing knowledge about grammar to junior secondary English teachers, arguing for building on the knowledge of constituent structure that teachers may already possess as the functional perspectives are introduced.
Martin's chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the systems of Appraisal, the approach to identifying the construal of judgment and evaluation in discourse that he has developed over the past decade. The Appraisal system is currently being used by many researchers in discourse analysis, and this chapter both describes the linguistic systems at stake and provides examples of how the analysis is undertaken and the kinds of conclusions it enables the analyst to draw. Appraisal analysis brings together a focus on voice, key, heterogloss, and other areas of interpersonal meaning that have not previously been theorized as related systems. Martin illustrates the roles of lexical metaphor and images in construing appraisal, providing multimodal analyses that illustrate how these features coarticulate “prosodies” of evaluation and judgment as texts evolve. Citing Bakhtin, he argues that appraisal is dynamic, ideological, and axiological, and calls for more work across modalities and in less frequently explored domains, such as humor.
Several chapters analyze language in educational contexts. O'Halloran offers an illuminating example of comprehensive SFL analysis of classroom discourse in three year 10 math lessons in Perth, Australia, showing how students' gender, social class, and school sector position them in ways that provide differential access to mathematics knowledge. She finds that linguistic selections in the oral discourse with working-class and private-school female students “are more consistently oriented towards interpersonal meaning at the expense of the mathematical content of the lesson,” while in a lesson for private school male students, “the ideational content of the mathematics is foregrounded” (192). She provides linguistic evidence to support these findings, analyzing the four aspects of meaning that Hallidayan theory links with realization in language (experiential, logical, interpersonal, textual), and showing how analysis of interpersonal meanings allows investigation of “the relative status of the teachers and the students, the level of affect and the social distance” (198). She points to specific linguistic expressions that indicate “that the teacher interacts with the students on a more direct basis where power is openly enacted” in the lesson with male students (199), and shows how this lesson lacks contestation of power, with smooth unfolding and congruence in the relationship between teacher and students. On the other hand, in the lessons with girls and working-class students, she finds more indirection, related to covert discipline strategies or to sarcasm as a control mechanism. The lesson for male students uses the highest level of technical language, while the working-class students experience the lowest level, often moving away from the mathematical content of the lesson through disruptions. Only the lesson for boys contains context-independent board text, and logical progression and coherence are more prominent in that context. O'Halloran shows that these findings are also reflected in the performance of students from these schools on national exams, with the male students scoring higher than the female, who in turn score higher than the working-class students. She draws on Bernstein to interpret these findings in terms of the social positioning of the students.
Mohan & Slater focus on assessment of learners of English as a second language and criticize practices that do not take account of the role of language as a resource for meaning. They elicited written scientific explanations and show how expert raters recognize that an explanation that uses temporal meanings is less sophisticated than one that uses causal reasoning, but because the rubrics used to assess such texts focus primarily on the accuracy of the language form, there was no means of recognizing an explanation that is “better.” The authors criticize communicative competence frameworks that only focus on the ways learners can be incorrect, without providing ways to focus beyond accuracy in evaluating students' writing.
In other contributions to the volume, Linda Thompson analyzes how rhymes written for a new curriculum in Singapore transmit cultural values central to the socialization process. Groom discusses some challenges of history texts, suggesting ways to approach these texts in primary and secondary school. Kramer-Ball & Tucker present a corpus analysis of the co-occurrence of different adjunct types with different process types. Several chapters focus on writing development. Foley & Cheryl Lee analyze children's writing to suggest what development means grammatically in the primary years in Singapore schools. Carolyn Hartnett discusses nominalization and its role in student writing development. Dahl analyzes her Asian students' experiences in learning to write, challenging essentializing discourses that rush to attribute problems with voice and authority to these students' ethnicity. She argues that the same issues face basic and inexperienced writers the world over, and offers suggestions from her undergraduate academic writing course for teachers, where she has students research literacy practices in Singapore and then use SFL tools to analyze the ways they have presented and discussed these experiences.
This volume offers new insights into the potential offered by a greater understanding of the active role of language in constituting contexts for learning, and researchers interested in any institutional contexts of language use will find valuable insights here. In addition, the volume illustrates the richness of SFL, both theoretically and practically, in helping us explore the relationship between language and schooling.
