Jason Wise: A Digital English Blog

Christie, Frances. “Systemic Functional Linguistics and a Theory of Language in Education.”

Christie examines how systemic functional linguistics (SFL), specifically the theories of academic register and genre, can be applied to the teaching of language in educational contexts. In SFL, there is no “clearcut distinction between theoretical and applied interests” (13). Instead, the relationship between theory and application can be seen as a “dialogue between theoretical questions and applied questions” (13). SFL is often used to solve specific problems, such as developing an inventory of the most common genres in which students write, as well as the linguistic and sociocultural features which make up genres.

3 Types of Language Teaching

Halliday, McIntosh, and Stevens identified three types of language instruction:

• Prescriptive– Rules-based. Teaching students the “preferred” academic conventions.
• Descriptive– The description of one’s native language, including informal language, dialects, etc.
• Productive– Extending students’ capacity to make meaning with their language.

Register: Field, Tenor, and Mode

Fig. 1 A Multi-Functional View of Register and Genre

Halliday hypothesized that a register is a variety of language in use consisting of three variables – field, tenor, and mode.

• Field– The activity language is being used to talk about.
• Tenor– The social relationships between participants in a text.
• Mode– The medium or mode of communication.

During the 70s and 80s, Halliday refined the theory of register to explain “the relationship of linguistic choices to the register variables,” which he termed the three metafunctions, the theory that all language enacts three different kinds of meaning:

• Experiential– The experiences represented in language.
• Interpersonal- The relationships between reader and text, as well as the social relationship between participants in a text.
• Textual– The organization and arrangement of a text.

As depicted in fig. 1, the variables of register correspond to the three metafunctions. Field relates to the experiential metafunction, tenor relates to the interpersonal metafunction, and mode relates to the textual metafunction.

Register and Genre: Context of Situation and Context of Culture

J.R. Martin and other researchers extended Halliday’s theory of register into a full-blown theory of genre, while documenting text types students were required to write in Australian schools. Taking Malinowski’s theories of context of situation and context of culture, Martin was able to distinguish between register, the context of a specific situation, and genre, the context of culture. Martin “argued firstly that any text involved a set of linguistic choices with respect to field, tenor, and mode, and that these were a condition of the context of situation, and secondly, that the text was in turn an instance of a particular genre, where the genre choice was a condition of the context of culture” (23). The big distinction here is that Martin found text types could share the same variable of field, tenor, and mode, “yet nonetheless produce different genres” (23). Register is shaped by the contextual variables present in a given situation, while genre is shaped by the broader social resources of an entire culture.

Putting It All Together: Register and Genre in English Studies

Wow, that was a lot of theory! So what can register and genre do for English Studies?

• One, as English Studies becomes more concerned with discourse and situating language within social context, register and genre provide functional and systematic ways for modeling social context on two levels: the instance (or immediate situation) and the culture.
• The theory of register has the potential to bridge the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) divide, as all disciplines use an academic register, valuing different variations of field, tenor, and mode. For instance, looking at “voice,” science favors third person, while creative writing may favor first person. If students were taught the concept of register, they would most likely have little difficulty navigating different configurations of academic register.
• Although there has been somewhat extensive cataloging of the most popular genres students write in K-12 education, primarily in Australia, colleges in the U.S. could benefit from an investigation into genre types. The Genre Project by The University of North Carolina Writing Program has been doing notable research into the most prevalent genres in first-year composition. The inforgraphic below (see fig. 2) shows the research essay is the most popular genre in fyc, followed by narrative and descriptive essays.

Fig. 2 Genres in FYC

• As regards to educational theory, SFL fosters three key pedagogical characteristics: learning language, learning through language, and learning about language (18). Additionally, this approach raises teachers’ meta-awareness of language within their disciplines.
• I have tried to incorporate genre-based approaches in my teaching by providing sample writing of the target genre, talking explicitly about the linguistic features of genres, and utilizing the teaching-learning cycle – deconstruction, joint construction, independent construction.

Halliday, M.A.K. “Ideas About Language.” On Language and Linguistics. Ed. Jonathan J. Webster. London: Continuum, 2003. Print.

“Much of our adult folk linguistics is no more than misremembered classroom grammar (or was, in the days when there still was classroom grammar); it may be wrong, but it is certainly not naive” (20).

Introduction

I chose this epigraph to begin this post to stir up questions surrounding what we mean by “grammar.” For most, grammar is the collective folk linguistics, the rules we remember, or misremember, from elementary school. Viewing language as a resource for meaning making, instead of a set of rules, opens up grammar’s rhetorical possibilities.

In “Ideas About Language,” Halliday surveys the history of linguistics, a period spanning several millennia, with particular emphasis on the origins and development of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), which Halliday situates within the rhetorical tradition. SFL is a functional grammar concerned with analyzing language within social context. SFL has a variety of theoretical and practical applications and is used in social semiotics, genre pedagogy, critical discourse analysis (CDA), multimodal discourse analysis, and natural language processing (NLP).

Language as Rule vs. Language as Resource

Halliday explores the ontogenesis, or biological development of the individual, to trace “what is it that people naturally know about language” (20). Halliday asks, “What does a child know about language before his insights are contaminated by theories of the parts of speech,” which children learn once they go to school (20). The crux of Halliday’s argument is that children initially see language as a resource, a way to enact meaning, structure experience, a way to fulfill one’s needs and desires, until children go to school and are taught to see language as a set of rules: “language will be superseded by the folk linguistics of the classroom, with its categories and classes, its rules and regulations, its do’s and, above all, its don’ts” (22).

The Rhetorical Origins of SFL: Ethnographic vs Philosophical Traditions

Though it may be an overly broad generalization, Halliday assigns the two views of language – language as resource and language as rule – to two different schools of linguistic tradition, the ethnographic and philosophical schools. Halliday traces the origins of the ethnographic movement, which SFL is a part, back to the Sophists, who were concerned “with the nature of argumentation, and hence with the structure of discourse,” as opposed to “truth” with a capital T (23). The philosophical tradition, represented by Chomsky’s formal grammar, goes back to Aristotle and is concerned with logic and absolute truth. Halliday’s descriptive, ethnographic approach stresses linguistic variety understood in social context, while the Chomskyan approach looks for universals in language (27). The Chomskyan, universalist approach has been criticized for being “ethnocentric” by “judg[ing] all languages as peculiar versions of English,” as well as relying too heavily on formalized rules based on an idealized version of “perfect” English (27). Yet, Chomskyan linguistics is still the dominant form of linguistics within English Studies.

Discussion

What I find most exciting about Halliday’s work are the potential applications for SFL within rhetoric, composition, and new media. Halliday argues that SFL is “the functional grammar of rhetoric” and then goes on to situate a functional grammatical approach in the rhetorical tradition. SFL shows untapped potential as a rhetorical language within English Studies, which sometimes suffers from a lack of shared metalanguage and systemization of methods, and tends to look at texts in isolation instead of social context. In English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline(s), McComiskey notes the importance of social context as “crucial to a full and productive understanding of English studies that has the potential for relevance outside of academia” (44).

Additionally, while multimodal composition has focused on student production of multimodal texts, a less explored and perhaps more pertinent topic is how students will analyze, interpret, and write about multimodal texts, which SFL, as a metalanguage and framework, helps facilitate.

I have done a preliminary study on how students can use SFL as a metalanguage to analyze and write about multimodal texts in a first-year writing course, using Kress and van Leeuwen’s sociosemiotic framework from Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. This semester, while teaching multimodal visual analysis in a unit on research and argumentation examining advertising and consumerism, I hope to make more explicit connections between SFL as a metalanguage for visual analysis and SFL as a language to analyze traditional texts and understand genres.