Language, Context and Text - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2022

Abstract

In this paper we look back at our work over the last thirty years as education consultants in a range of educational contexts in which we sought to promote an explicit, language-based approach to teaching and learning. We trace our pathway from the earliest days of meeting systemic functional theory and its potential application in education to recent times where we now are able to offer a suite of professional development programmes designed to build the capacity of teachers and students to understand how language works to make meaning. We reflect on the many challenges of re-contextualising such an elaborate model of language in educational contexts: challenges that embrace the pedagogical, the political and the logistical among others. The intent is to highlight the affordances we have seen while working closely with teachers over the years in the hope that others will be inspired to continue the work.

Abstract

In this paper an understanding of psychotherapeutic conversation is outlined emphasising whole-body functioning. The underpinning of conversation by both Central and Autonomic Nervous Systems (CNS & ANS) and evolutionary developments that support social engagement and language are considered. An idea will be taken up that for psychotherapy, language needs to be understood within each patient as more than meets the eye, rather than less, providing a potential for exchanges in the therapeutic conversation that enhance the growth of self for each individual. The notion of culminative patterns of communicative interaction speaks to this growth and the enhancement of a sense of meaning in personal contexts. This goes beyond an analytic approach, implying synthesis, integration and growing coherence over time. Human development is towards social engagement, building upon a capacity for relations that are rewarding to the parties involved (Meares 2016). The problem of responding to embodied communication in psychotherapy is considered in relation to moments of meeting, seen as mutative in therapy. Each person is an embodied text with potential for elaboration, re-shaping and discovery. Clinical illustrations are provided, demonstrating a linguistic model of therapeutic growth and an experimental method that provides a window onto the exchange characteristics of language. To close, the problem of systematising embodiment and its relation to the conversation is considered, along with the implications for therapy and future research, integrating linguistics and interactive functional measures of the body.

Abstract

Previous studies suggest that in times of great turbulence scientific writing becomes more conservative. In order to see whether this is true of the period of the First World War, a sample of research articles in the field of the physical sciences for the years 1900, 1910, 1920 and 1930 was studied. Features relating to process types, passives, first person pronouns, themes and nominalisation were considered. This showed that while there was little evidence for the initial conjecture, it was frequently the case that the direction of change altered during the period 1910 to 1920. This change was often maintained in the following decade. Thus, there are significant changes occurring in the period 1910 to 1920 which warrant further study.

Abstract

This study reports on a four-semester teaching programme for foreign language (FL) intermediate writing abilities in Spanish to be implemented in educational practice. The study conducts qualitative analysis, drawing on systemic functional linguistics (SFL), of developmental changes in twenty undergraduate, Spanish Level 4 students, based on their performance of, and comments on, pre- and post-instructional written tasks, focusing on meaning-making choices in the construction of a historical recount genre over one semester of instruction at an Australian university. Responding to the need for research on academic writing in FL, the paper shows that SFL facilitates students’ understanding of writing development in an FL as they explore textual, ideational and interpersonal meanings in conjunction with required lexicogrammatical choices to fulfil the rhetorical demands of this genre.

Abstract

This article provides an illustrative and necessarily selective review of scholarship in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) since the 1960s, examining two major strands of application within the institution of education: teacher education and writing development. We explore properties of SFL that have been significant in this institutional setting, asking: “What are the properties of SFL being applied in research in teacher education and writing development?” Five foundational properties emerged from the review (i.e. language as meaning-making resource, the cline of instantiation, ontogenesis or the process of learning how to mean, the hierarchy of stratification and the spectrum of different metafunctional modes of meaning). From this basis, we explicate how SFL-based pedagogies promote language learning and literacy practices in these educational domains. The article ends by suggesting how further explorations can be undertaken to enhance understanding of the potential of this social semiotic approach and its applied contributions to solving real-world problems.

This article reviews Systemic functional linguistics, Part 1, volume 1 in the collected works of C. M. I. M. Matthiessen

This article reviews Researching multilingualism: Critical and ethnographic perspectivesCritical sociolinguistic research methods: Studying language issues that matter

This article reviews Developing language and literacy in English across the secondary school curriculum: An inclusive approachTeaching and researching ELLs’ disciplinary literacies: Systemic functional linguistics in action in the context of U.S. school reformBilingual learners and social equity: Critical approaches to systemic functional linguisticsA new approach to English pedagogical grammar: The order of meanings