Language in Action; SFL Theory across Contexts; María Estela Brisk, Mary Schleppegrell

Edited by

María Estela Brisk [+–]

Boston College

Maria Estela Brisk is Professor of Education at Boston College. Her research and teaching address writing instruction, genre pedagogy, bilingual education, bilingual language and literacy acquisition, and preparation of mainstream teachers to work with bilingual learners. She is the author of numerous articles and six books: Bilingual Education: From Compensatory to Quality Schooling; Literacy and Bilingualism: A Handbook for ALL Teachers; Situational Context of Education: A Window into the World of Bilingual Learners; Language Development and Education: Children with Varying Language Experiences (with P. Menyuk); Language, culture, and community in teacher education; and Engaging Students in Academic Literacies: Genre-based Pedagogy for K-5 Classrooms. Professor Brisk is a native of Argentina.

Mary J. Schleppegrell [+–]

University of Michigan

Mary Schleppegrell is Professor of Education at the University of Michigan. She uses systemic functional linguistics to study the linguistic challenges of learning and children’s language development. With literacy scholar Annemarie Palincsar, she led the Language and Meaning project to support bilingual children’s literacy development across subject areas, and is currently collaborating with Chauncey Monte-Sano to study teacher learning to support emergent bilinguals in social studies. She is the author of The Language of Schooling (Erlbaum, 2004), Developing Advanced Literacy in First and Second Languages (with Cecilia Colombi, Erlbaum, 2002,) Reading in Secondary Content Areas (with Zhihui Fang, University of Michigan Press, 2008), and Focus on Grammar and Meaning (with Luciana de Oliveira, Oxford University Press, 2015).

Language in Action: SFL Theory across Contexts brings together recent research in elementary and secondary education, higher education, and translation studies, informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics. Authors reporting from a range of international contexts offer new insights into curriculum and instructional issues in subjects including history, physical education, and mathematics, with a focus on development of students’ reading, writing, and disciplinary literacy skills.

The chapters also report on studies in teacher education and student learning in settings where Spanish, Danish, or English are the languages of instruction, and the development of advanced academic writing in these languages is a particular focus of studies in higher education. The translation studies offer new perspectives on translation from classical Chinese literature and Italian museum texts. Across the volume, the chapters present innovations in genre pedagogy, pedagogical and methodological uses of SFL metalanguage, and approaches to curriculum development and school-based research. The authors draw on functional grammar, register theory, Appraisal, and Legitimation Code Theory to offer new analytic approaches and insights.

This book offers readers a range of work that can inspire and inform researchers and students interested in new approaches to Systemic Functional Linguistics in action.

Introduction

Introduction [+–] 1-9

María Estela Brisk,Mary J. Schleppegrell FREE

Boston College

University of Michigan

The title of this book, Language in Action: SFL Theory across Contexts, draws attention to the many ways Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is informing not only researchers, but also applied linguists, educators, translators, and others interested in the ways language shapes and is shaped by the social contexts in which it acts as a powerful social semiotic. The ten chapters that make up this book exemplify the range of ways the theory and its powerful discourse analysis tools can be applied to better understand the role of language in social life. They also represent a key activity of systemic functional linguists in gathering internationally each year as a community of scholars.

Part I: Studies in Elementary and Secondary Education

1. Theory Inspired Best Practices: Elementary Teachers Appropriate SFL Theory to Inform their Practice [+–] 13-32

María Estela Brisk £17.50

Boston College

This chapter reports on the development of writing instruction among teachers who participated for 10 years in a theory-based writing intervention at an urban elementary school with multilingual population. The intervention was grounded on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and the teaching and learning cycle (TLC). University researchers collaborated with teachers to develop a school-wide writing program with successful impact on teachers and students. Writing genre instruction evolved from focus on discourse structure with teachers exposing students to purpose and stages, to incorporating features of language related to the language metafunctions. The chapter traces the changes in instructional content and pedagogy of two teachers. The data includes classroom observations, teacher interviews, and students’ writing. There are four cycles of data from teachers teaching the same genre over time. The results show how in the early years, the teachers focused on teaching the purpose and stages. Their practices were highly dependent on what was discussed during professional development meetings. As teachers gained more knowledge of the theory and developed confidence in their teaching practices, instruction included testing their own understandings of the theory and increasingly focused on developing field and language, benefiting students’ products.

2. The Role of Meaningful Sentence-level Metalanguage: Insights from Children’s Thinking with Functional Grammar [+–] 33-53

Mary J. Schleppegrell,Carrie Symons £17.50

University of Michigan

Michigan State University

Carrie Symons is Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University, USA. Her research explores the relationship between classroom teachers’ instructional practices and immigrant-origin youth’s literacy and language development in multilingual contexts. Formerly an elementary classroom teacher of 10 years, Dr. Symons prioritizes the building of long-term, mutualistic, research-practice partnerships with local community organizations, schools, and teachers. In collaboration with these critical partners, she aims to identify what teachers need to know to effectively facilitate immigrant-origin youth’s learning across content areas and how this culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogical knowledge is best developed.

Children learning English as they learn school subjects need opportunities to consider how language means as they engage in reading challenging texts. For that purpose, a functional metalanguage can help focus their attention and support comprehension as it also raises their language awareness. In this chapter we report on the ways the Systemic Functional Linguistics metalanguage of Process, Participant, Circumstance, Connector functioned in a fourth-grade classroom in a project that supported teachers in engaging children who were learning English as an additional language in talk about texts. We situated work with the metalanguage in instructional contexts to help teachers achieve curricular goals, making the theory and its tools useful to and usable by teachers. Here we report on the ways the teacher used the metalanguage to engage students in talk about language to construct meaning as they read together. We then report on think-alouds with challenging text and interviews that engaged children from the classroom in deconstructing sentences and sharing their perspectives on the ways functional grammar metalanguage can support them in reading with greater understanding.

3. From Buttocks to Seminal Muscles: SFL-based Physical Education [+–] 55-86

Ruth Mulvad £17.50

National Centre for Literacy, Denmark

Ruth Mulvad, mag.art et cand.mag., is Associate Professor emerita, National Centre for Literacy, Denmark, previously also employed in teacher education in Denmark and Finland. She is a member of the board of the Nordic Association of SFL and Social Semiotics and Chair of the Danish Association for SFL in Education. Her research addresses SFL-based teaching and learning across the curriculum in primary and secondary schools and in teacher education. She has written an introduction to SFL in education, Sprog i skole (Language in school), articles and books about SFL in education, teaching materials and theoretical texts, in Danish and Nordic publications.

As a rule, language may not be considered a significant part of the school subject physical education (PE). However, just like all other subjects, learning PE is also based on language. Without language, students cannot develop their professionalism in PE Learning. This chapter presents a curriculum plan for PE, developed in close collaboration between teacher-educators and PE teachers, that incorporates disciplinary language learning within PE lessons. The paper illustrates this plan through a series of lessons for 4th grade. The plan includes vignettes with explicit language use by teachers and students to better illustrate disciplinary language instruction for teachers who do not have the experience of incorporating disciplinary language. The first part of this chapter presents the method of analysis of PE, the main results of the project and the Register-based planning model (following Derewianka 1990). Based on this model we developed the language-based teaching sequences in PE reported on here. The second half of the chapter presents one of these language-based teaching sequences developed for a 4th grade. The structure in this part of the chapter moves along the Register continuum, first presenting situations close to teaching practice, then taking a more theoretical perspective on the developed teaching sequence.

4. A Geometry Teacher’s Actions for Engaging Students in Mathematizing from Real-World Contexts: A Linguistic Analysis [+–] 87-116

Gloriana Gonzalez £17.50

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Gloriana González is Associate Professor of Mathematics Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests are problem-based instruction, classroom discourse, and teacher professional development. She has a special interest in the teaching and learning of geometry. She led a grant funded by the National Science Foundation, CAREER: Noticing and using students’ prior knowledge in problem-based instruction. Methodologically, she uses Systemic Functional Linguistics to analyze classroom talk and discussions among teachers. She received the 2015 Emerging Scholar Award from the North American Systemic Functional Linguistics Association.

I share the case of a geometry teacher’s work that encourages literacy practices to read a diagram during a problem-based lesson. Using a problem situated in the context of the visual arts, the teacher connected students’ understanding of the problem’s context with mathematical ideas. During the lesson summary, the teacher helped students to translate their work with the diagram into reasoned conjectures. I used Systemic Functional Linguistics to unpack the complexities of mathematics classroom talk, including lexical relations, processes, participants, and circumstances and conjunctive relations. The study exemplifies how linguistic analysis can help researchers to identify teaching actions for supporting students’ engagement in mathematizing with implications for teacher education.

Part II: Studies in Student and Faculty Development with Respect to Academic Writing at the University Level

5. Exploring New Perspectives and Degrees of Delicacy in Appraisal Studies: An Analysis of Engagement Resources in Academic Discourse in Spanish [+–] 119-148

Julio César Valerdi Zárate £17.50

National Autonomous University of Mexico

Julio César Valerdi Zárate holds a PhD in Linguistics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). His teaching experience has focused on English and Spanish for general and academic purposes as well as teacher training. He has taught several language and Applied Linguistics courses and workshops at the Autonomous University of Puebla, UNAM and Iberoamerican University (Ibero Puebla). As a full-time professor, Julio César Valerdi was head of the departments of English, Spanish, German, and Asian Languages at the Intercultural Language Center of Ibero Puebla. His fields of interest are Second Language Acquisition, Discourse Analysis, Linguistic Argumentation, and Interculturality.

In this chapter I propose an argumentative approach to the analysis of engagement resources in academic discourse. This argumentative approach consists of a methodological crossing of discourse analysis according to the Model of appraisal (Martin & White, 2005) and Toulmin’s Argumentation Model (1958, 2003). Through an evaluative-argumentative exploration of 20 MA thesis introductions, this chapter demonstrates how the complementary analysis of engagement within the framework of argumentative schemes allows for more delicate descriptions of the rhetorical workings of monoglossic and heteroglossic propositions than those based on the global structure of texts. It is also shown how this approach stands as a useful alternative to analyses based on discursive moves, which focus on stages realized by full paragraphs inside which toulminian argumentative components can be traced in more detail. The identification of the rhetorical functions of engagement realizations as well as the argumentative patterns which shape them represents a methodological innovation which could help improve our current understanding and application of the rhetorical influence of evaluative language in discourse.

6. A Functional Study of Transitivity and Attitude in Student Writing in Spanish across Disciplines: Making Connections [+–] 149-176

Natalia Ignatieva,Daniel Rodríguez-Vergara,Victoria Zamudio Jasso £17.50

National Autonomous University of Mexico

Natalia Ignatieva has Ph. D. in Theoretical Linguistics and M. A. in Applied Linguistics. She is currently working at the National School of Languages, Linguistics and Translation (National Autonomous University of Mexico). She is a lecturer in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and second language acquisition at the postgraduate program in linguistics. As a researcher she works at the Department of Applied Linguistics and she is a member of the National Research System (National Counsel for Science and Technology of Mexico). Her research interests include second language acquisition, pedagogic grammar, systemic functional linguistics and discourse analysis and she has published widely in these areas. Her recent co-authored and co-edited books are: CLAE: Corpus del Lenguaje Académico en Español de México y los Estados Unidos: Un análisis sistémico funcional (2014), La investigación en el área de lenguas extranjeras en la UNAM: diagnóstico y perspectivas (2015), Lingüística Sistémico Funcional en México: aplicaciones e implicaciones (2016) .

National Autonomous University of Mexico

Daniel Rodríguez-Vergara is a full time researcher at the Applied Linguistics Department of the National School of Languages, Linguistics and Translation of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He obtained a PhD in Linguistics and M.A. in Applied Linguistics at UNAM, and a B.A. in Modern Languages at the Meritorious Autonomous University of Puebla. His main academic interests have been in the fields of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), discourse analysis, academic writing in L2, and translation studies. Within SFL he has studied logico-semantic relations, transitivity, appraisal, thematic structure, etc. He has also developed research within Rhetorical Structure Theory and English for Specific Purposes. He has participated in several research projects related to the analysis of academic discourse and the teaching-learning of foreign languages. Currently he is a researcher and supervisor at the Program of M.A. and PhD in Linguistics of the UNAM.

National Autonomous University of Mexico

Victoria Zamudio Jasso has a Ph.D in Linguistics and M.A. in Applied Linguistics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She currently works as a full-time associate professor in the Applied Linguistics Department of the National School of Languages, Linguistics and Translation at the UNAM. Recently, she has developed and taught courses on the pedagogy of writing, ESP and academic discourse analysis at the undergraduate and graduate programs in Applied Linguistics. Her main academic and research interests include the use of evaluative language (including work within the appraisal framework), the analysis of academic discourse, (focusing mainly on the analysis of student texts), the development of academic literacies and the teaching of writing and reading for academic purposes.

This chapter presents a systemic analysis of process types in academic student texts in Spanish in three different disciplines: literature, history and geography. It also analyses these texts from the Appraisal perspective and how appraisal differs by discipline. Lastly, it establishes connections and observes the interaction of the experiential and interpersonal metafunctions and the systems of Transitivity and Attitude. Our purpose is to explore how student writers use process types to construe their specific disciplinary experience and what options they choose for encoding semantic categories of Attitude. The results suggest that each system (Transitivity and Appraisal) shows a strong connection to each of the three disciplines (literature, history and geography) while the relation between the two metafunctions (experiential and interpersonal) is much weaker.

7. Scaffolding the Wave: Supporting Student Teachers in Professional Academic Writing Through LCT and SFL [+–] 177-205

Anna-Vera Meidell Sigsgaard,Susanne Karen Jacobsen £17.50

University College of Copenhagen

Anna-Vera Meidell Sigsgaard is Associate Professor PhD, in Danish as a Second Language in the Department of Education at the University College of Copenhagen, Denmark. She teaches pre- and in-service teachers in the areas of second language education, literacy development, and language teaching pedagogy. She also teaches courses in academic writing for non-native English PhD students. Her research interests include exploring connections between language, knowledge and teaching/learning in the contexts of both elementary school and teacher education, as well as developing language-based (second language education) pedagogy in mainstream classes.
In collaboration with Susanne Karen Jacobsen, current work includes developing modules in teacher education to support student-teachers in writing academic texts. This work draws on both Legitimation Code Theory and systemic functional linguistics, exploring how analytical tools from both these theoretical frameworks complement each other in an academic writing context and how these can be used to inform pedagogy at the tertiary level.

University College of Copenhagen

Susanne Karen Jacobsen is Associate Professor in English as a Foreign Language and Danish as a Second Language in the Department of Education at University College of Copenhagen, Denmark. She teaches pre- and in-service teachers, primarily in the areas of English as a foreign language and second language education. She has written a resource book for teachers and contributed to numerous anthologies on language education, literacy and pedagogy. Most of her work draws on systemic functional linguistics and genre pedagogy. In collaboration with Anna-Vera Meidell Sigsgaard, her current work includes developing modules in teacher education to support student-teachers in writing academic texts. This work draws on both Legitimation Code Theory and systemic functional linguistics, exploring how analytical tools from both these theoretical frameworks complement each other in an academic writing context and how these can be used to inform pedagogy at the tertiary level.

Like many students, pre-service teachers in Denmark often exhibit difficulty writing about practice in a theoretically informed way. This chapter employs Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) and SFL analyses in conjunction to illustrate how students in a tertiary education setting are able to connect what they know (theory and theoretical concepts) with what they see (in this case, examples of educational practice and teaching materials). In analyzing examples of analysis-sections from student teachers’ written exams, we show how some students are more successful in presenting their analyses as emerging professionals while contrasting these with less successful examples. More specifically, semantic gravity and the notion of semantic waves from LCT identify where in analysis-section texts students make the connections between theory and practice, while resources from lexico-grammar and discourse semantics (including Appraisal theory) from SFL demonstrate how this can be done more or less successfully using genre-appropriate academic language. Insights from the analyses presented suggest that teaching students these same analytical tools from LCT and SFL more or less explicitly will help to both improve their academic writing and support their emerging professional identities.

8. Scaffolding Argument Writing in History: The Evolution of an Interdisciplinary Collaboration [+–] 207-233

Silvia Pessoa,Thomas D. Mitchell,Aaron Jacobson £17.50

Carnegie Mellon University, Qatar

Silvia Pessoa is Associate Teaching Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar where she teaches courses in academic reading and writing and sociolinguistics. She earned her Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition from Carnegie Mellon University. Her research areas include academic writing development, second language writing, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, and immigration studies. Her research has been funded by the Qatar National Research Fund and has appeared in international journals such as the Journal of Second Language Writing, Linguistics and Education, and the Journal of English for Academic Purposes.

Carnegie Mellon University, Qatar

Thomas D. Mitchell is an Associate Teaching Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar where he teaches courses in academic reading and writing, style, professional writing, and discourse studies. He earned his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University. His research has appeared in international journals such as the Journal of Second Language Writing, Linguistics and Education, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, and English for Specific Purposes.

Carnegie Mellon University, Qatar

Aaron Jacobson is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar where he teaches courses in global history, European history, and Latin American history. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of London. His research interests include refugee studies and forced migrations and his areas of expertise include Modern European history and Modern German history.

This chapter reports on a collaboration between two applied linguists and a novice history professor to scaffold student writing of the argument genre in a first-year history course. The collaboration took place at an English-medium branch campus of a US university in the Middle East where the majority of students have English as an additional language. When the history professor arrived at the university, the applied linguists already had a deeply contextualized understanding of the writing demands of the course using an SFL lens. For several years they had researched the content and assignments and delivered writing workshops. While recent research has explored a variety of factors that enable or constrain successful collaborations, few have focused on university classrooms, and fewer still have explored ones with the contextual knowledge imbalance that initially existed in ours. We explore the evolution of our collaboration, focusing on how the history professor’s understanding of the language resources of history arguments developed, and how his flexibility and feedback facilitated the refinement of the workshop materials and the development of a new assessment rubric. We conclude with implications for interdisciplinary collaborations.

Part III: Studies in Translation

9. Translation as Re-instantiation: An Investigation of Verbal Projection [+–] 237-256

Hailing Yu,Canzhong Wu £17.50

Department of Foreign Languages and International Studies, Hunan University

Hailing Yu got her PhD from the Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Australia in 2017. Since then, she has been working as assistant professor in the School of Foreign Languages and International Studies, Hunan University, China. Her research interests cover translation studies, systemic functional linguistics, discourse analysis and the spread of Chan Buddhism across languages and cultures. She has been working on different translations of the Platform Sutra since 2009, and her publications appear in journals such as Target, Social Semiotics, Functional Linguistics and New Voices in Translation Studies.

Independent scholar

Dr Canzhong Wu is an independent scholar having formerly been Senior Lecturer with the Centre for Language in Social Life, in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. His research interests include translation studies, systemic functional linguistics, corpus linguistics and computer-assisted learning and teaching. He has developed a range of computational tools for discourse analysis and corpus-based studies.

Following the concept of translation as re-instantiation, this chapter investigates how verbal projection in a Buddhist text written in literary Chinese (1291) is re-instantiated in four English translations (1930, 1977, 1998 and 2011). More specifically, it looks into the actual manifestations of verbal projection in the source text and its English translations, and examines what part of the systemic potential is instantiated and re-instantiated, and for what consideration. The significance of this study lies in its attempt to expand the application of systemic functional linguistics to the translation of literary Chinese, a language that was used for almost all formal writing in China until the early twentieth century.

10. Building and Enhancing Intercultural Communication in Museum Spaces through SFL and Translation Studies [+–] 257-283

Marina Manfredi £17.50

University of Bologna

Marina Manfredi is a Lecturer in English Language and Translation at the University of Bologna, Italy. She teaches English Language and Linguistics for undergraduate students and English Translation for postgraduates. Her main research interests lie in the fields of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Translation Studies and include Systemic Functional Linguistics and translation, translation teaching, postcolonial Translation Studies, translation and world Englishes (especially Indian English), audiovisual translation (in particular of multicultural television programmes for younger audiences), metaphor translation. She has contributed to national and international conferences on these topics and has published various articles and two books (Translating Text and Context: Translation Studies and Systemic Functional Linguistics, Volume 1: Translation Theory, Dupress, 2008; Translating Text and Context: Translation Studies and Systemic Functional Linguistics, Volume 2: From Theory to Practice, Asterisco, 2014). Her current research mainly concerns translation for the media, in particular of popular science for press magazines, for the web and news translation.

This chapter explores the fruitful interface between Systemic Functional Linguistics and Translation Studies in the field of museum translation, an area which has received less attention in both disciplines. After offering an overview of the context in which museum translation takes place, with special attention to the European and Italian settings, it examines translation practices in museum spaces, taking the city of Bologna, Italy, as an illustrative case. The chapter combines a context-oriented methodology, based on interviews with museum professionals, and a theoretical approach, arguing in favor of an SFL-informed translation training for museum translators. Through practical examples taken from three museums in Bologna, it shows how a linguistic analysis in terms of textual, interpersonal and ideational meanings might help the translator produce an effective target text, with a view to meeting the challenges of multilingualism, accessibility and inclusion. which current museum translation should foster and achieve.

End Matter

Index [+–] 285-299

Mary J. Schleppegrell,María Estela Brisk FREE

University of Michigan

Boston College

Index

Reviews

A collection of well-rounded studies in the fields of education and translation. The chapters present meaningful ways of analyzing the role and potential of language in the two fields, as well as innovative applications, such as curriculum design and teaching language across the disciplines, and nuances between classical, modern, and multimodal texts, respectively. The three sections of the book include interconnected chapters that highlight powerful SFL resources and profound insights that will enrich researchers and practitioners. Moreover, the chapters expand SFL possibilities through various languages (Spanish, Danish, Chinese, Italian, English as a second language), countries (Mexico, Denmark, Qatar, Italy), and contexts (educational settings, literature field, and museums). Recurrent themes of professional collaboration, scaffolding, explicit teaching, and disciplinary language evolve and repeat as leitmotifs throughout the book.
Language in Action: SFL Theory across Context includes an exemplary corpus of SFL studies, illustrating broad possibilities, stimulating reflective inquiries, and encouraging collaborations between experts in different fields of knowledge.
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Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

Language in Action

SFL Theory across Contexts

María Estela Brisk [+–]

Boston College

Mary J. Schleppegrell [+–]

University of Michigan

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