Teacher Discussion Forums

I am a busy private teacher (of adults),in a seaside suburb of Tokyo,and currently struggling with Systemic Functional Linguistics as part of a MA.
SFL is interesting but almost impossibly difficult. It offers a holy grail at the end but perhaps it might only be a crock! I have commanded my long suffering students to submit essays on thematic progression and genre writing. Anybody with other ideas on applied SFL?
A geordie in Tokyo

Can you explain what exactly you've asked your students to do? I can't imagine EFL students (at any level) writing "essays" on thematic progression or genre writing.

Hi Abufletcher,
Many thanks for replying.
Sorry I did not mean to suggest that my students are discussing linguistics. They are not writing ABOUT thematic progression but rather submitting simple essays USING `zigzag` thematic progression. The writing is very basic. I think it might help in their writing development because often I think Japanese find it difficult to be precise in their writing.
On genre - one of my students is a care nurse who visits elderly patients. She is writing about her work - the genre of `elderly patient care`.
Regards,
Geordie in Tokyo
Where are you located?

I'd say that at the lower level, Halliday and Hasan's work on "cohesion" would yield some practical benefits for novice EFL writers.

I too am struggling with SFL on a TESOLW course with the OU and not finding it funny at all. Frankly, I think it's a crock. How and where are you doing yours?

Hi Sam,
SFL happily is becoming less of a crock - do I detect a fellow Aussie here?
When I first tackled SFL it was because some respected contacts gave it a big rap. It looked a hopeless w..k at first - designed for eggheads in ivory towers. However, I have persevered and read several books and have tried out the applied techniques outlined in my first message above.
I feel it could help me in my teaching Japanese students. Recently I had a `aha` moment. - In (Bloor & Bloor) they mention the use of `tonic syllables and tonic foot` in presenting new and given information. Could be useful for the monotone delivery of most Japanese!
I have had no response as to practical examples of SFL. Perhaps most SFL students are eggheads in ivory towers!!
I am doing a M.Ed specialising in TESOL with University of Tasmania.
I am on my fourth unit of eight. Tassie allows great flexibility and minimal supervision in choice of topics and this suits me well.
I would like to know what you have read so far and what does TESOLW and OU stand for?
Cheers
Geordie

Hi Geordie

I thought you were British with the nickname 'Geordie' as Geordie is a nickname for people from the Midlands. I'm a British expat in Vienna, Austria.

My course is a Post Graduate Certificate in Professional Studies in Education (Applied Linguistics) which is what the PGCPSE stands for. It is a module with the Open University (OU) which could lead to a Masters in Education if added to with 2 other modules. I already have a PGCE (which stands for Post Graduate Certificate in Education), having followed a 1 year full time teacher training course back in England, and an MA in Arts Management.

The only reason I'm doing this course is because I was told that I could not be included in the recruitment process here for a full time job as a university lecturer for Business Management in English because I do not have a university degree with English Language as the subject (we don't have such a thing in England in any case).

I hope that answers your question.

Sam,
I did originally come from Newcastle many,many years ago - not the Midlands. Have you heard of Newcastle United?
Still would like to know what you have been reading on the subject.
Cheers,
A Geordie in Japan

Hi Geordie

I knew it was Newcastle, just couldn't think of the city name (I'm a Southerner, originally from Canterbury, then London and the New Forest). I've been in Vienna for the last 4.5 years and now really beginning to regret it.

Until the start of this course, I had never heard of SFL (I have a PGCE and a CELTA) but the course materials are:

• * OU Study Guide

• * "Analysing English In A Global Context" (a reader edited by Anna Burns and Caroline Coffin)

• * "English Language Teaching In Its Social Context" (a reader edited by Christopher N Candlin and Neil Mercer)

• * "Innovation In English Language Teaching" (a reader edited by David R Hall and Ann Hewings)

• * "Using Functional Grammar", 2nd ed, by David Butt et al, from the National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research (Australian)

Hope that helps

Have you read anything by Beverly Derewianka from Australia? She makes SFL very practical and useful. There is a whole curriculum designed by the Australian group in Hong Kong and you can see a lot of information from Hong Kong university on SFL. It is funny that you think it for eggheads because it is just a way to look at language that can be very practical. Of course you can go into it in more detail and read Halliday and Hasan, Mohan, Williams, etc. I find it enormously practical though - I used it in Greenland and used colour to designate the various parts of language - process, participants, etc. rather than use the words. My students already had to learn grammar vocabulary in Greenlandic and Danish so I didn't want to add to their burden as English is a 3rd language. They caught on quickly and actually asked for more specific words to define what "blue" (participants) words were and so on. Theme and rheme were the most important for the older grades because their Greenlandic verbs are within the sentence (they add things before and after the verb and one verb can be 45 or more characters long and actually comprise the whole sentence). Cohesion was the most important topic for the adults. Beverly has two books that are really practical for teachers and she gives a super course in the summers if you can find her. I am using Appraisal to exam some of the writing I brought back from students in Greenland, Mongolia and Japan. Geoff Williams has some good papers on introducing SFG to grade one and grade 5 students and it is inspiring to read accounts of how students can learn SFG vocabulary to describe their writing and reading. It seems to help them be critical readers as well as they can see how the language is constructed to influence them. I will look up the websites for you but check out Beverly's books if you can.

Thanks Sally for a wonderful reply.I will certainly check out all your leads.
Geordie

Interesting viewpoint, Sally. Good to see somebody has confidence in SFL and has found a practical wy to use it...

You asked about using colour. I got a lot of coloured paper and cut it into strips. I then asked the students in the lower grades to figure out which words in their writing or reading were words that described actions (material processes) and got them to write it on the red strips. Of course words like have, do and be were a problem so we chose a particular shade of red for those and tried to find out how many of those kinds of red words there were (existential processes). They also started to categorize the red words further by the end of the year and seemed understand mental processes and saying processes. We added tense endings to the base verbs in white and did past, and present. You can choose another colour for auxiliary verbs for future. We added adverbs in pink and blue for participants and green for adjectives. We just decided on the colours by chance and it depended on what colours were available from the art department. I put the words on the wall with that teacher's snot as the kids call it and we made columns of colours. Towards the end of the year I bought everyone a package of coloured pencils and the older kids particularly would colour words right on their work. I also marked several essays using colour to show where they were making errors. That took me a long time for the first batch but got much faster the more I did it. There is a program on the computer that does this for you and since I used to type out all their essays with corrections so I could give everyone a copy, it worked well. The person in charge of the computer complained about the cost of using the colour printer though so just did this once. It really helped the students add in more "colour" words to their essays as you could see that there weren't many pink or green words. It also helped them to know that they usually needed blue and red words in a sentence and to match these up. I found that it helped a lot with articles (grey) because they don't have articles in Greenlandic. Their textbooks had a section of common errors at the back and colour coding those helped a lot as well. They had a list of irregular verbs in this section of their text book and we had all sorts of games to help remember these.

Excellent! May I quote you?

PM for you...

We added tense endings to the base verbs in white and did past, present and future.

I'm puzzled. What are the tense endings in English for the future or for irregular past tenses.