Continuing Discourse on Language - A Functional Perspective, Volumes 1 and 2 - Ruqaiya Hasan†
12. SFL in text-based, web-enhanced language study
Continuing Discourse on Language - A Functional Perspective, Volumes 1 and 2 - Ruqaiya Hasan†
Carol Taylor Torsello [+]
University of Padua (retired)
Anthony Baldry [+]
University of Messina
Description
In this chapter we will report mainly on work that has gone on in Italy as the result of the combined efforts of scholars working at the Universities of Padua, Pavia, Pisa, Trieste, Udine and Venice beginning in the 1990s and continuing to the present time, in the context of nationally-funded research projects, the most recent of which are known by the acronyms CITATAL, LINGUATEL and DIDACTAS. There are three central sections which are rather different in content, but all represent ways in which Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) theory has been used in language study that is both text-based and web-enhanced. The first of these is devoted to some interactive multimedia teaching materials which at once teach and make use of systemic functional theory. The second deals with computer annotation of texts and of corpora as a way of doing research and as a teaching technique through which students are brought to apply SFL theory as they learn it. The third is basically about Multimodal Corpus Authoring System (MCA) and how it has been used so far as a tool for storing corpora, especially multimodal corpora, for analysing them and for making the analysed texts or text portions available for retrieval on the basis of the annotations provided. Some related software produced outside Italy will also be discussed briefly.