Systemic Functional Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching
Anne McCabe [+–]
Saint Louis University
View Website
Anne McCabe is a faculty member of the English Department at Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus, Spain, where she teaches linguistics, ESL and writing pedagogy to undergraduate and graduate students. She has published widely on application of Systemic Functional Linguistics to analysis of educational and media texts including An Introduction to Linguistics and Language Studies (Equinox).
This volume traces the applications of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to additional language teaching/learning. Major differences exist between learning an additional language in an immersive context, where that language is the dominant one (referred to as learning a second language) and learning in a context where the language is not the dominant one (referred to as learning a foreign
language).
Michael Halliday’s early interest in language went hand-in-hand with learning Chinese to teach it to English speakers as well as with teaching English to Chinese speakers. Thus, Halliday was intrigued by the endeavour of teaching/learning a foreign language, an endeavour which coincided with early his early theorizing of SFL. While SFL literature has provided a focus on second language learning through widely publicized applications to language pedagogy, mainly through genre-based pedagogy in schools and workplaces, in comparison, foreign language teaching and learning, henceforth FLT, has received less attention.
There are a couple of key issues, one related to pedagogy and the other to researching language development, which are considered throughout the volume. Genre-based pedagogy in immersive school contexts focuses on literacy development, moving from the whole text to the parts that make it up, while FLT has traditionally seen its role as building up from the parts (words, phrases, clauses, and sentences) to the whole, especially in the case of adult learners who already dominate a linguistic system (and may be highly literate in it). SFL, with its stratified view of language, can, in theory, mediate from context to lexicogrammar and vice-versa, both to undergird classroom pedagogy and to trace foreign language development; there is some evidence from FLT practice that demonstrates how this mediation via SFL can fruitfully take place. There are, however, arguments that SFL, with its social interactionist focus, works well when teaching more proficient language users in specific contexts, while other descriptive perspectives work better to help less proficient learners build up their knowledge of the foreign language system. With respect to research on foreign language development, the acquisitional mentalist bent has only relatively recently given way to interest in social interaction, and a number of other theoretical perspectives have proven more popular in tracing language development. This volume reviews the literature on applications of SFL to both foreign language pedagogy and research, in examining how it bridges the gap between the development of meaning-making resources and their linguistic forms.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 1 provides historical background to the emergence of systemic functional linguistic (SFL) theory with respect to foreign 1 language teaching. Michael Halliday, SFL’s initial architect, is often put forth as one of the founders of the communicative language teaching. approach, the dominant approach in modern language teaching since the early 1970s. His role in communicative language teaching can be traced from the publication of Halliday, McIntosh and Streven’s 1964 book, The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching, which set out to describe how language, exemplified through English, “works” (Halliday et al., 1964: x), and it has been described “as a kind of applied linguistics manifesto” (Widdowson, 2009: 194). At the time of Halliday’s theorizing about language, the notion of individual linguistic competence was made especially prevalent through Chomsky’s mentalist theory, which language teaching looked to as a response to the behaviourist view of language development, prevalent in the language teaching materials of the time. However, Chomsky’s theory was never designed for language teaching; rather it was designed to explain how individuals acquire the linguistic system based on the make-up of the human brain. Also at that time, Dell Hymes countered with the notion of communicative competence, which goes beyond linguistic competence in that “[t]here are rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless” (Hymes, 1972: 278). Halliday’s theorizing about language was viewed as a way of providing for the gap between rules of grammar and rules of use; i.e. Halliday’s theory of grammar, conceived through his desire to know what could be said in a given context in another language (Halliday & Hasan, 2006), was initially seen as providing a fruitful focus on functions of language for language teaching (Green, 2012). However, the chapter moves to explaining the small effect that SFL theory, especially the systemic part, has had on foreign language teaching beyond some very specific applications. That is, language teaching took up the notion of context and of functions, including a misapplication of Halliday’s child language functions to the learning of language at any age (cf. Brown, 2006; and see Thwaite, 2019); however, the model of language as a system of paradigmatic choices across strata has been far less evident in practical applications, perhaps due to familiarity in FLT with other descriptions of language, along with the complexity of SFL-based descriptions. This introductory ends with an explanation of the layout of the rest of the book.
Chapter 2
Chapter 2 reviews the applications of SFL to foreign language teaching. These applications have mainly been in the realm of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), including English for Academic Purposes (EAP), based in good measure on Halliday, et al.’s (1964) introduction of the notion of register. After detailing the aspects of SFL that have been applied to ESP/EAP (such as Theme/Rheme and thematic patterning, grammatical metaphor, appraisal), the chapter will take a short tour through SFL-informed genre-based pedagogy (GBP) and Reading-to-Learn (RtL); while these pedagogical applications of SFL theory have taken place mainly in second language contexts, especially those where children are faced with having to learn the additional language for purposes of schooling, they are relevant to some foreign language contexts, especially more content-based approaches such as content-and-language-integrated-learning (CLIL). The chapter will also review other SFL-based applications toteaching in foreign language contexts, for example through an examination of Tajino’s (2018) “meaning-based pedagogic grammar” (MAP grammar), which is an attempt at using SFL to teach the linguistic system at early levels of foreign language learning, and through the burgeoning work in applying SFL descriptions and pedagogy to languages other than English (Colobmi, 2009; Huang & Mohan, 2009; Troyan, 2021).
Chapter 3
In terms of language learning theories which have come to the fore since the advent of communicative language teaching, sociocultural theory (SCT) has been connected to SFL, given the affinity in their social interactionist perspectives (Ferreira, 2020, Byrnes, 2006). Also, SFL has been compared to other usage-based approaches to language, which have also been applied to language learning, such as discourse functionalism and cognitive linguistics (Tyler, 2010). Lourdes Ortega points out that, while the SFL view of “additional language learning as semiotic development in an L2, or the development of flexible meaning-making L2 capacities across contexts” seems optimal for focusing foreign language development, she suggests that other linguistic approaches that focus on meaning in context – namely, cognitive and corpus linguistics – have ‘been endorsed more strongly’ (Ortega 2009: 234) in the study of second language acquisition. However, from SFL, notably, the concept of grammatical metaphor, alongside the notions of what is distinctive between spoken and written grammar (Halliday, 1989), has been used to characterize complexity, (Ortega, 2015; Ryshina-Pankova, 2015; Ferreira, 2020) one of the standard measures of foreign language development in the individual, along with accuracy and fluency. Chapter 3 locates SFL with respect to these and other theoretical perspectives on foreign language teaching/learning, in terms of the types of classroom applications and research studies carried out under their respective umbrellas.
Chapter 4
From the application of child language functions to foreign language teaching, the teaching of genres as fixed structures, insularity in application, and the myriad of technical terms in SFL’s metalanguage, a number of issues have held SFL back from living its full potential in applications to (especially foreign) language teaching. This chapter reviews these issues by examining the published research on applications of SFL to foreign language teaching and learning. It also considers the difficulty of putting into classroom practice a language theory based on interaction, where learners often need to practise bits of language outside of a specific use. This difficulty leads to the suggestion that perhaps SFL can only work well with higher levels of proficiency (with ‘language users’ rather than with ‘language learners’; O’Donnell, 2011). Byrnes (2006: 21) asks that very question: “Can and should an explicitly meaning-oriented approach characterize an entire language program […] or is it more appropriate after lexicogrammatical resources have reached a certain breadth, depth and confident accessibility for the learner?” (Byrnes, 2006: 21). Byrnes’ work on applying SFL to teaching German as a foreign language has led her to a clear ‘yes’ to the first response: …we rarely describe beginning-level learners as making deliberate and noteworthy semiotic choices; and yet, that is what they do as well, though with a different scope and depth and to a different degree. Such a perspective opens up the possibility of taking an integrated and expansive long-term view of instructed language learning: No matter their performance level, all language learners continually engage in making and fine-tuning form-meaning and meaning-form associations in creative recalibration and approximation of fluid bidirectional linkages as they strive, over extended periods of learning, to expand their registerial and generic repertoire of language use (p. 135). This response provides a challenge to SFL in creating an applied pedagogy for foreign language learning, a challenge which leads to Chapter 5.
Chapter 5
Heidi Byrnes (2009: 5) explains that the SFL perspective on “learning ‘the grammar’ of a language is not about learning to adhere to rules, but learning to turn experience and human existence into meaning by using the resources that the grammar of a particular language makes available”. What it means to teach grammar as resource has been clearly modelled through genre-based pedagogy, moving from higher stratas (encompassing genres and registers) to lower ones (lexicogrammar and phonology). However, foreign language teaching has long been dominated by movement from the opposite direction, where more ‘traditional’ approaches to grammar descriptions are in the fore. Burns and Knox (2005: 256) suggest that SFL “is still very much in its infancy” in English foreign language teaching, where “considerable tensions exist for language teachers wanting to use SFL when institutional requirements, course material and textbooks, and student expectations are primarily based on dominant traditional grammatical frameworks”. As Derewianka and Jones (2010: 10) explain “[w]hile traditional grammar is familiar, SFG [systemic functional grammar] requires a different way of thinking about language”. Halliday himself recognized the difficulty of the endeavour, in this case referring to the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language: linguistics does not yet offer, at this time, the help that is really needed. It is nearly a hundred years since Edward Sapir observed that every language had “a certain cut”, its unique blend of semantic, lexicogrammatical and phonological styles, and its “characterology” in Prague School terms. We ought to be able to model this for teachers, but as yet we can’t. It is highly complex and highly abstract – the semiotic analogue of the interlocking material forces of a very sophisticated machine, a musical instrument, or a species of living organism – the essential catness of a cat, for example (Halliday, 2014: 5). This chapter explores the possibilities of using systemic functional grammar as a basis for teaching foreign languages by drawing on the material presented in the first four chapters, providing recommendations for further research and theoretical considerations.
ISBN-13 (Hardback)
9781000000000
Price (Hardback)
£75.00 / $100.00
ISBN-13 (Paperback)
9781000000000
Price (Paperback)
£24.95 / $32.00
ISBN (eBook)
9781000000000
Price (eBook)
Individual
£24.95 / $32.00
Institutional
£75.00 / $100.00
£24.95 / $32.00
Institutional
£75.00 / $100.00
Publication
01/09/2026
Pages
200
Size
254 x 178mm
Readership
scholars and students
Illustration
25 figures
