A Functional Linguistic Perspective on Developing Language 2020055633, 9781138616042, 9780429462504, 9781032013572

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A Functional Linguistic Perspective on Developing Language

This volume offers a comprehensive account of language development from a Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) perspective, integrating theory and data from a wide range of research studies. The book begins by taking an in-depth look at SFL theory and its focus on texts, highlighting the metafunctional nature of language and the ways in which individuals’ repertoires of meaning-making resources develop as they interact with the world and with others. Grounded in an SFL approach, the successive chapters consider in turn the key stages of language development, from infancy to school settings to additional, second, and foreign language learning contexts. Each chapter incorporates a range of SFL studies to demonstrate shifts in language development across these stages, but also the discussion of other functional perspectives to examine the ways in which these different approaches inform one another. A concluding chapter considers the implications of these studies for future research as well as for pedagogical practices in literacy teaching. In its consideration of the relationship between SFL theory and its application to language development, this book will be key reading for students and scholars in Systemic Functional Linguistics, language and education, and literacy studies. Anne McCabe teaches linguistics and academic writing in the English Department at Saint Louis University – Madrid Campus. She has published numerous book chapters and articles using a functional linguistics perspective applied to language development. She co-edited Language and Literacy: Functional Approaches and Advances in Language and Education.

Routledge Advances in Functional Linguistics

1 A Functional Linguistic Perspective on Developing Language Anne McCabe For more information about this series, please visit https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Advances-in-Functional-Linguistics/book-series/RAFL.

A Functional Linguistic Perspective on Developing Language

Anne McCabe

First published 2021 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Anne McCabe to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McCabe, Anne (Anne M.) author. Title: A functional linguistic perspective on developing language / Anne McCabe. Description: New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge advances in functional linguistics | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This volume offers a comprehensive account of language development from a systemic functional linguistic (SFL) perspective, integrating theory and data from a wide range of research studies”-Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020055633 | ISBN 9781138616042 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429462504 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Language acquisition. | Functionalism (Linguistics) Classification: LCC P118 .M388 2021 | DDC 410.1/83--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055633 ISBN: 978-1-138-61604-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-01357-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-46250-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo Std by SPi Global, India

To Shirley Lascara McCabe, for her devotion and ­commitment to her children’s learning

Contents

List of figures List of tables Acknowledgements List of abbreviations 1 Developing Language: A Functional Linguistic Perspective

viii ix x xii 1

2 Developing Language from Infancy

38

3 Developing Language through School

94

4 Developing Additional Languages

149

5 Developing Theory, Pedagogy, and Research

199

Index

248

Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6

Simplified phrase structure tree Fragment of mood network Simultaneous layers of the clause (based on Taverniers, 2011: 1108) The cline of instantiation (based on Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 28) Stratified model of language (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 26) Simplified version of the semantic system of speech function (based on Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 136) Congruent pairings across strata (Ideational grammatical metaphor) Non-congruent pairings across strata (Ideational grammatical metaphor) An overview of appraisal resources (based on Martin & White, 2005: 38) The protolanguage ‘microfunctions’ (Halliday, 1992: 21) The 9-month-old’s semiotic universe (based on Halliday, 1975: 85) From home to school: Cline of interaction – knowledge – register Modified stratified model (based on Martin, 1992: 496) Teaching-Learning Cycle (Rothery & Stenglin, 1994: 8) Number of articles published per year Literacy pedagogies The domain of linguistic sciences (Halliday, (1966[1960]: 4) Levels for linguistic description (Halliday et al., 1964: 18) Number of articles published per year Halliday and Martin's stratified models Perspectives on the transition from protolanguage to adult language (adapted from Taverniers, 2002) Language and context; system and instance (adapted from Halliday, 1998 and Bowcher, 2018) Simplified version of the semantic system of modality (based on Arús Hita, 2008: 374). MAP Grammar: The order of meanings (Tajino, 2018: 14) MAP Grammar: Vertical and horizontal axes (Tajino, 2018: 14)

10 13 16 19 22 23 25 26 28 57 59 97 103 105 109 132 151 153 159 201 203 209 222 223 224

Tables

2.1 Halliday’s (2004a [1969]) child language models 2.2 Halliday’s (1975) child language functions

54 58

Acknowledgements

The genesis of this book can be found in a Facebook post by Ruslana Wusterland in 2016 related to the difficulty of finding Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) research in books on the topic of language development. Through the ensuing discussion, it emerged that it would be useful to gather the SFL-based developmental research together in one place, and this became the aim of this volume. I should have realized what an ambitious project it would be; the wealth of research using SFL as a tool for tracing language development is tremendous. I continue to be amazed by the SFL story; this book tells in very broad outline how Michael Halliday’s interest in language—how it works and how it develops in individuals and societies—has spawned an incredible outlay of scholarly and pedagogic work. I am sorry for choices I had to make in leaving material out, above all for every one of those researchers and teachers whose names have not been included in this book, as it is the immense collective effort of the warm, welcoming, and vibrant SFL community that has illuminated language development so brightly to allow for a more just and inclusive society. It needs to be noted (seemingly paradoxically. after mentioning inclusion) that this book focusses mainly on educational traditions in countries whose majority language is English. Also, many of the background texts cited were published in the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s, at a time when gendered masculine pronouns were the norm for generic reference: ‘child’, ‘teacher’, and ‘individual’, for example, were typically subsequently referred to as ‘he’. Much of that reading, and thus the associated gendered pronouns, have naturally found their way into this book through quoting. I find it jarring to read them now, but also know that the writers who used them, all highly sensitive to the role of language in society, would not now do so. While writing this book has meant spending thousands of hours researching and writing, each one of them has been experienced with joy. It was delightful to spend two months at Cardiff University doing research, thanks to the kind hospitality of Lise Fontaine and Tom Bartlett, as well as to Saint Louis University – Madrid Campus, for providing the needed time off from teaching. In-depth conversations with Lise, while sampling the delicious and varied food offered in Cardiff ’s restaurants and cafés and taking in sights in and beyond Cardiff, was a

Acknowledgements

xi

perfect combination of ideational and interpersonal experiences, leading, in good measure, to the joy of putting everything together textually. I could not have written this book without my family’s nourishment. Luis’s constant concern and care has taken several forms, including his phenomenal cooking, always keeping the fridge stocked with hearty meals and fresh fruit and vegetables from the local market. Elisa’s nourishment has been of a different kind—she always provided an ear when I got hung up on something, helping me to talk through a solution, and our deep conversations at the kitchen table, about language and education, kept me focused on the bigger picture. I am also grateful to her for her unselfish sharing of her research on dialogic teaching (in Chapter 5). Diana’s nourishment from a distance has been, as always, her warm and loving nature. My mother, Shirley Lascara McCabe, has been a champion of my education and growth throughout my life. Their support and understanding set the context to work joyously. Reviewing the SFL language development work has been a project of joy. I only hope that some of that joy can be passed on to the reader through the pages ahead.

Abbreviations

ADL CAF CC CL CLD CLIL CLT DF EAP ELL ELT GBP GM HAP L1 L2 LAP LCT MAS R2L SD SF SFG SFL SG SLA SLD TLC

Additional Language Development Complexity, Accuracy, Fluency Contextual Configuration Cognitive Linguistics Child Language Development Content and Language Integrated Learning Communicative Language Teaching Discourse Functionalism English for Academic Purposes English-Language Learner English-Language Teaching Genre-Based Pedagogy Grammatical Metaphor Higher Autonomy Profession First Language Second Language Lower Autonomy Profession Legitimation Code Theory Manipulative Activity Scene Reading to Learn Semantic Density Systemic Functional Systemic Functional Grammar Systemic Functional Linguistics Semantic Gravity Second Language Acquisition School Language Development Teaching-Learning Cycle

1 Developing Language A Functional Linguistic Perspective

“Learning to mean is a process of creation.” (Halliday, 2004a[1978]: 138) The immense attraction of understanding language development—that is, getting at the heart of how we learn language to effectively interact across a wide variety of contexts during our lifespan—is widespread. Parents eagerly latch on to their babies’ first words; teachers of all subjects spend classroom hours explaining terms which they hope students will then use effectively in assignments and exams; and people of all ages and from all walks of life invest substantial time, effort, and money into learning to communicate with others through additional languages. At the same time, perhaps because of the ubiquitous nature of language, we sometimes lose sight of the extraordinary opportunities it provides us for expression, cognition, and interaction throughout our lifetimes. The purpose of this book is to explicate language development from a functional perspective, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), through its theory and accompanying research on how individuals develop their language abilities for meaningful interaction. Each chapter lays out the milieu in which the theory was developed, hand-in-hand with studies of how people develop language over time. SFL was conceived precisely with language development in mind, initially in the context of foreign language teaching; SFL’s founder and major architect, Michael Halliday, began developing the theoretical descriptions of first Chinese and then English when he was teaching Chinese to English speakers and English to Chinese speakers. He continued building on the descriptions through his work with mother-tongue English education in the United Kingdom, and through tracing the language development of his own son from an early age.The following three main sites of language development are included in this book: language development in infancy and early childhood, language development through school, and the development of additional language(s) once a first language has been learned. Along the way, other theoretical and research perspectives, often critical of SFL, are included to further illuminate language development from this functional perspective. These three sites of language development have had their impact on SFL theory, and their repercussions are

2 Developing Language

highlighted. In the final chapter, both the criticisms of SFL theory as it has been applied to language development, and the repercussions that the three areas of language development have had on the theory, are considered in order to prompt suggestions for areas of future research and theory-building for tracing and promoting language development from an SFL perspective.

1.1 Developing Language It is important from the outset to clarify the use of the verb ‘develop’ in A Functional Linguistic Perspective on Developing Language, as it is ambiguous in its context. On the one hand, ‘developing’ could be an adjective modifying ‘language’, i.e. a classifier of the word ‘language’, and, as such, it refers to descriptions of an individual’s language as it changes over time. On the other hand, ‘developing’ could be a verb, with ‘language’ as its direct object complement, referring to how that change happens. Throughout the book, ‘developing’ is used in both senses: that is, at times the focus is on describing language as it develops over time, through the provision of linguistic snapshots of individuals, as in the case of the studies of children described in Chapter 2, in the writings and classroom interactions of students in the school studies of Chapter 3, and in the language use of additional language learners in Chapter 4. At others, it refers to processes of developing language, or the ways in which, over time, we expand our repertoires of language use. In this second sense, the use of the word ‘development’ is a meaningful one, as other head nouns could be classified by the word ‘language’, such as language acquisition or language learning. About the metaphor of acquisition, Halliday said: The prevailing metaphor for talking about the learning of the mother tongue in the 1960s was the metaphor of ‘acquisition’, suggesting that language is some type of commodity that the child has to acquire […] it is noticeable how much of the work of this period is affected by the notion that language exists independently of people speaking and understanding; that there is an object called a set of rules which constitutes adult language, and it is the task of the child to acquire this ready-made object. (Halliday, 2007[1978]: 182) Halliday’s view of language development shifts the perspective away from the system and on to the learner as meaning-maker in interaction, a view that accords with other social interactionist views, such as Larsen-Freeman’s (2018) on language as a complex adaptive system. This perspective does not see “language development as the unfolding of a prearranged plan”, given that “the meaning-making potential resides with the learner, not with the system of language” (Larsen-Freeman, 2018: 83). Thus, acquisition is a metaphor that is sparingly used within the SFL body of work on language development (as in other social interactionist views; see Byrnes, 2019).

Developing Language

3

While SFL-based researchers view the metaphor of acquisition as a less effective term for the process of language development, Halliday viewed language learning as a semiotic process: “learning is learning to mean, and to expand one’s meaning potential” (Halliday, 1993: 113). In this sense, learning language means developing one’s repertoire of language for interaction in ever-widening contexts, from the informal, everyday contexts of the home to the formal contexts of schools, workplaces, and institutions. For Halliday, language development refers to three aspects: “learning language, learning through language, and learning about language” (Halliday, 2004b[1980]: 308), which suggests that, for Halliday, learning and development, with respect to language, refer to the same phenomena. Even further, “the ontogenesis of language is at the same time the ontogenesis of learning” (Halliday, 1993: 93); thus, as we learn language, we simultaneously learn the social and cultural worlds we inhabit. We see here a further term that is used alongside learning and development: ontogenesis. In SFL, ontogenesis, or change in the linguistic repertoire of an individual over time, is theorized alongside two other sites of semiotic change: logogenesis, or the evolving semiosis in a given text as it unfolds over time; and phylogenesis, the ever-evolving system of semiotic choices available within a given language. In a study of language development, these three semogenetic perspectives are intertwined through the cline of instantiation (see Section 1.4.4), as the overall linguistic system provides the potential for both logogenesis and ontogenesis, and, at the same time, the logogenetic unfoldings of all of the instances of text and the ontogenetic changes of all of the users of a language provide the motor for phylogenesis. Nonetheless, development can be viewed as different from ontogenesis. Budwig (1995), on child language development from a different functionalist perspective (see Chapter 2, Section 2.4.4), highlights the difference between ontogenesis, referring to actual change over time in an individual’s life, and development, which “does not lurk directly in the population(s) studied but resides fundamentally in the perspective used” (Kaplan, 1983: 196, in Budwig, 1995: 23). The difference lies in how change is viewed: simply as change—as an unfolding, irregular path of changes, leading in no specific direction—or as a more purposeful, staged pathway towards, for example, greater complexity and effectiveness.The key difference is that development, unlike ontogenesis, implies an evaluative stance towards change over time: a neutral and putatively value-free account of linguistic or lexical change over time, whether concerning the old and the young, poets as well as plebians, cultural phenomena in addition to individual ones, would not constitute a developmental account. This is because “development” […] as contrasted with “ontogenesis” or “history”, belongs in the domain of ideals, norms, and standards; in a word, it is a VALUE concept […]. (Pea & Kaplan, 1981: 2, emphasis original)

4 Developing Language

Pea and Kaplan explain two important corollaries of the value-laden nature of development: first, it is different from change; and second: “development”, as a desideratum, something we seek to achieve for ourselves and to assist others to achieve, cannot be derived from facts, nor based on empirical findings […] Rather, it is a standard by which we assess or evaluate the innumerable changes during life. (Pea & Kaplan, 1981: 3) Budwig sums up this view of development as “not equated with change but, rather […] as a perspective adopted toward data” (1995: 23).This point is held in consideration throughout the book with respect to data from studies that show change over time in an individual’s meaning-making abilities through language. The studies within the SFL research paradigm view change as an indicator of development when that change comes with an increased ability to discern the most effective and appropriate means of semiosis for the communicative needs of a situation. Thus, as becomes clear in the studies included in this volume, changes in ability to use language effectively in increasingly varied contexts are inextricably linked to cognitive development. The SFL focus on learning how to mean can be further linked to Vygotsky’s concept of semiotic mediation, or “mediation by means of semiosis-by-language”, whereby, for Vygotsky, “language alone maximized the attributes essential for the development of higher mental functions” (Hasan, 1992: 494, emphasis original). The processes of semiotic mediation refer to learning as semiotic expansion and to teaching as “semiotic intervention designed to support that expansion” (Coffin & Donohue, 2014: 4). In this view, the teaching–learning process provides support, or scaffolding for development. Martin (2015) traces the development of Bruner’s (1983) concept of scaffolding within SFL research, and demonstrates it at work through child–caregiver interaction, where caregivers ask questions which support and further extend children’s recounts of events, using Halliday’s example of his son’s (N) proto-recount of an event first to his father (F) and later to his mother (M): N:  try

eat lid F: What tried to eat the lid? N: try eat lid F: What tried to eat the lid? N: goat … man said no … goat try eat lid … man said no N: goat try eat lid … man said no M: Why did the man say no? N: goat shouldn’t eat lid … (shaking head) good for it M: The goat shouldn’t eat the lid; it’s not good for it. N:  goat try eat lid … man said no … goat shouldn’t eat lid … (shaking head) good for it

Developing Language

5

Through his parents’ scaffolding was born a story that Nigel told repeatedly, without his parents’ guiding support, for weeks after (Halliday, 1975: 112, in Martin, 2015). Chapter 3 provides a closer look at scaffolding in educational settings, focusing on its role in language development, which is inextricably tied to the development of understanding of concepts, i.e. of cognition: development is achieved through tools internalized through semiotic mediation in social interaction, such as interactions between peers or student and teacher. Schematically, semiotic mediation implies that human social experience is mediated as meaning, which is the locus of learning and, in turn, the internalization of knowledge and sociocultural development. (Ferreira, 2020: 50) Ferreira’s distinction suggests a difference between learning, which may be a “relatively immediate initial recalibration and adaptation” (Ferreira, 2020: 63) to the registers and language of schooling (such as when a student memorizes a definition of a term), and development, which refers to an increasing maturity and depth of cognitive ability to choose amongst options within the linguistic system most effectively and appropriately for intended meanings in a widening range of communicative situations (such as when a student provides an example of a term to help a classmate internalize its underlying concept). At the same time, development takes place, as Coffin and Donohue (2014), Martin (2015), and Ferreira (2020) underscore, through social interaction, whether it be, for example, with a caregiver; an older and/or wiser sibling; a friend or family member; or a teacher. This view of the sites of language development also draws on Vygotsky’s perspective on child development in general: Any function in the child’s cultural development appears twice […] it appears between people as an inter-psychological category, and then within the child as an intra-psychological category. This is equally true with regard to voluntary attention, logical memory, the formation of concepts, and the development of volition. […] Social relations or relations among people genetically underlie all higher functions and their relationships. (Vygotsky, 1981: 163) Thus, language development is an intersubjective process, whereby “elements of what ‘belongs to’ the collectivity enter a mind that ‘belongs to’ an individual and ‘the outside becomes the inside’” (Bernstein, 1987, in Hasan, 2005: 110). The logical next step, then, in theorizing about language development is provided by Bernstein’s sociological framework as applied by Hasan (2009) and other SFL researchers (Williams, 2007). Bernstein’s coding orientations, which refer to the (usually tacit) organizing principles underlying the language use of different social groups, are made manifest through semantic variation. Semantic variation is “the systematic variation in the meanings people select in similar contexts as a function of their social positioning” (Williams, 2007: 458). Through this

6 Developing Language

systematic variation, children are socialized differently into language use according to the legitimized ways of doing, being, saying, and meaning of their community of speakers. The variation across social contexts demonstrates the subtle ways in which “social subjects learn how to read a situation, and by the same token, learn what language games can be played in it and what legitimate ways there are of playing them” (Hasan, 2004: 39). This learning rarely follows from explicit teaching, but rather from participation in interaction in social contexts. At the same time, and where possible, for the purposes of this book, learning language tends to be used for language focus that occurs in the more official contexts of education, and thus the semiotic process of learning is taken up more fully in Chapters 3 and 4. Developing language is used to refer to the language change that accompanies sociocultural development through a recalibration of meaning-making resources that takes place through lived experience. As children grow and attend school, this language development occurs simultaneously with that which happens in the formal context of school. In schools and classrooms, language is often the explicit focus of instruction, while throughout our daily lives, through conversations, games, service encounters,TV, reading—in short, all of the instances mediated by language—we also have many opportunities to expand our meaning potential without focused attention on the language itself. In this view, then, learning and developing language are life-long processes. The perspective adopted towards language development is that of an increase in an individual’s linguistic resources to negotiate intended meanings and understandings effectively in interactive contexts. For example, when I first came to Spain as an English-as-a-first-language speaker at the age of 20 (having started learning Spanish in school at the age of 14, and having achieved the ability to read Golden Age drama, but not to converse), I needed to learn how to negotiate interactions such as buying food in the local market. I did so mainly by trial and error, by timidly ordering different foods and often saying something incorrectly or inappropriately for the context, with Spanish vendors guiding me into the right language for buying food. At the same time, my development during that period was not solely linguistic. I was not at all familiar with the metric system when I first arrived in Spain, and it caused the butcher a great deal of mirth to hear me order 10 gramos de chuletas, por favor (‘10 grams—or 0.4 ounces—of pork chops, please’), evidenced by his delight as he showed me a tiny piece of meat. In this case, the language was not difficult, but the concept behind it was, given my total lack of knowledge of grams. Over time, I became more effective at achieving my goals through Spanish by learning new language while learning new concepts. The SFL perspective, then, views language development as change over time in an individual’s ability to draw on the lexicogrammatical1 systems available in the language they use, in order to adapt the language choices they make to the meaningful needs of their current interactive situation. At the same time, the SFL model of language development does not see the process as one of individual subjects taking on pre-existing systems and meanings from the outside in; in fact, it defines language “as a large, open, dynamic system network, evolving and adapting in response to environmental demands (the uses speakers make of

Developing Language

7

it) and also shaping the environments with which it interacts” (Asp, 2017: 29). This dialectal nature of language also extends to how individuals come to develop language: while they are learning language, they are at the same time learning through language (Halliday, 2004a[1980]). In that sense, when children are learning their mother tongue, “[l]earning to mean is a process of creation, whereby a child constructs, in interaction with those around, a semiotic potential that gives access to the edifice of meanings that constitute social reality”, and so language development involves “intersubjective creativity” (Halliday, 2004b[1978]: 138). When we expand our meaning potential by learning new language, learning through new language and learning about new language, we are at the same time shaping the world in which we are interacting and shaping the language itself, which reverberates back to the language system (cf. LarsenFreeman, 2018). Through repeated interactions in the same shops in my early months in Spain, I came to learn a great deal about the different fish, vegetables, and cuts of meat that constitute Spanish cuisine, increasing my understandings of food well beyond those I brought with me from the mid-west United States; the sellers also became accustomed to my ways of ordering and responding, shaping their responses to my idiosyncracies of Spanish usage and cultural understandings of food. At the same time, it is important to point out that, as an immigrant to Spain from a background of privilege, the meaning-making idiosyncrasies that were part of my repertoire were not rejected; as both a non-native speaker of Spanish and a native speaker of American mid-west standard English, my odd ways of using the Spanish language were accepted as a not unexpected means of expression in the context of interaction. The role of interaction and intersubjectivity in language development and learning is traced through early childhood, school, and additional language development in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively; however, other contexts, such as those involving workplaces or hobbies, are not considered. This section has provided background on the developing part of the book title, and Section 1.2 provides the SFL view of language.

1.2 Language as Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic As to the what of development, it is necessary to establish the perspective towards the object of study, given that language can be viewed from different vantage points. A good starting point for a more general understanding of perspectives on language is Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of language. Saussure’s teachings, published posthumously in a book titled Cours de linguistique générale (1916), are considered foundational for developments in linguistics in the twentieth century. Saussure highlighted two different kinds of relationships which need to be kept in mind for any description of language: the syntagmatic, referring to the relationship between linguistic elements as they are ordered into links on a chain; and the paradigmatic, referring to the relationship between linguistic elements that can replace one another. In other words, and focusing on the first relationship, the syntagmatic dimension

8 Developing Language

refers to the relations between linguistic elements as they are arranged into structures sequentially. Word classes combine to make phrases, which combine to make clauses. So, the sentence The cat sat on the mat can be divided up to demonstrate these classes, phrases, and combinations: the+cat + sat + on+the+mat In this sentence, there is an initial noun phrase ‘the cat’, which consists of a member of the class of determiners2 ‘the’ and a member of the class of nouns ‘cat’; then follows a verb, ‘sat’, and subsequently a prepositional phrase, which consists of a preposition ‘on’ and a noun phrase ‘the mat’. Those who take a mainly syntagmatic perspective on language are interested in explaining how we come to develop our language (in this case, English) knowing what goes with what, in what order, and with what necessary modifications, for example to achieve concord of subject and verb. That is, for those whose first language is English, these researchers might ask: how do we learn that the following are not well-formed sentences in the language? *Cat the sat on mat the. *The cat sit on the mat. Knowing English includes knowing the ways in which linguistic elements can combine and knowing what needs changing because of those combinations; for example, in standard English dialects, when the subject of the sentence is thirdperson singular, then the verb in the present tense needs an added morpheme -s, so The cat sits on the mat.The same principle holds for knowing the sounds of the language; in order to utter the word that refers to a feline domestic animal, we produce the string of sounds in the sequence [k] [æ] [t].This sequence of sounds is a further example of how linguistic units relate to each other syntagmatically. The syntagmatic relation is one of co-occurrence and of sequencing, and thus is called the horizontal axis of language. The paradigmatic axis, on the other hand, is the vertical axis, where the relation between the linguistic units is one of substitution. The knowledge English speakers hold of their language through this axis can be exemplified by the following pairs of examples: a. The cat sat on the mat. b. The dog sat on the mat. c. The cat sat on the mat. d. The cat slept on the mat. e. The cat sat on the mat. f. The cat sat in the car. g. [k æ t] h. [m æ t]

Developing Language

9

That is, we know what can be substituted for what in the underlined slots, and this relationship of substitution creates meaning potential, as our knowledge of the world includes knowing the difference between elements which share distributional properties. We know that [p] is not [b], although both are bilabial plosive consonants, and so can distinguish pat from bat based on whether the initial consonant is voiced. Language is “a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others” (de Saussure, 1959: 114). These values can be composed of elements which are dissimilar, but which can be exchanged for each other (such as in the case of antonyms), and of similar things which can be compared with each other. Thus, the value of any linguistic element is given to it through its nature as part of a system, just as coins are part of a monetary system which gives them their value. Linguistics has always been about both axes, as syntagms are assembled through choices from the various paradigms (of phones, phonemes, and morphemes, for example), with some linguistic theories privileging one axis over the other. A great deal of research on language development, both over the life of the individual and for additional languages, has emphasized how we acquire the syntagms of a language by focusing on the acquisition of paradigms of formal structures, such as inflectional morphemes; for example, one might trace the development of the ability to use a particular grammatical form or set of forms, such as past tense forms of English verbs, in the language production of an individual, whether as a very small child or as an adult learning a second language. Thus, this perspective on language is called formalist, and it has been especially favoured by those researchers who study language acquisition.

1.3 Language from a Formalist Perspective During the 1950s and’60s, when Halliday was working on his functional model of language in China and the UK, in North America the dominate focus in linguistics was on the syntagmatic axis, mainly through Noam Chomsky’s highly influential theory of generative grammar. Chomsky’s early agenda clearly privileged the syntagmatic: “The fundamental aim in the linguistic analysis of a language L is to separate grammatical sequences which are the sentences of L from the ungrammatical sequences which are not sentences of L and to study the structure of grammatical sentences” (Chomsky, 1957: 13). Initially, the way into Chomsky’s linguistic descriptions was through phrase structure trees, which generated strings of slots that could then be filled in with the appropriate linguistic units (items from the lexicon that have the right kind of features) for the slots created. Figure 1.1 presents an example of a simplified tree: The bottom result of the tree in Figure 1.1 provides a paradigmatic string of slots that can be filled in with the lexical items that fulfil the category, or word class, such as The+cat+sat+on+the+mat; The+book+is+on+the+table. Thus, it is the syntagm that is of primordial importance as it generates the slots to be filled in with the lexical items.

10 Developing Language S

NP

VP PP NP

Det

N

V

Prep

Det

N

Figure 1.1  Simplified phrase structure tree.

In this view of language, the syntactic relations, i.e. those occurring on the syntagmatic axis, are the most salient, and what most interests researchers is how we develop the underlying rules of our systems. Note here that ‘rules’ do not refer to the kind of prescriptive rules we learn at school, such as “with count nouns, use ‘fewer’, not ‘less’”. Linguists set out to describe language, rather than to prescribe it.Thus, rules in a formalist perspective refer to the mental maps we hold in our brains of the restrictions existing in our dialectal variety as to which linguistic elements can combine with which others, and in what order and with which modifications. The ‘what’ of description for formal linguists, then, are the idealized, underlying morphosyntactic3 rules of our language—in other words, our linguistic competence. Chomsky set the boundary around what should be the purview of linguistic study by distinguishing between competence, referring to those abstract, idealized underlying rules that we have of how our language works, and performance, which is the messier, real use of language in interaction, with its false starts, hesitations, and errors: Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of language in actual performance. (Chomsky, 1965: 3) This focus on an idealized construct as the object of study for linguistics led Chomsky to posit that the “problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules” (1965: 4). For Chomsky, then, any study of child language acquisition (acquisition being the preferred term in this research paradigm) has to account for how children develop this underlying competence when their surrounding linguistic input is based on actual performance. The problem for the formal linguist is one of potentially faulty data: if the goal of the linguist is concerned with this underlying system of rules, which is a

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“mental reality underlying actual behavior” (1965: 4), real instances of language in use are only partially helpful. Chomsky (1965: 4) argued that: “observed use of language […] may provide evidence as to the nature of this mental reality, but surely cannot constitute the actual subject matter of linguistics, if this is to be a serious discipline”. To understand more fully “the actual subject matter of linguistics” for Chomsky, and consequently what we are looking at in terms of data, we look to another distinction of Saussure’s: that of langue and parole. For Saussure, while parole refers to the individual use of language—i.e. to its execution by the individual—langue is the system of forms, and refers to a “storehouse filled by the members of a given community through their active use of speaking, a grammatical system that has a potential existence in each brain, or more specifically, in the brains of a group of individuals” (de Saussure, 1959: 13–14). This definition suggests the simultaneous existence of a social artefact, which exists through tacitly agreed conventions within society, and its system of grammar, which becomes internalized in the mind/brain of each individual speaker. However, Chomsky rejected Saussure’s “merely … systematic inventory of items” (Chomsky, 1965: 4) and replaced that view of language with one of generative competence; that is, out of a finite set of rules, individuals are capable of creating an infinite number of sentences, including those which they have never heard before. Language, then, for Chomsky is an abstract, idealized ability based on an innate competence that exists within the brain of the individual. Thus, while “the actual data of linguistic performance will provide much evidence for determining the correctness of hypotheses about underlying linguistic structure”, also needed are “introspective reports (by the native speaker, or the linguist who has learned the language)” (1965: 18). It is the linguist’s introspection on acceptable linguistic forms which constitutes the main body of data for Chomsky—a very different scenario from the gathering of naturally occurring linguistic data which forms the body of evidence used by functional linguists. Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that formal and functional theories of language are “in principle, complementary rather than contradictory forms of theory, foregrounding different aspects of the vastly complex system of language” (Matthiessen, 2015: 103). Section 1.4 provides an explanation of SFL, highlighting those aspects that are key to understanding its approach to language development.

1.4 Language from a Functional Linguistic Perspective 1.4.1 An Extravagant Theory of Language As we have seen, Chomsky’s formalist theory calls for a condensing of language into the set of morphosyntactic rules that are theorized to constitute the linguistic competence existing in the individual brain.Thus, its object of study is an idealized version of actual language performance, a competence which underlies the performance. A functional view of language, such as that of SFL, does not allow for a separation between performance and competence as it sees no separation between something called ‘language’ and its use in interaction. This means that

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SFL also does not see a separation between Saussure’s langue and parole, as there is no place in its model for an abstract system of language which exists separately from its use (see Section 1.4.5). Rather, any given language is constantly shaped by all the various speech events carried out within its community of speakers (Gledhill, 2011).Thus, SF linguistics, unlike Chomskyan linguistics, “is an extravagant theory, not a parsimonious one” (Halliday, 1985: xix), and it views language as “an inherently functionally variable and adaptable system” (Matthiessen, 2019: 11). Like others who hold functionalist views, SF linguists are interested in how language creates meaning in social interaction. SFL views language as a social semiotic, as a meaning-making resource that allows humans to get things done in the world. In the SFL perspective, an intra-organism picture of language is less of concern than an inter-organism one, or what one ‘can do’ in interaction with the linguistic resources available (Halliday, 2013[1972]: 6). Thus, “[b]ecause of its sociological orientation, Hallidayan linguistics has always tolerated a much smaller degree of idealisation of the linguistic data than many other models” (Butler, 1989: 5). Indeed, SFL does not wish to idealize language, as in Chomsky’s model, which came with a price: “the language has to be so idealized that it bears little relation to what people actually write—and still less to what they actually say” (Halliday, 1985: xxviii). In SFL, data consists of real instances of language in use, where analysts need to “come closer to what is actually said” as “the features that are behaviourally relevant may be just those that the idealizing process most readily irons out” (Halliday, 1971: 171).This need for actual language as it is used in interaction is highly relevant when studying language development; for example, the language produced at any given point in the stages of development of a toddler, or of a child in school, or of an adult learning a second language, is often not at an idealized level when viewed from the perspective of Chomskyan competence. Thus, the SFL model of language has meaning as its point of departure, leading to several key characteristics of its architecture, which are explained briefly:4 the centrality of the paradigmatic dimension of language, the metafunctional nature of language, text as a fundamental unit of meaning (allowing for system and instance perspectives on language), context of culture and context of situation, and language as a stratified system; in addition, we briefly visit four areas of language analysis that have been modelled through the SFL architecture: grammatical metaphor, appraisal, cohesion, and periodicity. These aspects of SFL modelling have influenced and/or been influenced by applications to research on language development. 1.4.2 The Axial Rethink: From the Syntagmatic to the Paradigmatic Halliday (2003[1977]) compares the formalist emphasis on rules (the syntagmatic dimension) with the functionalist emphasis on language as resource (the paradigmatic dimension). He traces this distinction back to the Ancient Greeks, with the focus on rules emerging from the philosophical tradition based on logic; this tradition picks up on Aristotle’s concern for the truth value of

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propositions as expressed through units of discourse, such as nouns, verbs, articles, conjunctions, and so on, and in the rules for their combination. The focus on language as resource, on the other hand, can be traced back to the Sophists and to Plato, who were more concerned with the functions of grammatical classes such as verb and noun as action and actor, respectively, which come together to create discourse (Halliday, 2003[1977]). This distinction between viewing language as a set of rules for combining units, on the one hand, and viewing language as a resource for getting things done, on the other, is seen in the shift (in reverse order) of how children might conceive of language through their experience with it. First, in the home in early childhood, they experience language as something which allows them to have their needs addressed, to play, and to interact with others. Then, when they move into school settings, in the mother-tongue classroom, they become schooled into the first view, through the teaching–learning of correct spelling and appropriate word usage, for example, learning that language is a set of ‘do’s and don’ts’; this distinction between language as resource and language as rule is taken up further in Chapter 3, on developing language in school. While SFL modelling of language has focused on both, it is more interested in language as resource than as rule. The privileging of language as resource led to ‘the axial rethink’ (Matthiessen, 2015). Halliday’s early model of grammar, scale-and-category (see Chapter 4, Section 4.2), inspired by Firth’s (1957) system-structure grammar, gave equal weight to both the syntagmatic (‘structure’) and paradigmatic (‘choice’) axes. Later, Halliday moved the paradigmatic choices away from the slots provided by the syntagmatic structures (see the bottom of Figure 1.1 to visualize those slots) and into system networks, in effect turning the weighting given by the American formalists on its head—or, perhaps more aptly, on its side. The modelling of language as displayed Figure 1.1 shows that the structure generates the slots available for the meanings, favouring the syntagmatic axis. In Halliday’s systemic functional model, the favouring shifted to the paradigmatic axis (see Figure 1.2), and its relationship to the syntagmatic axis become that of realization: rather than conceptualizing language as the structure

imperative major clause MOOD TYPE + predicator

declarative Subject ^ Finite indicative

yes/no interrogative INTERRO GATIVE TYPE

Finite ^ Subject

WH WH ^ Finite

Figure 1.2  Fragment of mood network.

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generating the semantics, the semantics are seen as primary, and are then realized as lexicogrammatical choices, i.e. through the structure. That is, the structures became the realizations of the paradigmatic choices, rather than the paradigmatic choices resulting from the syntagmatic structures.The choices in meaning were moved into first position in Halliday’s model, with the structure serving the semantics. The major form of representation in SFL is the system network: the option of choices of meaning potential available to a text producer. In the fragment of the lexicogrammatical system network of mood5 (Figure 1.2), the entry point is that of a major clause, which is realized by a predicator (as indicated by the arrow: i.e. the downward arrow indicates how the meaning choice is realized in the lexicogrammar).The choice is made between imperative or indicative mood; in the case of the latter, there is a further choice, the first of which is declarative mood, realized by Subject followed by (as indicated by the caret symbol ^) the Finite (as in The cat sits, where the morpheme ‘s’ indicates the third-person singular of a conjugated verb, i.e. the Finite). The second choice is interrogative mood, which has two further choices: a ‘yes–no’ interrogative, realized as the Finite followed by the Subject (e.g. Is the cat…), or a WH interrogative, realized by the WH word followed by the Finite (e.g. Where is the cat?) Obviously, there are more choices to be made (e.g. depending on whether the WH word refers to the subject or object of the verb) in moving towards the structural realization of the full clause.6 Thus, systemic networks move from left to right in increasing delicacy; the farther to the left, the more general a category is and the farther to the right the more specific it is.That is, delicacy refers to the move from a general grammatical category towards a specific lexical item (see endnote 1). The ‘axial rethink’ “is a natural consequence of the conception of language as resource: to bring out the nature of language as resource, we can model it as choice – as paradigmatic options, treating syntagmatic patterns as realizations of one or more paradigmatic options” (Matthiessen, 2015: 153). So, for example, the example The cat sat on the mat can be viewed as the result of choices made at the semantic level, which are then realized at the lexicogrammatical level. Given that “the value of any particular item is partially determined by the absent items with which it is in contrast” (Asp, 2017: 28), we can imagine the choices made as compared to others available in the semantics: in terms of expressing the events themselves, we have chosen a feline pet rather than another type of domestic animal, one which is holding a non-moving pose rather than doing something active, such as frolicking; furthermore, the pet is situated on a smaller piece of material rather than something covering the whole room, such as ‘carpet’. In terms of how we position the utterance with respect to our readers, if our intention had been to request information, perhaps as a rhetorical question or as part of a dialogue, rather than choosing the declarative mood, we could have made the choice to use the interrogative mood: ‘Did the cat sit on the mat?’ (a choice that we could imagine in a children’s storybook, creating an interactive reading). In terms of the order of the information, if our intention was to describe a scene, such as ‘She opened the door and found herself in a bright, sunny room. In the middle of the room was a mat’, then we could have chosen to order our meanings as ‘On the mat sat a cat’.

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These examples demonstrate that, from the vantage point of SFL, the paradigmatic set of options available to speakers and writers, to achieve their communicative goals when creating texts in specific contexts, takes precedence in the model over their syntagmatic realizations. Matthiessen (2015) emphasizes that it was Halliday who recalibrated linguistics by taking the paradigmatic dimension as the organizing principle of language, rather than the syntagmatic; in this recalibration, language is seen above all as a resource for meaning-making, and “not as an inventory of structures” (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 23). SFL takes as primordial the paradigmatic axis of language; however, it does not ignore the syntagmatic: Of course, structure is an essential part of the description; but it is interpreted as the outward form taken by systemic choices, not as the defining characteristic of language. A language is a resource for making meaning, and meaning resides in systemic patterns of choice. (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 23) Before examining how structural outputs in the form of the clause are modelled, we turn to the metafunctions of language. 1.4.3 The Metafunctions of Language Another important SFL principle is the metafunctional nature of language.Texts bring together three over-arching functions of language: the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions (cf. Asp, 2017: 35): The ideational metafunction is split into two metafunctions: • the experiential, through which we express experiences, events, and states in the world (real or imagined) as assemblies of the participants, processes, and circumstances in a clause; • the logical, which allows us to encode relations between states and events across clauses through clause complexing. • The interpersonal metafunction allows us to assign speech roles, establish relationships with others, provide subjective comments on situations, and express opinions through the clause. • The textual metafunction orders the first two metafunctions into coherent texts by allowing us to package information as a message through the clause, highlighting a focus on certain meanings and staging their newsworthiness. •

Our example The cat sat on the mat can be analysed metafunctionally: • With respect to the experiential metafunction, we are in the realm of household feline pets and their behaviour; the writer of the text encodes the meaning through a behavioural process sit, with a participant Behaver, the cat, and a circumstance of location, on the mat. If we look at the constituents of the clause, further meaning choices are instantiated in the

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lexicogrammar of, for example, the nominal group: the deictic the tells the reader that the writer refers to a specific cat, one which is known to both writer and reader (compare with A cat sat on the mat). Our example does not exemplify the logical metafunction as it is a single clause; however, if the sentence continued into a clause complex with the addition of ‘and licked itself contentedly’, the second clause logically extends the meaning of the first. • In terms of the interpersonal metafunction, the clause is informing, as it is ordered into the declarative mood of Subject^Finite (where ^ means ‘followed by’; see Figure 1.2 and subsequent explanation); furthermore, the writer of the text has chosen to present it as a statement of fact, and so uses an unmodalized declarative (note the difference with The cat might have sat on the mat). • Textually, the writer has chosen to represent the unit of information with the point of departure, or Theme, The cat, followed by the salient information related to the Theme, known as the Rheme, sat on the mat, rather than moving from On the mat to sat the cat. This unpacking of the invented example shows that, in the SFL model, all three of these metafunctions come together simultaneously in the clause. Figure 1.3 provides an example of a clause (taken from an online hotel review7) and displays its metafunctional profile as a syntagm: The utterance in Figure 1.3 can be unpacked as follows: 1. The experiential metafunction is realized through choices in the system of transitivity, which refers to the choices of processes (realized through verbs), participants (usually realized through nominal groups), and circumstances (realized through, for example, prepositional phrases and adverbial groups). In Figure 1.3, the ideational metafunction is realized through the choice of a participant as Actor (the cat) involved in a material process (which refer to processes of doing, in this case eating), rather than in another and

the cat Actor

Grammatical functions

Ideational

was eating process: material

Mood Interpersonal

Conjunctive Adjunct

Subject

fish heads Goal

in the main dining room. Circ: location

Residue Finite

Predicator

Complement

Adjunct: circumstance

Nominal group

Prepositional phrase

Theme Textual

Textual Theme

Grammatical Conjuncclasses tion

Ideational Theme

Nominal group

Rheme

Verbal group

Figure 1.3  Simultaneous layers of the clause (based on Taverniers, 2011: 1108).

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type of process, such as relational (process of being), mental (processes of thinking, feeling, knowing), verbal (processes of saying) existential (processes of existing), or behavioural (involuntary, physiological processes).The Actor in the material process in this example affects a further participant encoded as a Goal (fish heads) and which occurs within a particular circumstance of location (in the main dining room). Note that the initial ‘and’ indicates that the clause enters into a complex with a previous clause through parataxis (equal clauses) within the logical metafunction. 2. The interpersonal metafunction is realized (as seen in Figure 1.2) lexicogrammatically through the choice made in the mood system (Figure 1.2), through the configuration of the Subject^Finite (which constitute the Mood of a clause): in this case the cat+was together instantiate the Mood as indicative-declarative. The Finite further roots the speech event in time (or, in the case of modals, such as may, must, and can, in the judgement of the speaker), in this case through the primary tense ‘past’. The rest of the clause, or the Residue, is constituted by the Predicator (the main verb eating), any Complements (fish heads), and/or any Adjuncts (in the main dining room); adjuncts can also realize the interpersonal, i.e., as modal Adjuncts which express degrees of obligation or certainty. 3. The textual metafunction is realized through systems of theme and information and through cohesion. The Theme refers to the point of departure of the clause as a message: “it is that which locates and orients the clause within its context” (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 89). Full clauses always have an ideational Theme, either a participant, process, or circumstance; in this instance, the ideational Theme is a participant, the cat, and it is preceded by a textual Theme and. Textual Themes, like interpersonal Themes (any modal or comment Adjunct), are optional: in this clause there is no interpersonal Theme, although it would be possible to include one, e.g. and unfortunately the cat was eating fish heads. The Rheme, which develops something about the Theme, completes the clause as a message (see Forey & Sampson, 2017). The information system is a separate but parallel grammatical unit to the clause, and refers to the tension between the Given, or what is presented as recoverable in the discourse, and the New: that which is not known, predictable, or recoverable, which is signalled in English through tonic prominence (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 216). Cohesion is explained more fully in Section 1.4.7.3; in this instance, the text producer presupposes that the text receiver is already acquainted with the cat and the dining room in question, as the definite articles indicate. With respect to Theme, the point of departure is the cat, whose location is revealed to us in the Rheme. While our sample utterance is taken out of context, the unmarked case is for the Theme and the Given to coincide, and likewise for the Rheme and the New; however, in this text, this clause contains the first mention of ‘the cat’. The fact that it is Thematized and introduced with specific reference leads the reader to surmise that the writer does not find the presence of a cat in hotels surprising.

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Indeed, while the metafunctional nature of language has been illustrated here through a single clause, the focus of analysis in SFL is the text. These systemic patterns of choice come together in human interactive communication through texts of all kinds—conversations, emails, warnings, pamphlets, shopping lists, notes, textbooks, recommendation letters, and so on. 1.4.4 Text as a Fundamental Unit of Meaning As a correlation to the centrality of meaning-making, SFL posits that language consists of texts, differentiating itself from other linguistic theories which view the grammar of the clause or sentence as most important to language study (and thus to language acquisition). In SFL, text refers to any manifestation of language in use: When people speak or write, they produce text; and text is what listeners and readers engage with and interpret.The term ‘text’ refers to any instance of language, in any medium, that makes sense to someone who knows the language. (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 3) The text as an instance of linguistic interaction is also the unit of analysis in SFL, which has an obvious effect on what is considered data: naturally occurring texts embedded in context. Chapter 2 includes data in the form of examples of texts that children produce in interacting with caregivers and others, while Chapter 3 provides numerous examples of studies that use different forms of texts from educational contexts. Chapter 4 also summarizes studies that draw on analyses of texts in additional language learning contexts; the vast majority of those studies are from school contexts in which the focus of learning is on some other content, perhaps because texts produced in general language learning classrooms are often seen as lacking in authenticity of interaction, used mainly to promote production of linguistic structures. Texts can be analysed from two complementary perspectives: first, as an object to be understood in its own right, in terms of how it creates meaning in a given context and situation; and second, as a way of revealing something about the overall system of language that the text belongs to (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014).Thus, SFL has two perspectives on language; one is the system, or “underlying potential of a language: its potential as a meaning-making resource” (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 27). The other is the actual instance of language in use, what the text is designed to mean in its situational use—that is, in its speech event. Essentially, system and instance provide two different perspectives on the same phenomenon, on language itself, as it is the instance that connects the text to the system. This concept can be modelled along a cline of instantiation (Figure 1.4). As illustrated in Figure 1.4, texts relate to the system along a cline that moves from the system, at one polar end of the cline, with all its potential, to a singular instance at the other end. At the same time, the notion of poles may not convey

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context of situation

context of subculture, institution... instance

context of culture

potential

sub-potential; instance type

repertoire of texts

repertoire of registers (text types)

linguistic system

Figure 1.4  The cline of instantiation (based on Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 28).

fully the relationship between system and instance, and, more importantly, the role of register in between: Register is perhaps best understood as a dialectic – between system and instance – since the two are never actually possible without each other. It does not so much sit between system and instance, as it is a take on system and instance at the one time. It is the culture brought to bear on the instance of the social process. (Lukin, Moore, Herke, Wegener, & Wu, 2011: 207) A register is a functional variety of language distinguished by its use, rather than by its user (which distinguishes a dialect) (Halliday, McIntosh, & Strevens, 1964); registers are the result of the coming together of the contextual variables of field (what the text is about), mode (the channel of communication), and tenor (the relationship between the interlocutors). These variables “refer to certain aspects of our social situations that always act upon the language as it is being used” (Hasan, 1989: 55). Throughout our daily lives, through multiple types of

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interaction—conversing, reading books and online newspapers, making appointments and reservations, and so on—with people who we know well or with strangers, with people of different ages and different status (tenor), about different topics (field), and through a wide variety of means of expression (spoken, written, written to be spoken, and so on) (mode), we experience texts that vary according to their use in our daily lives: …texts vary according to the nature of the contexts they are used in. Thus recipes, weather forecasts, stockmarket reports, rental agreements, e-mail messages, inaugural speeches, service encounters in the local deli, news bulletins, media interviews, tutorial sessions, walking tours in a guide book, gossip during a tea-break, advertisements, bedtime stories, and all the other innumerable text types we meet in life are all ways of using language in different contexts. (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 29) Figure 1.4 demonstrates the intermediate role of registers: intermediate because they represent probabilistic patterns of language in text (for example, we expect to see the imperative used in recipes, along with material verbal processes such as beat, stir, and mix). Thus, registers can be seen both as repertoires of instances of texts and as repositories of the sub-potential of the full system of language, which we draw on in creating an individual text. Every time we write a letter of recommendation or prepare a sermon, we do not have to start from scratch (from the potential of the whole language); rather, we can draw on the subpotential provided by the register. At the same time, the cline shows us that registers can be altered by the full linguistic system; that is, they are not fixed in stone as there is always a fuller potential to make use of, which allows for creativity in any instance of language use. The metafunctional nature of text in context is captured through the concept of register. With respect to the study of language development, registers, then, are a key site of analysis, while in language education they are a fundamental concept for teaching, as is shown in Chapters 3 and 4.Weaving together the SFL threads seen thus far, we can see a further effect created by viewing language as a resource which is realized through text: “text is a process of making meaning in context” (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 3). That is, from an SFL perspective, language cannot be analysed outside of a context. 1.4.5 Context of Culture and Context of Situation Context is indeed a central part of SFL theory: SFL aims to account in an integrated way for: meaning-to-form relations within language (linguistics); the relationship between language as a social construct and its contexts of use (sociology); and the acquisition and development of the language system by individuals as members of social groups

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(social psychology). The key points uniting these themes are that language is learnt in context, is used in context by socialised speakers, and is altered as a system by its use in various contexts. Context is therefore a unifying element within the overall architecture of SFL. (Bartlett, 2017: 375, emphasis original) Halliday, in his theorizing about language, drew on Bronislaw Malinowski’s concepts of the context of situation and the context of culture. Malinowski’s ethnographic work with Trobriand Islanders involved him in situations where he understood the words that were spoken to him, but he did not always get the meaning without a greater understanding of the surrounding events. This led him to the realization that an utterance becomes only intelligible when it is placed within it context of situation, if I may be allowed to coin an expression which indicates on the one hand that the conception of context has to be broadened and on the other that the situation in which words are uttered can never be passed over as irrelevant to the linguistic expression. (Malinowski, 1923: 306; italics original) In other words, “utterance and situation are bound up inextricably with each other and the context of situation is indispensable for the understanding of the words” (p. 307). The relationship between language and culture, thus, is one of realization. Meanings do not reside in language (for example, in terms in a dictionary); rather, “meanings are created by the social system and are exchanged by the members in the form of text” (Halliday, 2002a[1977]: 52–53). Therefore, meanings are “integrated systems of meaning potential…[they] are the social system” (p. 53, emphasis original). Language from this perspective is: a range of possibilities, an open-ended set of options in behaviour that are available to the individual […]. The context of culture is the environment for the total set of these options, while the context of situation is the environment of any particular selection that is made from within them. (Halliday, 1971: 166) For Halliday, the context of culture defines the potential of the linguistic system, while, within the context of situation, the actual refers to the choices that are made from the potential of the full system. Halliday viewed language as a social behaviour, as it refers to what we ‘can do’ through language, or, more specifically, what we ‘can mean’ through the options available to us in a given context of situation. J.R. Firth was interested in a “sociological linguistics” that would tackle “the very difficult problem of describing and classifying typical contexts of situation within the context of culture, and secondly of describing and classifying types of linguistic function in such contexts of situation” (Firth, 1935:

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65). As we shall see throughout this book, this agenda of Firth’s has remained at the forefront of SFL research. In sum, in this section we have seen that context forms part of the stratified language system within SFL (and is not without its theoretical difficulties, as is shown in Chapter 5). 1.4.6 A Stratified Model of Language Context, semantics, lexicogrammar, and phonology are stratified layers which make up the system of language. Halliday and Matthiessen (2014: 25) define language as “a series of redundancies by which we link our eco-social environment to non-random disturbances in the air (soundwaves)”. The connection between the eco-social environment, on the one hand, and soundwaves, on the other, is captured through a central principle of SFL: language as a stratified semiotic system—that is, language is modelled as a system of various strata, or nested layers, linked together through relationships of realization. Figure 1.5 demonstrates language as embedded in a context, which is realized (at least in part) by the semantic choices that a speaker/writer makes, in terms of functional meanings—ideational, interpersonal, and textual (see Section 1.4.3). These meanings are then realized through the choices made in the lexicogrammar, i.e. they are coded as wordings. The lexicogrammatical choices are realized through phonology (or graphology, in the case of writing): i.e., wordings are coded as soundings (or as series of letters). Looking at the picture from the other way around, we can say that lexicogrammar recodes phonological and graphological patterns as words and structures. The word ‘recode’ is used by Martin and White (2005), who highlight an important point about the composition of lexicogrammar:

context semantics

content plane

lexicogrammar phonology

expression plane

phonetics

Figure 1.5  Stratified model of language (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 26).

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[it] is not made up of phonological or graphological patterns; rather it is realised through them. It is a more abstract level of organisation, not just a bigger one. […] Lexicogrammar is a pattern of phonological patterns; that is to say, it is a more abstract level realised by a more concrete one. (Martin & White, 2005: 9) Moving up, then, the semantic stratum is a more abstract level made up of patterns of lexicogrammar. The content plane of language is split into two strata: semantics and lexicogrammar, while the expression plane is that of phonology (realized through phonetics in the spoken language and graphology in the written). The relationship between the lexicogrammatical system of mood (Figure 1.2) and that of the semantic system of speech function (Figure 1.6) is an example of the realization relationship across strata. The simplified speech function system in Figure 1.6 illustrates that, in any exchange, we have simultaneous choices (hence the rounded bracket to the left); we can choose to or be positioned to initiate or respond within an exchange, while also choosing whether we are giving or demanding either a good/service or information. These semantic choices can be mapped onto the lexicogrammatical choices included in Figure 1.2 for the mood system. That is, a typical initiation of an exchange in which information is offered is mapped on to the initiate MOVE

respond

give move (in exchange)

INITIATING ROLE

demand

information COMMODITY

goods & services

Figure 1.6  Simplified version of the semantic system of speech function (based on Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 136).

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declarative mood, while a typical demand for information is mapped on to the imperative mood (Tell me!) (but see Section 1.4.7.1 for incongruent mappings). Halliday elaborated the stratification model of language in connection with his work on child language development (Taverniers, 2011) to compare the full adult system with the linguistic system of very young children. The emerging child system is not initially stratified on the content plane, as their ‘protolanguage’ consists of one expression for one meaning. That is, an utterance such as ‘wa-wa’ may mean for a child ‘I want water’. Over time, children layer on intonation to achieve differentiated meanings (e.g. ‘look! there’s water’), and begin to order their words in different ways in order to carry out more and more functions as they move towards the adult linguistic system (see Chapter 2), where the content plane is stratified into a semantics and a lexicogrammar,8 and thus any one utterance is multifunctional, and can be mapped metafunctionally (see Figure 1.3). 1.4.7 Above and Beyond the Clause SFL concepts have led to a number of analytical tools for approaching texts which have been particularly revealing for studies of language development. These concepts draw on the central principles of SFL, affording a vantage point on language that goes above and beyond the level of the clause. Given that these tools appear across more than one chapter in this book, they are explained here. Other SFL tools and approaches are explained in later chapters (for example, Halliday’s child language functions in Chapter 2 and the ‘Sydney school’ of genre-based pedagogy in Chapter 3). The analytical tools explained here are grammatical metaphor, appraisal, cohesion, and periodicity. 1.4.7.1 Grammatical Metaphor One motivation for continuing to model language as stratified is a notion within SFL called grammatical metaphor (GM). According to cognitive linguists Lakoff and Johnson, “the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003: 5, italics original). Grammatical metaphor refers to the stratal tension created by using lexicogrammatical forms to encode non-congruent meanings—that is, encoding a meaning as a grammatical resource not proto-typically associated with it. Given the metafunctional nature of the clause (see Figure 1.3), these mappings can create ideational, interpersonal, and (arguably) textual GM. Halliday and Matthiessen (2014) illustrate ideational GM with an example from a school textbook: Slate was once shale. But over millions of years, tons and tons of rock pressed down on it.The pressure made the shale very hot, and the heat and pressure changed it into slate… (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 710; underlining original)

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Semantic stratum figure

element

realizes

is realized by

sequence

participant

process

logical relator

quality

circumstance

nominal group

verbal group

subordinator

adjective

prep phrase

pressed, got

because

hot

Lexicogrammatical stratum clause complex*

clause**

group:

tons and tons of rock, it, shale

over millions of years

* Over millions of years, because tons and tons of rock pressed down on it, shale got very hot. ** tons and tons of rock pressed down on it; shale got very hot

Figure 1.7  Congruent pairings across strata (Ideational grammatical metaphor).

In this text, ideational GM appears through the nominalizations ‘pressure’ and ‘heat’; the process ‘pressed down’ and the quality ‘hot’, congruently expressed through verbs and adjectives respectively, through the unfolding of the text, become reified into entities that can then act on other entities. That is, the meaning from a clause becomes condensed into a nominal group. Congruence in mapping between the strata of semantics and lexicogrammar suggests the pairings in Figure 1.7. In a congruent mapping of semantics onto lexicogrammar (Figure 1.7), participants, or entities, are realized by nominal groups, processes as verbal groups, and so on. In a non-congruent mapping, there is a downward shift in the realization, as exemplified in Figure 1.8. Figure 1.8 shows the encapsulation of a clause complex within a single clause, which is achieved by nominalized forms, pressure and the heating up of shale, expressing a process and a quality respectively (experiential GM), and a verbal form led to expressing a logical relationship (logical GM). Ideational GM is a key resource for creating greater abstraction (Ferreira, 2020) and thus an important step along the path of language development, especially for schooling and more formal contexts: As grammatical generalization is the key for entering into language, and to systematic commonsense knowledge, and grammatical abstractness is the key for entering into literacy, and to primary educational knowledge, so grammatical metaphor is the key for entering into the next level, that of secondary education, and of knowledge that is discipline-based and technical. (Halliday, 1993: 111)

26 Developing Language Semantic stratum figure

element:

realizes

is realized by

sequence

Lexicogrammatical stratum

clause**

process as participant

logical relator as process

quality as participant

nominal group

verbal group

nominal group

group:

pressure

led to

the heating up

**The pressure of tons of rocks over millions of years led to the heating up of shale.

Figure 1.8  Non-congruent pairings across strata (Ideational grammatical metaphor).

At the same time, development goes beyond a simple ability to deploy ideational GM; rather, its “internalization and development are understood to expand the subjects’ potential choices among ideational construals rather than irrevocably replace one mediating tool by another” (Ferreira, 2020: 57). It is the process of discerning which resource is needed at which point in a text that indexes development. Ideational GM “is associated with the discourses of education and science, bureaucracy and law” (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 709), and therefore its development requires access to formal contexts. On the other hand, children are surrounded by instances of interpersonal GM from the time they are very small. With respect to interpersonal GM, the meanings at risk in any interaction can be mapped out as referenced in Figure 1.6: congruently, a demand for a good is encoded through imperative mood (Give me a cup of coffee), while a demand for information is encoded through interrogative mood (Is there any coffee left?) and an offer of information through declarative mood (The coffee is brewing). Of course, we know that the range of meaning-making resources available to us for demanding goods/services or information is far wider than a strict adherence to grammatical mood would allow. In fact, probably most would interpret Is there any coffee left? as a demand for a good (or at least a pre-sequence to one). Interpersonal GM is also seen in the modalizing of statements, as in I think it’s going to rain. In this utterance, I think is functioning much as a modal Adjunct (such as probably)—it is not really functioning as Subject, given that the tag question for this utterance would be isn’t it? not don’t I? Another example of interpersonal GM in English is the impersonal it projecting clause, e.g. it is clear that, it is obvious that, which also function much the same as the comment Adjuncts clearly and obviously, while positioning the comment in a seemingly more objective, impersonal manner (Hewings & Hewings, 2004).Thus, we have a range of resources for expressing the interpersonal; in Anglo societies, some of these may be explicitly taught to children (as in ‘say Please may I have…?’ rather than Give me…); at the same time, much of the learning takes place because “the interpretation of interpersonal metaphors is often both supported and ‘tested’

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immediately in the ongoing dialogic interaction” (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 709), affording children many opportunities to negotiate and enact social roles and relations. Martin (1992) makes the case for textual GM, a type which is not included in Halliday and Matthiessen (2014). Martin’s argument stems from his focus on discourse semantics, through which meaning is approached from the perspective of the text rather than from the clause. Discourse systems construe text as “‘material’ social reality” (Martin, 1992: 416), where nouns such as reason and example are abstract references which “organise text, not field” (Martin, 1992: 416), as in ‘the first reason…the second reason…’. Thus, they are more aptly labelled as textual, not ideational, GM.While far fewer studies have picked up on textual GM, interpersonal, and especially ideational, GM have been used as an indicator of language development in numerous studies (Whittaker & McCabe, 2020; Ferreira, 2020; Liardét, 2013, 2015, 2016a, 2016b; Ryshina-Pankova, 2010, 2015; Ryshina-Pankova & Byrnes, 2013; Byrnes, 2009; Colombi, 2006; Painter, Derewianka, & Torr, 2007; Painter, 2003b; inter alia), many of which are more fully explained in later chapters. 1.4.7.2 Appraisal A further development within SFL also came from the perspective of discourse semantics in the form of the appraisal model of evaluative lexis in text (Martin & Rose, 2003; Martin & White, 2005).The discourse semantic model of appraisal was created with language development clearly in mind, through research within the Write it Right project, a school and workplace language education project funded through the Disadvantaged Schools Program in New South Wales, Australia (Veel, 2006). The project’s objectives included researching the kinds of literacy demands needed beyond school, and then relating those demands to key learning areas in secondary school. In working with Martin’s (1992) discourse semantics, those on the project realized that they needed a more robust way of bringing to light the interpersonal features of texts used across the curriculum and beyond school. Figure 1.9 provides a fragment of the resulting appraisal model, mainly using Beatrix Potter’s The tale of Peter Rabbit to illustrate the different categories. The curly bracket to the left in Figure 1.9 indicates that all three subsystems of the appraisal system—engagement, attitude, and graduation—can be entered simultaneously. engagement refers to meanings that are used to align interactants to propositions and are either monoglossic or heteroglossic. Monoglossic meanings are expressed through unmodalized positive declarative clauses, which “encourage the reader to assume that the proposition is unproblematic and that it enjoys broad consensus” (Coffin, 2002: 510). Any other type of mood/modality choice makes for a heteroglossic utterance, which can either open up the dialogic space by suggesting other possible interpretations (in Figure 1.9, both I think and might indicate other possibilities, as would also be the case if another voice were included through acknowledgement of another voice, so-and-so said…), or can close it down, through a number of means, such as negation, counter-expectation (in Figure 1.9,

28 Developing Language Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits

MONOGLOSS

CONTRACT

ENGAGEMENT

but Peter wriggled out just in time

HETEROGLOSS EXPAND

AFFECT

APPRAISAL

ATTITUDE

Peter was most dreadfully frightened

JUDGEMENT

Peter, who was very naughty

APPRECIATION FORCE

I think he might have got away altogether

It would have been a beautiful thing to hide in

Peter, who was very naughty

GRADUATION

FOCUS

The Aborigines did present some sort of resistance towards the Europeans … (Coffin, 2006: 143)

Figure 1.9  An overview of appraisal resources (based on Martin & White, 2005: 38).

exemplified through but), or comment Adjuncts such as obviously or clearly. The second appraisal subsystem, attitude, refers to emotions (affect), judgements of people’s behaviours (judgement), and evaluations of things, events, and phenomena (appreciation).The final subsystem, graduation, refers to resources that turn up or down the volume of appraisal meanings, as, for example, through the increase in intensity of the judgement of Peter in very naughty through the subsystem of force; focus, on the other hand, sharpens or softens non-gradable meanings, and it is interesting to note that there were no examples in the Peter Rabbit story of a fine-tuning of categorical meanings, and thus the example included is from Coffin’s (2006) study of secondary school historical discourse. In addition to her study, numerous others have applied the appraisal framework as a tool for analysis of development of meaning-making abilities in childhood (Painter, 2003a), in adolescence (McCabe & Whittaker, 2017; Morton & Llinares, 2016; Humphrey, 2015; Derewianka, 2007), and at graduate and postgraduate university levels (Liardét, 2018; Myskow & Ono, 2018; McCabe, 2017; Liu & McCabe, 2017; Lee, 2010, 2015; Cheung, 2015; Lancaster, 2014; Hood, 2010; Swain, 2007; Belz, 2003; inter alia), some of which are taken up in later chapters. 1.4.7.3 Cohesion Another development within the overall SFL architecture is the modelling of cohesion: a set of lexicogrammatical resources which transcend the boundaries of

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the clause in order to create textual connections (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014), placing it within the textual metafunction of language. Cohesive devices create semantic ties, as their interpretation is dependent on some other element in the text (Halliday & Hasan, 2013[1976]), and they are divided into four main types: Reference: including pronouns, demonstratives, the definite article, time and place adverbials (e.g. here and now), and comparatives. 1. Substitution and ellipsis: where one item is replaced by another, through, for example, nominal substitutes such as one/ones, the same; verbal substitutes such as do (I like chocolate. So do I); clausal substitutes such as so (Do you think it will rain? I don’t think so); or by omission (although the item is clearly recoverable) (He slipped underneath the gate, and was safe at last = he was safe). 2. Conjunction: through conjunctions and conjunctive Adjuncts. 3. Lexical: through repetition, synonymy, hyponymy, hypernymy, and collocation. Cohesive ties can be immediate (in a contiguous sentence), mediated (by one or more intervening sentences), or remote and non-mediated (by one or more intervening sentences not involved in the relationship between the referent and referred item). They can also differ in what they are pointing towards. Endophoric reference ties to something within the text, and can be anaphoric (referring back to something that has already been mentioned in the text) or cataphoric (referring ahead to something coming up in the text). Finally, exophoric reference ties to something outside of the text in the context of situation. Numerous studies have traced developmental pathways through the use of cohesive devices (Cox, Fang, & Otto, 1997; Crowhurst, 1987; Neuner, 1987; McCulley, 1985; Connor, 1984; Collins & Williamson, 1981; see also Chapters 3 and 4). It is worth pointing out that cohesion analysis caused great furore in the 1980s, with some researchers vehemently opposed to seeing Halliday and Hasan’s (2013[1976]) taxonomy of cohesive devices as related to coherence in a text. Halliday and Hasan use the term ‘texture’, which is what distinguishes a text from a non-text. Because a text “functions as a unity with respect to its environment” (Halliday & Hasan, 2013[1976]: 481), it has texture, and texture is created, in part, through cohesion. Carrell (1982) argued that this explanation of texture equates it with coherence, but, for her, cohesion is a surface-level phenomenon; thus, she sees a serious omission in Halliday and Hasan (2013[1976]) of the role of the reader’s background knowledge and schemas that are brought to bear on understandings of a text, which is what, in her view, provides coherence. It goes beyond the scope of this book to delve into that argument, but it is worth contrasting the SFL view, which sees cohesion as operating within the contextual configuration of field, tenor, and mode—a view which does not simply assume that surface features of a text create coherence, but rather that the semantic features of linguistic elements are interpreted within the register of a text (Fries, 1986). Nevertheless, Carrell’s (1982) main

30 Developing Language

objection was to the teaching of cohesive devices as if doing so would solve problems of text coherence. This objection is not to be ignored, as it reoccurs with respect to SFL and the uncontextualized teaching of elements of linguistic theory as a panacea for educational ills (see Chapter 5, Section 5.2.4). As the studies included in Chapters 3 and 4 show, over time, cohesion came to be studied alongside other text features connected to the context of situation. 1.4.7.4 Periodicity: Information Flow An additional tool for analysing text also comes from a discourse semantic perspective on the textual metafunction of language and is an expansion on the Theme-Rheme and Given-New constructs (Forey & Sampson, 2017; Section 1.4.3). Building on Daneš’ (1974) thematic progression and Peter Fries’ (1983) work on method of development in texts, Martin (1992) posits that, at the paragraph/ phase level, an introductory sentence or set of sentences may establish a Theme that is subsequently picked up on throughout that paragraph or phase of the text; this is called a hyperTheme. At the level of the text, a macroTheme is a sentence or set of sentences that predicts the set of hyperThemes. Thus, the Theme is the point of departure at the level of the clause, the hyperTheme of the paragraph or of a phase, and the macroTheme of the text. Parallelly, as the New information in a clause tends to coincide with the Rheme, the accumulation of New information in the Rhemes of clauses in a paragraph/phase of a text is termed hyperNew, which may be distilled into a concluding sentence for a paragraph/phase, and accumulation of the New of the whole text is called macroNew, which may be distilled into a concluding paragraph for the text. Texts use these textual resources to manage the flow of information in various ways, which may serve to strategically guide readers to an effective reading.These ways of packaging information are culturally bound (Maxwell-Reid, 2015) and thus develop differently in linguistic repertoires, usually depending on amount of exposure to text types. 1.4.7.5 Beyond Language The SFL research and modelling is not limited to the semiotic of language; starting from foundational texts by O’Toole (1994) and Kress and van Leeuwen (1996), it has extended its metalanguage, including those related to text structuring, cohesion, and appraisal, to meaning-making modes such as static and moving images, audio description, and gesture (Taylor, 2017), as well as music, sound, and the discourse of mathematics (O’Halloran & Smith, 2011). Images in textbooks and newspapers, for example, have been analysed for the interplay between visual and verbal texts in metafunctional terms.Visual texts have also been analysed for their information structuring: English viewers tend to ‘read’ visuals from left to right, as they do verbal text, meaning that the New information (see Section 1.4.3) often appears on the right side of an image, or, at least, we may read it that way. As we develop our language resources through our interactions with others,

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we also develop our abilities to extract and make meaning through other semiotic modes and in combination. In an increasingly digital world, multimodal literacy (or multiliteracies) has taken on greater importance, and a wealth of studies from an SFL perspective have shown how modes work together to create meaning in ways that may not be readily available to the untrained eye.Thus, developing and applying analytical tools for unpacking how meanings are made through multimodal semiosis have become an important part of the SFL educational research and pedagogic agendas (Unsworth, 2001, 2006; Royce, 2007).

1.5 Summary: Language Development from an SFL Perspective There are two methodological corollaries of the expanding repertoires perspective on language development.The first is that the preferred metaphor is language development, not acquisition.The development metaphor implies some active participation on the part of the individual in developing their semiotic resources in interaction with others, rather than passively intaking an already existing phenomenon. The second corollary is that the data is observational, naturalistic, and rarely experimental (although a few studies include control and experimental groups in their design, as shown in Chapters 3 and 4). Furthermore, the context of use of language as encoded in text is, in essence, inseparable from the language itself, meaning that the nature of any experiment would have an effect on the language used. The evolution of language in the individual consists of expanding systems of meaning potential; that is, as individuals interact with others, they encounter opportunities through which they can build on their repertoire of meaningmaking resources. SF linguists have taken this insight further into creating models based on SFL theoretical principles, both for researching language development and crafting educational practices which make explicit to caregivers, school-age children, and learners of an additional language these contextualized uses of language and other meaning-making resources. The subsequent chapters in this book elaborate on this work.

Notes 1 Lexicogrammar is a term used in SFL, coined by Halliday, to refer to the continuum between morphosyntax at one end of a continuum, and lexis at the other, each of which enter into patternings at varying levels of delicacy.This approach to language rejects one in which “the bricks of lexis are joined by the mortar of grammar” (Hasan, 1996: 100) 2 Some classify ‘the’ into the word class of ‘article’; depending on the perspective taken on language, there are variations in the labelling of word classes. 3 Morphosyntax refers to morphemes, and how they combine to create new units of meaning, such as the third- person singular present tense verb ending -s (necessary for The cat sits on the mat), + syntax, which refers to how separate words are allowed by the rules of the language to be ordered into sentences. Different languages draw on these two ways of creating and ordering linguistic units; for example, in English we need two separate words, a noun followed a verb, to create the declarative sentence I exist, where in Spanish the same can be created by inflecting the verb, existo.

32 Developing Language 4 See Christie (2012, Chapter 1) for an explanation of the theory for educational purposes. 5 Note that systems in SFL are indicated by small caps. 6 For a far fuller diagram of the mood system network, see Halliday and Matthiessen (2014: 162). 7 www.tripadvisor.ie/Hotel_Review-g4116358-d3492932-Reviews-Villa_FerriMuo_Kotor_Municipality.html 8 Note that elements of protolanguage also appear in adult life, through interjections of pain, anger, or fear, for example (Halliday, 2002b[1996]: 389)

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34 Developing Language Halliday, M.A.K. (2003[1977]). Ideas about language. In J.J. Webster, On Language and Linguistics. Volume 3 in the Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday (pp. 92–115). London/ New York: Bloomsbury. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474211932 Halliday, M.A.K. (2004a[1978]). Meaning and the construction of reality in early childhood. In J.J. Webster, The language of early childhood: Volume 4 in the Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday (pp. 113–143). London/New York: Bloomsbury. https://doi. org/0.5040/9781474212007 Halliday, M.A.K. (2004b[1980]). Three aspects of children’s language development: Learning language, learning through language, learning about language. In J.J. Webster, The Language of early childhood: Volume 4 in the Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday (pp. 308–326). London/NewYork: Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474212007. ch-014 Halliday, M.A.K. (2007[1978]). Is learning a second language like learning a first language all over again? In J.J. Webster, Language and education. Volume 9 in the Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday (pp. 174–193). London/New York: Bloomsbury. https://doi. org/10.5040/9781474211895.ch-008. Halliday, M.A.K. (2013). Interview with Herman Parret (1972). In J.R. Martin, Language turned back on himself (pp. 1–39). London/New York: Bloomsbury. https://doi. org/10.5040/9781472541956.ch-001. Halliday, M.A.K., & Hasan, R. (2013[1976]). Cohesion in English. London/New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315836010. Halliday, M.A.K., & Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. (2014). Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. London/New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203431269. Halliday, M., McIntosh, A., & Strevens, P. (1964). The linguistic sciences and language teaching. London: Longman. Hasan, R. (1989). The structure of a text. In M.A.K. Halliday & R. Hasan, Language, context, and text: Aspects of language in a social semiotic perspective (pp. 52–69). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hasan, R. (1992). Speech genre, semiotic mediation and the development of higher mental functions. Language Sciences, 14(4), 489–528. https://doi.org/10.1016/03880001(92)90027-C. Hasan, R. (1996). The grammarian’s dream: lexis as most delicate grammar. In C. Cloran, D. Butt, & G.Williams, Ways of saying:Ways of meaning—Selected papers of Ruqaiya Hasan (pp. 73–103). London/New York: Cassell. Hasan, R. (2004). Analysing discursive variation. In L. Young, & C. Harrison, Systemic functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis (pp. 15–52). London/New York: Bloomsbury. Hasan, R. (2005). On the social conditions for semiotic mediation: The genesis of mind in society. In R. Hasan, & J.J. Webster, Language, society and consciousness (pp. 106–129). London: Equinox. Hasan, R. (2009). Semantic variation: Meaning in society and in sociolinguistics(J.J. Webster, Ed.). London: Equinox. Hewings, A., & Hewings, M. (2004). Impersonalizing stance: A study of anticipatory “it” in student and published academic writing. In C. Coffin, A. Hewings, & K. O’Halloran, Applying english grammar: Functional and corpus approaches (pp. 101–116). London: Hodder Arnold. Hood, S. (2010). Appraising research: Evaluation in academic writing. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Humphrey, S. (2015). Building a critical stance in academic and civic discourse: Burnishing and tarnishing. TESOL International Journal, 10(1), 47–61. Kaplan, B. (1983). A trio of trials. In R. Lerner, Developmental psychology: Historical and philosophical perspectives (pp. 185–228). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Kress, G., and van Leeuwen, T. (1996) Reading images:The grammar of visual design. 1st edition. London/New York: Routledge. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lancaster, Z. (2014). Exploring valued patterns of stance in upper-level student writing in the disciplines. Written Communication, 31(1), 27–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/07410 88313515170. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2018). Second Language Acquisition, WE, and language as a complex adaptive system (CAS). World Englishes, 37, 80–92. https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12304. Lee, S.H. (2010). Attribution in high-and low-graded persuasive essays by tertiary students. Functions of Language, 17(2), 181–206. https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.17.2.02lee Lee, S.H. (2015). Evaluative stances in persuasive essays by undergraduate students: Focusing on APPRECIATION recourses. Text & Talk, 35(1), 49–76. https://doi. org/10.1515/text-2014-0029. Liardét, C.L. (2013). An exploration of Chinese EFL learner’s deployment of grammatical metaphor: Learning to make academically valued meanings. Journal of Second Language Writing, 22, 164–178. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2013.03.008. Liardét, C.L. (2015). Academic literacy and grammatical metaphor: Mapping development. TESOL International Journal, 10(1), 29–46. Liardét, C.L. (2016a). Nominalization and grammatical metaphor: Elaborating the theory. English for Specific Purposes, 44, 16–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2016.04.004. Liardét, C.L. (2016b). Grammatical metaphor: Distinguishing success. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 22, 109–118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2016.01.009. Liardét, C.L. (2018). ‘As we all know’: Examining Chinese EFL learners’ use of interpersonal grammatical metaphor in academic writing. English for Specific Purposes, 50, 64– 80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2017.11.005. Liu, X., & McCabe, A. (2017). Attitudinal evaluation in Chinese University Students’ English Writing; A contrastive perspective. Singapore: Springer. Lukin, A., Moore, A.R., Herke, M., Wegener, R., & Wu, C. (2011). Halliday’s model of register revisited and explored. Linguistics and the Human Sciences, 4(2), 187–213. Malinowski, B. (1923). Supplement 1:The problem of meaning in primitive languages. In C.K. Ogden, & I.A. Richards, The meaning of meaning (pp. 296–336). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Martin, J.R. (1992). English text: System and structure. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Martin, J.R. (2015). Teaching/learning: The yin and yang of language development from home through school. Linguistics and the Human Sciences, 10(1), 49–68. https://doi. org/10.1558/lhs.v10i1.27276. Martin, J.R., & Rose, D. (2003). Working with discourse: Meaning beyond the clause. London/ New York: Bloomsbury. Martin, J.R., & White, P.R.R. (2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. (2015). Halliday on language. In J.J.Webster, Bloomsbury companion to M.A.K. Halliday (pp. 137–202). London/New York: Bloomsbury. Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. (2019). Register in Systemic Functional Linguistics. Register Studies, 1(1), 10–41. https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.18010.mat.

36 Developing Language Maxwell-Reid, C. (2015) Secondary school students’ use of discourse strategies in two languages: The role of hyperTheme in argumentative writing. TESOL International Journal, 10(1), 77–92. McCabe, A. (2017). Knowledge and interaction in on-line discussions in Spanish by advanced language learners. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 30(5), 409–431. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2017.1312461 McCabe, A., & Whittaker, R. (2017). Genre and appraisal in CLIL history texts: Developing the voice of the historian. In A. Llinares & T. Morton, Applied linguistic perspectives on CLIL (pp. 105–124). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. McCulley, G.A. (1985). Writing quality, coherence, and cohesion. Research in the Teaching of English, 19(3), 269–282. Morton, T., & Llinares, A. (2016). Students’ use of evaluative language in L2 English to talk and write about history in a bilingual education programme. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 21(4), 496–508. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670 050.2016.1192101 Myskow, G., & Ono, M. (2018). A matter of facts: L2 writers’ use of evidence and evaluation in biographical essays. Journal of Second Language Writing, 41, 55–70. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jslw.2018.08.002 Neuner, J.T. (1987). Cohesive ties and chains in good and poor freshman essays. Research in the Teaching of English, 21(1), 92–105. O’Halloran, K.L., & Smith, B.A. (2011). Multimodal studies: Exploring issues and domains. London/New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203828847. O’Toole, M. (1994) The language of displayed art. 1st edition. London: Leicester University Press. Painter, C. (2003a). Developing attitude: An ontogenetic perspective on APPRAISAL. Text & Talk, 23(2), 183–209. https://doi.org/10.1515/text.2003.008. Painter, C. (2003b). The use of a metaphorical mode of meaning in early language development. In A.-M. Simon-Vandenbergen, M.Taverniers, & L. Ravelli, Grammatical metaphor: Views from systemic functional linguistics (pp. 151–167). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.236.09pai Painter, C., Derewianka, B., & Torr, J. (2007). From microfunction to metaphor: Learning language and learning through language. In R. Hasan, C.M.I.M. Matthiessen, & J.J. Webster, Continuing discourse on language: A functional perspective (pp. 563–588). London: Equinox. Pea, R.D., & Kaplan, B. (1981). Lexical development from the perspective of genetic-dramatism. Paper presented at The Second International Congress for the Study of Child Language. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, August 9–14. Retrieved September 1, 2018, from http://web.stanford.edu/~roypea/RoyPDF%20folder/A8_Pea_Mawby_82_MS.pdf Royce, T. (2007) Multimodal communicative competence in second language contexts. In T. Royce, & W. Bowcher, New directions in the analysis of multimodal discourse (pp. 361–403). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Ryshina-Pankova, M. (2010).Toward mastering the discourses of reasoning: Use of grammatical metaphor at advanced levels of foreign language acquisition. The Modern Language Journal, 94(2), 181–197. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2010.01016.x. Ryshina-Pankova, M. (2015). A meaning-based approach to the study of complexity in L2 writing: The case of grammatical metaphor. Journal of Second Language Writing, 29, 51–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2015.06.005.

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Ryshina-Pankova, M., & Byrnes, H. (2013).Writing as learning to know:Tracing knowledge construction in L2 German compositions. Journal of Second Language Writing, 22, 179–197. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2013.03.009. de Saussure, F. (1916). Cours de Linguistique Générale (C. Bally, & A. Sechehaye, Eds.). Lausanne & Paris: Payot. de Saussure, F. (1959). In C. Bally, & A. Sechehaye Course in general linguistics Translation by W. Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. Swain, E. (2007). Constructing an effective “voice” in academic discussion writing: An Appraisal theory perspective. In A. McCabe, M. O’Donnell, & R. Whittaker, Advances in language and education (pp. 166–184). London/New York: Bloomsbury. Taverniers, M. (2011). The syntax-semantics interface in systemic functional grammar: Halliday’s interpretation of the Hjelmslevian model of stratification. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 1100–1126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.09.003. Taylor, C. (2017) Reading images (including moving ones). In T. Bartlett & G. O’Grady, The Routledge handbook of systemic functional linguistics (pp. 575–590). London/New York: Routledge. Unsworth, L. (2001) Teaching multiliteracies across the curriculum: Changing contexts of text and image in classroom practice. Buckingham: Open University Press. Unsworth, L. (2006) Towards a metalanguage for multiliteracies education: Describing the meaning-making resources of language-image interaction. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 5(1), 55–76. Veel, R. (2006). The Write it Right project—Linguistic modelling of secondary school and the workplace. In R.Whittaker, M. O’Donnell, & A. McCabe, Language and literacy: Functional approaches (pp. 66–92). London/New York: Bloomsbury. Vygotsky, L.S. (1981). The genesis of higher mental functions. In J.V. Wertsch, The concept of activity in soviet psychology. (pp. 144–188). Armonk, NY: ME. Sharpe. Whittaker, R., & McCabe, A. (2020). Writing on history in a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) context: Development of grammatical metaphor as evidence of language learning. In R.M. Machón, Writing and language learning: Advancing research agendas. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Williams, G. (2007). Semantic variation. In R. Hasan, J.J.Webster, & C.M.I.M. Matthiessen, Continuing discourse on language: A functional perspective (pp. 458–479). London: Equinox.

2 Developing Language from Infancy

“Learning to live and learning to language are virtually synonymous” (Thornton, 1972: 51)

2.1 Introduction: Learning How to Mean In the late 1960s, Michael Halliday’s work in developing Systemic Functional Linguistics took a turn with the birth of his son, Nigel.1 The Canadian government denied Halliday admission to the country, meaning that he could not take up a position at the University of British Columbia (Halliday & Hasan, 2006; Halliday, 2013d[1986]); this gave him an extended period of time to record in detail Nigel’s utterances in interaction, and to then describe and interpret them according to a functional framework of language development. He delivered numerous papers on these descriptions (Webster, 2004). In 1975, he published a monograph, Learning how to mean: Explorations in the development of language on Nigel’s language development, which was well received by reviewers: “a significant and humanitarian contribution to the ‘proper study of mankind’” (Maw, 1976: 243), and “an amazing tour de force” (Dore, 1977: 114). Halliday was viewed as “a good ethnographer […] bringing the child as agent back into developmental linguistics” (Lee, 1977: 952), while approaching language development “with a stock of refreshing insights and a daringly original perspective” (Dore, 1977: 118). Dore further appreciated Halliday’s novel question of “‘how the child constructs his social reality’ through his use of language”, while his “proposals about the relations between the linguistic system and the situationtypes in which it is deployed offer exciting first answers to this ambitious question” (Dore, 1977: 118). These comments evidence a move in the 1960s and’70s towards interest in children developing language through social interaction; Halliday’s study of Nigel provided an in-depth glimpse into a child’s building up of a system of communication which provided the basis for developing his mother tongue, English. However, reviews of Learning how to mean were not all positive. For example, Greenfield and Smith’s (1976), in comparing five studies of singleword utterances in child language, wrote:

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It is unfortunate that Halliday does not describe any objective bases for distinguishing different types of utterances. As a linguist, he provides extremely detailed transcriptions of the sounds Nigel makes, but does not describe the overall contexts in which he uses them. His six functions (instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, and imaginative) are never operationally defined. We do not know what situational features led to the classification of an utterance in one category rather than another. In general, his empirical method is inadequately described. (Greenfield & Smith, 1976: 209–210) Several issues related to the study of child language development (CLD) emerge from the reviews, such as the ‘state of the art’ of CLD at the time and the originality of Halliday’s work, the method Halliday used to trace CLD, and the functions he used for analysing his data, as well as a major question that underlies all critiques of CLD research: what is it that develops in child language development? In this chapter, I review some of the ways in which CLD has been studied, leading to Halliday’s work in this area. Obviously, it goes beyond the scope of this book to provide a complete history of the vast wealth of research on language development;2 thus, the focus is on studies that provide relevance to Halliday’s study and to the issues raised by the reviewers. I then move to Halliday’s study and others that followed it, and finally place it with respect to other perspectives that have arisen since. Ultimately, I conclude that the SFL focus on CLD illuminates the developmental pathway that children follow through expanding needs for meaning-making in interaction.

2.2 Background: Studies on CLD 2.2.1 Diary Studies Interest in how children develop language from infancy, which—perhaps rather paradoxically—derives from the Latin meaning “without language” (Nelson, 1996: 353), certainly predates CLD as an established field of research. Of special interest as a background to Halliday’s research are diary studies, which go back to the start of the seventeenth century (Levelt, 2013), while child development and language acquisition were areas of philosophical consideration and empirical enquiry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Lorch & Hellal, 2010). Leopold (1948: 2) places the “exact study of child language development” in mid-nineteenth-century Germany, through the German writer, doctor, and teacher Berthold Sigismund, whose book Kind und Welt, published in 1856, contains notes from the diary he kept of his son’s development, including his linguistic abilities (Levelt, 2013). Interestingly, compared to other writers’ perceptions of infant–caregiver interaction, Sigismund shows “underestimation of the child’s capacities” (Levelt, 2013: 96); he records few observations during his son’s first year as, according to Sigismund, during the first 3 to 8 weeks, the child has the ability to hear “but the mind is still without sense for the sound

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waves” (qtd. in Levelt, 2013: 96); Sigismund also suggested that the infant did not recognize his mother’s voice at that early age. His observations were not shared by all observers of infants, however. For example, Pérez (1889: 237) noted that “little children appear, from the very first, to understand the simple language of their mother, and can distinguish their different tones of joy and anger, of coaxing or threatening”, and he provides an example of a 3-week-old infant girl who “stops screaming and crying instantly when her mother speaks coaxingly to her”. Sigismund’s observations of his son’s language during the second year include carefully recorded detail of phonology, first words, and first sentences, and, of special interest in foregrounding Halliday’s study, of the functions of utterances; for instance, Sigismund notes that “the little speaker uses the first uttered words at once, mainly or maybe exclusively, as expressions of will […] The protolanguage is nothing but a will made audible” (qtd. in Levelt, 2013: 97). Further publication of diary studies took place in the British journal Mind, founded in 1876. These diary studies, similar to that of Sigismund, were not focused solely on language development; their authors recorded whatever caught their interest in their subjects (often their own children, as in Halliday’s study) with respect to their mental, moral, emotional, and psychomotor development, as well as language. Over time, interest became more focused on linguistic abilities; for example, Frederick Pollock’s 1878 article provides recorded notes of his daughters’ linguistic production as interpreted according to their function, as this excerpt shows: 17 m. Ní (knee). This is a real word used in a special, and at the same time extended, meaning. It signifies: Take me on your knee and show me pictures; and also expresses in a general way the idea of something (generally the cat) being on a person’s lap, so that ní not unfrequently means: I want to see the cat on your lap. […] About this time “baby” came to be freely used as an imperative or desiderative, combined with movements or gestures indicating an object—the sense being, I want that. (Pollock, 1878: 394) A number of historical accounts of CLD studies (Shatz, 2007: 1) date the study of CLD as a field of research to 1907 and the publication of the diary studies in Clara and William Stern’s Die Kindersprache (1907); Levelt (2013, 309) writes that the Sterns “set the scene, or rather the example, for twentieth century research in language acquisition”, and their book is deemed “the first classic work devoted exclusively to child language” (Ingram, 1989: 8). The Sterns systematically recorded their three children’s language development, and, from the data gathered, they laid out the stages of phonological and lexical development from infancy. Still used today in studies of child language is the Sterns’ notation system for children’s ages as year(s);month(s) (e.g. 1;7 is one year seven months), and two of their findings—those of dramatic expansion in vocabulary near the second year, and variability in the rate of vocabulary acquisition among children— have been confirmed in numerous studies (Levelt, 2013: 339).

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Overall, diary studies have provided rich accounts of child development, with greater linguistic detail in the twentieth century. Most diaries have been kept by parent observers, and thus carry the advantage of close knowledge of the child’s common behaviours and milestones, making the latter more easily noticed (Ingram, 1989). However, there is potential of bias and of untheorized or intermittent recording of events. Early diary studies tended to focus on describing the developmental events in the unfolding linguistic repertoire of children and were less concerned with the theoretical principles underlying the process of development. Ingram (1989, 9) sums up the widely held view that “the child brought a great deal of internal linguistic organization to the task [… and was] perceived as being very creative, and capable of discovering the structure of language from its environment”. At the same time, the study of CLD through diaries was closely linked to the overall development and behaviour of the child, and thus is often considered part of developmental psychology, as is the case with the Sterns’ work, rather than of linguistics. 2.2.2 From Bigger Data to More Theory Starting in the 1920s, developmental psychologists turned to sampling the language of greater numbers of children, in response to the perception that, while the diary studies provided a “wealth of observational material” (McCarthy, 1954: 494, qtd. in Ingram, 1989: 12), they lacked scientific rigour of method, reliability, and validity.These sampling studies gathered normative data to further investigate how factors such as socio-economic status, gender, bilingualism, disabilities, and intelligence might impact on child development (Levelt, 2013).This research had its roots in Piaget’s “new observational paradigm, which he called “clinical”” (Levelt, 2013: 326); Piaget commissioned observers to collect data from more than twenty children, and then divided their utterances into egocentric or socialized uses. Dorothea McCarthy revised Piaget’s method into a “well standardized procedure” (Levelt, 2013: 333), in which different categories of children (e.g. age cohorts) had an equal number of subjects, to be observed in similar circumstances, providing an equal amount of data.This cross-sectional data was then analysed for “superficial aspects of language” (Ingram, 1989: 13), such as mean length of sentence, vocabulary development, and ability to produce different parts of speech. These studies (for a review, see McCarthy, 1933) presented statistical analyses of the data to provide objective measurements of language development. At the same time, the studies tended to be “surprisingly a-theoretical” (Levelt, 2013: 334). In this sense they were similar to the diary studies, focusing on similar aspects of CLD, such as vocabulary growth, without developmental explanations. The behaviourists brought theory into the CLD picture. In his book Language (1933), Leonard Bloomfield, while laying out his theory of structural linguistics, also provided an explanation of how language is acquired. In his reckoning, language works between speakers based on a stimulus–response pattern; that is, “[l] anguage enables one person to make a reaction (R) when another person has the stimulus (S)” (1933, 24, italics original), which he illustrated with the story of Jill wanting

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an apple, making an utterance, and Jack complying by plucking an apple from a tree. According to Bloomfield (1933, 29), “Every child that is born into a group acquires these habits of speech and response in the first years of his life”. B.F. Skinner, renowned amongst the behaviourists in the field of psychology, expressed the view that Bloomfield was “the best linguist in the field today [….] But his account of what is happening when words are used is laughable” (Skinner, 1979: 150). Instead, Skinner argued that the place of the study of verbal behaviour (a more apt term, in his view, than ‘language’) was squarely in psychology: The final responsibility must rest with the behaviorial sciences, and particularly with psychology. What happens when a man speaks or responds to speech is clearly a question about human behavior and hence a question to be answered with the concepts and techniques of psychology as an experimental science of behavior. (Skinner, 1957: 5) Skinner contended that children acquire language through operant conditioning, via reinforcement of responses by surrounding speakers of the language. Through this process, the child’s “unpatterned vocalizations […] gradually assume forms which produce appropriate consequences in a given verbal community” (Skinner, 1957: 31). Few empirical studies from a behaviourist perspective were carried out during and for some time after the time Skinner was writing (Levelt, 2013; see Sautter & Leblanc, 2006, for more recent Skinnerian empirical studies).That is, many large-scale studies which were taking place during the first half of the twentieth century were limited to observing and recording linguistic behaviour, without attempting to provide an explanation of how children develop language, leaving aside the theoretical perspective of Bloomfield and Skinner. In addition to Bloomfield and Skinner, another exception to the tendency towards atheoretical description during the first half of the twentieth century were studies on the development of speech sounds. Jakobson’s (1968[1941]) theory of phonological development posited a discontinuous trajectory between babbling and first meaningful words, with a universal order of acquisition (e.g. plosives are acquired before fricatives), which becomes increasingly refined through contrasts; that is, babies are first sensitive to broader contrasts, such as consonants vs. vowels, and then move to increasingly finer contrasts, such as nasal vs. oral consonants. While children may vary in the rate of development, the order is constant. This developmental pathway has been confirmed in other studies (Levelt, 2013), including Leopold’s (1947) diary study of his daughter. 2.2.3 Universal Grammar Perhaps the most highly visible and widely expanding theoretical perspective at the time of Halliday’s ethnographic study was Chomsky’s nativist and universalist theory, explained briefly in Chapter 1 (Section 1.3). Within this perspective,

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CLD researchers are mainly interested in how children build up the mental repertoire of syntactic structures belonging to their language variety, moving from an initial innate state. Chomsky’s theorizing opposed the reigning paradigm of “empiricist and behaviorist doctrines” (Chomsky, 1992: 22), in which knowledge of language refers to a “system of habits, dispositions and abilities”, acquired through “conditioning, training, habit-formation, or ‘general learning mechanisms’ such as induction” (Chomsky, 1992: 19). In Chomsky’s view, knowledge of language is knowledge of a “computational system, a rule system of some sort”, acquired through an innate language faculty, whose initial state “determines possible rules and modes of interaction” (Chomsky, 1992: 22).Thus, Chomsky’s view of language is mentalist and nativist; language is acquired through the language acquisition device of the language faculty of the brain, which guides the selection of an appropriate rule system based on the direct evidence provided by the surrounding language. This position has led to a theorizing of the basic principles of a universal grammar (UG), and the finite set of parametric values which specific languages apply. Indeed, the search for those universal principles of all language grammars has been a major part of the generative research agenda (Haspelmath, 2008). At the same time, a further goal of CLD research from within Chomsky’s transformational generative paradigm in the late 1960s and early 1970s was to find the generative grammar of child language that would explain the process accounting for the earliest syntax of children from around 2 years of age (Bloom, 1975). Distributional analysis was used to arrange lists of child utterances according to the patterns of combinations of frequently occurring words with less frequently occurring ones. This method revealed consistencies in the placement of frequently occurring words, such as ‘more’ or ‘it’, with other words; in twoword utterances, they occurred either in first or second position but rarely could they be found in both. Thus, a child might utter ‘more juice’, ‘more cookie’, ‘fix it’, ‘do it’, but not, for example ‘read more’ (Bloom, 1975: 255). These frequently occurring words were called ‘pivots’, “since the bulk of the word combinations appear to be formed by using them as pivots to which other words are attached” (Braine, 1963: 4). This grammar came to be known as ‘pivot grammar’. Braine (1963) concluded from his research that children’s language developed structurally through the formation and learning of the position of new pivot words, and it developed lexically through the addition of new open words. Braine also saw a corollary between the closed and open word classes of the adult language. Both Brown (1973) and Bloom (1975) summarize this research and relate it to other studies that analysed similar structures. Brown (1973), for example, mentions the findings of Slobin (1966), who suggested, based on evidence from Russian, that these structures may be a universal feature of child speech; McNeill (1966) related them further to UG and to adult linguistic competence. According to Bloom (1975), in CLD research through the mid-1960s,‘pivot grammar’ was the prevailing notion. However, she (and others) soon raised flags, one of which concerned the lack of explanations related to the continuity of development from pivot grammar to adult grammar; another addressed the lack of focus on

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the meaning relations between the words—that is, pivot grammar ignored the underlying semantic intention encoded in children’s surface forms, a point which we return to in Section 2.2.4. It is worth mentioning, before leaving Chomsky’s acquisition perspective, that studies within this paradigm often include experimental methods to demonstrate that children’s language learning comes about at least in part due to an initial state of UG in the brain. In this research paradigm, child language has been “a good testing ground for innateness” (Crain & Thornton, 1998: 10). One experimental method for testing hypotheses is that of elicited production, seen as an optimal way of overcoming the obstacle of rarity of production of certain forms in children’s spontaneous speech (Crain & Thornton 1998). An example is the study of Principle C (Chomsky, 1993), also referred to as Lasnik’s (1976) Principle of Non-coreference (Chomsky, Belletti, & Rizzi, 2002: 7), which states that referring expressions must be free and not bound when occurring in the same phrase or domain. Principle C refers to domains such as that created through the sentence in 2.1: 2.1 On the top of Oscar’s head, he rubbed the donut. (Lust, Eisele, & Mazuka, 1992: 350) From this sentence, we imagine someone who is not Oscar rubbing the donut on Oscar’s head, as Principle C rules out the possibility in this type of domain of ‘Oscar’ as antecedent for ‘he’. Lust et al. (1992) provide results from a number of experiments, including act-out tasks (where children are asked to act out the meaning of the clause) and truth-value judgements (asking whether ‘he’ can refer to Oscar) to test comprehension, and elicited imitation (where children repeat the sentence) in order to test production.The results of these tests suggest that children apply Principle C, which the researchers argue would be difficult to learn from input alone. Indeed, this major paradigm of child language acquisition argues for a “poverty of stimulus” (Chomsky et al., 2002: 5); in this view, the linguistic data children are surrounded by is not rich enough for them to have the opportunity to work out all of the rules of the language. Chomsky et al. (2002) use the understanding of utterances such as 2.1 to argue that there must be something beyond the child’s linguistic experiences underlying knowledge of how language (e.g. coreference) works. Chomsky et al. (2002: 6) compare sentences 2.2 and 2.3: 2.2 John said that he was happy. 2.3 *He said that John was happy. The underlined elements are co-referents, thus rendering 2.3 ill-formed, as ‘he’ and ‘John’ cannot refer to the same person. The comparison between these two sentences leads the researchers to ask “why don’t [children] assume that coreference is ruled by a simple linear principle, rather than by the hierarchical one

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referring to the notion of domain?” (Chomsky et al. 2002: 7). Crain and Thornton (1998) suggest that, if children learned from experience of language alone, then they would try things out (such as uttering 2.3 to mean that it was John who said that he himself was happy), making errors along the way until they learned the constraints. However, this type of research suggests that children do not go through this process, so they must have an underlying knowledge of these principles. In sum, at the time Halliday was carrying out his research on child language, Chomsky’s nativist and mentalist focus on language and its acquisition was emerging as the major research paradigm for child language acquisition amongst linguists. It is not the purpose of this book to provide a fuller critical review of this paradigm (see, for example, Painter, 1984, 1999), but rather to situate Halliday’s within the wider context of child language studies. To support the hypothesis that there is an innate language faculty, nativists point out that experience on its own cannot account for the acquisition of language structures, given the poverty of stimulus argument. They also argue that on its own it cannot account for the convergence on a remarkably similar grammatical system within a given language by children who receive vastly different kinds of input. There are child language linguists who focus on other aspects of language development, and to these we now turn in order to further place Halliday’s study of CLD. 2.2.4 Experience-Based, Semantic, and Functional Theories of CLD When Chomsky formulated his hypothesis that humans are born with an innate capacity for language, he was reacting to the empirical developmental perspective of Skinner (1957), characterized by patterns of stimulus, response, and reinforcement. Several child language researchers were interested in other aspects of language development and did not necessarily adhere to Skinner’s behaviourism. For example, Bullowa, Jones, and Bever (1964) followed the tradition of the large data studies (Section 2.2.2), because of interest, through descriptions of data, in establishing the developmental trajectory of “presumably normal babies” (p. 101) to then illuminate trajectories of children with communication difficulties. For their project, they gathered weekly tape-recorded data from four infants from the time of birth in order to empirically test Jakobson’s (1968[1941]; Section 2.2.2) theory of phonological development; while they do not report on the results of that goal in the 1964 article, what Bullowa’s research team uncovered was the immense role that interaction plays in language development starting from the time of birth.This finding led Bullowa to suggest that key elements of the ontogenesis of human communication consist of interaction with caregivers, shared focal attention, and specificity of reference (Bullowa, 1977).This interactional view of CLD contrasts with the individualist views that existed from the diary studies through to Chomsky’s perspective. Note that the argument from the interactionist viewpoint is not so much about whether there is an innate capacity for language or whether it develops solely out of experience. Rather, the argument is for the highly central role of interaction for the development of language.

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In addition to Bullowa and her team, many others were taking an interactionist approach to CLD. For example, Bateson (1975) used a sample of the data collected by Bullowa et al. (1964) to analyse the interaction between a mother and her son, starting from 1.5 months of age, in which the mother’s participation was recognizably patterned on conversation, as she constructed implied participation on the part of the infant. Bateson treated these interactive vocalizations as “proto-conversations” (p. 111). Stern, Jaffe, Beebe, and Bennet (1975) studied mother–infant dyads because of an “unexpected finding”—the great extent to which mothers and 3–4-month-old infants vocalize simultaneously during recorded play sessions. In addition to an alternating mode of vocalization in which the mother and baby take turns, Stern et al. (1975) discovered a coaction mode in which they vocalized together. They provide naturally occurring empirical data as evidence for the two patterns in mother–child interactions, which serve different communicative functions: the alternating mode as a precursor to a dialogic pattern in conversation, and the coactive mode, which occurred more frequently and which was connected to interactions of high emotional arousal, such as when the infant was fretting and the mother soothing, as a means to create/sustain interpersonal relationships. Likewise, Lewis and Freedle (1972) wrote of the striking dynamic interactional pattern between mothers and their 12-week-old infants, a dyadic relationship with numerous chainings of gaze, touch, and vocalizations, leading them to hypothesize that aspects of this communication system form the rudimentary bases for the development of language. For Lewis and Freedle (1972), “meaning becomes the central factor to be considered when one wishes to explore the development of language” (p. 5). Their interpretation of observational data led them to suggest that the communication network of 3-month-old babies could be developmentally linked to the more formal linguistic skills which they observed in the same children at the age of 2. Others were also taking a semantic perspective on CLD while still taking the word as the point of initiation into language—i.e. the onset of what is called the holophrastic stage, followed by the two-word stage. One objection to the research focusing on a potential universal structure of child language, pivot grammar (Section 2.2.3), was that it did not focus on the meaning behind the structure. Bloom (1970) found that a superficial focus on the ordering of elements failed to take into account differences in contextualized meanings: for example, ‘Mommy sock’ was used by a child to mean two different things, one referring to the child picking up her mother’s sock and the other to the mother putting the sock on the child. Bloom saw the importance of the immediate context in disambiguating the child’s meaning: as the mother was putting on the child’s sock, she knew exactly what her child meant. She (and others; see Brown, 1973, for an overview) focused on the semantic relations, such as possession, location, and agency, that the utterances encoded. Furthermore, in CLD, waiting until a child puts two words together in order to understand the development of grammatical competence is problematic, as prior to that time children do express meanings which are clearly understood by their interlocutors. Ingram (1971) drew on Fillmore’s (1968) case

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grammar, whose semantic functions of, for example, agent and instrument provided an effective framework for the kinds of semantic notions that children express, and can be seen as the basis for the development of grammar. In order to create a fully semantic model, Ingram replaced Fillmore’s ‘verb’ with the semantic category of transitivity, arguing that language acquisition consists of “the development of semantic categories with eventual syntactic marking” (p. 889); in this view, semantics leads the development of syntax; Ingram further included gesture, intonation, and one-word utterances as precursors of markers of syntactic use. At the same time, Brown (1973: 148) highlighted the differences across some of the abstract taxonomies of semantic functions by different researchers, suggesting that “no proof exists that the semantic levels hit by any theorist […] are psychologically functional”. In sum, the semantics behind child utterances has provided a rich field of research. Another related and productive research perspective on CLD was taken by those who were pursuing a functional line. In considering language function, it is useful to draw on Asp’s (2017) classification: language as instrument (through which we express thought and emotion and through which we create communication and contact), language as action (through which we tell stories, joke, gossip, and so on), and (here we diverge from Asp’s third category and draw on Halliday, 1975: 4) language as consisting of functional structures internal to the clause. In the instrumental category we find Karl Bühler (1990[1934]), German psychologist and linguist, who viewed language as an organum (‘instrument’ in Ancient Greek). Bühler identified three semantic functions of the sign which come together in speech events: first, it functions as a symbol, representing “objects and states of affairs” (p. 35); second, it works as a symptom, conveying the inner states of the speaker; third, it is a signal, designed to appeal to the hearer, “whose inner and outer behaviour it directs as do other communicative signs” (p. 35). He uses the terms representation, expression, and appeal respectively to refer to these semantic relations. The sign is thus simultaneously a symptom, a signal, and a symbol, which functions to convey the point of view, including the emotional state of an addresser (the expressive function), in order to reach an addressee (the appeal function), about some situation or thing (the representation function). In a study which could be considered an application of Bühler’s instrumental functions, Katherine Nelson (1973) collected data on mothers’ regular, detailed records of their child’s use of words between the ages of 1 and 2 years. Nelson found a difference between two children in the study in terms of the functions of the language used: one child talked more about things, which Nelson suggests is a “largely object-oriented language”, which she termed ‘referential’ (R) (p. 22); the other child talked more about herself and other people, which Nelson characterized as “a more self-oriented language” and termed ‘expressive’ (E) (p. 22). Nelson further argues that “at an early point the child appears to act on one or another dominant hypothesis about the function of speech … [which] dictates the kind of language he attempts to learn—primarily E or R” (p. 102).The hypothesis emerges through the child’s interaction with surrounding adults and is often derived from the interactive style of the mother.

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Asp’s second category of language functions, language as action, includes speech acts, focusing on the intent with which an utterance is produced. That is, utterances (and other paralinguistic phenomena, such as head nods and shoulder shrugs) carry an illocutionary force, or intent, such as requesting, accepting, threatening, or informing. Numerous studies have focused on how children do things with their utterances. Gruber (1973) distinguished a child’s utterances depending on whether the action referred to someone or something present, thus acting on something in the context. Using data from a child aged 1.24 to 1.42 years3 from Bullowa et al.’s (1964) study, Gruber noted that all of the child’s early two-word phrases are of this type: for example, demanding someone’s attention or demanding something of someone; in these cases, which he terms ‘performative’, the “speech and accompanying bodily activity represent the same communicative act” (p. 443). Towards the end of the observation period, however, the child began to also express reportative speech acts, such as “shoe all gone.” Gruber’s theorizing about how the child learns to carry out these types of utterances is located within Chomsky’s UG agenda (see Section 2.2.3), and thus he saw them as reduced forms of fuller sentences (given the innate view of structural knowledge). Dore (1974) took another approach to speech acts, with the “primitive speech act” itself as the basic unit of communication. Dore tackled the long-standing controversy regarding the notion of the holophrase as standing in for a complete sentence, which could be avoided, he argued, by starting from the primitive speech act, which consists of a “rudimentary referring expression” (such as ‘doggie’ or ‘bye-bye’) and a “primitive force indicating device” (typically intonation); by combining the two (for example, ‘mama’ with a falling tone for the primitive speech act of ‘labelling’, and with a rising tone for “requesting”) (Dore, 1974: 31). In addition to labelling and requesting, other primitive speech acts include greeting, protesting, calling, and repeating. Over time, the child’s referring expressions become increasingly grammaticalized, first as rudimentary propositions and later as sentences (p. 35). Dore (1974: 39) positions his primitive speech act developmental theory between the extreme positions of Chomsky’s mentalist, innate structures and Halliday’s communicative functions. Finally, in studying language functions that are internal to the clause, Halliday (1975) lists several possibilities for what might be considered as such. For example, Subject is a function in the structure of the clause; so are transitivity functions such as Agent and Process, as in Fillmore’s case grammar, applied by Ingram (1971). Halliday (1975: 4) notes that both types of studies—of structural and transitivity functions—are ultimately semantic in nature. Another possible clause internal focus is through the discourse functions of Theme-Rheme or topiccomment. Prague School linguists developed Bühler’s functional model further through their characterization of information structure through Theme (typically given information) followed by Rheme (which typically encodes new information) (Asp 2017: 33; see also Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3). Researchers have applied notions of given and new information to child communication: Greenfield (1978) argued that children’s single-word utterances encode new or unknown/uncertain information, which can include an object not in the child’s

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possession, or, if the object is in possession, it is undergoing a change of state. Thus, a child might utter ‘car’, and then, with the car in possession, the child might utter ‘beepbeep’ or ‘down’ to indicate some change in the object itself. Bates and MacWhinney (1987) drew on Greenfield (and others) to further suggest that background or given information, relevant to the meaning but often shared in the context, is rarely encoded by very young children, unless via extralinguistic means, such as gesture (e.g. pointing). Paprotté and Sinha (1987) underscore the joint construction of interactive events between small children and caregivers while also emphasizing the regularity and predictability of both linguistic and non-linguistic patterns in these events. In these contexts, it seems that children from an early age can both determine the status of information and utilize that status to regulate the discourse. They give the examples of actionrelated expressions, such as ‘off ’ and ‘down’, and indicators of dis/appearance, such as ‘there’ and ‘gone, which “do not encompass any single form-class of adult grammar” (p. 283) but which foreground the dynamic or changing aspect of a sequence of actions from the point of view of the speaker and his or her goals. Such expressions presuppose, as given information, the participant roles both of the interactants and of the objects acted upon (p. 283). Still, they are cautious in considering this discourse organization as based upon a fully developed distinction between Theme-Rheme or given-new. This section of CLD studies has led to important considerations related to interaction, semantics, and functions of language, all issues which were central to Halliday’s work on language and its development.

2.3 Halliday’s Study of CLD 2.3.1 The State of CLD from Halliday’s Viewpoint Halliday (1975) described the contemporary period of CLD studies as dominated by a psycholinguistic perspective that viewed the goal of CLD as the acquisition of the structures of the fully formed adult language; thus, the child’s attempts were considered “ill formed; they are interpreted as deviations from an eventual norm” (Halliday, 1975: 2). Halliday objected to both the nativist perspective and its predecessor, behaviourism; while they were seen as antithetical, with the former focused on “learning by predisposition from within” (Halliday, 2004f[1980]b: 309) and the latter focused on learning by imitation, they held a similarity: [i]n both of these accounts of the learning process the child is treated as an island. Here is the child, and individual entity; here is language, a readymade thing-in-itself, and the child’s task is to reach out, or reach in, and acquire it (309).

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Halliday (2004g[1983]) located his research by tracing perspectives from both psychology and linguistics. From psychology, the “revolution in professional thinking about children” (p. 210) around the time of his writing about CLD in the early 1970s moved away from viewing infants as passive and non-receptive and towards accepting them as responsive, interactive, and communicative (see Section 2.2.4). He argued that linguists did not embrace this view of the infant immediately, as they were “constrained by the schemata of their own discipline just as psychologists were by theirs” (p. 210), citing first the focus on phonetics and phonology (as inspired by the work of Jakobson, 1968[1941]), and then the immense influence of Chomsky and his focus on syntactic development. Halliday reacted negatively to this focus, arguing: from this came the black box view of language acquisition, designed to solve a problem that the theory itself had created – the ‘problem’ of how a child could construct a grammar on the basis of what was thought to be (quite erroneously, as it happens; cf. Karmiloff-Smith 1979: 5) ill-formed and impoverished data. This purist view of natural speech as something scrappy, formless and unsystematic was itself a product of the same ideology, which idealized the individual speaker, explicitly denied the significance of the social context, and lacked the conception of an underlying semantic system from which the syntax of a natural language is non-arbitrarily derived. (Halliday, 2004g[1983]: 210–211) Halliday found the focus on input misleading; he was not interested in arguments related to the poverty of the stimulus (Section 2.2.3); in fact, he cites William Labov (1970) to support the point that the language surrounding the child “is fantastically rich and structured”4 (Halliday, 2013a[1972]: 29), and “coherent, well-formed and contextually relevant” (Halliday, 1975: 45). According to Halliday, this disagreement on the richness of the input was not an argument against the nativist hypothesis; rather, it was an argument against the necessity of that interpretation.The nativist/empiricist debate was not of interest to him; as he phrased it,“I don’t believe in input; I believe in interaction” (Halliday, 2013b[1985] a: 69). In fact, in Halliday’s view, children’s protolanguage is created between children and their caregivers; it is “an interact” (Halliday, 2013c[1985]b: 89). At the time, Halliday read much of the CLD literature available, some of which “simply counted vocabulary, which doesn’t tell you very much” (Halliday & Hasan, 2006: 28). He traced the focus of attention in CLD from phonology to syntax to semantics, and then wrote positively of the “convincing illustrations” (Halliday, 1975: 139) in the work of Lois Bloom (1970, 1973, 1975) of language learning as an aspect of cognitive development.This movement towards developmental explanation as rooted in a “higher level of semiotic organization” (1975, 139), such as learning and cognition, he saw as sensible; however, he chose the alternative, but complementary, perspective of the higher-level semiotic of the social system:

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The social semiotic is the system of meanings that defines or constitutes the culture; and the linguistic system is one mode of realization of these meanings. The child’s task is to construct the system of meanings that represents his own model of social reality.This process takes place inside his own head; it is a cognitive process. But it takes place in contexts of social interaction, and there is no way it can take place except in those contexts. (Halliday, 1975: 139) Halliday, then, was among those developmental researchers who stressed the importance of interaction from the time of birth for CLD, as “communicative behaviour begins at a very early stage in life. It begins, we would now say, at birth, and perhaps even before” (Halliday, 2004g[1983]: 213). Halliday and other researchers at the time reacted negatively to the conception of the newborn (as Sigismund viewed his child; see Section 2.2) as a pre-communicative being and thus not of interest to analysis of language development. Claire Painter, who followed Halliday’s line of research, argued that “by the time the first word is uttered, the infant has a long interactional history behind him, and experience of communicative behaviours with significant partners which is changing and adapting as he changes” (Painter, 1984: 49); that is, it is an intersubjective process: Text, the language process, is co-created by child and other; each in interaction with the other, and both in interaction with the context of situation … What the child learns from is not the product that comes from out there, but the interactive process by which his own resources are playing a part in creating the text. (Halliday, 2004e[1980]a: 207) That is, the meanings are jointly constructed; they are not simply imposed by the caregiver nor […] simply owned by the child. […] the success of the sign depends on the caregiver being able to interpret the child’s expression in a way which makes sense to her but which also leads to a response that will satisfy the infant. (Painter, 1984: 39) Halliday takes it back further, using Trevarthen’s (1974) images of very tiny babies displaying interactive behaviours with their mothers, in which one can perceive a remarkable sense of identity between their actions, as if the two were taking part in a single act. Not that they are superficially similar – neither is imitating the other; yet they chime. When the film is slowed down, the child is seen to be fractionally ahead; it is he who is leading the dance. But the mother is dancing with him; it is a duo, not a ‘follow my leader’. (Halliday, 1979: 171)

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Halliday also cites Bateson (1975; see Section 2.2.4) to argue that “the sharing of attention between infant and mother is actually an exchange of meaning” (Halliday, 2004h[1998]: 7, emphasis original). Thus, Halliday’s work was aligned with research in CLD that focused on children as active participants in their development within their social context. Halliday stipulates that one criterion for linguistic behaviour is, quoting from Leopold, “the intention of communication, which must be considered the chief criterion of language” (Leopold, 1939: 21). This intentionality accords with Jane Torr’s (1997: 15) definition of intersubjectivity: “the conscious adaptation of behaviours for communicative purposes”. Torr, who also applied Halliday’s method to trace the language development of her child, highlights a major difference between Halliday’s view of CLD and that of other functional views, where caregivers impose structure and meaningful intentions on infants’ utterances and actions. In the SFL view, mirroring the interactive ‘dance’ of tiny infants, “the child regulates the interaction and the mother makes subtle adaptations to accommodate the child’s message” (Torr, 1997: 15).Thus, intersubjectivity provides continuity in the pathway of development from very early infant communicative behaviour through to protolanguage and on to the adult linguistic system. From this rendering of the contemporary research paradigms for the linguistic study of CLD, Halliday’s agenda for research emerges clearly: an interest in naturalistic enquiry, highlighting the significance of social context, prioritizing the semantic component, which motivates the structural output, and tracing developmental changes in the ability to intersubjectively construct intended meanings in interaction. Halliday’s earlier training in linguistic ethnography, along with this desire to incorporate the fuller interactional context of a child’s language development, led him to carry out his diary study of his son’s functional use of language.

2.3.2 Halliday’s Method 2.3.2.1 A Diary Study Halliday cites diary studies (see Section 2.2.1) as a rich source of understandings of early CLD: it is from the diary studies, in which intensive observations were made of individual children, typically within the family and with the child’s behaviour being natural and unelicited, rather than from the academic disciplines, that the message comes through that communicative behaviour begins at a very early stage in life (Halliday, 2004g[1983]: 211) One objection to diary studies for tracing CLD is that they are often carried out by non-linguists who are also interested in other aspects of their child’s

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development. Halliday used the ethnographic technique of the field worker by keeping a notebook record of Nigel’s meaningful expressions, when they were observed for the first time and when they re-occurred. Halliday would sometimes record as a participant-observer, through his own interactions with his child, and at others he would observe Nigel playing on his own or in interaction with others. Halliday’s in-depth training in linguistics as a fieldworker on Chinese dialects (Webster, 2007) stood him in good stead for creating the highly detailed notation system with which he recorded Nigel’s utterances (Halliday, 2004c[1976]: 64). Detailed charts in Learning how to mean include the articulation of Nigel’s expressions in phonetic script, as well as their intonation and a gloss for each. Halliday recorded any new expression which he considered meaningful, as well as expressions he had heard before, and at six-week intervals he would collate his notes into a description of the child’s system; thus, “the system was reinterpreted and described afresh each six weeks” (Halliday, 1975: 12). He chose six weeks as the optimal period, as a shorter timescale might have meant missing items which were part of the child’s system of meaning during the time period, and a longer one would have meant missing out on steps in development. He began interpreting Nigel’s utterances into the detailed descriptions at the age of 9 months as, prior to that time,“Nigel had no sysstem at all” (Halliday, 1975: 12). An important difference between prior diary studies and Halliday’s is the theoretical backing he used in mapping Nigel’s language development (Williams, 2019). 2.3.2.2 Child Language Functions Halliday was not interested in examining child language from the perspective of the fully developed adult mother tongue, but rather from the perspective of the child’s development in meaning-making abilities; thus, Halliday analysed his child’s communicative interactions for a set of basic functions. The criticisms of Learning how to mean by Greenfield and Smith (1976; see Section 2.1) suggest that Halliday (1975) provides only a sketchy account of the basis for his child language functions, with no operational definitions. Halliday (1975) does provide background by first describing a potential scenario for building up the functions inductively from the data, arriving at the functions of a child’s semiotic system “shunting between sensible observation on the one hand and imaginative but at the same time goal-directed theory on the other” (p. 15). Thus, from observation, and using common sense, a researcher would be able to generalize about a given utterance functioning, for example, to demand something from someone, and thus come up with a list of speech acts. However, he comments on a severe limitation of this method for analysing development: as children mature, the uses to which language can be put are an “endless catalogue” (p. 16),5 meaning that there would not be a strong theoretical basis for relating the child’s uses of language to generalizations about the adult’s usage. A further important consideration for Halliday in analysing CLD was that of interaction, with the objection that “the speech act is a subjective, not an intersubjective, construct”

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(Halliday, 2004d[1978]: 138). Further motivation for his child language functions came from two main sources: from outside of language through other theoretical views on functions, on the one hand, and from within language using SFL theory, on the other. To get the full background, we need to go beyond the covers of his 1975 book. As we look to Halliday’s motivations from within language, it is important to note that he theorized child language functions before the birth of his son—that is, before he began the diary study. In later interviews (Martin, 2013; Halliday and Hasan, 2006), Halliday explained that he began thinking about CLD through the literacy work he was carrying out in schools with classroom teachers (see Chapter 3), who wanted to know what children came to school with in terms of functional abilities; the teachers’ main question was: what was pre-school language development like? In a 1969 paper (Halliday, 2004a[1969]), Halliday lays out the ways in which children use language, or, as he calls them, “the child’s models of language” (p. 271). These models of language are built up through interaction with caregivers, and are the ways in which children come to internalize “what language is and what it is for” (p. 271), as children derive these understandings about language through their own experiences of language in situations of use (p. 277). Table 2.1 includes the models and a summary of Halliday’s (2004a [1969]) explanations. Table 2.1  Halliday’s (2004a [1969]) child language models Model

1) Instrumental

2) Regulatory

3) Interactional 4) Personal 5) Heuristic 6) Imaginative

7) Representational

Summary children early on become aware that “language is used as a means of getting things done” (p. 271); it is the simplest of the models of language use, one of the first to be evolved. children become aware of the use of language to regulate the behaviour of others and that language is used by others in attempts to control the children’s own behaviour. children become aware that language is used to create and maintain social relationships. through language, children become aware of themselves as individuals, and that language serves to express their own individuality. children become aware that language is a way of “investigating reality, a way of learning about things” (p. 274). children become aware that language can be used to create worlds of their own making and that, through language, they can play with its sounds, through, for example, rhymes, poems and riddles. children become aware that language is a means of communicating messages about the world, of expressing propositions.

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The representational model is “the only model of language that many adults have” (p. 276); that is, to many adults, perhaps because they do not think about its other functions, language serves to express propositions, to express content about the world. Halliday suggests that this model of language comes into play relatively late in the child’s developmental process; the representational model “never becomes in any real sense the dominant function; but it does, in later years, become the dominant model” (p. 276, emphasis original). Thus, in this 1969 paper, there is a difference between a model of language, suggesting some conscious awareness of the role language is playing in a given context, and a function of language, which suggests a more unconscious use, except arguably in the case of the representational function. This focus of the adult on language as a means of representing experience through propositions is “for the child, a quite unrealistic picture of language, since it accounts for only a small fragment of his total awareness of what language is about” (p. 276). In his 1969 paper, Halliday did not explain the background to this theorizing of child language models, motivated by teachers wanting information about what a 5-year-old child comes to school knowing about language. However, much later he commented that, as he was investigating this knowledge for the teachers, he read “a lot of the literature available at the time on early language development […] for instance a lovely book by Ruth Weir (1962) called Language in the Crib” (Halliday & Hasan, 2006: 28), a book which he has also said “was one of the best in those days” (Halliday, 2013d[1986]: 121).While he does not elaborate on why he found Weir’s work worthwhile, we can assume that he was attracted to her functional approach, drawing on Jakobson’s (1960) functions to analyse the pre-sleep soliloquies of her 2½-year-old son. In later writings, he elucidated more fully the functional milieu into which he wrote (Halliday 2003[1981]), tracing a pathway starting from Malinowski’s (1923) functions: pragmatic, including active and narrative functions, and magical, which included religious and ceremonial functions. He then moved on to Bühler’s (1990[1934]; see Section 2.2.4) functions, and from there to Jakobson (1960), who added three further functions to Bühler’s: in Jakobson’s model, Bühler’s expressive function became the emotive function, connecting the message to the addresser’s attitudes and opinions; likewise, Jakobson’s conative (Bühler’s appeal) function is that of the message’s design on the addressee, and his referential (Bühler’s representation) function is oriented towards the context. Jakobson, like Bühler, saw these functions as occurring simultaneously in verbal messages, and, also like Bühler, contended that the referential function “is the leading task of numerous messages” (1990: 4). Jakobson added three further functions: the phatic,6 which is oriented towards contact between interlocutors; the metalinguistic, which focuses on the code, or language itself, as in What do you mean by X?; and the poetic, in which the message itself is the important factor—it is focused on for its own sake. Halliday (2003[1981]) also mentioned Desmond Morris’s (1967) ‘information talking’, or the ability to refer to objects and events (Morris, like Bühler and Jakobson, saw this as the dominant form of communication); ‘mood talking’, or the ability to express emotion; ‘exploratory talking’, similar to Jakobson’s poetic

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function; and ‘grooming talking’, or “the meaningless polite chatter of social situations” (Morris, 1967: 106). Finally, Halliday also drew on Britton’s (1970) functions from the perspective of education and children learning to write in school, where they usually start with the expressive function and move to the transactional (which includes Jakobson’s conative and representational) and/or the poetic function. Halliday’s conclusion from this review is key to SFL theory: “although the categories and terminologies differ, all of these incorporate in some form or other a basic distinction between an ideational (representational, referential, cognitive) and an interpersonal (expressive-conative, social evocative) function of language” (1975: 52, emphasis added). These two metafunctions of language—the ideational and the interpersonal—are served by the third metafunction, the textual (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3), which is an enabling function. It is intrinsic to language, and thus, according to Halliday, is not treated in most functional accounts. Furthermore, given that the textual “arises out of the very nature of language” (1975: 52), there is no need to trace its developmental emergence independently of the other two metafunctions. The movement from the child language functions, which are multiple and do not initially co-occur in an utterance, to the metafunctional nature of the adult language thus provides the developmental pathway children take in learning how to mean. In his 1969 paper Halliday did not explain how children move from their models of language to the adult system; however, he does so in his 1975 book, as we shall soon see. A further important consideration for theorizing functions from within language is Halliday’s view of other functional theories which “have attempted, as a rule, not so much to explain the nature of language in functional terms, as explain types of language use” (Halliday, 1975: 52).That is, Halliday highlights the difference with the SFL theorizing of functions in that the others were “functional theories of the utterance, but not recognized as a dimension of the grammar” (Halliday & Hasan, 2006: 27). In adult language, meaning potential is openended as it can convey an “infinite range of options in meaning” (Halliday, 1975: 16); SFL groups that range of options into the three metafunctions, which have strong internal and weak internal constraints on the choices made. That is, choices in one metafunction have little effect on choices in the other two metafunctions; however, choices made within each metafunction constrain other choices within. Thus, from within language, SFL theory views the three metafunctions as working together to give rise to the network of options available in the grammar of a language (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3). At the same time, Halliday’s study of CLD is one of the motivations that led precisely to this metafunctional view of language (Taverniers, 2002). That is, “the macro-functions of the adult language are groupings of the (more diversely differentiated) uses of the child’s language in various contexts” (Taverniers, 2002: 64). From outside language, in theorizing his language models/functions, Halliday drew on the social theory of Basil Bernstein, who posited a number of “critical socializing contexts” (Bernstein, 1971: 137), or “types of situations involving the use of language which play a key part in the transmission of culture to the child”

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(Halliday, 1975: 18). Given their critical role in transmitting culture, Halliday considered that they would also be critical for the process of language learning. These contexts of Bernstein’s are the regulative (where children are made aware of rules of moral order and how they are backed), the instructional (where children learn about the objective essence of things and people), the imaginative (or innovative: contexts in which children are encouraged to create worlds of their own), and the interpersonal (where children learn about affective states, their own and those of others) (Bernstein, 1971: 140). Bernstein argued (following Sapir, Malinowski, Firth,Vygotsky, and Luria) that these different contexts place constraints upon syntactic and lexical choices. Also from outside language, again in a later paper, Halliday (1992: 20–21) constructed the way in which meaning develops in the individual, beginning with ‘protolanguage’: meaning evolves out of the tension between the two primary modes of experience: first, material processes, which are experienced ‘out there’; and, second, conscious processes ‘in here’. Nigel’s first sign at 5 months was a high-pitched squeak, which Halliday glossed as “what’s that? – that’s interesting”. Here, the baby is “beginning to construe conceptual order out of perceptual chaos” (1992: 21) by bringing together the conscious (curiosity) with the material (what’s going on). This projection of the material by the conscious is the process through which meaning emerges; furthermore, in this projection, the consciousness can take one of two forms: reflection (‘I think’) and action (‘I want’). At the same time, there are two domains of material experience: one the intersubjective ‘you and me’, and the other the objective ‘the rest’ (‘it’, ‘them’). The combination of the forms of consciousness and the domains of experience create a matrix which demonstrates the emergence of the microfunctions of protolanguage (Figure 2.1). Thus, we can piece together Halliday’s functional motivation from two directions. First of all, it came from within language, from the desire to explicate the transition in early childhood from protolanguage to adult language, from microfunctions which are realized bi-stratally (one meaning = one expression), through the child’s protolanguage, to metafunctions which are realized tristratally, with the lexicogrammar of the adult language mediating between the semantics and the phonology (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.6). Second, it came from outside of language, from the combination of the semiotic space created by the fusion of the two primary modes of experience (Figure 2.1) with the addition of Bernstein’s critical social contexts; here there is an alignment of Halliday’s regulatory and instrumental with Bernstein’s regulative, and the interactional form of consciousness domain of experience 1st/2nd person 3rd person

action

reflection

regulatory instrumental

interactional personal

Figure 2.1  The protolanguage ‘microfunctions’ (Halliday, 1992: 21).

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and personal with Bernstein’s interpersonal. That leaves Bernstein’s imaginative (which Halliday includes as one of his microfunctions; see Table 2.2) and instructional, which arguably aligns with Halliday’s heuristic function. In the 1975 book, he glosses the microfunctions7 as summarized in Table 2.2. Note that, at this point, Halliday did not include the representational microfunction, the ‘I’ve got something to tell you’ function, which refers to the use of language to communicate information to someone. Halliday later called this microfunction the ‘informative’ and contended that it emerges much later, as it is intrinsic to language itself (a point which we return to in Chapter 5).We now turn to Halliday’s findings with respect to Nigel’s language development. 2.3.3 Nigel’s Language Development 2.3.3.1 Phase I Halliday (1975) divided Nigel’s language development into three phases: protolanguage, transition, and into the mother tongue.The first phase begins at around 9 months and is divided into five time periods of six weeks each. Nigel was at the “threshold of language” (Halliday, 2004b[1974]: 91) at the age of 9 months, with a meaning system consisting of five elements. Halliday discerned two vocalized expressions, both [ø]: one with a mid-low to low falling tone, and the other uttered on a mid to low falling tone. Halliday categorized these expressions respectively as interactional (‘let’s be together’) and personal (‘look, it’s moving) (Halliday, 1975: 148). Nigel also communicated using three gestures,

Table 2.2  Halliday’s (1975) child language functions Microfunction

Summary

1) Instrumental

the ‘I want’ function, serving to satisfy material needs.

2) Regulatory

the ‘do as I tell you’ function, serving to control the behaviour of others—it is directed towards a particular individual, while the instrumental centres on the goods or services. the ‘me and you’ function, serving to create interaction and convey meanings such as generalized greetings. the ‘here I come’ function, serving to express children’s own awareness of their uniqueness within their environment; at later stages, it further serves “to mould that self—ultimately, language in the development of the personality” (1975: 20). the ‘tell me why’ function; in its earliest form, it exists as demands for names of things, which is children’s way of categorizing objects in their world. the ‘let’s pretend’ function; children use language to create world of their own.

3) Interactional 4) Personal

5) Heuristic 6) Imaginative

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two of which were instrumental (grasping an object firmly meant ‘I want that’, touching an object lightly meant ‘I don’t want that’) and one regulatory (touching a person or object firmly meant ‘do that again’). While Halliday (1975: 22) wrote that the vocalized expressions “need hardly be regarded as constituting a linguistic system”, as, in each case one meaning was assigned to one function, with no alternatives, he regarded them as “a form of language” (a protolanguage), given that they fulfilled two criteria: systematicity (referring to the relation between the content and the expression) and functionality (given that the content can be interpreted in functional terms) (Halliday, 2004b[1974]: 91). By the age of 10½ months, Halliday characterized Nigel’s sets of options as a linguistic system. At that age, he vocalized four out of the six microfunctions, including different expressions for systemic options within each. Here I provide the examples of the microfunctions with glosses in brackets of each of the systemic options, without the vocalizations; i.e. I only provide their meanings.8 For the instrumental microfunction, Nigel had an expression for both general (‘give me that’) and specific (‘give me my bird’) demands. For the regulatory, he expressed both normal (‘do that’) and intensified (‘do that right now!’) commands. For the interactional, he expressed initiation moves, both normal (or friendly, as in ‘nice to see you’ or ‘let’s look at this together’) and intensified (showing impatience, as in ‘nice to see you – finally!’), as well as a response move, with an expression indicating ‘yes, it’s me’. For the personal microfunction, Nigel had expressions of interest, both general (‘that’s interesting’) and specific—referring to movement (‘look, it’s moving’); he further expressed pleasure, also general (‘that’s nice’) and specific—referring to taste (‘that tastes nice’). Also within the personal microfunction was another systemic choice: that of withdrawal (‘I’m sleepy’).This led Halliday to theorize Nigel’s semiotic universe at this stage as consisting of the self and the non-self, or the environment (Figure 2.2). This theorizing further extends to the child’s enactment of interactive roles in the symbolic exchanges that take place, often channelled through objects which themselves take on different roles; that is, caregivers use objects such as toys and dolls as ‘be-ers’ (Halliday, 1975: 83) to create interaction with babies (whom they self (personal) inward: withdrawal outward: affect outward: curiosity

for interaction (interaction) self-initiated other-initiated

social system persons environment

for control (regulatory) objects (instrumental) general favourite

Figure 2.2  The 9-month-old’s semiotic universe (based on Halliday, 1975: 85).

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greet, for example), as ‘do-ers’ or ‘causers’ of different activities, and as ‘givers’ or ‘recipients’ of other objects, thus providing the semiotic space for the development of the interactional, regulatory, and instrumental microfunctions.The child also takes on these roles through interaction, which “anticipates in an interesting way the roles of persons in the transitivity system of the adult semantic” (Halliday, 1975: 83) Between 10½ and 12 months of age, Nigel continued to expand the systemic options available in the interactional and personal microfunctions. He added to his earlier repertoire in the interactional microfunction by expanding his initiation moves to a personalized greeting (the nanny’s name) and adding an expression to the normal greetings to indicate objects (‘look!’, e.g. ‘a picture!’). His response system split into two expressions: one responding to interaction (‘yes, it’s me’ or ‘yes, I see’), and another responding to regulation (‘yes?!’) He added a further interactional system through an expression indicating engagement (‘what’s that?’, ‘there it is’, or ‘that’s what I wanted’).The personal microfunction also gained in expressions; for example, within the participation: interest: specific system, he increased his range of vocalizations to dog, ball, aeroplane, and nose. As Nigel moved to the period extending from 12 to 13½ months, he increased the systemic choices within his four initial microfunctional systems and added the imaginative microfunction. In the instrumental, he now not only demanded but also responded with two different vocalizations: one to indicate an object available in the environment, and the other for an object not present. He also had different vocalizations for different specific demands, e.g. for powder and a clock. In the regulatory microfunction, he added a new overall system: that of specific commands, such as ‘go for a walk’ or ‘play with cat’. He further increased his general commands by splitting that system into initiation (with both normal and intensified commands) and response: positive or negative. Within the interactional microfunction, he increased his personalized greetings (adding ‘Daddy’), and now both responded to and initiated engagement. In the personal microfunction, in addition to interest and pleasure, he had vocalizations for surprise and disgust. Finally, the imaginative microfunction took on pretend-play (which shared the vocalization of withdrawal in the personal microfunction; i.e. when Nigel wanted to express ‘I’m sleepy’ as well as ‘let’s pretend to go to sleep’); also within the imaginative microfunction, Nigel had a vocalization for singing. In the 13½- to 15-month-old period, the main differences were in the personal microfunction in terms of the systemic options to express interest; now Nigel had different vocalizations to express general and specific interest. Within the latter, he had different vocalizations each for movement or noises related to ‘dog’, ‘bird’, ‘bus’, and ‘aeroplane’, and also for the familiar objects ‘cat’ and ‘pottie’. Within the imaginative microfunction, he added vocalizations for songs and jingles.Then, in the next six-week period, from 15–16 ½ months, Nigel’s vocalizations and systems expanded widely. In the instrumental microfunction, he expanded his system of initiations, providing differing vocalizations to indicate a normal demand (‘give me that’), an exploratory one (‘that’s new; let me see it’), and a plaintive utterance (‘somebody do something!’). His specific demands now

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went beyond his ritual objects of ‘powder’ and ‘clock’ to include food, with a vocalization for a general demand and separate articulations for specific food items; he also had a specific demand for ‘pottie’. As to the regulatory microfunction, his specific commands became vocalized as suggestions (with separate ones for ‘go for a walk’ and ‘draw a picture’) and requests (also separate vocalizations for two requests: ‘draw curtains’ and ‘come for lunch’).The range of interactional expressions continued to include greeting and engagement, the former now including an expanding repertoire of personalized greetings for specific people. In addition to this expanding repertoire, for the first time Nigel layered on intonation to distinguish two meanings when uttering personal names; a high-level tone meant ‘where are you? I’m looking for you’ and a mid-fall plus low-level tone meant ‘hullo, there you are!’. This layering of intonation onto the same expression to create differing meanings involved “a level of coding intermediate between content and expression” (Halliday, 1975: 155), a meaning-making strategy which foregrounds the tri-stratal adult language system. In addition to the novelty of the use of intonation to contrast meaning during this 15–16½ month period, the engagement subsystem of the interactional microfunction increased both in types of response (with different response vocalizations whether Nigel was asked to say something, to find something, or to look at something) and types of initiation; the latter included a vocalization for shared regret (as in ‘let’s be sad’ because, for example, something was broken) and another for shared attention, which foregrounds the heuristic microfunction of language. Nigel also increased his repertoire of vocalizations for meanings within the personal microfunction, which now was split into observations (of movement/noise and of familiar objects) and expressions of feelings (with different vocalizations for interest, pleasure, surprise, excitement, ritual joy—when presented a favourite object or a mirror—warning, and complaint). Within the imaginative microfunction, he added two specific vocalizations for two different games (peek-a-boo and hiding an object) and a third for pretend-play. 2.3.3.2 Phase II:Transition The second phase of Nigel’s language development, the transition to the adult system, began during the period from 16½–18 months. Nigel made rapid advances in vocabulary,9 increasing both in range (adding 80–100 new meanings) and in form: the expressions were now much more clearly English words. At first, these expressions were used holophrastically, and thus construed meanings which were both complete and functionally independent. So, for example, Nigel’s utterance of ‘cat’ meant ‘hullo cat’ (interactional) and ‘syrup’ meant ‘I want my syrup’ (instrumental) (Halliday, 1975: 42). Interestingly, there were a couple of occasions in which Nigel combined two functions into one utterance, for example ‘cake!’ meaning both ‘look, there’s a cake—and I want some!’. This striking occurrence foregrounds the adult language in which all utterances are plurifunctional, and “for a child the ability to mean two things at once marks a great advance” (Halliday, 1975: 42; see Chapter 5 for further discussion).

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During this phase of rapid growth in new words, some utterances did not fit into any of the microfunctions that Nigel had expressed before, i.e., the instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, and imaginative. The previous sixweek period had provided a tiny glimpse of the heuristic combined with the interactional, while the addition of lexical items such as ‘bubble’, ‘toe’, ‘star’, ‘hot’, and ‘weathercock’ during this transition period combined the personal and the heuristic; Nigel’s reportorial expansion in this lexical stage seemed highly motivated by his desire to learn about his environment. The process of combining the personal and the heuristic follows a developmental pathway starting from the separation of the self from the environment (see Figure 2.2), with the increased meaning potential provided by each of these social systems, where the self is focused on the personal (e.g. pleasure, bodily needs) and the environment consists of other persons or objects. New meanings emerge when the two are combined, as in ‘look! that’s interesting!’, which then leads the child into developing “a semantics for the interpretation and structuring of the environment in terms of his own experience” (Halliday, 1975: 43). Thus, what Nigel was doing with these new additions to his repertoire of meaning-making resources was categorizing his experience and his observations; these expressions serve as a “heuristic hypothesis about the environment” (p. 43), which can later be used in further contexts as methods of recall and prediction. Thus, at this stage, Halliday posited the emergence of two macrofunctions: one is the “learning function of language”, or the “mathetic function” (p. 44), which combines the personal and heuristic microfunctions, and the other is the “pragmatic function”, which includes the instrumental, regulatory, and interactional microfunctions. Nigel’s holophrastic stage was short; his explosion of vocabulary was followed closely by a structural explosion, where he continued the process of developing a stratum between content and expression, that of the lexicogrammar. At the beginning of Phase II, Nigel used two types of what Halliday calls ‘proto-structures’ (1975: 45).The first was an expression combined with a gesture, such as in [ndà] (‘star’) while shaking his head, which meant ‘I can’t see the star’. The second consisted of combining a general and a specific expression from within the same function: an example from the personal microfunction is [ù æyì] ‘ooh, an egg’, to express excitement at seeing an egg. Not long after, Nigel started to string together two or more words, such as ‘bubble no more’, meaning ‘the bubbles have gone away’. At first, each of the words had their own independent tone contour (falling). Similarly, Bloom (1973: 41) reported that the children in her study initially strung together single-word utterances which were relatively equally stressed, were separated by pauses, and were articulated on a falling tone; she later explains that these successive single-word utterances were related to one another by virtue of context and behavior—they referred to intersecting states of affairs. The lack of sentence prosody and the general unpredictability of the order in which successive single-word utterances were emitted corresponded with the observation that the semantic interpretation of such sequences was totally dependent on context. It was

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apparent that the children were aware of and could talk about things that go together, although they were apparently unable to code or specify the relations among them linguistically. (Bloom, 1973: 45) It can be said, then, that this initial stage of putting words together is protostructural, marking the transition phase from protolanguage to the adult language. Subsequently, at 19 months, Nigel started putting together two words within one tone unit. He produced two overall groups of these two-word units: pragmatic, from the instrumental (‘more meat’) and regulatory (‘mummy come’) microfunctions; and mathetic, from the personal-heuristic microfunctions (‘green car’, ‘bee flower’). Nigel distinguished these two macrofunctions through his use of intonation, a “fully systematic” distinction (Halliday, 1975: 46), with all pragmatic expressions uttered on a rising tone and mathetic ones on a falling tone. This was Nigel’s “own idea” (p. 55), his “particular form of realization” (p. 46) of this major functional opposition, given that the adult system does not use intonation in this way, and “contrasts in meaning that are expressed by intonation in English are still outside his functional potential” (p. 53). Thus, while at first Nigel’s two-word utterances occurred only within one of the categories—for example, ‘more meat’ as meaning ‘I want more’ (instrumental pragmatic)—over time, using intonation, they could be transferred to the other category, the mathetic, where ‘more meat’ could come to mean ‘look, there’s more meat!’ Halliday saw this ability to make the distinction between the pragmatic (language as doing) and the mathetic (language as learning) as developmentally important in two ways. First, the use of differentiation of intonation imposes a systemic level of form between expression and content, paving the way to the development of the lexicogrammatical stratum of language, to the tri-stratal system. Second, the distinction between the mathetic and pragmatic macrofunctions “leads directly to the abstract functional distinction of ideational and interpersonal that lies at the heart of the adult linguistic system” (Halliday, 1975: 53). That is, these functional categories of the transition period during a child’s language development, where utterances are broadly either about the world (mathetic) or about doing/getting something (pragmatic), foregrounds utterances which are both simultaneously, as in fully developed language. Two further important developments that Halliday documented during the transition phase (Phase II) were dialogue and narrative. Proto-dialogue was in evidence earlier on; for example, Nigel initially engaged in dialogue through specific responses to greetings or offerings, and with responses in the instrumental, regulatory, or interactional microfunctions (e.g. in response to questions such as ‘do you want…?’). However, until the transition period, at around the age of 18 months, Nigel was not capable of initiating dialogue or of responding in a purely linguistic way; that is, he was not able to take up the dialogic social roles

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that can only be instantiated and adopted through language. The transition saw him beginning to respond to Wh-questions by providing information which, in the child’s view, is not necessarily known to the adult or available in the immediate context. This kind of dialogue is not about getting something the child wants, but rather of playing a linguistic game, as it were, of taking up a social role whose success is measured in linguistic terms (Halliday, 1975: 51). Another generic structure, narrative, also emerged in Phase II; early in this Phase, Nigel formed sequences organized by semantics but not by grammar, as in ‘tree broken, take-away, all-gone, bye-bye’ (Halliday, 1975: 111). Over time, his linguistic resources allowed him to fill in the grammar needed for storytelling, including those related to the textual metafunction, such as ordering sequences of Given-New. Related to narrative, a further addition to Nigel’s functional repertoire during the transition phase was, at around 22 months, the appearance of the informative microfunction—that is, of providing information for someone whom it is assumed does not already have it. He made an interesting distinction between information which he knew was shared with the hearer, for which he used the declarative form, and information that he knew the hearer did not possess, for which he used the interrogative form. Halliday gives the example of Nigel building a tower with blocks: to someone who was there he would say “The tower fell down” but to someone who was not present he would say “Did the tower fall down?” That is, he used these forms to distinguish between types of information rather than to encode statements or questions. 2.3.3.3 Phase III Halliday continued to record Nigel’s language through to 24 months, providing numerous examples of his expanding repertoire of meaning-making resources in interaction with those around him. The final phase of CLD, Phase III, is open-ended as children initiate the period of life-long language learning, as well as learning through and about the full language system; it begins at the end of Phase II, after the child has moved into the two macrofunctions and into dialogue. Halliday wrote that not all children would necessarily follow the same pattern of development: they might not create a Phase I language, or display clearly demarcated shifts from Phase I to Phase II; for example, they might use the one-word stage to transition into structure rather than doing so at the two-word stage. In any case, the combination in Halliday’s model of semantics and sociolinguistics, hitherto “rather unconnected,” shows the intertwining of the development of a linguistic system with the development of communicative competence (Halliday, 1975: 79). It is also the story of the development of a child’s meaning potential, moving from a reliance on the context and immediate relationships to being able to construct contexts and relationships through language. The rest of this chapter investigates issues arising from Halliday’s study, and includes other accounts which have applied his theory.

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2.4 Issues Arising from Halliday’s Study Several issues have arisen throughout this relating of Halliday’s theory of CLD, both in and of itself and also when comparing it to other research: the applicability of his functional categories, the nature of the input, the issue of continuity (or how children move from their initial language to the adult version), and the fit with other contemporary perspectives. These are addressed in turn. 2.4.1 Applications of Halliday’s Theory and Categories Regarding Halliday’s child language functions, Ingram echoed Greenfield and Smith’s (1976) criticism of Halliday’s functions: While the descriptions of each are straightforward enough, there are no operational definitions of how anyone can apply these to data from another child. The only method available is an understanding of the definitions combined with a very careful reading of his actual analyses from Nigel, focussing on the meanings. (Ingram, 1989: 171) A relatively small number of studies have applied Halliday’s functional categories in following the developmental trajectory of children, and these studies are reviewed in this section and the next. First of all, using a sampling method rather than a diary study, Barrett (1981) traced the functional use of language of two children over the course of eight months from just under 18 months to just over 24 months old; data was collected every two weeks in the form of half-hour recorded sessions in the child’s home; any adults present were asked to interact naturally with the child. Barrett analysed his data using Halliday’s microfunctions, and confirmed the order of emergence of the microfunctions, from instrumental, regulatory, interactional, and personal to later imaginative and heuristic, with no instances of the informative microfunction. However, his analysis did not confirm Halliday’s suggestion that children’s utterances are relatively unambiguous in terms of their function, as some functions are “inherently ambiguous” (p. 294). For example, one child used an utterance for both requesting objects (Instrumental) and for giving objects to others (Interactional), which, he argued, could be interpreted as requests for action—that is, asking the addressee to hand over the object in the first case and to take the object away in the second. Barrett also found the children using one term for two or more different microfunctions, which, while Barrett found it contradictory to Halliday’s finding, at this age (during Halliday’s transition Phase) is not necessarily so. Furthermore, Barrett’s examples of this perceived contradiction do not specify if the same intonation was used. Another example of “functionally ambiguous terms” (Barrett, 1981: 295) were the children’s use of ‘nominals’ to carry out more than one function; however, nominals are a rather broad category of linguistic elements, so it is difficult to judge the extent to which the uses were indeed

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ambiguous. Barrett compared Halliday’s categories with others (e.g. Dore, 1974) and concluded that “there is no reason to suppose that the categories which are used to classify the children’s linguistic productions in these […] studies actually have any psychological reality for the child” (p. 297), thus arguing against a “preconceived classificatory system to categorize […the] data” (p. 297). At the same time, we should bear in mind that Halliday’s categories were designed to capture what was happening not in the mind of the child, but rather in the interaction in context.That is, “where speech act theory embraces a notion of intention, this is avoided by Halliday, who is concerned with intersubjectively negotiated purposivity in using language, not with individual intention” (Andersen, 2017: 115). Clare Painter (1984) applied Halliday’s theoretical framework and method in a diary study of her first-born son and wrote a brilliant monograph demonstrating in detail the affordances of this type of study in tracing language development. At the same time, she carefully scrutinized Halliday’s linguistic categories of analysis, and considered the criticisms of his model. She highlighted the issue of whether the networks are located at the stratum of lexicogrammar or at that of semantics, and for her purposes treats them as a single stratum in most cases. Thus, in her interpretations of her son’s utterances, she does not distinguish between speech function and mood (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.6), and does not posit a semantic system corresponding to the grammatical one of transitivity.10 Painter included several critical voices on the provenance of Halliday’s child language microfunctions, ultimately taking the position that “Halliday’s analysis is insufficiently explicated, though this does not mean that it is simply unprincipled” (p. 52). She argued for the validity of the microfunctions, not on language-internal grounds (which is the case, for example, with phonological and grammatical categories in the adult language), but rather externally; they are extrinsically defined, and they “constitute the social contexts which instances of the language may be interpreted as realizing” (p. 48). She argued that Halliday’s microfunctions allow for a connection between early vocalizations and the development of language; that is, the context of early sociocontextual frameworks as theorized through the microfunctions allows for protolanguage to be related to the functional nature of the adult language, an argument which Halliday also makes, as we have seen. Painter further suggested that research from a psychological perspective may support Halliday’s sociologically defined categories; this research follows the interaction between caregivers and infants from the time of birth, from mirroring behaviours to forms of playing, and includes the caregivers’ constant search for and construal of meaning in child utterances. (see Section 2.2.4). Studies from an interactional perspective by Trevarthen and Hubley (1978), Bates (1979), and Newson (1978) show a milestone in child development around the age of 9 months, when babies pay voluntary attention to objects in the environment while at the same time exhibiting communicative behaviour with others (Painter, 1984). Before that time, while babies might indicate a desired object by fussing or crying, when they turn to an adult it is for comfort at not obtaining it. However, when they reach the milestone, they begin to alternate looking at

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the object and looking at an adult while they vocalize; they also begin to gain attention from others by giving or showing objects. We return to Halliday’s research to illustrate this milestone (Nigel at 9 months): Nigel had just learnt to sit up on his own, and was now ready to start meaning in earnest. He had a little floppy rabbit; I was holding it on my hand and stroking it, then making it jump in the air. When I stopped, Nigel put out his hand, and touched the rabbit, firmly but without pushing it. It was a gesture which meant ‘go on, do that again’—the same meaning that he was later to express vocally as “ùh”. He had two other gestures. If he meant that he wanted something, he would grasp it firmly in his fist, without pulling it towards him, and then let go. If he meant he did not want it, he would touch it very lightly and momentarily with the tip of his finger. These gestures were true acts of meaning. Nigel was not acting directly on the objects; he was addressing the other person, enjoining him to act. (Halliday, 2004d[1978]: 131) Note that Halliday initiated his analysis of his son’s language at 9 months. Painter further related the observation of this milestone from neonatal developmental research on intersubjectivity with Halliday’s proposed contexts of functional language use, which highlight the distinctions in the relationships enacted between babies and caregivers: focus on the self (personal), on other persons (interactional and regulatory), and on objects (instrumental) (see Figure 2.1). In sum, Painter (1984) provided strong backing for Halliday’s microfunctions; however, she posited two conditions for considering Halliday’s framework as viable. The first was whether the microfunctions would prove to be adequate to the task of interpreting her child’s utterances “without doing violence either to the observed data or to our understanding of the child’s social and mental world” (Painter, 1984: 51). The second was whether the framework would serve as an apt analytical tool for tracing continuity between early infant vocalizations and later language development (the problem of continuity, which we return to in Section 2.4.3). Painter (1984) provides a wealth of in-depth descriptions and interpretations of her son Hal’s functional repertoires as they evolve over the same six-week periods as Halliday’s.11 She also compared Hal’s development with Nigel’s, and finds some similarities and differences, the latter of interest to discussing Painter’s first condition for validating Halliday’s microfunctions. During Phase I, there were some differences between Nigel and Hal in timing of appearance of microfunctions, which may be due to variability in individual children’s development. However, in her analysis of Hal, Painter did not find a clearly demarcated line between personal and interactional microfunctional expressions (a point which Halliday also made [1975: 40]); that is, she found in her data the same expression occurring in an interactional context (with eye contact and an expectation of acknowledgement) and in a personal one (where the child does not seek an addressee nor a response). Note that, unlike Barrett (1981), she did not find the

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utterances ambiguous, as the child’s meanings became clear in the interactional context. Like Barrett, she found expressions which could be used for different microfunctions—i.e. Hal’s protolanguage did not necessarily limit one sign to one microfunction. Painter conjectured that perhaps “the functional framework is imposing an untenable distinction on the data and needs reworking” (p. 54) and suggested that the interactional and the personal could be better theorized as points on a continuum rather than as two discrete microfunctions. Another difference between Hal and Nigel was that, while the latter had expressions within the regulatory microfunction, the former did not. Hal exemplified regulatory behaviour, for example indicating that he wanted someone to stop/continue doing something, but he did so in an improvised way that was at best only marginally symbolic in each case. Also, during Hal’s protolinguistic phase, Painter did not encounter the heuristic microfunction, mainly because Hal did not make a clear, distinct vocalization of a ‘what’s that?’ meaning until the transition towards the macrofunctions, when the interactional and personal were converging towards the mathetic. In the transition phase, Painter noted aspects of language which were more protolinguistic in nature and others which were much like adult language. Like many others (not just in the SFL research paradigm), Painter observed the striking move away from Hal’s invented baby forms to the use of mother-tongue forms, with his vocabulary rapidly expanding between 16½ and 18 months from around twenty words to more than ninety. Sometimes, and initially, those additions were protolinguistic in that one sign had one meaning/function. However, during this phase, there was “a washing out of some microfunctional boundaries” (Painter, 1984: 115), between the instrumental and regulatory, on the one hand, and the interpersonal and personal on the other, with words used in these latter two contexts uttered using a similar falling (sometimes rising-falling) tone. There were also some instances where a word was used initially within a personal context and subsequently in an instrumental one (for example dropping something and noting ‘there-tis’, and then, not being able to reach it, changing to a plaintive voice until someone picked it up). Here the switch from one function to another was marked by voice quality and not just by the context. Like Nigel, Hal used intonation to mark the distinction between the pragmatic and mathetic macrofunctions. Painter, like Halliday, viewed this use of tone as a step towards simultaneous encoding of the interpersonal and ideational metafunctions of language. Painter, considering the differences in microfunctional use between Hal and Nigel, further reflected that the initial microfunctions can be arranged along a cline from more reflective to more active, rather than thought of as discrete functions. At the same time, she contended that Halliday’s microfunctional approach provides a useful heuristic for “discovering the relevant contexts for early speech, and thus for tracing the origins of later linguistic developments, as well as for building up a picture of the child’s social world” (1984: 117). Painter provides a far fuller consideration than does Halliday through the end of the transition of Hal’s building up of lexicogrammatical structures, the proto-structures which lead to the structures of the adult

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language, a fascinating picture which goes beyond the space available here, but which would be well worth comparing to other accounts of how children learn the structures of language. For example, she demonstrates how Hal gradually built up towards an approximation of the mood system of English, in using forms which approximated imperatives, declaratives, and interrogatives, as well as how he used these forms to realize the speech function system, such as initiating and responding in information exchanges.These ever-closer approximations to the adult system follow the contextual needs and goals of children’s communication, while also being built from the linguistic resources available at any given point in their development. In 1985, Qui (1985) published an article relating some of the results of a crosssectional study of ten children at various ages of the transition period (16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, and 25 months, respectively) using Halliday’s theoretical base. Each child was observed three times during sessions of 1–1.5 hours over a period of three weeks. In his article, he reports on the linguistic repertoires of the 16-, 19-, and 23-month-old children to illustrate the beginning of the transition into Phase II (Stage I), the further development in the pragmatic and mathetic macrofunctions (Stage II), and the breakdown of the opposition between the pragmatic and the mathetic (Stage III). For the latter, Qui gives the example of the 23-month old’s utterance, translated as “Where’s the little stool?”, which suggests the mathetic macrofunction (seeking information), yet the pragmatic function was that of command, a function that was corroborated in the child’s subsequent utterance, translated as ‘Bring me the little stool’. Qui’s (1985) study, like Painter’s, provides detailed descriptions of the children’s linguistic resources, showing differences in their repertoires over time, but which corroborate the overall trajectories of Nigel and Hal. Jane Torr also applied Halliday’s method to her daughter Anna’s language development over the course of her first 2.5 years, which appeared first as her PhD thesis in 1987 and then as a monograph 10 years later (Torr, 1997). She also provided detailed functional networks of vocalizations and their glosses, with multiple examples from her daughter’s language. She compared her findings to those of Halliday, Painter, and Qui, and found similarities in the linguistic development of all the children, in spite of differences in language background, environment, and culture. She also found some differences. For example, Anna used voice quality instead of tone (as used by both Nigel and Hal) to mark the difference between the mathetic and pragmatic macrofunctions, and she did not do so consistently. Also, dialogue occurred earlier in Anna’s data than in Hal and Nigel’s, and for Anna, like Nigel but not like Hal, language structures developed more prominently in the pragmatic macrofunction, while the mathetic remained unelaborated in comparison.Thus, although in general grammatical terms the developmental pattern first observed by Halliday is certainly common to Anna and Hal as well as Nigel, individual differences exist in the actual strategies used by the children in the passage from infant communication to adult language (Torr, 1997: 165)

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Torr highlighted the key role of context in the SFL interpretation of language, and points out that Anna, as a younger sibling (with a sister 20 months older), had contexts of interaction which differed from the others, and also had opportunities to observe her sister in interaction with adults, sometimes modelling her utterances on those of her sister. Similarly, Tenbrink (2004) reported on a longitudinal study of a German child, J, from the age of 18 months until almost 4 years in interaction with his family members—mainly with his mother and his younger brother. In addition to a diary, data for her study also included once-a-month one-hour videotapes of unstructured typical home interaction.Tenbrink found that from the time his brother was born, J would simply comment on his presence, e.g. uttering ‘kuka’ (his way of saying his brother’s name), or, while putting a hat on his brother’s head, ‘kuka hut’. This occurred during the phase of rapid vocabulary expansion, and the utterances did not seem designed to convey information, but rather to simply comment on experience. There followed a period in which J layered emotion onto his utterances, seemingly with the desire of sharing his excitement about events with others. As he approached 30 months, his comments became more intentional and directed towards others, and Tenbrink demonstrates his moves towards merging the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions in his utterances. He began to convey meaningful information that went beyond the context of the discourse, ordering information through clausal expansion; for example, after moving his brother’s cap up, he tells his mother: “hab ich Müttüt hocheschiebt! besser sehen tann!” [“I moved up the cap! can see better!”]. Furthermore, as he approached the age of 3, J was able to inform others of something they did not know (i.e. he was able to take into account their knowledge state) and to talk about past and future events. Thus, from the age of 30 months “J seemed to have learned that language may not only serve as an expression of experience, but also as an alternative to it” (Tenbrink, 2004: 514). Around the same age, J also begin adapting his language in terms of complexity, vocabulary, and other features to his interlocutors, using language differently when interacting with his brother or his mother. The above-mentioned studies involved children learning one language. In a bilingual study, Sriniwass (2007) traced the language development of her own two children learning English and Bahasa from the time they first started using language. The children spoke English to family members and Bahasa to their Indonesian caregivers. Like other researchers applying Halliday’s method, Sriniwass kept detailed field notes of her children’s interactions over a period of around ten months. Her findings showed similar trajectories to those found by the other SFL CLD researchers: functional meanings expressed in Phase I through a limited range of meanings, which both children expanded in somewhat differing ways in Phase II. Sriniwass also found a tone distinction as her children moved into the mathetic and pragmatic macrofunctions. In her study, she highlighted criticisms of Halliday’s lack of focus on the syntagmatic dimension of CLD, and (like Painter, 1984) as a remedy, traced her children’s lexicogrammatical development at the end of Phase II, through the expansion of the

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nominal group, of clause-level structures in the three metafunctions (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3): the construction of Mood + Residue in the Interpersonal; of participants, processes, and circumstances in the Experiential; and of Theme and Rheme in the Textual; as well as of the logico-semantic relation of projection (e.g. ‘Amma asked you to practise piano’). Examples in Sriniwass’ data include the children’s use of one language or another and of code-switching; the focus on meaning of the SFL model had a positive effect on her ability to trace their language development across two languages. In another bilingual study, Keshavarz (2001) applied Halliday’s functional framework to the language development of his second child, Arsham, from the age of 9 to 18 months. Arsham had a 7-year-old sister at the time of birth and was raised in an environment in which one parent spoke English with him and the other Persian. In addition to keeping a diary, Keshavarz also collected audio recordings and carried out occasional informal experiments as a check on Arsham’s linguistic comprehension and production. Keshavarz tweaked Halliday’s framework through a distinction between the instrumental and regulatory microfunctions: he associated the former with objects and the latter with actions, which, he argued, avoids the confusion and ambiguity inherent in Halliday’s system (as found also by Painter, 1984). For Halliday (1975: 19) the difference between the two is that, in the instrumental microfunction, whether the desired thing is a good or a service, it is expressed as a want without a specified recipient, while the regulatory microfunction is directed to a particular individual. It could be argued that, for Halliday, the regulatory microfunction is focused more on action, as it is tied to regulating the behaviour of the particular individual. It is hard to evaluate the distinction that Keshavarz introduces to the model; he includes an appendix with examples of the different microfunctions, with ‘Gimme’ included as instrumental, and ‘slide’ (glossed as ‘Can I go on the slide?’) as regulatory. Without more context, it is difficult to know whether another researcher might classify ‘Gimme’, if directed at a particular individual, as regulatory and ‘slide’ (glossed as ‘I want to go on the slide’) as instrumental. Keshavarz further provides a distinction between the heuristic and informative microfunctions, with the former related to the child making inquiries about only present events in the world, while the informative microfunction refers to the child providing new information and can be about past events as well. In Halliday (1975), the heuristic microfunction is closely related the personal microfunction (the heuristic focused on exploring the non-self and the personal on expressing the self), with the informative coming in at a later stage through the more sophisticated linguistic realization of communication of new information. Again, looking at the examples in the appendix, it is hard to judge the contribution of Keshavarz’s (2001) tweaks to the model; at the same time, they serve to show the context-dependent glosses that caregivers provide for their child’s linguistic production and hence the difficulties of determining if an utterance is being used on one type of context (function) or another. Keshavarz’s findings would thus seem to provide support for Painter’s (1984) argument for modelling the microfunctions along a cline, rather than seeing them as discrete functions; that is, they

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are designed not so much as ends in themselves (or as a psychological reality), but rather as a useful way of tracing functional language use in interaction from early childhood to the full adult system. Keshavarz compared Ashram’s linguistic production with Nigel’s through Phase I and Phase II, and found similarities in the overall expansion of functional use, with some differences in the amount of production and in the favouring of one function over another. Keshavarz concluded that Halliday’s functional framework can be applied across languages and to bilingual children. To sum up this section on the applicability of Halliday’s theory, the perceived holes in his theorizing of the child language microfunctions and of operational definitions have in many cases been recognized and overcome by other researchers who have applied his theory to their own data. The analyses and findings of the different researchers have proven to be comparable and explainable, especially with reference to the social and interactional contexts of child language use. The observed expansion and reorganization of vocalizations and their concomitant meaning-making abilities in an ever-widening range of contexts and situations in all of the child data (both in the diary studies and the cross-sectional study) is traceable through the microfunctions (albeit with some discrepancies as to the exact delineation of those initial child language functions) to the macrofunctions (the mathetic and the pragmatic) and further on to the metafunctions (ideational, interpersonal, and textual) of the adult language. 2.4.2 The Input A further criticism of SFL research into CLD, especially given the central role of social interaction and context in his theoretical framework, is the lack of focus in Halliday’s (1975) study on the other side of the interaction—that is, to the caregivers’ linguistic input: what it consisted of and the role it played in how Nigel constructed his protolanguage and developed it into the adult language. Around the time of Halliday’s own study (Nigel was born in 1969), there were several studies from different theoretical perspectives on mothers’ speech, which focused on descriptions of everything from Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) and syntactic complexity to pragmatic features, ellipsis, discourse features, and teaching devices (Snow, 1977). Snow (1977: 36) also described the broad outlines of mothers’ speech to children: delivered at a higher pitch with exaggerated intonation, with redundancies, questions, and imperatives, few past tenses and co- or sub-ordinated clauses, and few disfluencies. She further reported on differences in situational use of ‘motherese’, with unstructured situations involving more complexity (in terms of MLUs and length of paraphrases) than caretaking situations (such as changing nappies), and book-reading situations involving even greater complexity. Halliday’s own study did not focus on the input (we will remember Halliday’s “I don’t believe in input. I believe in interaction”); however, other studies within SFL have focused on both sides of the interaction. Matychuk (2005) used a naturalistic study design to analyse the input from caregivers of Hikaru, a baby born to Japanese parents living in the USA, with

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two other children (seven and five years of age), using Halliday’s child language microfunctions. Hikaru’s parents tape-recorded sessions involving normal interaction with Hikaru from 19 months to 31 months of age, in a broad range of settings, which Matychuk subsequently transcribed into phonetic script. He used the local context of utterances (that is the utterance preceding the one under analysis) to determine its most likely function: at times, utterances were double- or triple-coded because the form triggered one kind of function while the context suggested that the intent was another; at other times, no function was assigned because it was not clear in the context. Matychuk coded each of the family members for their use of the functions in interaction with Hikaru. He found no instances of the instrumental, the personal, or the imaginative microfunctions, a finding which, he suggests, is not surprising given that those functions would seem to be ones that would appear in the child’s language, rather than in the caregivers’. The mother’s language showed greater use of the interactional microfunction, more than any other function, while the father showed more regulatory language. Matychuk also found increasing use of the heuristic microfunction over the course of time. Based on his findings, he suggests that the most effective child-directed speech will contain a range of functions, as he observed that the regulatory microfunction elicited less language (and less meaningful language) from the child, yet “when used in combination, the regulatory, heuristic, and interactional language microfunctions may help the budding language learner cope with his environment and learn to express him/ herself more fully than when single functions dominate the linguistic interaction” (p. 368). For Matychuk (2005) the language functions created contexts through which the child could, over time, discriminate between uses of language and thus create the kind of functional utterances he needed for his communicative needs and overall linguistic development. Like Matychuk, Snow (1977: 39) also emphasizes the importance of quality of interaction for language development: it may be “the crucial variable”. Torr’s (1997) daughter, Anna, had an older sibling, a context which,Torr argues, shaped the way in which Anna created the linguistic resources in the different functions; for example, Anna used the possessive pronouns mid-transition (Phase II) for both the pragmatic and mathetic macrofunctions, while Hal, Painter’s son did not.Torr, citing Wells (1979: 381), points out that children with older siblings are more likely to develop their expression of possession, a situational use which can become more salient in this case, given the child’s communicative needs and desires. Several SFL-based studies have investigated differences in child-directed speech based on sociolinguistic variables such as gender, age, and socio-economic class. For example, Hasan and Cloran (1987) gathered tape-recorded data from twenty-four mother–child dyads, of children around 3 years and 8 months old; twelve of the dyads came from families in which the major breadwinner was in a Lower Autonomy Profession (LAP) and twelve in a Higher Autonomy Profession (HAP); the dyads were also equally divided in each of the groups into girls and boys. The mothers were asked to record normal interactive events with their children, which Hasan and Cloran categorized into three overall types:

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caregiving activities (e.g. bathing or dressing the child), cooperative activities (playing together, reading picture books, doing chores together), and motheronly activities with the child present. Hasan and Cloran (1987) provided results of the semantic features related to questions and their responses. One dyadic cluster of meanings when children initiated the questions was structured as follows: the child did not repeat the question, the questions were more likely how/why than who/what/where/when or is it/does it, and the child was more likely to relate the question to some other message, thus elaborating on it; characteristics of the response of the mother included a far greater likelihood that she answered than not, that she answered adequately, and that she elaborated on a minimally sufficient answer (p. 89). This type of dyadic interaction was significantly more typical of the HAP dyads, and it also showed a near-significant difference depending on whether the child was a girl or a boy, being more typical of mother–daughter dyads. In the case of the mother initiating the questions, one dyadic cluster of meanings was structured as follows: the mother was more likely to ask who/what/where/when or yes/no and not how/why questions, she was not likely to make unspoken assumptions in her question (e.g. it was not likely that she would ask a question of the type ‘why aren’t you going to kiss me?’), it was not likely that she would repeat the question, she would relate her question to other messages, thus elaborating on it, and would introduce her question as representing someone’s point of view (as what someone thinks or prefers, for example, ‘did you know…?’). On the part of the child as responder, their responses were taken as adequate to the question, and the responses were likely to be elaborated on. This type of interactive sequence was significantly more present in HAP dyads and was also more likely to be found in mother–daughter dyads than in mother–son ones. Hasan and Cloran (1987) argue (see also Hasan, 2009), based on Bernstein’s concept of code orientation (Bernstein, 1973),12 that children come to learn a different semantic orientation to questions through this socialization into what questions do and how they are responded to.Thus, it is not simply the nature of the input which affects the types of meanings that children respond to and develop, but also the nature of the interaction itself. 2.4.3 Child Language as a Different System (or the problem of continuity) Many child language studies strive to establish the point(s) at which the child approximates an adult target language structure; in this sense, development is seen as attaining the end goal of the adult language. This focus has meant that early child language is, at worst, seen as a deficient form of the adult language and perhaps at best as a reduced form of adult syntax. This type of comparison might show the relationship between the child and adult forms, “but it blocks the way to the recognition and interpretation of the child’s own system” (Halliday, 1975: 2). At the same time, developmental studies which describe child language in its own right can be viewed as not making the connection between it and the adult language. Functional approaches have been critiqued on the

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issue of continuity: “[i]f the child uses function as a wedge into grammar, how does a researcher account for the transition into a formal abstract system?” Budwig (1995: 16). Halliday (1975: 3) saw a similar problem: “if language development is primarily the acquisition of structures, why does the child learn one set of structures in order to discard them in favour of another?” His response was to focus on meaning, through which the child’s own semiotic system leads the way to the adult language system. The SFL-based theory of CLD allows for a child language system, a protolanguage in its own right (not a deficient form of the adult language), while also demonstrating how it evolves into the adult language, thus providing for continuity. Halliday, in an interview in 1972, summed up his son’s development: Nigel initially created his own system of content/expression pairs to express a range of limited functions, and, once he had four or five functions with around fifty meanings in the system, he switched to taking over the adult system. Halliday said: there comes a very sudden discontinuity – at least a discontinuity in the expression, and, more important, in the nature of the system itself – when the child as it were shrugs his shoulders and says, look, this is just too much work creating the whole of human language again from the start; why don’t I settle for the readymade language that I hear around me? And he moves into the adult system. (Halliday, 2013a[1972]: 20) This move is a needed companion for the mathetic macrofunction, and “however much we wish to stress continuity in development there will be a real change in functional potential to be recognized at this point” (Painter, 1984: 118). It is the functional limitations of the child system that lead children to the adult one. However, “there is a discontinuity in the expression; but there is no discontinuity in the context” (Halliday, 2013a[1972]: 28). Language development takes place in the wider context of a social system, whose transmission occurs from the adult to the child. Over time and through interaction with caregivers, children’s meanings progressively approximate those of the mother tongue, but those meanings begin before the child has access to the forms of the adult language (Halliday, 1975). Thus, there is continuity in the development of the language as a social semiotic, as a system of meanings within a wider social context. 2.4.4 From Function to form and form to Function The argument in this chapter is not that SFL is the only or the best way to study CLD, but rather that it provides important insights into how children move from their own protolinguistic system to the adult system. These insights are connected to how children are socialized into the use of the culturally valued system of meaning-making resources through interaction. The point of departure from the SFL-based perspective is the initially reduced set of contextual communicative uses of utterances—that is, the regulatory, instrumental, interactional, and

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personal functions of language use. These microfunctions, as we have seen, are the contexts of language use. There are researchers who move from conceptual notions to grammatical forms, and others who move from language forms towards their functional use. While it goes beyond the scope of this chapter to analyse in any depth the great wealth of functional studies available, I briefly consider a few to provide a comparison with the SFL-based view of the insights from these points of departure. Functional studies from various perspectives focus on conceptual notions as the basis for analysis, such as those represented in Section 2.2.4 by Ingram’s (1971) study of the semantic functions of agent and instrument, leading later to adult sentence forms. This view of function guiding form has dominated in functional approaches to language development (Budwig, 1995). Budwig (1995) includes in this type of study the immense body of work across languages led by Dan Slobin (1985) on the ways in which children universally map meaning on to form for prototypical events. For example, Slobin’s Manipulative Activity Scene (MAS), a conceptual gestalt of an animate agent that brings about a change of state in an inanimate patient, has been analysed in children’s development across many languages. In Slobin’s (and others’) observations, children of accusative languages initially apply grammatical markings (whether through morphology or word order) to verbs involving physical action, such as ‘throw’ and ‘put’, which are examples of the MAS, while they do not do so with other verbs, such as ‘read’ or ‘see’, while children learning ergative languages use the ergative inflection similarly. It seems that the frequency of the prototypical event leads to the conceptual salience of the MAS, and thus its grammatical form emerges earlier than is the case for other types of event. In earlier research, Schlesinger (1971) theorized the notion of an I-marker, referring to the speaker’s intentions, as part of his model of the deep structure of utterances. The I-marker consists of concepts and the relations between them, with the concepts realized by words and the relations by grammar (word order and inflection).Thus, grammar evolves through the innate cognitive capacity of children to perceive concepts and relations while making sense of the utterances they hear in meaningful situations, and, with time, creating utterances to express these concepts and relations. Halliday’s broad view of the transitivity of the clause would seem to accord with Slobin’s and Schlesinger’s. Halliday writes of the clause as figure, consisting of a process unfolding over time, participants involved in the process, and any associated circumstances: the “framework is very simple; it makes sense to very young children, who are learning their mother tongue” (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 220).This view of meaning leading language development is shared across many functional views of language. At the same time, Halliday’s theory takes the concept of meaning further, connecting these conceptual, situational-based meanings to the microfunctional contexts of language use that children interact in from the time of birth.Thus, these I-markers, or figures, find means of expression through the child’s protolanguage, perhaps uttered to regulate other’s behaviour (regulatory microfunction) or to express some perceived event in the environment (personal microfunction). Interestingly, Halliday (1975: 106) found

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differences in Nigel’s grammaticalization of semantic concepts in Phase II, between the mathetic and pragmatic macrofunctions. He explains that Nigel first built up his set of words related to the objects in his world, and then added properties of those objects. First to emerge were colours and numbers (e.g. ‘green car’). Then he began to incorporate circumstantial elements (e.g. ‘toothpaste on’); these elements and their combinations tended to appear first in a mathetic context before they were transferred to the pragmatic context. However, when Nigel began uttering more complex processes involving, for example, two participants (‘look at dada bóok’) at around 21 months, these tended to occur first in a pragmatic context. That is, when he introduced agentive constructs, these were mediated by the pragmatic macrofunction; on this slender evidence, Halliday tentatively suggested that it is this function that contributes to the development of transitivity by “creating the conditions for the representation of the causative element in the structure of processes” (1975: 107). These processes contain echoes of earlier Phase I meanings, where something like ‘again’ or ‘more’ can mean ‘make it jump again’. Painter (1984) observed utterances in Hal’s 21–22½-month old mathetic macrofunction which consisted of Actor + process in intransitive structures (e.g. ‘Daddy’s coming’, ‘Hal pee’) and Process + Goal in transitive ones (‘Saw dog’, ‘Bite apple’). In the SFL view of transitivity, clauses can be viewed from both the transitive and ergative perspective; that is, a material clause can consist of, for example, Actor + Process (‘Mummy come’) in the transitive interpretation, or, in the ergative, Medium + Process (‘cup break’).The transitive view is one of ‘doing’, of “extension-&-impact” (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 336). The ergative view is one of ‘happening’, with the process represented as self-engendered, and the ‘doing’ is caused by a participant that is external to the Process+Medium; that external causer is called ‘Agent’. An utterance such as ‘Bite apple’ can be given both interpretations: Process+Goal (transitive, with the Actor left out, meaning e.g. ‘I bite the apple’) or Process+Medium (ergative, meaning e.g. ‘the apple has been bitten’). Painter gives these structures an ergative interpretation: that is, in Hal’s mathetic macrofunction there is just one participant expressed, through which the process is realized, which tended to be the Actor in an intransitive process and the Goal in a transitive one. However, in Hal’s pragmatic macrofunction, both intransitive and transitive Actors appeared (e.g. ‘Hal take’, ‘Hal press button’), and, if he only expressed one participant in a transitive clause, in ergative terms, it tended to be the Agent rather than the Medium. Painter argues that these differences in inclusion of participants across the two macrofunctions may foreground the notion of Subject in the interpersonal metafunction, given that in the pragmatic macrofunction Hal, through the use of the proper noun, would often specify the subject or person who he wanted to fulfil the desired action (‘Mummy sit’), which structurally in the adult language in English is omitted in the imperative mood. In experiential terms, this difference in inclusion of participants across the pragmatic and mathetic macrofunctions may also suggest that Hal was developing the alternative transitivity models inherent in the English language. Note that Slobin’s (1985) research would seem to corroborate this difference, and that

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Painter’s argumentation shows the role of the macrofunctions in the process of language (and, arguably, conceptual) development. Thus, the researchers who started with function (albeit a different type than Halliday’s) and moved to form, such as Slobin and Schlesinger, provide a finer-grained type of analysis of the development of grammatical structures; however, it is a type of analysis that has been carried out within the SFL paradigm, which then connects the structures to the micro- and macrofunctions, and on to the adult linguistic system. As an example of moving from linguistic form to communicative function, Budwig (1995) analysed the use of personal pronouns in data from children ranging from 20 to 32 months, in interaction with peers and caregivers at a daycare centre. She videotaped a series of prompted interactions over time. In an early phase, children used pronouns or other self-reference forms, such as ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘my’, contrastively, in order to encode different perspectives of their self-role in events. For example, one child demonstrated semantic differences with ‘I’ used for referencing the self as experiencer (‘I like peas’), while ‘My’ served as prototypical agent (‘My build tower’). He also showed pragmatic differences, with ‘My’ referring to the self in control acts (directives, requests, protests), and ‘I’ in assertives where control was not an issue, such as in replies to information questions and descriptions. ‘Me’ was similar to agentive ‘My’, but referred to actions that affected the child himself, and not an external object. While the particular forms differ across children during this early phase, in a later phase children moved to using ‘I’ for all of these functions, which “frees the forms My and Me to express their adult functions as possessive pronoun and object of the verb” (Bamberg, Budwig, & Kaplan, 1991:129). Given that the initial phase involves non-adultlike forms, “rather than starting with broad categories of semantic meaning or pragmatic function, it would be advantageous to begin one’s functional analysis with form contrasts” (Budwig, 1995: 200). Her research led her to see that the children’s increasing range of communicative situations created needs for expressing a wider range of communicative functions, while, at the same time, their array of linguistic resources was expanding. She traces this development through the reorganization of the grammatical systems, following Werner and Kaplan’s (1984) orthogenetic principle with respect to transformational developments, which involve both continuity and discontinuity, as well as increasing differentiation and hierarchical organization of forms and functions. Budwig’s developmental functionalist approach and the SFL-based approach are complementary, arriving at a very similar conclusion in these terms. Budwig discovered through an analysis of forms that children do not simply add new forms to their language systems, but rather they reorganize them through differentiation and hierarchical integration of forms. The SFL studies found in children’s language use an increasing range of microfunctions which then become reorganized into a broader set of macrofunctions, leading the way towards a plurifunctional system which reorganizes the overall functions of language into the lexicogrammatical resources of the clause. It would be a worthwhile comparison to use the SFL-based data to analyse how form-function pairings transform in this way over time. As seen in

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Section 2.4.1, in the case of Torr’s (1997) SFL study of her daughter, this type of diary study provides details of those communicative situations, underscoring Budwig’s point that key for the function–form connection are the contexts of interaction and their impact on the development of these pairs. Butler (2003) summarizes the language learning research studies from three functional theories: Dik’s Functional Grammar (FG), Van Valin’s Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), and Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). The studies mentioned that follow FG and RRG also take forms as their point of departure, tracing, for example, the order of acquisition of adverbs, tense, or modality. For Butler, the principled linguistic theorizing of FG shows some predictive power in the sequence of acquisition of different types of adverbs, for example. According to Butler, RRG studies have demonstrated the ways in which areas of the grammar (which, from a UG perspective, were thought to provide solid evidence for innateness), can be acquired through the surrounding input from caregivers given the existence of broad cognitive principles related to pragmatic concerns, such as Grice’s cooperative principle, topicalization, and relativization. For Van Valin, grammar is relatively motivated semantically and pragmatically, and the child has enough information in the surrounding input to be able to construct a grammar. In fact, he has argued further against the poverty of the stimulus, after carefully demonstrating in numerous articles how RRG’s rigorous syntactic theory, which is, at the same time, concerned with the communicative and cognitive functions of language, can account for linguistic phenomena across data from children learning several different languages which were thought by formalists to be explainable only through innateness. Even in the absence of particular constructions in the input, “knowledge of one area of the grammar for which there is abundant evidence can be extended to other, related areas of the grammar for which such evidence is apparently (or supposedly) not available” (Van Valin, 1991: 33). Van Valin further argued that these claims could be empirically tested on child language, an empirical testing which he and others have carried out, as summarized by Butler (2003).With respect to SFG, Butler (2003), (drawing on Dore’s 1977 review) found problematic Halliday’s claim of the connection between the internal organization of the grammatical system and the language functions; for example, how do the language functions determine the transitivity roles of Actor, Process, and Goal? Painter (1984) devotes more detailed attention to this aspect of the theory, as we have seen with her analysis of transitivity and ergativity in the pragmatic and mathetic macrofunctions, and Butler reviewed her work positively. In summarizing this section on functionalist approaches, it is worth pointing out that the functionalist perspective of meaning leading grammar has (as we have seen) received heavy criticism from nativists who hold the poverty of stimulus argument. At the same time, the nativists focus on what would seemingly be impossible for a child to do without an innate faculty; however, they fail to provide a corresponding focus on how components of innate knowledge “demonstrably aid learning” (Ambridge, Pine, & Lieven, 2014: e82; see also Schlesinger, 1971). From a meaning-based perspective, Ambridge et al. (2014)

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provide an alternative explanation of, for example, Principle C (see Section 2.2.3) using functional principles of discourse and information structure, which suggests that the research within the nativist paradigm at the time lacked (at best) consideration of and (at worst) dismissal of other research perspectives on CLD. At the same time, functional approaches differ widely, as we have seen in this short section. Butler (2003) compares RRG and SFG and highlights some of the important differences.The RRG point of departure of analysing a range of child language data for constructions allows for typological comparisons across languages, while also focusing on the acquisition of morphosyntax with reference to syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic considerations, as well as the cognitive capacities of children. The work in SFG focuses on individual children through longitudinal case studies, and the entry point is not morphosyntax (which is actually not focused on much) but rather meanings and their realizations, connecting these to the situations and contexts of use of language. At the same time, SFG is a linguistic theory that models grammar as the structural output of the semantics, which is a different approach than that of cognitive linguistics or construction-based approaches. 2.4.5 Cognitive and Construction-Based Approaches Cognitive linguistics (CL) has also contributed significantly to studies on CLD. Michael Tomasello, for example, has published widely in the field of child language acquisition, including a major book (Tomasello, 2005); Tomasello calls his linguistics ‘usage-based’ (as functional approaches are also considered), rather than ‘cognitive’, although he draws on CL and his publications have appeared in cognitive linguistic journals and edited collections. There is a strong affinity between his work and Halliday’s, as Tomasello’s research also emphasizes the importance of the social environment and of social interaction for CLD. At the same time, while highlighting that developmental psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics are now light years beyond the simple behavioural responses of Skinner, Tomasello (2005) emphasizes two inherited cognitive capabilities that are key in the ontogenesis of language: first, intention-reading, which includes the ability to share attention, to create pointers (whether linguistic or paralinguistic) for others and follow those from others to distal objects and events, and to learn to understand communicative intentions; and second, pattern-finding, which includes abilities related to categorical perception, the formation of sensory-motor schemas in response to recurrent patterns, statistical analysis of input for distributional patterns, and analogy. Tomasello, like Van Valin, argues that there is no need to posit a separate module in the brain for language as human biological endowment equips children with these powerful, domain-general learning mechanisms that are capable of leading them, through interaction, to the construction of the linguistic system. Tomasello highlights the difference between usage-based approaches to linguistics and formal linguistics with respect to the notion of ‘construction’.While formal linguists look to the underlying rules of sentences and phrases, given the

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interest in usage-based approaches in how language is used in particular contexts, the focus is on the repeated patterns that emerge from that use. An example is the pattern X VERBed Y the Z which signifies the transfer of possession (Tomasello, 2005: 99), as in ‘The boy gave the girl the book’.There are thousands of such constructions, ranging from words to phrases to clauses, with differing degrees of complexity. He explains that, rather than a set of words that they can combine into sentences applying a set of syntactic rules, before the age of two children have in their linguistic repertoires concrete words (such as bird), some bound morphemes of varying degrees of productivity (for example, plural -s, past tense -ed, but only with some words), frozen phrases (such as I-wanna-do-it), and a variety of item-based (mixed constructions (Where’s the X? X on-there: I wanna X) (p. 99). Therefore, Tomasello joins other linguists who argue that “it is not categories and grammatical relations which are the basic units of language, but constructions: categories and relations are defined in terms of the roles they play in constructions” (Dąbrowska & Kubinski, 2004: 261). Children first learn a reduced set of “lexically-specific formulas”, that they “gradually decompose and elaborate to more complex and schematic units” (Diessel, 2013). Studies within cognitive and construction-based approaches to language development include experimental research; for example, in how pivot schemas, such as ‘more X’ (see Section 2.2.3) might be productive; when a novel name, such as ‘wug’ is introduced, children are able to use it within their own pivot constructions (such as ‘more wug’ and ‘wug gone’).This productivity shows that children are creating linguistic categories from a young age; however, these pivot schemas do not have syntax—that is, they are not put together with syntactic significance, but rather through a “consistent ordering pattern” (p. 115). Tomasello (2005) also reports on studies using naturally occurring data, including diary studies and sampling methods. In fact, in 1992, he published a book on the language development of his daughter in her second year, in which he uses Langacker’s 1987 cognitive linguistic framework and Nelson’s (1985) notion of event concepts to analyse the usage of verbs during this period of his daughter’s life. He posits that her lexical choices are linked to sensory-motor concepts; for example, her acquisition of change-of-state verbs can be linked to the conceptual notion of object permanence/movement, with dynamic forms emerging earlier than static ones; however, emergence of activity verbs did not follow the same dynamic-static pattern. At the same time, with both types of verbs, processes with only one object (for example, the child herself as actor) emerged first. Tomasello (1992) connects the function of phenomena in the environment with the function of elements in the child’s linguistic system: Just as the child forms categories of objects and actions on the basis of how they function in larger event structures on the conceptual level (Nelson, 1985), on the linguistic level the child forms paradigmatic classes of words

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on the basis of how they function in sentences – a kind of functionally based distribution analysis. (Tomasello, 1992: 28) Over time, then, children develop their repertoire of ways of marking the syntagmatics, or the functional relations of elements in a chain, which create slots to be filled in, while also developing their repertoire of paradigmatics—that is, greater complexity in what can be filled in those slots, increasing, for example, from single nouns to noun phrases. Tomasello (1992) argued that this build-up towards the adult linguistic system “required nothing other than the basic cognitive processes involved in the learning and development of verb-argument structures” (p. 29). Research from a cognitive linguistic perspective focuses on how children learn to develop a linguistic system using certain human domain-general learning mechanisms and because of the rich experiential-based interactive contexts in which language is used. This perspective complements the semantic-based interactionist perspective of SFL.

2.5 Moving Towards School The SFL studies we have seen in this chapter stopped right at the point that the children were on the cusp of adult language, at the end of Phase II (the transition to adult language), where the various microfunctions converge into to macrofunctions—the pragmatic and the mathetic—and where dialogic and narrative structuring of interactions begin to allow for the overall strands of meaning from the three metafunctions of language—the interpersonal, the ideational and the textual—to be woven in to structural realizations of phrases and clauses. In moving towards Chapter 3, on how language development continues through schooling, it is important to mention the post-protolanguage pre-school years and how SFL studies trace the development of children’s linguistic systems. The SFL literature has focused on expansion of various linguistic systems, such as the nominal group, clausal embedding, logical relation devices, transitivity, and grammatical metaphor. In a study rich with linguistic detail, Painter (1999) followed the language development of her second son, Stephen, 4½ years younger than his brother, Hal, from the ages of 2½ until 5. Painter, as in the other SFL studies, used a diary method because of the richness and quality of data which can be collected in multiple contexts and situations over the period of recording. A further advantage, especially in the case of a participant-observer trained in linguistics, is the accuracy and depth of interpretation: through the sheer quantity and heightened quality of contact with the child, the parent-ethnographer can provide fuller background information for contextualized meaning (Painter, 1999: 71–72). Given the role of interactive situations in language development, it is important to note that Stephen, in addition to having an older sibling, attended a child-care centre and also played with other children in the neighbourhood. Painter traces

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Stephen’s development in learning through language, and thus his building up of different fields of knowledge through his expanding repertoire of ideational systems. One such linguistic system is that of lexical taxonomies (e.g. types of vehicles, colours, and family relations), along with relational processes to further identify and taxonomize (e.g. ‘X is a Y’) and nominal group modification to further identify and describe things (‘the __ X’, ‘the X with the __ properties’), including embedded post-modifiers (“Where’s the thing [[go on there]]?”, p. 96). Another system is that of material transitivity, or the linguistic resources for expressing what happens and who/what did X (to whom/what). In addition, she traced Stephen’s build-up of resources for expressing activity sequences through logical relations (‘X happened, then Y happened’, ‘X happened because Y happened’), his construction of a system of reference and his expansion in linguistic resources for expressing semiotic events, through mental and verbal transitivity processes (‘He said X’). Painter characterizes these changes in Stephen’s linguistic system for the construction of field in terms of the register variable of mode; that is, the expansion allowed him to construe events appropriate to and effective for different channels of communication. His repertoire led him to be able to generalize, and thus to decrease context dependency, allowing him to create utterances which were constitutive of context. At the age of 3 years and almost 7 months, Stephen said: “When we cut them, they’re called fingernails” (Painter, 1999: 107).This example also shows an ability for learning through language while learning about language; through this kind of growing metalinguistic awareness and expression, Stephen was building up his categories of the world, hypothesizing and testing connections of taxonomies, activities, and sequences. Another example of generalization (and thus moving away from context dependency) is recorded when he was 3 years and 9 months old: “it’s got wings there and two wings there and that means it’s a biplane” (p. 112). Finally, Stephen was moving towards abstraction and away from congruence; one small step towards that happened during his third year with embedded post-modifiers, such as “Where’s the thing [[go on there]]?” (p. 96). In his fourth year, examples such as “that means it’s a biplane” shows an ability to package up previous text into a semiotic fact realized by ‘that’. An additional development is seen in his use of logical connectors, initially to organize sequences of events which later evolved into an ability to organize sequences of rhetorical moves, such as counter-expectation, as in “They go fast… – But that one doesn’t go fast” (p. 179). Stephen’s development of semiosis moved from an ability to recall dialogue as an event (in his third year) to that of recalling dialogue as meaning (in his fifth year), and an ability to reflect on the meaning of a recalled text while also reporting as a locution what someone else has said. Painter thus connects Stephen’s expanding linguistic resources to expansions in his ability to mean, demonstrating his learning through and about language. Painter highlights the relationship between text (as instance) and the linguistic system (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.4): each text, or interactive encounter with and through language, serves “as a source of data for readjusting the system” (p. 319). The flexibility of the linguistic system itself aids in the expansion of

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meaning-making resources; thus, “[d]eveloping a linguistic system means developing a resource for thinking” (p. 320). Painter (1999: 319) illustrates how the potential in the linguistic system to convey “the same reality” through different linguistic construals leads learners to new possibilities for meaning, with the example of the overlap in the verb ‘say’ of two different kinds of relationships: that of identification (“That says Peter Rabbit”) and that of verbalizing and projecting speech (“I can say ‘accident’”). During a period of time in Stephen’s language development, these two meanings overlapped (‘the sign says ‘shop”), leading to later meanings in which a non-human subject acts as a Sayer in a verbal process (‘the book tells us that…’). Painter argues that this ability to interpret inanimate objects as symbolizers is an important conceptual development foregrounding the type of learning that happens through the written medium of language in school. At the same time, while learning is a “powerful driver of the language development process…each milestone in the process [is] founded on interpersonal beginnings” (Painter, 2004: 137). It is children’s need to interact through dialogue with others and to express emotion that drives language development processes. Children’s initial protolanguage serves not to represent experience but rather to share their experience through the child language microfunctions (instrumental, regulatory, personal, and interactional). Over time, they develop the array of linguistic resources needed to assign speech roles in dialogue. At the same time, protolanguage is an initial step in expressing meanings from the interpersonal appraisal system of affect (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.2), meanings such as desire, frustration, pleasure, happiness, trust, security, and curiosity (Painter, 2003a); in fact, for Painter “the whole semiotic enterprise begins as a sharing of affect to achieve a variety of functional goals” (2003a: 191). Painter (2003a) demonstrates the multiple ways in which children’s interactions involve meanings from the appraisal systems not only of affect, through expressions of their own emotions and those of others, but also of judgement and appreciation; through dialogues with important others in their environment, they learn to navigate the values and perspectives of their culture. Also, through the interpersonal, children first learn incongruent construals of the systems of mood and modality, and, thus, the interpersonal provides a gateway to grammatical metaphor (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.1), or “a skewing of the relations between the semantics and grammar” (Painter, Derewianka, & Torr, 2007). Interpersonal grammatical metaphor occurs early on, both in the child’s production and in the input. For example, Painter (2004) demonstrates the use of mental processes, such as Stephen’s ‘I think’ in “I think I do the piano” (at 2 years 8 months), not as a report on his state of thinking but rather as a softener to ward off a potentially negative response to his wanting to play the piano. Around the same age, in dialogue with his mother, who asks “Where’s the blue cup?”, Stephen responds “I expect Daddy’s got it”, indicating possibility. In interaction with adults, children learn that expressions such as “If you would just keep quiet for a moment” realizes the command “keep quiet” (Halliday, 1993: 104). Hal used “That’s mine” or “That’s Hal’s” to mean “Don’t touch” (Painter et al., 2007:

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578–579). Thus, through the interpersonal metafunction, using non-congruent grammatical forms for the semantics (in this case, a declarative to realize a command) is a way of increasing meaning potential. In fact, within the interpersonal metafunction, children are often first exposed to and first produce these constructions, which are mismatches between speech function and mood choices, for example, the interrogative mood (‘What are you doing?’) used and interpreted as ‘Stop doing that’ (Painter, 1984). Obviously, the argument from SFL is not that there is some kind of mental or cognitive notion of these stratal elements or of stratal tension. It probably is the case that children hear and come to use these constructions as wholes, as if they were “big words” (Holger, 2013). It is important to note that the SFL model of language is a clause-based model in terms of the grammar, and thus this notion of incongruence is posited not as something that children consciously do, but rather as a potential in the linguistic system. In addition to grammatical metaphor within the interpersonal, there are also realizations of ideational grammatical metaphor at young ages. Painter (2003b) found mismatches between lexical class and grammatical function in early uses of Process^Range structures in Hal and Stephen’s language, such as “do a pee” and “do a big kick”, where the nominal group and not the verbal groups encodes the action. They also used rank-shifted clauses such as “Where’s [[a man shouting]]?” (p. 159) when reading a picture book. Here the embedded clause construes a figure (a participant in a process) which is being used as a participant in a relational clause. This is the child’s way of taking a visual representation (a picture) and “freezing the experience, making it static, observable and tangible and therefore more legitimately construed as a participant” (Painter, 2003b: 160). It is through these embeddings that ideational grammatical metaphor has its start in pre-school years. SFL research and modelling is not limited to the semiotic of language; it also includes how other modal resources, such as pictures in storybooks, function on their own and in conjunction with text to further meanings. SFL-based research has highlighted the interpretive skills that children need to have in order to extract these meanings (Painter, 2007; Moya Guijarro, 2014). Rose (2011) explains how parent–child reading in the home is situated through joint attention, in which adults direct children’s attention to an aspect of a picture storybook. This type of interaction involves four phases: preparation, identification, evaluation, and elaboration. First, the adult reader prepares the child to recognize some feature of the text, perhaps by pointing to a picture.The child then identifies a feature of the text or picture, an identification which is then evaluated by the adult, who may further elaborate on the response.Through this kind of joint reading, adults model reading positions, such as understandings of emotions portrayed in images, and empathy for and other judgements of characters presented. They also help children understand the flow of activity sequences and logical relations that are created through images, as well as the interrelations between the visual and the verbal meanings (Painter, 2007). An analysis using Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) ‘grammar of the image’, based on Halliday’s metafunctional principle, provides an understanding of “the interpersonal effects of the

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visual strand of the story, how the juxtaposition of visual and verbal meaning can indeed multiply the meaning potential of the text and also how much interpretive work is required of the inexperienced reader” (Painter 2007: 48). With this semiotic mode, as with language, the key for expanding repertoires of meaningmaking is in the multiple and rich contexts of interaction, a point we return to in Chapter 5. The next chapter takes up language development through the context of schooling.

Notes 1 Pseudonym for Neil, who was born October 29th, 1969 (O’Donnell, n.d.) 2 See Levelt (2013) for a comprehensive history of child language studies. 3 Gruber does not specify how he calculates the child’s age, which does not follow Stern’s notation system; Gruber refers to a ten-week period, which is presumably from nearly 15 months to 17 months of age. 4 The richness of the input finds support from other scholars; for example, Atkinson (2002, 528) suggests that 12,000–15,000 instances of “intensive contact between average caregivers and children over their first years together” is a conservative estimate. 5 A criticism of speech act theory, for example, is the vast number of possible speech acts; Austin himself (1962: 150) reckons that there could be around 1,000 performative verbs. He attempts to classify these into five categories, two of which he finds “most troublesome” (p. 152), either because of their miscellaneous nature and/or because of their overlap with other categories. 6 Jakobson attributes the term to Malinowski. However, there are differences between Malinowski’s meaning of phatic communion, through which “ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words” (1923: 315), and Jakobson’s, which is somewhat more restricted to maintaining contact between speakers, as in the case of greetings or checking if someone can hear. 7 Note that Halliday (1975) does not use the term ‘microfunction’. However, Painter (1984) uses this term, and Halliday used it in later writings; also, it is useful to distinguish micro-, macro-, and meta-functions, as shall be seen. 8 Given the ever-increasing number of vocalizations, I provide here only the functional glosses for each of the meanings expressed; the full range of expressions are included in Halliday (1975, pp. 147–157). 9 Coinciding with Stern and Stern’s (1907) observations; see Section 2.2.1. 10 When Painter was writing the 1984 book, the tri-stratal model was very new and still being developed; see Chapter 5, Section 5.1.1, for more on stratification in the SFL model. 11 Painter (1984) explains that one reason for using 6-week intervals was to be able to compare her findings with Halliday’s; she also experimented with shorter increments during the protolanguage period but found that either there were no noticeable changes or not enough time to establish a phenomenon as a new development. 12 Hasan’s supporting evidence for Bernstein’s codes has been heavily criticized (Jones, 2013), as indeed have Berstein’s codes. We touch on these criticisms briefly in Chapter 3, on school language, and then more in depth in Chapter 5.

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3 Developing Language through School

“Language … is the essential condition of knowing, the process by which experience becomes knowledge” (Halliday, 1993: 94)

3.1 Introduction: Moving on to School While we move ontogenetically from early childhood language development (Chapter 2) to school language development here, the chapters move anachronistically with respect to Halliday’s research. Child language development was, in essence, the last of the three large areas of Halliday’s work within language development which impacted SFL theory. First came his experiences with additional language learning, the topic of Chapter 4, through teaching English and Chinese. Then, with respect to school language development (henceforth SLD), at the end of the 1950s Halliday moved out of Chinese studies and into linguistics, through his appointment to the Department of English Language and General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh (Halliday & Hasan, 2006). That department had many graduates who went into school English teaching, and its head, Angus McIntosh, would invite them back to share their experiences. Thus was born a collaboration between a linguistics department and mother-tongue English school teachers (Halliday & Hasan, 2006); through weekly meetings, teachers would identify what they found most relevant from linguistics for their classrooms, which “convinced me of the need to examine more closely the linguistic basis of the teaching of English as a mother tongue” (Halliday, 2007[1971]: 35). This chapter shows the applications of SFL to language development through school and how this application has pushed further developments in the SFL architecture. As in Chapter 2, we will see that for language development to most effectively take place, children need rich opportunities to interact, through both spoken and written texts; at the same time, this chapter shows the ways in which SFL analyses illuminate the meaning-making that takes place through those texts and illustrates how those insights can be applied to scaffold learning. In 1963, Halliday moved to the Communication Research Centre at University College, London, where he worked with local teachers on English language education in schools. He directed a research and curriculum development

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project, the Initial Literacy project, involving linguists and teachers in designing “the grammar of English from the point of view of its relevance to English teaching” (Halliday & Hasan, 2006:19), and in making decisions about the curriculum for primary and secondary language education at three key stages: initial literacy, the middle school (transition from primary to secondary), and upper secondary (age 16 plus). One key breakthrough from this collaborative work was the realization that, to most people, including educators, at the time of this work in the 1960s, language meant written language. That is, people viewed the goal of language development as the ‘correct’ language of academic books: full forms (e.g. going to and not gonna), correct spelling, and standard grammatical structures, and not the reduced forms, vernacular pronunciations, and incomplete sentences of everyday conversations, which were (and continue to be) seen as deficient forms of language. Halliday’s work on language development demonstrated that spoken and written modes of language are, in essence, different (Halliday, 1987); one is not superior to the other: they have evolved to do different things. In the SFL view of language, several important differences are highlighted between the way children are socialized into language use through interaction at home and at school.1 One significant distinction lies in the type of knowledge that language is used to express, which, for Halliday, is inextricably linked to the grammars of human language: “Understanding and knowing are semiotic processes— processes of the development of meaning in the brain of every individual, and the powerhouse for such processes is the grammar” (Halliday, 2004[1995]: 11). Thus, in early childhood, children implicitly come to view the language code that they are surrounded by as ‘natural’; they have learned to use the grammar during their interactions in contexts of situations in ways that allow them to carry out their communicative purposes. Halliday (2003[1977]) highlighted the distinction between viewing language as a resource and as a set of formal rules (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.2), stemming from different philosophical trends (rhetoric vs. grammar). When children are socialized into language in the home, they interact with caregivers who attend to their needs, and thus they come to see language as a resource, as a way of getting things done. Chapter 2 outlines the functions that serve children as they develop their language, which encompass the role of language in regulating others’ behaviour and their own, in creating relationships with others, in expressing their own creativity and individuality, in learning, and in then communicating what they have learned. Obviously, small children are surrounded by more proficient language users who may correct their language use, often in terms of appropriateness to a given context: for example, parents may admonish their children for using taboo expressions and encourage them to use pragmatic politeness markers such as ‘please’ and ‘thank you’.They may correct children’s pronunciation or word choice. Still, the ‘rules’ they learn through these admonitions tend to be geared towards showing children how to get things done more effectively. However, when children move to school, the focus on rules very often becomes one of ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’, rather than one of effectiveness in or appropriateness to a context. Arguably, it is still the case that most people think of ‘proper’ language as we see it in more formal, written contexts, while the type of language that is used

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in informal, spoken conversation is often seen as a corrupt version of the written (see Beal, 2018, on society’s continued desire for prescriptivism). In addition, in schooling a more profound change is needed in how children live through language as they move into becoming literate, which involves learning much more than correctness of grammatical forms. Children need to learn writing, a different semiotic system:“a second-order symbolic system, with symbols standing for other symbols; hence the learner has to recognize two sets of abstract entities, and also the abstract relation between them” (Halliday, 1993: 109). Children have to learn that written symbols represent spoken sounds which combine to create words which represent meaning. Thus, in school they move away from language being mainly something they learn through to also being something they learn about. A further change between home and school is the kind of learning that happens through language. In early childhood language development, there comes a point where there is a discontinuity in expression in the nature of the language used (see Chapter 2, Section 2.4.3) yet there is a continuity in the contexts of interaction; however, when the child moves to school, there is discontinuity in both expression and contexts of interaction. The kinds of interactions that children experience in and through school move away from a dependence on a shared material environment between interactants and towards the need for greater explicitness in building a context for participants not present. However, it is not the case that more everyday experience is captured in registers only at home and educational experience only at school. While first graders, during morning news time in the classroom, might have to make up a lack of shared knowledge in telling classmates about a family event, such would not be the case in a conversation with the teacher about lunchtime snack at the time that the event occurs (Henrichs, 2010). At the same time, in many homes children are asked what they did at school, an interaction which calls on their ability to build context through language for their family members. Examples of types of activities that children are involved in from home to school (Henrichs, 2010: 2) are arranged on a cline in Figure 3.1. There is also a shift in the type of knowledge learned, away from “commonsense ways of knowing to new forms of knowledge that are distinct and distinctive for educational knowledge” (Byrnes, 2006: 4). Halliday (1994, 6) outlines the discontinuity between “commonsense” learning, which is what children are involved in from birth through interaction with their families and friends, and educational learning, or the institutionalized learning that takes place in school. Not only is there a change in the interactive relationships through which language is learned, but the meanings themselves shift away from commonsense knowledge, which tends to be fluid and indeterminate, focused on actions and events, built up through interaction, and implicitly known, towards educational knowledge, which tends to be determinate and systematic, focused on concrete and abstract things, events, and phenomena, built up by the individual, and explicitly known. These differences are outlined in Figure 3.1. The way the knowledge, or field, is packaged up into texts also changes, so children need to move into using new registers, often writing for imagined, distanced audiences (tenor) through seemingly ‘objective’ reports, essays, and other

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Register

Knowledge

Activity

school-based artefacts (mode). Meanings at the spoken end tend to be expressed as more lexicogrammatically intricate, through chainings of clauses into complexes, so more verbal in nature, while at the written end meanings are often expressed through nominalizations and packed into denser clause simplexes. Given the use of greater nominalization in more formal academic registers, there is a greater use of grammatical metaphor (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.1), where meanings are frequently abstracted away from the immediate material environment of lived experience. At the conversational end, meaning is negotiated through interaction, which is often the goal in and of itself. At the more formal, written end the final product is often the goal, which then becomes a static object for perusal or analysis, or for evaluation, as frequently happens with school written registers. The difference in distance between interlocutors also allows for a difference in explicitness: conversation lets us leave meanings implicit in the verbal language, as there are other contextual resources for expressing meaning (people/objects in the environment, gestures, and body language, for example), while, in formal, written texts, in the absence of images or other meaning-making resources the context needs to be created wholly through the verbal language used; Figure 3.1 arranges these differences in register along a cline (Leckie-Tarry, 1995: 64; Gallagher & McCabe, 2002: 18).

Informal everyday conversation

Parent-child joint book reading

Morning news, show-and-tell in first grade

Instructional discourse in the classroom

Written academic essay

fluid and indeterminate; no clear boundaries or precise definitions (little importance given to beginnings and endings of processes or how one phenomenon differs from another)

determinate and systematic: categories of experience are organized into conceptual structures with defined properties and explicit interrelations

foregrounds processes: actions and events are most important; there is also concern for things, but mainly as to how they enter into processes

foregrounds things: initially with persons and concrete objects, then moving to increasingly abstract and virtual objects (which help explain how the things behave)

construed as dialogue: built up interactively (“intersubjectively”) by the human group

construed as monologue: built up by the individual, with others in the group acting more as competitors than as collaborators

unconscious: we typically do not know what we know – usually no examinations

conscious: typically rehearsed, so that it can be monitored and examined

Grammatically intricate Verbal Congruent Concrete Meaning as process Implicit

Lexically dense Nominal Metaphoric Abstract Meaning as product Explicit

Figure 3.1  From home to school: Cline of interaction – knowledge – register.

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These three perspectives on the requirements of language through the move from home to school (types of interactive activities, knowledge, and register) are brought together in Figure 3.1. The move through activities from left to right in Figure 3.1 involves different forms of knowledge, leading towards registers at the academic end of the cline, and shows the direction in which children’s repertoire of meaning-making resources needs to develop for success in school. The move into school literacy, therefore, is a major development in the language use of children in most, if not all, of the world’s modern societies. It involves major changes from how children are accustomed to interacting through language in early childhood. Of course, literacy happens in the home as well: caregivers often read storybooks to children, creating a different type of interaction from spontaneous conversation and providing experience with the written genres of narrative. In the context of school language, as in the context of child language (see Chapter 2, Section 2.3.2.2), Halliday’s theorizing about language development was impacted by Basil Bernstein’s theorizing about discourse from a sociological perspective. Halliday first met Bernstein in the early 1960s, when the latter visited Edinburgh to give a talk based on recorded discussions amongst teens from different socio-economic classes, in an attempt to discover systematic differences in their forms of discourse. Bernstein, who “was troubled by issues of disadvantage when observing how working-class children performed badly in London schools” and Halliday, who “had a passion to use his linguistics to make a difference in exploring the nature of social experience and in addressing questions of equity and social justice” (Christie, 2008: 3), saw complementarity in their research agendas. Halliday and his fellow linguists suggested to Bernstein that he needed a linguistic theory for his agenda, but, at the same time, the state of SFL at the time was not ready for him: we had something of a grammar, but we had no semantics. We had hardly a clear concept even of semantics as a coherent stratum within the organization of language: that partly came through the demands Bernstein was making on our own work and our own abilities. (Halliday & Hasan, 2006: 21) SFL provided the linguistic framework for developing the semantic tools, leading to studies such as Hasan and Cloran’s (1987) semantic orientation to questions (see Chapter 2, Section 2.4.2), where it was found that it was more likely for children in families in which the major breadwinner was in a Higher Autonomy Profession (HAP) to be oriented towards asking questions that were exploratory, that would be responded to, and that would be elaborated on by their mothers, while they would also be socialized into responding to questions with responses that they would elaborate on and which were received as adequate responses. Hasan (2009) further showed the similarity between the typical HAP mother’s type of questions and those of teachers in school, concluding that it

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does not seem too far fetched to suggest that a child who brings to the school a disposition that is already congruent with the disposition the schools are aiming to create stands a better chance of succeeding in constituting the what of knowledge in ways that through the ages have been considered essential to it. (Hasan, 2009: 265) The concern in Bernstein-informed SFL work is not in the differences in language but rather in the differences in semantic orientation—in how children understand and construe contexts of interaction (Schleppegrell, 2004), ways of interacting which then, for them, become normalized. Halliday’s work with teachers emerged in the UK at a time which was ripe for bringing into the school ways of talking about language that were not based on traditional prescriptive ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts’ designed to eradicate what many considered to be poor linguistic habits. In 1975, A Language for Life, (aka The Bullock Report; Department of Education and Science, 1975), a report on language teaching in schools commissioned by the UK government, was published; it recognized that no one linguistic variety is inherently superior to any other, and further stated that the child’s language should be accepted, and most teachers appreciate the importance of this. To criticise a person’s speech may be an attack on his self-esteem […]. We believe that a child’s accent should be accepted, and that to attempt to suppress it is irrational and neither humane nor necessary. The teacher’s aim should be to indicate to his pupils the value of awareness and flexibility, so that they can make their own decisions and modify these as their views alter. (Department of Education and Science, 1975: 143) However, Crystal (2017) notes that there was no representative of linguistics on the Bullock Committee, and thus, in the wake of jettisoning a traditional prescriptive approach to teaching grammar, teachers had little to draw on. Furthermore, an earlier report (Plowden Report, 1967) endorsed a progressive educational curriculum which included, for mother tongue English, the promotion of selfexpression within a constructivist model of education (Christie, 2006); while Christie writes in the Australian context, the situation was similar in the USA and the UK, leading teachers to question their commitment to progressivism: We had begun to sense that progressivism’s prescriptions for individual control, student-centred learning, student motivation, purposeful writing and individual ownership did not provide the success for the predominantly working-class students with whom we worked. (Walsh, 2006: 164) Halliday and his group set out to find a way of talking about language that would avoid the traditional focus on approximating a standard through error correction

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while overcoming the relativism of progressive education. Sections 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4 elaborate on SFL-based literacy for SLD, while Section 3.6 places it in relationship to other views of literacy, including those mentioned in this section.

3.2 Breakthrough to Literacy The differences between how language is used at home and at school, clarified by SF linguists in their discussions about school language education with teachers, led to understandings of the different ways that language is used in different contexts and situations. For initial literacy, the team designed a programme called Breakthrough to literacy, “the idea being that you were as it were breaking through from the spoken language to the written language” (Halliday & Hasan, 2006: 22). Thus, the materials were organized around the child’s abilities, needs, and desires for making meaning, with the teacher’s role as guide rather than instructor.Three levels were made available—for primary school: Breakthrough to literacy (Mackay, Thompson, & Schaub, 1970); for middle school: Language and communication (Forsyth & Wood, 1977); and for secondary level: Language in use (Doughty, Pearce, & Thornton, 1971) In the discussions involving educators and linguists, in addition to emphasis on the difference between written and spoken language, with initial literacy seen as the bridge between the two, there was an emphasis on learning language (or literacy) across the curriculum. For example, Halliday wrote in the ‘Foreword’ to Breakthrough to literacy:Teacher’s manual that one of the goals of the programme was to: look at the whole problem of language in school, taking account not only of the basic skills of reading and writing and the traditional concerns of the teacher of ‘subject English’ but also of the demands made on the child’s language potential by the school as a whole, and by the community at large. […] the concept of ‘initial literacy’ is much broader and much more closely linked to the child’s total experience of language, as it is at the time and as it will be in the years to come. (Mackay et al., 1970: vi) This focus on language across the curriculum extended to the secondary level of the project. In a publication that explicated the theoretical and methodological background behind the materials (Doughty, Pearce, & Thornton, 1972), Doughty emphasized the increasing demands made on students as they move through the educational system, where many educators see the gap between students’ literacy and that needed for the learning of their specific subject as the responsibility of the English Department. Instead, his explanation took secondary school teachers across the curriculum through a set of four stages that learners go through when encountering new concepts as expressed through new language: recognition, an often silent stage as students slowly come to recognize that which is new; familiarization, in which new items are used with hesitation and where concepts are best explored through more informal conversation and anecdotal examples,2

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with the teacher as guide, so that pupils can come to grips with the new material; hesitant command, in which participants “begin to sound more adult in discussion”, with longer, more objective contributions, still with some hesitancy (linguistic difficulties in expressing a concept at this stage may make it seem as if students have not adequately grasped it); and finally, fluent command, where discussion around the topic is fluid, and appropriate language is used to express the concepts. Doughty connected these stages to reading and writing, as recognition and later stages are supported through reading, and the familiarization and hesitant command stages benefit from students sketching out their ideas by writing them down. He noted that fluent command requires several written drafts for a fluid version of the concept(s), while usually what teachers get is an early stage draft, as students are not given time for redrafting.Yet it is through this work that students can rehearse into deeper understandings of concepts and thus more effective language use across the curriculum. What we have seen thus far on SFL and language development is a focus on pedagogy which gives students ample opportunities for making meaning, moving from spoken to written language, so that they can become socialized into its uses in the school-based context. At the same time, during this period in the 1960s, “what we now know as SFL came into being” (Halliday & Hasan, 2006: 26). That is, while linguists and educationalists were working to provide robust transitioning from home to school, and then again at key points during children’s schooling, they were also working with other linguists, such as Robin Fawcett and Margaret Berry (Halliday & Hasan, 2006), towards building up the notion of system networks, of realization, of strata, and of metafunctions (see Chapter 1). The fact that “this whole experience of interaction between language specialists and teachers played a critical part” (Halliday & Hasan, 2006: 27) in these fundamental developments in SFL theory may go some way towards explaining why SFL theory has very strong ties with educational contexts around the world (as seen in this chapter and the next). Christie (2006) locates SFL theory within the field of education in the 1970s with respect to others who were also concerned with the role of language in children’s school development, such as Britton (1970) and Barnes (1976). Their perspectives, like that of Halliday and his group of educationalists, were developing within education at a time when the child, rather than the content to be learned, was being placed at the centre of the teaching–learning endeavour. However, the non-SFL theories were mainly interested in how children learn through language and were far less focused on learning about language. So, at this point, the reader may ask: what kind of focus on language was included in the materials designed by the SFL-based linguists and educationalists? Hodge (2014) places the Breakthrough to literacy programme for the early years between a synthetic phonics (or bottom-up) and a whole word (or top-down) approach to literacy, in what he calls a “middle-out” approach.The centre tool of Breakthrough to literacy is a sentence maker, a plastic stand with word cards which students choose in assembling their own sentences, building up from words they know and the meanings they wish to create.The sentence-maker was designed to

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help children make connections between the spoken (home) language and written (school) language (Mackay et al., 1970: 3) and between reading and writing, as well as to foster creativity (Mackay et al., 1970: 109) and collaboration (Aspinwall, 1986) in the classroom. The children begin working with clauses and words, as these are familiar structures from the spoken language (Hodge, 2014), and, once they are comfortable using words to create clauses, then they move on to the word-maker, designed to focus attention on and provide practice in putting together the symbols used to construct words. The Breakthrough approach makes a clear distinction between spoken language and the written code—a distinction which a bottom-up synthetic phonics approach often blurs, leaving children “to discover the hard way how different it really is” (Hodge, 2014: 136). Also, phonics is used when needed, to break down or construct words, at a point when “the child is strongly, intrinsically motivated to master them” (Pienaar, 1977: 491), to more effectively decode a word in a meaningful context. As to other linguistic foci in the early literacy years, Mackay et al. (1970: 7) list the language needed in the classroom to talk about written language, terms such as listening, speaking, reading, telling, sound, shape, letter, symbol, word, space, sentence, text, first and beginning, last and end, middle, left, right, and direction. In moving to the middle school years, Language and communication: book 1 (Forsyth & Wood, 1977) includes activities which centre around various aspects of language, such as speech sounds, sound–symbol correspondences, nouns, verbs (including verbs of action and being), patterns in language (such as Subject-Verb-Object patterned clauses), sentence types (statements, questions, commands and exclamations), and practice in writing different genres and from different points of view.There are chapters that involve students in reading about the development of writing and literacy, and about non-verbal communication. Technical terms referring to language are very few and include those italicized in this paragraph. The secondary school book, Language in use, continued the focus on meaning-making in communication; Crystal (2017) sums up the types of focus on communication that were included, such as ‘talking on the telephone’,‘applying for a job’,‘ambiguity and ambivalence’, and ‘slanting the news’. However, there is very little metalanguage, beyond some technical terms such as pronoun, past tense, comparative adjective, and subject, which are not explained or defined. Crystal cites the authors on the theme ‘Pattern in language’, which illustrates the purposeful avoidance of a metalanguage: “The aim of this theme is to make the exploration of the internal organization of language possible without requiring of teacher or pupil a technically descriptive vocabulary or an explicitly linguistic mode of analysis” (Doughty et al. 1971, qtd. in Crystal, 2017). Thus, while the linguists were working towards SF grammar (or SFG) as we now know it, and the SFL perspective about language informed the writing of the teaching materials, the children were not receiving explicit instruction through SFL metalanguage in the materials designed in the Breakthrough programme. Doughty et al. (1971) “wasn’t as successful as it might have been at school level […] because it went too far in the direction of avoiding structure […] the grammatical baby had been thrown out with the bathwater” (Crystal, 2017). Still, the Breakthrough project was taken up in other languages and

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countries; Mackay developed it in Scots Gaelic and for the Netherlands Antilles, and it has been used in Australia and, above all, in South Africa, with courses in over 30 African languages (Halliday & Hasan, 2006: 20). However, for further developments in literacy with respect to SFL linguistic theory and its related pedagogy, we now move with Halliday to Australia.

3.3 The ‘Sydney School’ of Genre-based Pedagogy In 1976, Halliday took up a post in the Department of Linguistics at Sydney University, where he created a graduate programme in Applied Linguistics (Language in Education); Notably, in 1979 Jim Martin joined the faculty, where he spearheaded an application of SFL concepts (Martin, 1999a, 2014), through in-depth research and project work with other SF linguists—Joan Rothery, Frances Christie, Guenter Plum, Suzanne Eggins, Robert Veel, and Ejia Ventola, amongst others—into what has become known as the ‘Sydney School’ of genre theory and pedagogy (Martin, 2000)3 (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.2, for a mention of the Write in Right project). One of the early results of this work was a theorizing of genre to refer to “staged purposeful social processes” (Martin, 1999b: 28) that humans carry out through language. Genre was also posited as operating at a deeper level of abstraction than the contextual register variables of field, mode, and tenor.The revised version of the stratified model of language included Martin’s (1992) discourse semantics, which approaches meaning from patterns in whole texts rather than from grammar within the clause, and thus Martin’s (1992) model of stratification differs from Halliday’s (Figure 3.2; compare with Figure 1.5 in Chapter 1).4 In Martin’s revised model (Figure 3.2), genre (linked to the context of culture) is a supervenient category which is realized by patterns of register (linked

genre register discourse semantics lexicogrammar

phonology

Figure 3.2  Modified stratified model (based on Martin, 1992: 496).

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to the context of situation), which is realized as patterns of discourse semantics, and so on (Martin, 1992). Genre, according to Martin, refers to recurrent social processes that take place through interaction within a culture, and which follow a set of stages in carrying out a particular social activity in order to achieve a purpose (Martin, 2009). SFL theorizing about genre has been informed by other research into text macrostructures, or schematic structures, for example on narrative (Labov & Waletzky, 1967) and from English for Specific Purposes (ESP) (Swales, 1990), while SF linguists have taken analysis further by including the discourse semantic and lexicogrammatical features of the stages (and phases within stages) of genres. Genres have been analysed by numerous SFL researchers in a multitude of contexts, educational and beyond (Martin & Rose, 2008; Christie & Martin, 1997), mapped in terms of their overall structures and their typical discourse semantic and lexicogrammatical features. For example, in the early days of the genre-based projects, more than 2,000 texts from a primary school in Sydney were collected and analysed for their generic structure (Rothery, 1996). Martin and Rose (2008) have also mapped out genre families, from three broad categories of story, factual, and evaluating genres, to more specific categories, such as, within factual genres, procedures, which can be further taxonomized into types such as “how to do an activity”, including recipes and operating instructions. Christie (2002) has mapped curriculum genres and macrogenres, both of which are “staged, goal-driven activities, devoted to the accomplishment of significant educational ends” (p. 22) that are construed as recognizable patterns of talk in classrooms. Genres have been further sequenced in terms of their chronology as children move through school, as, for example, with the genres of history (from recording genres to explaining and arguing genres) which “constitute a pathway along which students move as part of their developing control of the discourse of history” (Coffin, 2006: 47). Thus, in SFL-based pedagogy, scaffolding students into increased mastery of an expanding repertoire of genres is key in SLD. In addition to the wealth of studies which map genres and their features, SFLbased genre work is also widely known for its pedagogy. As with Halliday’s earlier work related to education, the genre work spearheaded by Martin is carried out with teachers and accompanied by classroom application (see Martin, 1999a, for a history of genre-based pedagogy, henceforth GBP). Rothery and Martin designed an interventionist pedagogy (Rothery, 1996), a macro-genre that consists of stages: first, a deconstruction stage, in which teachers introduce students to model texts of a given genre, and help students take it apart to see how it works, to talk about its generic stages and linguistic features, thus building up a shared metalanguage, and to discuss where they might find instances of the genre in school and beyond; second, the joint construction stage, in which the teacher and students together, using the metalanguage as a scaffolding, draft a text; the final stage involves the students in writing their own text as an independent construction. This type of scaffolding of writing in the classroom is reminiscent of that which parents provide their very young children in prompting them to relate something they have experienced as a story (for an example, see

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Chapter 1, Section 1.1, where Nigel’s parents guide him in remembering details of seeing a goat eating a lid, which turns into a story he can tell others). In the classroom, the teacher also works with the students in building knowledge of the relevant fields—that is, in constructing the type of knowledge to be included in the text. Figure 3.3 models what has become to be known as the TeachingLearning Cycle (TLC). SFL and genre-based descriptions and pedagogy have been applied to primary and secondary education (Humphrey, 2016; Humphrey, Chen, & Macnaught, 2016), and higher education (Dreyfus, Humphrey, Mahboob, & Martin, 2015; Coffin & Donohue, 2014; Nesi & Gardner, 2012) (see Mickan, 2019, for the range of educational levels and teacher education). They spread from Australia to other countries, such as the United Kingdom (Clark, 2019) and the United States (Brisk, 2015; de Oliviera & Iddings, 2014; Gebhard & Harman, 2011); they have been applied to Spanish heritage language learners (Colombi, 2009), and to contexts in which students learn content subjects through an additional language (Llinares, Morton, & Whittaker, 2012), a topic for Chapter 4.

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Figure 3.3  Teaching-Learning Cycle (Rothery & Stenglin, 1994: 8).

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3.4 Developing Genre-based Pedagogy 3.4.1 Reading-to-Learn Based on the tenets of GBP, and on literacy work with Indigenous communities in Australia (Martin, 2006), David Rose worked towards creating a literacy-based programme called Reading to Learn (R2L) (Rose, 2006; Rose & Martin, 2012). Surprisingly, none of the studies reviewed later in this chapter apply R2L (although studies in additional language journals have done so; see Chapter 4); however, it makes sense to explain it at this point in the book, given its relationship to GBP. R2L pedagogy is a teaching macrogenre that follows several stages: first is Preparing before Reading, in which the teacher discusses the topic of a text and summarizes each of its generic stages and phases so that the students are familiar with the field before they read; the teacher then supports the students through Detailed Reading of the sentences in the text, helping students understand the context and meanings, identify wordings, and elaborate on understandings, a process which can include critical discussion of both field and language; next, together the class writes up notes from the text on the board in the Preparing for Writing stage, which leads to Joint Rewriting. The scaffolded interaction that happens during the reading of text front-loads what students need to know in order to be able to respond successfully (Martin, 2006), and thus is quite different from the ubiquitous Initiation-Response-Evaluation type of interaction in which the teacher holds an answer that students may find themselves fishing for. It is also designed around the type of interaction that happens in the home between parents and children during storybook reading. Rose’s pedagogy as applied in the classroom tends to avoid SFL metalanguage, using instead “commonsense terms from everyday folk rhetoric” (Martin, 2006: 111), much like the talk between caregivers and very young children (see Section 3.6 on metalanguage). Applications of R2L pedagogy have included researched intervention studies with highly positive results, with acceleration of literacy development “twice to over four times expected rates, at the same time as they close the gap in any class between the most and least successful students” (Rose, 2008, pp. 151–152; cf. Rose, 2016). The pedagogy has been applied in educational contexts around the world (cf. Ramos, 2015; Whittaker & García Parejo, 2018), in content-and-language-integratedlearning (CLIL; cf. Whittaker & Acevedo, 2016; Whittaker, 2018) and has been translated into Spanish (Rose & Martin, 2018). It has also been effectively applied in higher education contexts (cf. Millin & Millin, 2014). 3.4.2 Collaboration with Legitimation Code Theory The fruitful dialogue between Bernsteinian and SFL perspectives on education (Christie, 2008; Maton & Doran, 2017) include Christie’s (1995, 2002) work on instructional and regulative registers in the classroom, through which, respectively, content, on the one hand, and classroom interaction and management, on

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the other, are constructed through the configuration of metafunctional choices. The dialogue has continued with a robust sociological framework, Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), which elaborates Bernstein’s code theory more fully (Maton, 2014). The LCT website clearly shows the affinity with SFL-based work in education: LCT concepts reveal the ‘rules of the game’ shaping different arenas of social life, such as education. Such bases of achievement are typically tacit, so actors whose social backgrounds do not equip them with keys to these ‘legitimation codes’ are disadvantaged. By making the codes visible, LCT enables the rules of the game to be taught and learned or changed, advancing social justice (Legitimation Code Theory, http://legitimationcodetheory.com/ home/theory/introducinglct/) The commonalities can be seen, for example, between Bernstein’s (2000) horizontal and vertical discourses and Martin’s (1992) taxonomy of fields, ranging from common sense to uncommon sense (Martin, 2011). LCT has stimulated areas of research within SFL on the construal of disciplines (Martin, 2011) and knowledge structures in the classroom. The LCT dimension of Semantics (Maton, 2013, 2014) provides two knowledge constructs: semantic gravity (SG), which refers to the dependence of meaning on context—the weaker the semantic gravity the more abstract or generalized ideas become; and semantic density (SD), which refers to the degree of condensation of meaning within a term— technical terms often have high SD, for example. Researchers have analysed classroom discourse to show how meanings can move from initial mentions of terms with high SD and low SG, terms which are then unpacked through everyday language and examples (using ranges of SD and raising the strength of the SG) to create semantic waves of information. Studies show that flat lines of semantic gravity, for example, can cause lack of understanding if they remain high or lack of learning concepts if they remain low. Other studies show strategies for creating flows of SG and SD and their repercussions for student learning (Córdova Jiménez, Melo, Bacigalupo, & Manghi, 2016; McCabe, 2017; Galloway, Dobbs, Olivo, & Madigan, 2019; Lo, Lin & Liu, 2020). The LCT semantic dimension has also been used to trace the learning of metalanguage for R2L in a professional development programme (Hipkiss & Andersson Varga, 2018). The goal of these studies is to find optimal strategies for scaffolding knowledge structures in learning environments.

3.5 SFL Research on SLD SFL has developed its linguistic theory at the same time as it has developed a pedagogy which is designed to aid learning. A strong claim is made for SFL as a theory which can successfully underpin language and learning development. Collins and Williamson (1981) noted that the connection between spoken and

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written language which they theorized in their cross-sectional study of differences between weaker and stronger writers in school, based in part on Halliday and Hasan (2013[1976]), was the product of reasoning rather than of empirical evidence. Thus, it is important to provide an account of the empirical research which has examined the claim that SFL theory can shed light on language development during schooling, and, even further, can provide a pedagogical framework which is optimal for its enhancement. While in Chapter 2 this kind of review of the empirical research was not included, given the limited (although detailed) studies using an SFL perspective to trace child language development, I include in both Chapters 3 and 4 a research synthesis of studies from topranked journals. Given the impossibility of including everything that has been written using SFL to analyse SLD—a wealth of books, journal articles, and PhD dissertations—I narrowed the scope through a synthetic study of the SFL-based articles on language development from the 60 top-ranked journals in the category of ‘Education’, as indicated by the journal impact factor for the year 2017 of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) (Clarivate Analytics, 2018). I searched each of the journals for the terms ‘SFL’, and if no articles appeared, then for ‘Halliday’; I read the abstracts and kept those articles that reported on either longitudinal changes over time in student language ability connected to gains in learning or on comparisons in learning attainment due to some differential factor, such as age or socio-economic status. Also kept were snapshots providing evidence of the meaning-making capabilities of students during different types of classroom activities, such as writing or drama. These snapshots are often exploratory, leading to a comparison of ways in which school learners encode meaning—often ways which are deemed more or less effective; thus, these studies can be seen as leading to the creation of cross-sectional categories, such as ‘strong/weak writers’, which were not established a priori to the study. Not included in the review are articles that focused on teacher talk only and did not go on to report the effects of that talk on children’s SLD.5 Also left out were descriptive studies of a register or of a specific disciplinary literacy, of classroom language, or of textbook language. Finally, some of the education journals focus on learners whose first language differs from that of the school,6 and the relevant studies from those journals (which, in addition to Education, are also ranked as Language journals) are included in Chapter 4. Appendix A at the end of this chapter lists the journals with articles that fit the criteria, as well as the ranking of the journal and the number of articles it contains. A total of 53 articles fit the criteria: 13 (as indicated by an asterisk) were included in journals that focus on the learning of an additional language, so these studies are considered in Chapter 4, and the remaining 40 are reviewed here. Appendix B provides a list of the top-ranked journals that did not include any articles that fit the criteria. Figure 3.4 presents the rate of publication over the years (including only those years in which at least one article appeared). The number of articles peaked at five per year in 1999, while most years saw the publication of, at most, one article. The vast majority of studies focus on English (36 out of the 40 studies), with 2 on Italian, 1 on Korean, and 1 with no indication of the language of instruction. Most of the studies took place in the

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Figure 3.4  Number of articles published per year.

United States (26), followed by Australia (5), and then the United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, and Korea with 2 each and Singapore with 1. These studies are reviewed in the following three sections. Of the studies, 28 included no intervention—that is, these studies provide indications of SLD through changes in the way language is used over time, either in the same subjects or across subjects, using SFL descriptive tools, without an SFL-based teaching intervention; 12 of the studies include an intervention.The studies can be divided into three overall types: snapshot (8), cross-sectional (18), and longitudinal (14), and the interventions are included within each: 1 snapshot, 1 cross-sectional, and 10 longitudinal studies. 3.5.1 Snapshot Studies The snapshot studies provide views of various children’s meaning-making abilities at a given point in time, and are thus helpful for comparison of expansion of resources over time or after intervention. Schrader (1989) studied pre-kindergarten children in an early childhood education centre, with an age range of 5–5½ years, through data collected in the form of video recordings during the children’s symbolic play, along with field notes; also collected were all texts written during the play, along with accompanying notes from discussions with each

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child who produced the texts as to their purpose and content. Schrader used Halliday’s child language functions (see Chapter 2, Section 2.3.2.2) to classify the written language. For example, writing a shopping list was classified as Instrumental (to obtain goods), writing instructions as Regulatory, writing a letter as Interactional, writing a diary as Personal, writing questions as Heuristic, writing a story as Imaginative, and writing down one’s name and address as Informative. Schrader found written texts in all of the functions except the Heuristic and the Imaginative: the children used the Heuristic in oral language, in asking each other questions; however, Schrader speculated that they were not experienced in using the written language for this function. They also did not write out stories (Imaginative function) during play; however, in another investigation, Schrader found that children were capable of writing stories about pictures. She concluded that students used written language appropriately for the registers they were enacting, such as keeping house, for which they wrote letters, checks, and signs, for example. She also highlighted the importance of rich play contexts, where children can extend their literacy development through situations which call for written language. While some of their texts were plain scribbles, the children still showed the knowledge of what it means to ‘write a letter’, or ‘sign a check’, as part of typified responses to recurring interactions such as shop encounters, even while they might not yet have the ability to actually write out words, phrases, or sentences.Thus, play-rich, interactive contexts can help students move into literacy. With children at the next stage of development, first to third graders,Varelas et al. (2010) also show the use of imaginative activities to stimulate interaction and thus learning through language. They gathered data in the form of fieldnotes, videotapes, and transcripts of discourse used during drama activities from public school classrooms in first, second, and third grades, where students enacted representations of scientific concepts in order to mediate and transform their understandings of the content knowledge; for example, they engaged in scenes where they represented molecules moving in different ways to enact water in its changing states.Varelas and her team of researchers coded the events according to the ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions. The drama activities were seen to provide ample multimodal opportunities for students to discuss knowledge while negotiating with peers and teachers and sequencing actions in time and space. Thus, the dramatizing of scientific concepts allows for the creation of hybrid spaces “as everyday and scientific ways of thinking, communicating, and acting become interwoven with each other” (Varelas et al., 2010: 304), providing a flexible and creative way to scaffold students into understanding concepts. Within subject science, three ‘snapshot’ studies shed light on various aspects of learning through language in the middle-school years. Seah, Clarke, and Hart (2011) analysed the lexicogrammatical choices in written science explanations by 27 seventh-grade students; using transitivity processes (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3) to examine the texts, the researchers were able to differentiate more effective use of clause choices to construct the process of expansion of molecules from lexicogrammatical choices that did not demonstrate appropriate

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understandings of the concept. They concluded that teachers could provide more explicit focus on several linguistic aspects of explanations, such as the specific language that may apply to one entity or another in a scientific explanation, the functions of different kinds of logical connectives, pronoun use to manage endophoric reference more effectively, and the stages of science genres. Keys (1999) investigated written reports in science produced by thirty-four students in seventh, eighth, and ninth grades for expansion clauses which indicated logico-semantic relationships between events; her goal was to ascertain how students expanded on observations, facts, and inferences. Keys found that student reports contained few meaningful inferences, and, while the participants were able to list facts and observations, they did not relate these to new hypotheses or knowledge claims, thus remaining at the level of knowledge-telling. Some of the students did expand scientific ideas and generate meaningful inferences, which meant that their texts demonstrated a scientific perspective and, thus, writing at the level of knowledge-transforming. While all of the students had the same instruction at the science camp where the research took place, they came from different schools, and thus, according to Keys, factors such as prior knowledge and varying experiences with appropriate scientific discourse could explain why some of the students seemed to understand interpretation and the formation of hypotheses as important features of writing in science while others did not. Keys concluded that interventions which include specific attention to reading and discussing models of scientific writing, while also engaging students in meaningful and open-ended inquiries into scientific concepts and allowing them opportunities to write their ideas informally, discuss data interpretations, and then write more formally (as suggested by Doughty; see Section 3.2), could help students learn scientific ways of thinking and concepts through writing. Maeng and Kim (2011) set out to find the kind of classroom interaction most conducive to middle-school children learning through language. The authors analysed transcripts from four lessons for seventh graders in Korea within a unit on rocks and rock formation, by a teacher who had attended in-service training to expand her repertoire of teaching practices beyond a traditional, teacherdirected approach to more constructivist and student-centred forms of practice—a move which she expressed difficulty adapting to. The authors applied a methodology for analysing the teaching modality of the various discourse episodes which made up the lessons, using Bernstein’s (1990) notions of classification and framing. That is, they analysed the discourse for what was happening between discourse participants, where teacher-dominated discourse was considered as having a strong classification, and a more collaborative construction between the teacher and the student a weaker classification; the discourse initiative was labelled as strongly framed when the teacher’s selection, sequencing, pacing, and evaluation of knowledge was dominant, and weakly framed when it was the students doing these activities; finally, they analysed the hierarchical relation of the discourse into three types: imperative (with the teacher ordering the students’ behaviour directly), positional (in which the teacher led students to act or think as an instructor would), and personal (where students are encouraged

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to identify the teacher’s perspective more as equals). Maeng and Kim analysed the discourse for these patterns and used the SFL textual metafunctional notions of Given and New (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3) to further analyse the student positioning via the discourse. Thus, for example, a discourse episode in which the teacher asked questions led to a weak classification of the participants through dialogic, collaborative discourse, guiding the students’ understandings for a weak framing of a more personal discourse. At the same time, when the teacher accepted a student’s contribution as New, that created for that student a pedagogic subject position of “a positive science discourse participant”, with additional elaboration by the teacher creating one of “a successful science learner” (p. 442). However, when the teacher acknowledged a student’s contribution as Given, it created a pedagogic subject position of “a simple participant in a discourse” (p. 442), and, when it was rejected, it created one of an “unsuccessful science learner” (p. 454).Thus, for Maeng and Kim (2011: 454), “it seems reasonable to conclude that it is not the vocabularies used in students’ utterances that decide the students’ pedagogic subject positioning, but the discursive interaction itself between a teacher and students”. This positioning can locate students as members of a “science learning community of practice” (p. 454), which can contribute positively to their learning. Thomas (2012) presents a snapshot study which followed a teaching intervention; it reports on 3D movies created by primary school students,7 and on their explanations of the choices they made in creating these multimodal texts, during a unit which included explicit teaching of multimodal grammatical design, drawing on SFL theory (see, for example, Unsworth, 2001). While this study includes mention of a pedagogical intervention, it is not classed as longitudinal because it does not report on change over time, but rather shows the students’ work and justifications at the end of a unit. The results from a sampling of Thomas’ data show that the children are clearly on their way to becoming adept at creating narratives which combine three semiotic modes—image, verbiage, and sound— while exhibiting variability in doing so. Also, while the children were able to effectively communicate the justifications for their choices in constructing their multimodal texts, they did not tend to use the explicit metalanguage that had been used in class; even when they did, they showed some confusion with everyday understandings of a term such as ‘demand’.Thus, for Thomas, while the pedagogy seemed to be effective in helping students understand the potentials of the multimodal meaning-making resources, more explicit teaching of the metalanguage might help them more effectively articulate their own projects. We return to the use of metalanguage in pedagogical practice in Section 3.7. Another snapshot study is located within a first-year undergraduate course in sociology. Prosser and Webb (1994) used phenomenography, a qualitative research methodology which describes the learning experience from the student’s perspective, combined with an SFL analysis of nineteen student essays. Data included the essays and transcriptions of interviews with students on their views of essays in sociology and how they approached the writing of the essay analysed. The essays were analysed through the textual metafunctional lens of

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Themes, hyperThemes and macroThemes, and the degree to which the macroThemes predicted the paragraphs in the essays and to which the hyperThemes predicted the rest of its paragraph (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.4); in this way, the researchers traced the essays’ “predictive scaffolding” (p. 131). From the perspective of the ideational metafunction, the content words in the texts were analysed through their taxonomic relationships within semantic fields and through processual relationships between concepts across semantic fields. The phenomenographic approach provided a focus on the process of writing an essay for sociology, while the SFL analysis allowed for a focus on the written product. Their results showed that students who took a more surface approach to writing the essay, focusing on listing key points of the topic, wrote essays with fewer processual relationships and less predictive scaffolding than did the students who took a deep approach, which involved them in thinking about relations across ideas and creating an argument. The authors highlight the value of combining a focus on both process and product, as they are “inextricably linked” (p. 135). A pedagogical focus needs to consider the authentic contexts in which the writing takes place, as: students need to be able to analyse authentic contextualised examples of writing, so as to reflect on the processes necessary for achieving those products. This involves making explicit the normally implicit ways that writers approach their work, and bringing to conscious awareness the way that written texts are mirrors of the interaction between the writer and the cultural domain. (Prosser & Webb, 1994: 137) These last two snapshot studies emphasize the importance for students to be able to articulate their choices as they approach and explain how they put together a text, including justifying why these are appropriate for their goals for the text in a given context. Thus, these studies support an explicit teaching of text features, which we will return to in Section 3.6. A final snapshot by McCulley (1985) analysed cohesion, which, like other studies of cohesion included in this synthesis of developmental studies, does not focus on intervention. Rather, cohesion is used as a measure of quality in individuals’ language repertoires, and researchers, while providing results as to differences in these language resources and their effects on abilities to create meaning, sometimes conclude with methodological implications, and at others with pedagogical ones. As a methodological tool for testing Halliday and Hasan’s (2013[1976]) cohesion framework and its relationship to text quality and coherence (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.3), McCulley (1985) used the primary-trait coherence scoring guide of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a measure of student achievement in the United States. He applied Halliday and Hasan’s category of cohesive devices to a random selection of 120 persuasive argument essays written by twelfth graders (17 years old) for the NAEP 1978–1979 test which had scored across the range on the NAEP

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coherence primary-trait measure. His results showed that, while not the case for other cohesion categories, greater frequencies of synonyms, hyponyms, and collocations were important contributors to coherence. He concluded that cohesion is one aspect of coherence and writing quality, but it is not the full picture. 3.5.2 Cross-sectional Studies While only one of the ‘snapshot’ studies analysed cohesion, it is a predominant tool of analysis in the cross-sectional studies, used in 13 out of the 18 studies. Of these, a number, like McCulley (1985), focused more on methodological implications related to cohesion. Crowhurst (1987) applied Halliday and Hasan’s (2013[1976]) taxonomy of cohesive devices to an analysis of texts written by students from sixth-, tenth- and twelfth-grade classes. From a total of 657 essays, Crowhurst chose at random a sampling of 35 texts from each of the grade groups. Students wrote in one of two modes in response to an image of a performing whale: narrative (create a story about the picture), or argument (about the treatment of whales as entertainment). Her findings showed no difference in frequency of cohesive ties over the three grades; however, there were differences in types of cohesive devices, as use of collocation and synonyms increased with grade level while use of exophora, as well as causal and temporal conjunctives, decreased. She also found mode differences, with greater use of pronominals, demonstratives, definite articles, and temporal conjunctives in narrative. In terms of qualitative differences, the frequency counts obscured developmental features, such as motivation for the use of repetition, which in the sixth-grade essays was linked at least in part to immature repetitiveness in lexical choices, while in the twelfth-grade essays it was linked to more elaboration and summary of arguments. Thus, Crowhurst argues, frequency of synonyms and collocation might index writing maturity and quality, but other frequency counts might not, and their context of use is key in determining whether development is evident. Bamberg (1984), in response to the view that cohesion is only part of the coherence story, developed the Holistic Coherence Scale, based on Halliday and Hasan (2013[1976]) and on van Dijk’s (1977, 1980) text structures and schemas, where coherence is partly built up from readers’ knowledge and/or expectations. Bamberg’s model includes four scales, from ‘fully coherent’ (with a clearly identified and focused topic to which readers are oriented through the creation of a context or situation, with details organized according to a discernible and sustained plan, and with cohesive ties linking sentences and/or paragraphs) to ‘incomprehensible’ (topic not identifiable, digressions, assumed context, and few cohesive ties), with two intermediary levels. These scales were applied to an analysis of 2,698 essays written by 13- and 17-year-olds for the 1969, 1974, and 1979 NAEP tests in the United States. The essays were also rated holistically for their quality.The results showed a clear difference in the number of essays which received higher coherence scores in the older age group, regardless of the quality rating of the essays: almost 92% of the good essays written by 17-year-olds were rated coherent as compared to 68% of the good essays of the 13-year-olds;

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similarly, with the poor essays, the percentage was 45% as compared to 19%.That is, even the poor 17-year-old writers were more likely to write coherently, and almost all of the good writers of that age group were able to do so, showing that there is a developmental trajectory with respect to coherence as students mature, but which weaker writers were not able to follow, thus creating a widening gap. Fitzgerald and Spiegel (1986) compared stories written by twenty-six third graders and twenty-two sixth graders on two different prompts, analysing the texts for cohesive ties and cohesive errors (Halliday and Hasan, 2013), for coherence (based on a version of Bamberg’s Holistic Coherence Scale) and for quality, using a holistic rating. They found that the relationship between cohesion and coherence did not vary according to grade level or quality of writing, although it did vary substantially with respect to the content of the story. On the other hand, they found that more selective use of cohesive ties, with shorter distances to their referents, were present in stories that were judged to be more coherent. However, sometimes too many cohesive ties (for example, additive or temporal conjunction, such as when young children string together sentences with ‘and’) detracted from coherence. There was a decline in both the number of cohesive ties and of cohesive errors from third to sixth grade; thus, their study provides evidence of development of coherence over time. Spiegel and Fitzgerald (1990), using the same data as Fitzgerald and Spiegel (1986), also applied Halliday and Hasan’s (2013) categories of cohesion (also analysing cohesive errors). Differently to the first study, for coherence, they also applied Hasan’s (1984b) cohesive harmony (which refers to chains of cohesive devices which may relate to or interact with other chains) as a point of comparison with the measure used in the 1986 study. Hasan’s (1984b) view of coherence is based on the degree of interaction between chains of cohesive ties, and its analysis is based solely on the linguistic features in the text itself, and not on the reader’s schema and expectations. The results of this second study were similar to those of the first study in terms of the relationship between cohesion and coherence, including the effect of text content and lack of variance in the relationship between cohesion and coherence with respect to quality of writing or student age. Also similar was the development from third to sixth grade in the decline of the distance between cohesive ties and their referents, and in the increased perceived text quality. However, the profiles of the nature of the relationship between the two were different; in the first study, fewer ties (especially conjunctions) were associated with increased coherence, while in the second, the use of more ties (especially use of reference and lexical cohesion) was associated with increased coherence. With respect to measuring coherence, Spiegel and Fitzgerald (1990) ultimately argue that the Holistic Coherence Scale has greater construct validity, as it correlated more predictably with other measures, such as quality, while the cohesive harmony index did not; the cohesive harmony index also measured a more restricted range of cohesive variables, not taking into account macro-structural aspects (such as clause order and redundancy), psychological factors (e.g. memory span), conjunctions, or distances between ties and referents. It is worth pointing out

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that Fulcher (1989), in a theoretical article (and thus not included in this synthetic study) argues that “schemata and linguistic signals are two sides of the same coin” (p. 158), as, if the linguistic signals do not trigger the schemata appropriately, then comprehension may not occur. The stratal SFL approach to cohesion sees these linguistic resources precisely as both semantic and lexicogrammatical simultaneously. Neuner (1987), also aware of the arguments related to the suitability of Halliday and Hasan’s (2013)[1976] cohesion as an analytical tool to distinguish essay quality, analysed letters of explanation related to giving good advice written by first-year university students; the texts were first rated holistically, and twenty good and twenty poor essays were randomly chosen for analysis of cohesive ties and chains. While cohesive ties did not distinguish text quality, cohesive chains did, depending on several characteristics such as length of chain, variety of words, and maturity of word choice. Neuner argues that the metaphors supplied by Halliday and Hasan’s (2013)[1976] terminology surrounding cohesion are helpful additions to terminologies used in the teaching of writing: Terms such as chain, distance, tie, coherer, precursor, intersection, and network suggest that connectedness is at the core of meaning and that complex meaning is never resolved in a single word of [sic] phrase but through longer semantic structures that cross or intertwine with others. (Neuner, 1987: 101) According to Neuner, the “notions of flow or movement” (p. 101) that the theory implies are a welcome complement to more traditional terminologies which focus on static structures for building up a text and allow for a move from considering writing as a set of particles to thinking about it as field. On the pedagogical side, Collins and Williamson (1981) called for empirical research on register-appropriate use of cohesion, and a number of the crosssectional studies compared students’ abilities to use cohesive devices effectively. For example, in a study designed to examine writing media, social relationship, and microgenetic development effects on narratives written by twenty firstgraders, Jones and Pellegrini (1996) collected data over a period of 11 weeks, during which the children participated in a writing workshop consisting of sessions in both a computer lab and in the classroom. In both contexts, sessions began with a mini-lesson on some aspect of writing (e.g. selecting a topic, reading and celebrating good literature, qualities of good writing) and ended with students writing a narrative. Ten writing tests, in the form of writing a story in response to a series of pictures, were also completed by the children, five on the computer and five using pencil and paper. The written narratives were analysed, based on Halliday and Hasan (2013)[1976], for cohesion in the form of endophoric and exophoric reference, conjunction, ellipsis, and lexical ties.They were also analysed for their narrative structure, based on Stein and Glenn’s (1979) model, consisting of six of their categories: setting, initiating event, internal response, attempt, consequence, and reaction. The authors found that the

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computer facilitated the writing of narratives for the children, whereby they produced more lexically cohesive texts, with greater frequency of reiteration and collocation of lexical items, and they generated more metacognitive talk. In both contexts, the children’s narratives became more cohesive over time, as they were more endophoric in second grade. In another study related to the registerial variable of mode, Collins and Williamson (1981) used Halliday and Hasan’s (2013)[1976] category of exophoric reference, along with Ong’s (1980) formulary expressions (commonplaces, clichés, proverbs, and epithets) in order to operationally define ‘semantic abbreviation’, which they characterize as “incomplete and inexplicit meaning” (p. 32) or “an inadequate representation of situational and cultural contexts of language in student writing” (p. 23). They argue that semantic abbreviation is more a feature of spoken rather than written language, and set out to test the extent to which school-aged writers (grades four, eight, and twelve) include this feature in descriptive texts; for each of the grades, they analysed the ten highestand ten lowest-rated texts (based on primary-trait scoring) for the rate of semantic abbreviation, which was calculated by combining the totals of personal and demonstrative exophoric references and formulaic expressions and dividing that by the total number of words per text. Their results showed a significant difference between strong and weak essays on the semantic abbreviation rate, and they conclude that the weaker writers use more features of spoken language when writing. This finding leads them to argue for a gradual transition from speaking to writing and for providing weaker writers with a chance “to talk through more explicit meanings for their writing” (p. 34). While Collins and Williamson (1981) did not test for semantic abbreviation in the spoken language, Cox, Fang, and Otto (1997) analysed cohesive devices in pre-school language across registers, and is the only cohesion study which compares middle- to lower-income students. In their study, forty-eight 4- and 5-yearolds were assessed using Sulzby’s (1985) Categories of Storybook Reading, which classifies children’s reading style based on pretend-reading of a familiar storybook; in Cox et al.’s study, three groups were found: ‘no-story’(for example, simple labelling of pictures), oral-like (for example, creating voices for dialogue or using reading intonation while telling the story from seeing the pictures), and writtenlike/print-governed (where reading/storytelling might be mixed, or the story that is recited is very close to the original). The children then carried out two tasks in the form of monologues: one on a personal experience, told while they conversed with an adult participant (oral register), and the second a retelling of the same story for the adult to write down, ostensibly for other children to read (written register). After the retelling and transcribing, the researcher read the story back to the child, who could then make edits to it. All the texts were analysed for Hasan’s (1984b) cohesive harmony, as in Spiegel and Fitzgerald (1990), with both cohesive and noncohesive indices calculated as ratios of tokens per all of the tokens in the text. Results from quantitative analyses showed that both the income and emergent reading categories had statistically significant main effects on a higher use of cohesive harmony and a lower appearance of

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noncohesive choices in the written register texts, while age and gender showed no significant effects; there were also no significant differences with respect to the oral register texts. That is, the middle-income children showed more cohesive harmony in their written register stories than did the lower-income children; the case was similar for the written-like/print-governed children, who showed great cohesive harmony in the written register than did the no-story and picturegoverned children, regardless of income level. At the same time, in the oral register, children were fairly equal in their use of cohesion in the face-to-face oral monologue. Qualitative analysis of the texts showed further that some of the students were able to adjust the type of cohesive devices appropriately, depending on the register, while others were not. The authors concluded that differences in child-centred home experiences with books leads to these different understandings of code-switching between registers, as well as the ability to do so, and that knowledge of the literacy experiences that children bring to school can help educators determine the best type of implicit/explicit instructional interactions to aid students in their literacy development. In an earlier study, with children who were slightly older (nine kindergarteners and nine second graders), Cox and Sulzby (1984) analysed anaphoric, cataphoric, and exophoric reference in stories, classifying the reference as either cohesive or noncohesive. The children, previously assessed in both grades as having differing levels of reading ability, narrated the stories through three modes: they first told the story (about a wind-up toy race), they dictated the story for it to be written down, and then they wrote the story themselves. The first two modes were audio-taped and transcribed. Results showed that, in each of the grades, the children rated higher in reading ability produced significantly more appropriate reference for the task than did children of lesser reading ability. In another study led by Beverly Cox (Cox, Shanahan, & Sulzby, 1990), the authors highlighted the awareness that a simple counting of items that have a cohesive relationship without taking into account the purposes of the text will not “accurately describe the coherence of a text” (p. 52). The researchers collected texts from forty-eight children, some high- and some low-ability readers, from third and fifth grades, who wrote four texts: two narratives and two reports. They analysed the texts for simple coreferential and coclassificatory cohesive ties: pronoun reference, definite articles, comparatives, demonstratives, and ellipsis; they further classified their use as appropriate or inappropriate (e.g., if there was ambiguity in the cohesive tie). They also analysed the texts for cohesive harmony, based on the chains created by the cohesive ties. The results showed statistically significant effects for both age and reading ability in the narrative genre, with more appropriate cohesive ties and cohesive harmony in the fifthgrade narrative writing than in the third-grade writing and also in the higherability students’ texts than in the lower. However, with the expository texts, while the differences were also significant based on ability, they were not based on grade; that is, with expository texts, there was more similarity in use of cohesion, an effect which could perhaps be attributed to less familiarity with expository writing. In a related study, Cox, Shanahan, and Tinzmann (1991) analysed

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only the expository texts for cohesive harmony, organization, and expository voice, which was calculated based on appropriate use of particularized/nonparticularized nouns, verbal constructions, and personal identifying pronouns, given the “tendency of exposition to deal with classes and nonparticular instances and to elaborate via the lexicon rather than pronominal coreference” (p. 197). The researchers found that more proficient and older readers employed a more sophisticated use of cohesion, organized their texts more effectively, and showed a preference for lexical rather than coreferential cohesive devices; that is, the significant differences were related to reading ability. The authors conclude that children need to be exposed to reading and writing expository, and not just narrative, texts from a younger age, and that they also need explicit attention to enhance their knowledge of how these texts are designed for various audiences and functions. Coming to a similar conclusion with respect to pedagogical needs, Kamberelis (1999) used cohesion (amongst other measures) to analyse abilities with and understandings of different genres. Kamberelis studied three text types—stories, science reports, and poems—written by fifty-four children across kindergarten, first, and second grades. The author also collected transcripts of each child reading the finished text, talking about the kind of text it was and where the ideas for writing it came from; additionally, he carried out interviews with children, asking them about sources of knowledge of different genres (e.g.,‘Where do you usually learn about science and science books?’). The students’ texts were analysed for three categories of features: textural (features operating at the sentence or inter-sentential level, including cohesion), register (features operating at the word or sentence level and which signal the field, tenor, and mode of the text), and structural (features which operate at the level of the whole text, in this case narrative, informational, or poetic text structure). Kamberelis’s findings showed that the children had greater experience with and knowledge about narrative than the other two genres. At the same time, the children demonstrated greater knowledge of macro-level genre features than they did of micro-level features, such as cohesive devices.The findings led Kamberelis to conclude that “children develop increasingly differentiated and flexible repertoires of genre forms and functions” (p. 403), and that there is a need for a greater focus on many different kinds of texts in the classroom, to help children “learn, analyse, interrogate, and creatively exploit” the structures, functions, potentials, and effects of genres. Kamberelis and Bovino (1999), in a study of the same grade levels, tested eightyeight children’s ability to reproduce a story and a factual biology report under two conditions: one after being prompted to recall a specific instance, which was denominated the scaffolded condition; the second, the unscaffolded condition, consisted of asking children to tell a story or create a report of their own. The resulting texts were then analysed, as in Kamberelis (1999), for textural features, including cohesion and overall text structure, as well as for summary measures which took into account both the prototypicality of the text’s textural and structural features, on the one hand, and its holistic, rhetorical effectiveness rating, on the other. The results showed, as did Kamberelis’s 1999 study, that older

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children produced texts that were more well formed and rhetorically effective than did younger children, and that the narratives fared better than did the reports, which tended to be less prototypical, sometimes even drawing on narrative qualities; also, the texts fared better for both genres in the scaffolded condition. Thus, “relying on cultural artefacts as scaffolds seemed to index and activate textual, intertextual, and contextual knowledge about particular discursive fields that children possessed even if they could not analyze, verbalize, or critique such knowledge” (Kamberelis & Bovino, 1999: 163). They conclude that the greater the repertoire of genres that children “learn as part of their language socialization and education, the deeper and broader their potential for cognitive and communicative growth is likely to be” (p. 166). Furthermore, making explicit the similarities and differences of the forms and functions of different genres can help children understand how and when to deploy their genre knowledge “more effectively and critically” (p. 166). Finally, they argue for the role of imitating models and “even copying” (p. 166), as these activities can function as a zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978). Appropriating and using cultural artefacts serves to scaffold development. Donovan (2001) provides a cross-sectional view from kindergarten through fifth grade of children’s development in the control of macro-level organizational features of narrative and informative texts. Her study included 222 participants, from two classes from each grade level. At the beginning of the school year, students were given prompts to elicit each of the two genres, and all of the texts were analysed for the global elements of the corresponding text structure; the narrative macro-structure was based on Stein and Glenn’s (1979) model, consisting of setting, initiating event, internal response, plan, attempt, consequence, and reaction; the informational text macro-structure was based on Pappas (1986), who draws on Hasan (1984a), consisting of the obligatory elements of topic presentation, description of attributes, and characteristic events, and optional elements of category comparison, final summary, and afterward. Donovan found a clear grade-level progression with narrative, as kindergarteners and first graders included the fewest macro-level elements in their stories, while, by second grade, the writers included the range of elements, combining them in a variety of ways. In over 40% of texts, second and third graders included an internal plan and reaction, which increased to 50% of texts by the fourth and fifth graders. However, the developmental trajectory was not as marked as at the second-grade level. She also found increasing complexity through the grades in the writing of informational texts, with second grade serving as a transitional year—by that year, the students produced a fuller range of texts, which gained in organizational complexity thereafter. Donovan argues that children’s writing development does not progress at the same rate as does their growth in reading and mathematics; she thus suggests pedagogical implementations which include more scaffolding of writing by focusing on the intermediate forms children produce as they grow in their writing abilities and on informational writing, and transitioning students from using oral language to talk about their experiences (e.g. for description, explanation, and recount) to writing about them in genre-appropriate ways.

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In a more focused study of the same grade levels, Donovan and Smolkin (2002) applied multiple levels of scaffolding, from low (simple prompts, e.g. ‘tell a story’), middle (e.g. using visual support aids to prompt the telling of a story), high (e.g. recall after listening to a story), to highest (e.g. including organizational structure supports with time for revision). From each of the two classrooms at each of the grade levels (K–5) participating in the study, two children, described as above-average writers, were selected for sets of chronologically ordered tasks, such as writing a story and an informational text, describing the differences between the two, pretend-reading a story and an information book with only pictures visible, defining story and information books, sorting a stack of books by genre, and explaining how they wrote their initial texts. As in Donovan (2001), the written texts were analysed for Stein and Glenn’s (1979) macro-structural elements for narrative and Pappas’ (1986) for informational texts; oral transcriptions of the recall tasks were analysed for the same. The data resulting from the other tasks (explanations of the differences between writing stories and informational texts, definitions of story and information books, explanations for why they sorted books the way they did, and responses about their writing processes) were analysed for salient categories. The authors found that children produced more sophisticated texts in terms of organization with the middle-level scaffolding task (pretend-reading) than with low-level scaffolding (writing from a prompt). They also found that, having carried out previous tasks, students showed greater development in later tasks; for example, having written a narrative, compared it with an informational text, and completed a pretend-reading of a story, a child was better able to define a narrative. The authors conclude that tasks are effective in scaffolding student achievement and draw on Kamberelis and Bovino (1999) in support of genre imitation as a scaffold for genre appropriation.They also conclude that, from the SFL genre-based account of genres, a key factor that is missing in the writing of genres is the audience and the individual’s goals for using certain meaning-making choices. So, while these authors are comfortable with a genre pedagogy that teaches form, or overall text structure, they conclude that an author’s goal—for example, to entertain—may override the expected genre form, and are thus less comfortable with the lack of inclusion of individuality (a point which we return to in Chapter 5) in the SFL pedagogical model. Tasks can scaffold students into genre awareness, and they can also elicit different types of interaction. In a cross-sectional study focused on interaction through a computer-supported collaborative learning online platform, Tan and Seah (2011) investigated questions posted by students across ten online discussions from each of three fourth-grade science classes.The researchers divided the students’ questions according to their ideational function into one of three overall types: meta-discoursal, including clarifications of meaning, suggestions for alternatives, and questions related to relevance of postings, which are indicative of the degree of interactivity amongst peers and are thus “crucial for collaborative inquiry” (p. 1682); epistemological, or inquiries related to evidence for claims, which indicate critical stance-taking towards the knowledge posted by peers;

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and scientific, which are questions related to science content, such as scientific facts, concepts, and principles. Tasks differed across the three discussion forums: one elicited scientific facts about the body’s need for a digestive system, another used students’ everyday knowledge of household items to compare them to parts of the digestive system, and the third presented an open-ended problem where students were asked to theorize the feeding habits of an animal based on the remains of a skeleton. Findings showed that the first task elicited mainly scientific questions from students, while the second task elicited the greatest number of questions, which were mainly scientific or meta-discoursal with few epistemological questions. The third task elicited the second highest frequency of questions, which were fairly evenly distributed amongst all three types of questions. The authors conclude that more open-ended tasks or tasks that require justifications of responses might elicit a range of question types from students, while tasks which are more focused on scientific knowledge and are more closeended elicit mainly content questions. Kellogg and Shin (2018), in a study designed to find a connection between Halliday’s synoptic-dynamic complementarity, or “the congruent commonsense grammar of daily life and the metaphorical grammar of education” (Halliday, 1993: 112) and Vygotsky’s (1998) true concepts, or deeper understandings which combine an individual’s every day and scientific understanding of concepts, draw on the SFL categories of logico-semantic expansions of clauses: elaboration, in which a clause rephrases in some way a previous clause; extension, in which a clause adds some additional data to a previous clause; and enhancement, in which a clause provides a qualification in terms of time, place, manner, cause, or condition of something in a previous clause. The authors compared adolescent students’ use of expansions in summaries of a text about a scientific topic, from which they then prepared a written presentation for a mock scientific conference. The three students’ presentations had been scored high, middle, and low. They also compared the student presentations with a TED Talk by an expert on the same topic. The authors hypothesized that, as they moved from the lowerrated text to the expert text, there would be a corresponding move away from elaboration (which asks for the least amount of involvement) towards enhancement (greater involvement in creating a different circumstantial environment), and that the written presentations would contain more elaboration (which, they suggest, is a more synoptic mode of expansion) compared to in the presentations, which they speculated would include greater enhancement (more dynamic, in that it changes the environment of the clause); however, they found the opposite in both cases. The elaboration in the spoken mode and by more expert language producers perhaps could be connected to a move away from the exact wording of the original text and thus an ability to extract the scientific concept to paraphrase, exemplify, and clarify it. They also found more stringing together of clauses in the texts of lower ability, and greater embedding in the higher ones. Thus, they conclude that “the tendency to elaborate and embed clauses grows with expertise, while the tendency to tell stories wanes” (p. 287). They suggest that a set of tasks such as those included in their study can provide

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a way of measuring the next zone of development, an understanding which could help teachers in designing scaffolding. A final cross-sectional study is of university students studying art compared to those studying science. North (2005) had observed that in a history of science course, students from arts degree programmes achieved significantly higher grades than students who came from a science background. She analysed sixty-one essays written at four points over the course by ten students from each of the disciplinary backgrounds and found differences in their Theme-Rheme structure. Arts students provided more orienting Themes, which included textual and interpersonal Themes, as well as experiential Themes consisting of circumstantial information surround the event; the inclusion of these types of Themes suggest that arts students understand writing in history as “perspectival rather than factual” (p. 530). Through interviews with seventeen of the students, North also found that the arts students did their writing over an extended period of time with greater revision as compared to the science students, who were more likely to write at one go; the arts students also showed an understanding of writing as interpretation and not just as reporting facts. She concludes that students’ writing is shaped by their previous encounters with writing in their disciplines, and which puts into question the extent to which abilities are transferable across contexts. 3.5.3 Longitudinal Studies Four of the longitudinal studies in educational contexts traced development without any specific kind of intervention related to SFL. These non-intervention studies took narrative as their point of departure. Pappas and Brown (1987) followed one kindergartener over three consecutive days of having a picture storybook read to her and then being invited to pretend-read the book herself; while she was read to, and also while she pretend-read, she could ask questions about the story, and these sessions were audio-taped. Pappas and Brown analysed the resulting transcripts using Hasan’s (1984a) global text structure of story, which consists of the obligatory moves Initiating Event, Sequent Event, and Final Event, and optional moves Placement, Finale, and Moral. The researchers also applied a texture analysis of the cohesive chains and their interactions. In both analyses, the child’s construction of the story was compared with the actual story as written in the book. Tokens from her construction which occurred in the same chains and interactive patterns as those in the book were labelled approximate tokens. Ambiguous tokens were referent items used by the child which cause difficulty for someone who did not know the story to interpret, for example because they were exophoric. Other tokens were labelled as extrapolated if they occurred in the wrong global structure element, contradicted information from the book, repeated a token and relationship already told by the child, interacted with another token differently than in the book, or involved indirect inferencing which did not occur in the book. The authors traced the child’s growing understanding of key elements of the story, such as its central conflict, coinciding with an increase in the approximate tokens and a drastic decrease in

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ambiguous and extrapolated misplaced element tokens. While the extrapolated tokens that were different from the book (tangential relevant) or which involved direct inferencing (tangential oblique) were relatively few, their existence shows the creativity the child brought to re-constructing the story. The authors found similar patterns of growth towards the conventional register of written story in pretend-reading studies of twenty-six other children; thus, pretend-reading provides children access to written language, helping them learn “how to extend the functional potential of storybook language” (p. 175). Pinto, Tarchi, and Bigozzi (2016) compared 122 children’s narrative competence at the end of both kindergarten and first grade. At the end of kindergarten, the students were presented with a story and asked to retell it in their own words; the same children heard the story again at the end of first grade, at which time they were asked to retell it in writing.The transcripts of the oral and the written stories were analysed for narrative structure (opening, setting, description of characters, description of problem, a central event, resolution to the problem, and closing), as well as for coherence and cohesion. The researchers found that the only predictor of narrative competence development from kindergarten to first grade was global structure. Coherence and cohesion were affected by the change from spoken to written mode, demonstrating the additional demands that writing places on children. They suggest that there is a need to provide young children with good narrative models and opportunities to tell their own stories, and to first teach them oral language genre abilities, such as text structure, in order to help them make the transition to the written language. Duke and Kays (1998) highlight research that shows that children who had storybooks read aloud to them from around six months of age developed a distinct written narrative register, and thus they also used reading aloud as a strategy for familiarizing children with genre features. They extended the genre repertoire beyond narrative to information books in their study of twenty-three kindergarteners, who were asked to pretend-read both an unfamiliar information book and a storybook at the beginning of the study. Then, during a three-month period, information books were read to the students almost daily by their teacher in the classroom, and books were available for them to peruse and listen to. At the end of the three months, the children pretend-read the books again. The transcripts of the pretend-readings were divided into intonation units, which were analysed for linguistic features of information texts, such as timeless verb constructions, generic noun constructions, repetition of topical Themes, verb types, technical vocabulary, classificatory structures, and general statements at the opening and closing of the text.These features were found in the first reading of the information text, suggesting that students had some familiarity with the features and their appropriate context of use, as few of these features were found in their narratives. At the end of the three-month period, their information texts contained far more instances of the features; they had learned to move from ‘what happened’, which is typical of narrative, to ‘what happens’, through nouns that refer to generic rather than specific participants. The children also did not mix features of information genre into their narrative readings, showing a

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differentiation in understanding of the two genres.The authors conclude by calling for greater exposure to expository texts with young children, coupled with reading them aloud in the classroom to aid development of genre knowledge. Nuthall (2000) opens his article with a hypothesis, “that memory is socially constructed” (p. 248), which is fitting with SFL’s view of semiosis and cognition (for a discussion of this view, see Andersen, Boeriis, Maagerø, & Tonnessen, 2015: 142–145). Nuthall (2000) suggests that genre theory provides a way to uncover how students remember the content of a text. As we have seen from previous studies mentioned in this chapter, this perspective sees the process of learning as “a form of apprenticeship in which students progressively acquire the skills, behaviors, and language of the experts (teachers, other more knowledgeable students) they interact with” (Nuthall, 2000: 252). Genres serve not just as patterns of discourse, but also as ways of “conceptualizing and thinking about experiences that are expressed in those discourse patterns” (p. 252). This view of learning contrasts with the cognitive view of schema theory, which gives this critical role to mental representations. Nuthall uses data from a curriculum unit on Antarctica in an upper elementary classroom (10- to 12-year-old children) which took place over six days, focusing on five selected students. The focal point of the study was a talk by a visiting speaker about her work in Antarctica on the fifth day, after which the students brainstormed with a peer what they found most interesting, which they then shared with the whole class. Students also wrote a report, a letter thanking the speaker, and a short-term outcome test with both open-ended and multiplechoice questions, including noting any questions they had asked during the talk. Classroom data in the form of recordings of all the activities were included for analysis, and students were also interviewed eight months after the unit. Nuthall distinguished five distinct genres in the different texts produced: narrative (what the speaker did when in Antarctica), account (what she did when she was in the classroom), description (of places and objects), evaluation (of the speaker and the talk contents), and thank-you and well-wishing (in the letter). He further analysed the types of talk and student collaboration that were happening around the activities. The genre analysis pointed to some of the ways in which the students structured their responses in the recall activities. However, the structuring was also shaped by the way the students interacted, and thus the recall of the speaker’s talk “was a constant, interactive, and context-bound activity” (p. 296). Students’ remembering involves “the sorting and integration of new experiences with one another and with knowledge structures already stored in long term memory” (p. 296). One way of describing the organizing systems of memory is as “genre-like knowledge structures” (p. 296) that provide templates for connecting information, or elements of discourse, and integrating related experiences.Thus, Nuthall argues, memory results from the internalizing of the experience of classroom activities: the genre-like structures that I have used […] as the basis for analyzing the patterning of students’ recall are part of what constitutes culture. Internalizing such structures so that they become the structures of memory is part of the way in which we internalize our culture (p. 300).

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Nuthall, like others, suggests that involving students in a variety of language and activity structures can have positive effects on how students internalize and use knowledge. Longitudinal studies that involve intervention may provide evidence for the benefits of such instruction. For example, in a study designed to promote narrative competence in kindergarteners, following the implications of their 2016 study (see above), Pinto, Tarchi, and Bigozzi (2019) compared the results of experimental and control groups in a study of nearly 400 children from several kindergarten classes in schools in Italy. Over a three-month period, the experimental group received instruction designed to increase genre awareness through teaching of narrative macro- and micro-structural competences, coherence, and cohesion. During the same period, the control group received more general emergent literacy activities as per curricular mandates. Both groups were administered pre- and post-tests in the form of an oral storytelling task. The transcriptions were analysed for narrative moves of opening, setting, description of characters, description of problem, a central event, resolution to the problem, and closing, as well as for coherence and cohesion. The results showed higher improvement in narrative competence in all three areas—structure, coherence and cohesion—on the part of the experimental group, confirming the beneficial impact of explicit teaching of genre. Wollman-Bonilla (2000) used first graders’ ‘Family Message Journals’, or notebooks taken home every day from school with a message by the child, to which family members respond in writing, to analyse the ways in which content-area learning links with classroom instruction in written text to communicate a message to someone who did not experience the school activity.The teachers of the two classrooms involved in the study used the Teaching-Learning Cycle (see Section 3.3), especially the joint construction and independent construction phases, to scaffold students by modelling the linguistic patterns of the appropriate genre for what they had been working on in class, as well as the linguistic choices that are used to construct the genres. The teachers did not use specific grammatical language (e.g. by explaining that present-tense verbs suggest timelessness), but rather modelled the use of the verbs; they also encouraged the children to use more scientific terms to express scientific concepts. Wollman-Bonilla gathered all the journal messages and their replies of four case study students from October through May, and also interviewed their parents. For purposes of analysis, she identified the messages (a total of 82) that were framed as science writing and analysed them according to their genre—report, experiment, or explanation—in terms of their text structure, based on Halliday and Martin (1993), as well as for the key lexicogrammatical features of the genre. While the children rarely copied the teachers’ models, they did use the structures and appropriated some of the language. At the same time, given the communicative purpose of the journals and their audience, students also asked questions and wrote about other related experiences they had had with their families. Wollman-Bonilla concludes that “based on their learning of conventions, children may establish a foundation from which to work in creating socially-valued genres but may simultaneously

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develop the ability to improvise on these genres with their intentions and their audience in mind” (p. 59).This significant finding would seem to allay Kamberelis and Bovino’s (1999) concern that the SFL genre model does not consider intentions and audience (see Section 3.5.2). However, it does speak to the need for authentic interaction so that attention to intentions and audience are included in classroom activities. It is precisely the effects of authentic interaction and explicit teaching that Purcell-Gates, Duke, and Martineau (2007) set out to test in their study; these researchers randomly assigned 16 second-grade classes to one of two groups, both of which incorporated authentic teaching activities, but only one of which received additional instruction through explicit teaching of genre features for science informational and procedural texts. All of the classes incorporated authentic literacy events, which are at the opposite end of a continuum of activities from “school-only” activities, whose purpose is aiding children in their development of reading and writing. Authentic literacy events include a social communicative purpose, such as reading to glean or writing to provide information, in texts such as fliers, novels, news articles, and health procedures. Explicit teaching of the genres involved modelling of texts while teachers named, described, and explained the function of genres and their features. Weekly visits to the classrooms during science instruction produced evidence regarding the degree of authenticity of the activities (on a three-point scale), while explicitness of teaching was coded for each type of explicit naming used. The researchers measured the students’ ability to read and write the informational and procedural science genres at six points: the beginning, middle, and end of grades two and three. Their findings show that the higher the degree of authenticity, the greater the student growth in comprehending and producing the two science genres; however, explicit teaching made a difference only in procedural written texts and only in conjunction with degree of authenticity. They also provide results across SES levels, where they did not find any differences to the results of the overall study; that is, children from lower-parental-education families did not benefit additionally from explicit instruction and grew at comparable rates to children from higher-parental-education homes. In sum, the greatest effect on growth came from involving children in greater authenticity of language use. A longitudinal study which further supports the role of authentic interaction for language growth is Falk-Ross (2000), a year-long case study of a fourthgrade boy with a history of language difficulties. In contrast to the pull-out model of working with children outside the classroom, Falk-Ross worked with Henry through his interactions in the classroom setting by observing him in all of the different types of contexts of interactions (such as conversations and whole-class, small group, and peer discussions), and then provided coaching of strategies both inside and outside the classroom. Falk-Ross analysed and coded data, collected through audiotapes and field notes, using the register variables of field, mode, and tenor. Her results show an increasing ability for Henry to appropriately participate in classroom discourse, highlighting “the importance of understanding both the student’s lived experience and that of his teachers as

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they work together to improve the student’s communicative competence during instructional discourse” (p. 524). Her study also underscored the importance of not pulling students completely out of the interactional environment to work on their language development, as that leaves out “the many social, emotional, and cultural influences that act upon and shape children’s language behaviors in everyday classroom discourse with peers and teachers” (p. 524).These influences are key to providing the context in which the field, mode, and tenor of discourse led to opportunities for the student to develop more appropriate and effective discourse strategies. Continuing up the age ladder with longitudinal studies, two studies seem more relevant to the topic of the next chapter on developing through additional languages; however, they are both published in ranked Education journals (which are not included in the rankings of the Language journals), and thus they are included in this chapter. Symons, Palincsar, and Schleppegrell (2017) use an iterative, design-based research approach in their study of the extent to which, after an academic year of a curriculum which engaged fourth-grade emergent bilinguals in functional grammar analysis for text comprehension and argument construction, ten selected students appropriated its tools in think-aloud protocols when reading a text pitched a grade level higher and in an interview immediately following the reading. They found that students who consistently attended to the participants, processes, and circumstances of time and place and made felicitous inferences (e.g., bridging ideas across the text, revising their thinking in response to new information) constructed a coherent mental model of the text (Symons, et al., 2017: 109). The authors hypothesize that the children’s functional grammar awareness helped to enhance their text interpretation strategies, as this type of grammatical instruction is designed to uncover how language makes meaning through relationships of form and function. Proctor, Silverman, Harring, Jones, and Hartranft (2019) carried out a longitudinal intervention study at schools in the United States in which all of the participating students (239 fourth and fifth graders) were bilingual (Spanish or Portuguese and English).The intervention they applied, CLAVES (an acronym for “comprehension, linguistic awareness and vocabulary in English and Spanish”), refers to academic language and is informed, in part, by SFL, as well as by other research on academic language skills and on second language acquisition, and involves a text-based instructional approach. Intervention was carried out with half of the students (experimental group) in the form of small group sessions over the course of an academic year, while the control group continued their learning as usual. The increases on the part of the experimental group, as measured on standardized measures of academic language and reading comprehension, were significant, leading the authors to provide suggestions for literacy development, including choosing meaningful texts, guiding students through reading, focusing on language, encouraging student talk about texts and about language, and assigning writing as a way of extending talk.

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In a study of eighth graders, Keys, Hand, Prain, and Collins (1999) used SFL as a tool of analysis, while the teaching intervention was informed by a different tool, which they call the science writing heuristic (SWH). The SWH provides templates for both students and teachers for structuring activities such as expressing ideas, collaborating with peers, and writing, in order to facilitate metaknowledge about laboratory investigations. During an 8-week period, the students studied water quality under the SWH, including specific instruction on writing a report. Resulting written reports were analysed in various ways, including clause expansion type: elaboration, extension, or enhancement (as in the study by Kellogg & Shin, 2018; see Section 3.5.2). Results showed an increase in frequency of expansions in later reports, which meant that students were packing more related ideas into their sentences, clarifying meanings, and providing relationships between data and inferences, for example. The final two articles in this synthetic study are at the postgraduate level of education.The first, by Woodward-Kron (2007), is a case study of a student from a non-English-speaking background. The researcher followed the student’s development over the course of an individual consultation with an adviser about the student’s research report. The student consulted the adviser about her methods chapter, which two supervisors had sent comments on, and for which the student did not understand the required changes. Woodward-Kron analysed the transcript for the different ways in which the writing consultation unfolded through interactive exchanges which sought clarification of meanings and of supervisors’ comments, through directives and other means of suggesting and negotiating changes, and through exchanges in which the adviser and the student jointly constructed passages, with the advisor thus scaffolding the student’s meaning-making processes. Woodward-Kron also analysed the range of meanings addressed through the consultation in metafunctional terms, through the ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings that the pair focused on. Thus, the adviser suggested casting terms into a more academic register, helped the student to reduce her subjective perspective (as required by the supervisors’ comments), and discussed the organization of the methods section and the need for thematizing relevant information in paragraphs.The analysis of the transcript thus shows the potential of an interactive writing consultation for scaffolding writing development, especially at critical stages of writing, and in conjunction with other language support modes. James (2013), also through a case study, focused on what it means to become a postgraduate research writer, through combining learning and identity formation. She draws on the notion of difference as a process of something becoming more than itself in its past while at the same time maintaining continuity with the past. She also draws on performativity to make the case for tracing the development of internalization of what it means to be a research writer through multiple drafts of the focal student’s PhD thesis, about her son’s language development. She analyses the drafts, as Woodward-Kron did, in metafunctional terms, tracing changes over time in the writer’s textual, interpersonal, and ideational meanings. Through these analyses, along with interviews with the writer, James creates an account through which

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Anna becomes something more than a simple writing subject producing more developed and sophisticated written drafts. In overlapping moments Anna also becomes a more elaborate, more complex subject: an intelligible writing subject, a disciplinary knowledgeable subject, a compliant subject, an anticipating subject, an insistent subject, a researching subject and a mothering subject. (James 2013: 119) Thus, James argues for a pedagogy which does not focus solely on a final linguistic product, but rather one which puts at the centre student becoming through writing and drafting. 3.5.4 Summary: Approaches and Issues This synthetic study of articles which incorporate an SFL approach towards SLD demonstrates a range of analytical tools and classroom applications. Many of the studies in the ’80s and ’90s focused mainly on cohesion, questioning the relationship between cohesion and coherence, with Hasan’s (1984b) cohesive harmony seen as strengthening that relationship. An important point from the cohesion studies of student output is that more is not necessarily better: counting features without looking at their contextual use does not provide a picture or pathway of development. Other linguistic resources which have been analysed in SLD include genre macrostructures and more specific lexicogrammatical features, such as transitivity, logico-semantic expansions, and Theme-Rheme, and one study focused on development of multimodal resources. Developmental pathways have been demonstrated through cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, showing that children do make changes in their use of meaning-making resources in ways that accord with age and maturity and that are register appropriate. Texts that are deemed successful bring together meaning-making resources across the metafunctions in ways that are seen to be valuable by raters and educators. Most of the studies which included pedagogical implications stressed the need for a student-centred praxis, which scaffolds students by helping them see the connections between the more familiar meaningmaking resources and new ways of making meaning (for example, moving from conversation to written mode and from more familiar to newer genres). Still, gaps are seen between lower- and higher-achieving students, and those gaps seem to grow over time.While no empirical evidence is provided, some researchers have concluded that differences in home interactions may lead to the initial gap in school. Interactions and tasks which provide scaffolding in the classroom have been seen to be helpful, as have contexts which are rich in providing opportunities for different kinds of interactions that foster creativity and needs for different kinds of genres, a familiarity which can aid students in internalizing concepts and in recall, and which also provides for a widening repertoire of meaning-making resources. The ways in which teachers interact with students, through their classification and framing of knowledge, has also been shown to

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have an effect on students’ pedagogic subject positionings, with some openended tasks and questions and with teacher acknowledgement of student contributions having positive effects by positioning students as successful participants. The research suggests that close work with students, using the principle of guidance through interaction in the context of shared experience (Martin, 2015: 55) on how language works across the metafunctions in others’ texts and in their own, helps not just their language development but also serves in opening up alternative subject positions. The SFL studies have also been combined with other research and pedagogical methods, such as phenomenography and deep learning. Like Clark (2019: 9), I would not deny that other approaches to literacy are less important than that of SFL; in fact, combinations of SFL and other literacy approaches, as seen in the literature review in this chapter, such as those that take an ethnographic approach (see also Gardner, 2012), lead to positive results. At the same time, explicit teaching of genres has mixed results: while some studies show success, others find different factors, such as authenticity, to be more important.A related issue to explicit teaching is the extent to which and what kind of metalanguage should be used; these two topics are considered over the next two sections. At the same time, the issues raised through the study in this chapter—how language develops, if using SFL for teaching/learning makes a difference towards that development, and whether and how much metalanguage should be used—are further taken up through studies of learning about and through an additional language in Chapter 4.

3.6 Genre-based Teaching on the Literacy Map In exploring the question of whether genres should be explicitly taught, it is important to briefly contextualize SFL-based pedagogy with respect to other literacy pedagogies, while acknowledging that it is impossible in the space available to do justice to the complexities of the field of literacy practices. Figure 3.5 provides a view of literacy pedagogy as mapped through Martin’s (2006, 1999a) pedagogic discourses, drawing on Bernstein (1990), and on Humphrey et al.’s (2016) application based on de Silva Joyce and Feez (2016). The terrain is divided into loosely bound vectors, along the vertical from the centrality of the individual to that of the social in the learning process, and along the horizontal from acquisition to transmission models of teaching/learning. Thus, across the top quadrants are pedagogies that consider the centrality of the individual in the development of literacy, what Halliday (2013[1972]: 6) refers to as intra-organism and Bernstein (1990) as intra-individual. These ways of viewing literacy development focus on change as it takes place through individual processing of aspects of literacy (Humphrey et al., 2016) through its teaching and learning practices at school. Read counter-clockwise, from the top-right quadrant, literacy is transmitted through the explicit teaching of a hierarchy of skills, using a bottom-up approach, from decoding letters as sounds (a synthetic phonics approach), learning words, combining words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs. Behaviourism informs the pedagogy, which is a

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individual practice: developing individual creativity

individual processing

expressive pedagogy

coding and skills practice; learning SPaG

behaviourist pedagogy

acquisition acqu q

transmission

situated practice: involving the learner

critical pedagogy

scaffolded practice: guiding the learner

social interaction

development (change): how it is designed to be brought about

focus of development (change): where it happens

genre-based pedagogy

Figure 3.5  Literacy pedagogies.

visible one, and practices are often carried out through rote learning—for example, of spelling, pronunciation, and traditional grammar rules (SPaG). Teachers are the eminent authority in the classroom and hold the key to the rules; their role is to modify the behaviour of pupils through helping them develop the skills needed for successful reading and writing. Part of this role involves correcting errors, a practice which often creates anxiety in students, who can be left feeling that their language use is simply wrong. In the top-left quadrant, the individualist pedagogy moves to one of acquisition, rather than of transmission. In this progressive view, learning happens through discovery and exploration (Humphrey et al., 2016), rather than through explicit teaching of rules. Here, literacy development is seen as occurring most fruitfully through reading and writing, both of which are individually liberating for the individual (de Silva Joyce, and Feez, 2016: 15).The focus in the classroom is on effective reading strategies, immersion in texts, and writing for creative expression. For early literacy, analytic phonics, or a top-down meaning-first approach, is used to help students grasp word-spelling correspondences. Progressivism informs the pedagogy, which is an invisible one; the teacher’s role is one of guide or facilitator, attentive to the needs of individuals in the classroom, stepping in when the child is ready to learn how to apply a strategy to help achieve a reading or writing goal and encouraging creative, individual expression. In this classroom, focus on rules is reduced—some advocate a

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creative spelling approach for small children to communicate their ideas—and so, in turn, is the tension created by error correction. John Dewey’s (1938: 19) contrasts between traditional and progressive education sum up the latter’s central philosophy with respect to its classroom pedagogy: To imposition from above is opposed expression and cultivation of individuality; to external discipline is opposed free activity; to learning from texts and teachers, learning through experience; to acquisition of isolated skills and techniques by drill, is opposed acquisition of them as means of attaining ends which make direct vital appeal. Thus, this expressivist pedagogy is focused on cultivating the individual. The bottom half moves to pedagogies which take into account the centrality of social interaction in literacy practices—what Halliday (2013[1972]) refers to as inter-organism and Bernstein (1990) as inter-group. These pedagogies share with the progressivists the learner-centredness of the teaching-learning project; however, what is stressed for literacy development is socialization into its practices and uses rather than individual cognitive development. On the left-hand side of the bottom half, the pedagogy is one of acquisition through involvement in situated practices of language use. It focusses on the identities of the learners involved as shaped by and as shaping the literacy events that they encounter, rather than on the skills and dispositions that they need to acquire. At the same time, it is informed by critical literacy approaches, which advocate for a deconstruction of the power dynamics in society, including those inherent in schooling. SFL GBP, as described in Section 3.3, fits into the bottom-right section as it includes a specific transmission of genres and their features. It sees the development of literacy events as constructed through interaction with others, while at the same time recognizing that certain events are highly valued in society and not all children have equal access to the typified instances of literacy events that shape into highly regarded genres. Teachers may (and do) move in and out of these different modalities of pedagogy; that is, a classroom teacher may encourage free-writing at one point during a lesson (expressive) and at another will impart some rules for writing paragraphs (transmission). Still, most will probably privilege one over another, and society may view one or another (usually of the top two) as what should be happening in the classroom (letters to newspapers would suggest that coding and skills practice is the most favoured). Educationalists, on the other hand, tend to be convinced by research showing the lack of positive effect of traditional grammar exercises on literacy development. Many literacy educators would place themselves in the bottom half of the quadrant, reacting negatively to a progressive pedagogy which wished to do away with top-down rules transmission and focus on error correction, replacing it with a focus on individual expression of voice in the context of cultural and linguistic pluralism (Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Purcell-Gates et al., 2007); this negative reaction has been fostered by the reality that there are ways of expression that lead to greater success

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in school, and these ways of expression are based on the culture of the middle and upper classes (Delpit, 1988), leaving children from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds to have to intuit the rules. Thus, children need to be able to understand the literacy practices in the societies that they are part of. At the same time, there has been much debate as to which of the two bottom quadrants of the circle is more advantageous to students who come to school with less familiarity with the genres of schooling.Those in the left quadrant—sometimes called Situated Literacies (Anderson, 2013) or Academic Literacies (Coffin & Donohue, 2012)—view those in the right as being “overly prescriptive and reflecting a static vision of genre […] as well as ignoring, or glossing over, issues of culture and power, despite its lens of genre as social and cultural phenomena” (PurcellGates et al., 2007: 12). These literacy advocates would argue more in favour of “transformation of the discourses of the academy to better meet the diversity of students’ experiences and identities” (Coffin & Donohue, 2012: 72). The genrebased educators, however, argue that not making explicit the ways in which the powerful genres of society are constructed and used leaves those who are less familiar with them to learn solely through immersion. Kamberelis and Bovino (1999: 165) suggest that “children who encounter different kinds of written genres are likely to have a much greater general awareness of these genres, their shapes, their meaning potentials, and their functions than children who do not”. SFL-based educationalists argue that explicit genre pedagogy is especially helpful in creating greater equity in access to education precisely for those children who do not. Those on either side of this debate (for a summary, see Purcell-Gates et al., 2007; Anderson, 2013; Coffin & Donohue, 2012, 2014), agree that meaningmaking is “social, semiotic, and textual” (Anderson, 2013: 278), and that literacy teaching is a social justice issue (Coffin & Donohue, 2012: 72). Both Anderson (2013) and Coffin and Donohue (2012) see as unnecessary the perceived dichotomy between whether the student or the text is at the centre of the pedagogy; the complementarity of these approaches can be, and often is, transferred to teaching, as seen in studies such as Wollman-Bonilla (2000), Woodward-Kron (2007), and James (2013), where teachers combine the ‘what’ of literacy practices (text) with the ‘how’ of the situatedness of its writers. When analysing the evidence of how children develop their school language repertoires, a key question within the SFL research paradigm, then, is: to what extent does an explicit focus on genre and language benefit that development? Can overt knowledge allow for children to be able to analyse, verbalize, and critique their genre knowledge? If it does allow for these abilities, do they lead to greater gains for SLD? Many studies included in this chapter conclude that they do, although these are often qualitative case studies. One consideration is the lack of a control group in most of the genre-based studies (Hermansson et al., 2019); from the synthesis studies, Pinto et al. (2019) and Proctor et al. (2019) included a control group, with positive results for the experimental group. Another study which incorporates experimental conditions, and not included in the synthesis study above, is Hoogeveen and van Gelderen (2015), who divided 140 Dutch-speaking sixth graders into three groups: one which received specific genre-based

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knowledge, another which received general knowledge about communicative writing, and a control group whose instruction followed the regular language curriculum. Their study showed strong effects of the genre-based intervention in improving students’ final texts. There is counter-evidence for gains through, for example, the deployment of the Joint Construction phase of the TLC in the classroom (Hermansson et al., 2019); this study involved ninety Swedish-speaking students, divided into control and experimental groups across Grades 4, 5, and 6 and a Swedish elementary school. All of the teachers in the groups carried out the Deconstruction and subsequent Independent Construction phases of the TLC, but only the experimental groups participated in the Joint Construction phase, while the control groups watched a film version of their texts and also dramatized it in the classroom. Their results show no difference in the resulting texts for students involved in jointly constructing a text. We return to experimental studies in Chapter 4, Section 4.4.4. On the other hand,Wollman-Bonilla (2000: 58) (see Section 3.5.3) found that repeated modelling of genres and involving students in joint construction may in and of itself be “a powerful instructional tool”, and, thus, “explicit instruction may not be as essential as other researchers suggest”. Purcell-Gates et al.’s (2007) (see Section 3.5.3) longitudinal experimental study suggests that explicit knowledge of specific generic features did not make a difference in children’s growth in their abilities to read informational and procedural genres between second and third grade, and only made a difference in writing procedural, but not informational, texts, in authentic immersive classroom activities. They raise the question of age; perhaps, for children as young as ages 7 and 8, it may be that the explicit teaching of linguistic features of specific genres is not congruent with their cognitive and linguistic abilities and thus does not facilitate acquisition of genre knowledge over and above authentic immersion in its use, but that for older children such instruction may be congruent (Purcell-Gates et al. 2007: 42) However, the study by Pinto et al. (2016) of kindergartners showed a positive intervention effect. Moving up the age range, Proctor et al. (2019) also found a positive effect of functional grammar intervention in fourth and fifth graders, as did Symons et al. (2017) with fourth graders. Still, the evidence found through the studies in this chapter is slim. It is, of course, the case that the synthetic study was limited by the choice of the 60 top-ranked Education journals, which leads to two suggestions for further research. One is to peruse a more wide-ranging choice of materials for evidence of development based on explicit teaching using SF grammar; the second is that SFL-based researchers should aim to publish their findings in highly ranked journals. This is not to diminish the value of journals, such as Linguistics and Education, which have published numerous valuable articles on SFL interventions in school contexts (cf. Gebhard, Chen, & Britton, 2014; Moore & Schleppegrell, 2014; Hodgson-Drysdale, 2014;

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O’Hallaron, Palincsar, & Schleppegrell, 2015; Lo & Jeong, 2018; Galloway, Dobbs, Olivo, & Madigan, 2019). Nonetheless, the danger of resorting to a limited range of journals for publication can mean that we are talking mainly to each other within the SFL community. In sum, the SFL-based community needs to accumulate and make widely available more evidence to support genre-based teaching in educational contexts; we revisit this point in Chapter 4 through studies of English language learners through genre-based pedagogy.

3.7 Metalanguage in School-based Learning Studies One of the reasons for the grammar baby being thrown out with the bathwater (see Section 3.2) in schools was the number of studies which showed that explicit teaching of traditional grammar had little or no effect on student writing (Myhill & Watson, 2014). However, there is growing evidence that a focus on grammar for writing can make a difference if it “promotes students’ explicit metalinguistic understanding of how grammar choices shape meaning in texts and of the writing choices available to them, founded upon a descriptive, functionally oriented understanding of grammar” (Myhill & Watson, 2014: 54). Many SFL-based educationalists favour explicit instruction, as “a metalanguage based on a rigorous theory of language, such as systemic functional linguistics (SFL) in combination with GBP and the explicit teaching of language for curriculum learning can have a positive impact on teaching and learning” (Forey & Cheung, 2019: 92). Thomas (2012) argues that more explicit understandings of the multimodal metalanguage would allow students to be able to reflect on and articulate their design choices. Other researchers, however, are less favourable towards including specific SFL metalanguage in the classroom (see, for example, Rose’s work in Section 3.4.1; Martin, 2006: 110–113). However, the metalanguage can make explicit phenomenon which might not be seen otherwise. Williams (2000) reports on a classroom intervention in which six-year-olds were taught process types (Relational, Existential,Verbal, Material, and Mental) and differences between participant types such as Actor and Goal; this metalanguage was used to discuss meanings in a children’s storybook, and the children used it to demonstrate how the writer created different character positions through the grammar of the clause. Williams (2000) makes the point that children can use these terms to talk about text, and that “children’s ability to reason abstractly and enthusiastically about language has been grossly underestimated by curricula from the mid-1970s to the present” (p. 127). Other studies on school-based learning provide empirical evidence to support the use of metalanguage (Moore & Schleppegrell, 2014; Christie & Derewianka, 2008). Gebhard, Chen and Britton (2014) report on three third grade students’ writing of the genres of historical, biographic and scientific explanations, as well as on external reading scores and English proficiency scores, showing gains across all data points; at the same time, the authors suggest that there could be other causal explanations for improvements. Still, they argue that their study provides positive evidence for curricula to include SFL metalanguage. Galloway, Dobbs, Olivo, and Madigan (2019) describe a three-year

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intervention study in which the students’ own metatalk (Galloway, Stude, & Uccelli, 2015) was leveraged along with metalanguage which was based in part on SFL, in order to create semantic waves (Maton, 2013) (see Section 3.4.2) of linguistic knowledge in the classroom, from students’ metalingual expressions to more complex linguistic packaging of concepts. A two-week unit was designed and refined over the three-year period, and results from focus group interviews and classroom data showed an increase in the amount and type of languagefocused talk, which moved away from being mainly centred on lexical aspects of academic registers and broadened to include syntactic features, cohesive devices, and stance markers; students also “expressed greater agency as academic language users by the end of the instructional unit as they came to view academic language as a set of tools that could be deployed at will to achieve their own communicative goals” (p. 21). An analysis by Ellis, Taylor, and Drury (2005) of university students’ responses to questionnaires about their experiences writing in first-year biology in a course based on GBP also highlights the need for understanding students’ previous writing experiences in order to bridge them into disciplinary ways of writing, including understanding the relationship between the subject matter (e.g. interpreting results) and writing, in order to aid students in developing deeper approaches to writing and learning. Clearly, the teaching of metalanguage itself is not what can make a difference; it is, rather, a deeper awareness of the concepts encoded in the metalanguage.

3.8 SFL and SLD: Summary and Critical Issues From Halliday’s initial insights into differences in spoken and written language to the carefully structured pedagogic interactions of GBP and R2L, it is abundantly clear that, rather than seeing the language developmental value of school as one of eradicating ‘incorrect’ ways of speaking, the SFL view equates SLD with expanding repertoires of registers, accompanied by discernment in choosing the most effective expression for a given purpose in a given context of situation. In the SFL pedagogy, the expansion occurs through careful scaffolding from home to school registers, and, within school registers, from shunting back and forth between more concrete examples of concepts using more fluid, congruent, everyday language and generalized concepts packaged up as abstractions through more metaphorical, static, nominalized academic language. Leung (2014: 137) reminds us, however, that it is not helpful to think of the movement from home to school solely as one of moving from spoken to formal written academic registers, as classroom register “clearly encompasses a much wider range of language registers and styles than the bookish formal content-linked written variety” and therefore must take into account the “contingent interactionally minded spoken language in classroom”. Other objections to the notion of academic language have been raised; some suggest that SFL-based educators see academic language as a reified set of linguistic practices that some students simply do not ‘have’, thus suggesting a ‘deficit’ view of language in some communities (and see the debates in Section 3.6), objections which we revisit in Chapter 5.

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The synthetic study of articles in this chapter has shown the potentials of SFL-based descriptions as analytical tools for tracing SLD through classroom interactions and through children’s texts (including multimodal ones), using the metafunctions, genre, register, cohesion, clause expansion, Theme-Rheme construct, and other SFL-based concepts. In order to provide descriptions of how language works in school, from the Breakthrough to literacy programme to continued developments in GBP and R2L, SFL theory has undergone expansion and some changes, such as Hasan’s cohesive harmony index to respond to criticisms related to coherence, and the move in GBP to placing register and genre outside of the content plane of language and into the context of situation and context of culture respectively (Section 3.3; we return to this theoretical point in Chapter 5). It has also (like Chapter 2) highlighted the need for children to be immersed in a rich variety of interactions to trigger the use of the different genres and different subject positionings, and suggests (with very modest support) that drawing students’ attention to the linguistic construction of genres at various levels (macrostructures, discourse semantics, and lexicogrammar), either through an SFL-based metalanguage or through other commonsense labelling, can aid in children’s deep learning of genres and thus in their development in terms of an expansion of a repertoire of genres and registers that they can draw on discerningly in their communicative interactions. Chapter 4 continues to look at these potentials through SFL and additional language development.

Appendix A JCR ranked journals (top 60) with developmental studies of school language, based on SFL. Note: starred entries are reviewed in Chapter 4. JCR Rank

Journal Title

4 7 11 13 14 20 22 28 33 37 39 40 42 44 47 50 52 53 58 60

Computers & Education Learning and Instruction Journal of Research in Science Teaching Learning, Media and Technology Science Education The Modern Language Journal Reading Research Quarterly Advances in Health Sciences Education American Educational Research Journal Early Childhood Research Quarterly Studies in Higher Education British Journal of Educational Studies TESOL Quarterly Language Teaching Language Learning & Technology Language Teaching Research Higher Education Research & Development Research in the Teaching of English Computer Assisted Language Learning Assessing Writing

No. of articles 1 1 3 1 2 1* 6 1 2 4 2 1 5* 1* 2* 1* 2 14 2* 1*

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Appendix B Top 60 JCR ranked journals (Education) with no SFL-based developmental studies JCR Rank

Journal Name

1 2 3 5 6 8 9

Review of Educational Research Internet and Higher Education Educational Research Review Educational Psychologist Educational Researcher Metacognition and Learning Studies in Science Education International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Journal of Teacher Education Journal of the Learning Sciences Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy Sociology of Education Academy of Management Learning & Education Comunicar Sport, Education and Society British Journal of Educational Technology Journal of School Violence Harvard Educational Review Environmental Education Research Physical Review Special Topics – Physics Education Research Journal for Research in Mathematics Education Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis Teaching and Teacher Education The Journal of Environmental Education Journal of Education Policy European Physical Education Review Teachers and Teaching Scientific Studies of Reading Journal of Higher Education Journal of Studies in International Education Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics ReCALL Education Finance and Policy Urban Education Critical Studies in Education Journal of Engineering Education (tied with Research in the Teaching of English) Active Learning in Higher Education Higher Education Journal of School Health Instructional Science

10 12 15 16 17 18 19 21 23 24 25 26 27 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 38 41 43 45 46 48 49 51 53 55 56 57 59

Notes 1 As Schleppegrell (2004: 5) notes, schools differ widely in terms of their subculture and, thus, also in their ways of using language; however, her definition of school as “the

140 Developing Language through School institutional framework in which children are socialized into ways of formal learning in our society” works well for the broad purpose of highlighting the move out of the home and into a new cultural and interactive environment. 2 This is reminiscent of the semantic dimension of Legitimation Code Theory (see Section 3.4.2). 3 For comparisons of the SFL-based view of genre and other views, see Christie (2016). 4 See Gardner (2017) and Bowcher (2017) for SFL views of genre and register. See Chapter 5 for a discussion of the differences in these stratified models. 5 Obviously, the input is important, as we have seen in Chapter 2. However, for the purposes of tracing language development (in this case, in school children) interaction and uptake are key, and thus the studies which focussed only on teacher input are not included in the review. 6 The majority of these studies focus on contexts where English is the mother tongue; for example, in the U.S.A., in 2016, the percentage of public school students who were English language learners was higher (9.6 percent, or 4.9 million students) than in 2000 (8.1 percent, or 3.8 million students: see https://nces.ed.gov/programs/ digest/d18/tables/dt18_204.20.asp), which suggests a growing trend. In the U.K., the number has more than doubled since 2006, with 1.6 million pupils considered English as an Additional Language (EAL) learners: see http://www.bell-foundation. org.uk/eal-programme/guidance/education-policy-learners-who-use-eal-inengland/. 7 Note that Thomas does not explicitly mention the children’s ages, but they would seem to be 10–12 years old, i.e. middle school students.

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Plowden Report (1967) Children and their primary schools. Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England). London: HMSO. Proctor, C., Silverman, R.D., Harring, J.R., Jones, R.L., & Hartranft, A.M. (2019). Teaching bilingual learners: Effects of a language-based reading intervention on academic language and reading comprehension in grades 4 and 5. Reading Research Quarterly, 0(0), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.258. Prosser, M., & Webb, C. (1994). Relating the process of undergraduate essay writing to the finished product. Studies in Higher Education, 19(2), 125–139. https://doi.org/10.1 080/03075079412331381987. Purcell-Gates, V., Duke, N.K., & Martineau, J.A. (2007). Learning to read and write genre-specific text: Roles of authentic experience and explicit teaching. Reading Research Quarterly, 42(1), 8–45. https://doi.org/10.1598/rrq.42.1.1. Ramos, K.A. (2015). Using genre pedagogy to teach adolescent English learners to write academic persuasive essays. Journal of Education, 195(2), 19–35. https://doi. org/10.1177/002205741519500205. Rose, D. (2006). Reading genre: A new wave of analysis. Linguistics and the Human Sciences, 2(2), 185–204. https://doi.org/10.1558/lhs.v2i2.185. Rose, D. (2008). Writing as linguistic mastery: The development of genre-based literacy pedagogy. In R. Beard, D. Myhill, J. Riley, & M. Nystrand, Handbook of writing development (pp. 151–166). London: Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9780857021069.n11. Rose, D. (2016). New developments in genre-based literacy pedagogy. In C. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald, Handbook of writing research, 2nd edition (pp. 227–242). New York: Guilford. Rose, D., & Martin, J.R. (2012). Learning to write, reading to learn: Genre, knowledge and pedagogy in the Sydney School. London: Equinox. Rose, D., & Martin, J.R. (2018). Leer para aprender. Lectura y escritura en las áreas del currículo. (Trans. R. Whittaker, T. Bordón, I. García Parejo, J. Arús). Madrid: Ediciones Pirámide. Rothery, J. (1996). Making changes: Developing an educational linguistics. In R. Hasan & G. Williams, Literacy in society (pp. 86–123). London: Longman. Rothery, J., & Stenglin, M. (1994). Spine-chilling stories: A unit of work for junior secondary English. Sydney: Metropolitan East Disadvantaged Schools Program. Schleppegrell, M.J. (2004). The language of schooling: Functional linguistics perspective. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410610317. Schrader, C.T. (1989). Written language use within the context of young children’s symbolic play. Early childhood research quarterly, 4, 225–244. https://doi.org/10.1016/ s0885-2006(89)80005-5. Seah, L.H., Clarke, D.J., & Hart, C.E. (2011). Understanding students’ language use about expansion through analyzing their lexicogrammatical resources. Science Education, 95(5), 852–876. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.20448. Spiegel, D.L., & Fitzgerald, J. (1990).Textual cohesion and coherence in children’s writing revisited. Research in the Teaching of English, 24(1), 48–66. Stein, N.L., & Glenn, C.G. (1979). An analysis of story comprehension in elementary school children. In R.O. Freedle, New directions in discourse processing. Volume 2 (pp. 53–120). Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. Sulzby, E. (1985). Children’s emergent readings of favorite storybooks: A developmental study. Reading Research Quarterly, 20, 458–481. https://doi.org/10.1598/rrq.20.4.4. Swales, J.M. (1990). Genre analysis. English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

148 Developing Language through School Symons, C., Palincsar, A.S., & Schleppegrell, M.J. (2017). Fourth-grade emergent bilinguals’ uses of functional grammar analysis to talk about text. Learning and Instruction, 52, 102–111. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2017.05.003 Tan, S.-C., & Seah, L.-H. (2011). Exploring relationship between students’ questioning behaviors and inquiry tasks. Computers & Education, 57, 1675–1685. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.03.007. Thomas, A. (2012). Children’s writing goes 3D: A case study of one primary school’s journey into multimodal authoring. Learning, Media and Technology, 37(1), 77–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2011.560160. Unsworth, L. (2001). Teaching multiliteracies across the curriculum: Changing contexts of text and image in classroom practice. Buckingham: Open University Press. van Dijk,T.A. (1977). Text and context: Explorations in the semantics and pragmatics of discourse. London: Longman. van Dijk, T.A. (1980). Macrostructures: An interdisciplinary study of global structures in discourse, interaction, and cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Varelas, M., Pappas, C.C., Tucker-Raymond, E., Kane, J., Hankes, J., Ortiz, I., & KeblaweShamah, N. (2010). Drama activities as ideational resources for primary-grade children in urban science classrooms. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 47(3), 302–325. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.20336. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Vygotsky, L.S. (1998). Collected works.Volume 5. New York/London: Plenum. Walsh, P. (2006). The impact of genre theory and pedagogy and Systemic Functional Linguistics on national literacy strategies in the UK. In R.Whittaker, M. O’Donnell, & A. McCabe, Language and literacy: Functional approaches (pp. 159–176). London/New York: Bloomsbury. Whittaker, R. (2018). Reading to Learn in CLIL subjects: Working with content-language. CLIL Journal of Innovation and Research in Plurilingual and Pluricultural Education, 1(1), 17–25. https://doi.org/number_cliljournal.0000. Whittaker, R., & Acevedo, C. (2016). Working on literacy in CLIL/bilingual contexts: Reading to Learn and teacher development. Estudios sobre educación, 31, 37–55. https:// doi.org/10.15581/004.31.37-55. Whittaker, R., & García Parejo, I. (2018). Teacher learning for European literacy education (TeL4ELE): Genre-based pedagogy in five European countries. European Journal of Applied Linguistics, 6(1), https://doi.org/10.1515/eujal-2017-0021. Williams, G. (2000). Children’s literature, children and uses of language description. In L. Unsworth, Researching language in schools and communities: Functional linguistic perspectives (pp. 111–129). London/Washington, DC: Cassell. Wollman-Bonilla, J.E. (2000). Teaching science writing to first graders: “Genre learning and recontextualization”. Research in the Teaching of English, 35(1), 35–65. Woodward-Kron, R. (2007). Negotiating meanings and scaffolding learning: Writing support for non-English speaking background postgraduate students. Higher Education Research & Development,26(3),253–268.https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360701494286.

4 Developing Additional Languages

“Developing language is developing the power that consists in knowledge and in control; and learning a second language is adding to this power” (Halliday, 2009a: 212)

4.1 Introduction: Halliday and Additional Language Teaching Michael Halliday’s interest in language was sparked early on by the learning of an additional language. In 1942, he volunteered for the UK’s national services’ foreign language training course and was chosen to learn Chinese, in large measure because of his knack for recognizing tones (Webster, 2015). He then began to study Chinese through the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, finding that: [a]s a learner, I was often puzzled by the grammar of Chinese, and wanted explanations where no explanation was offered. How did you actually know what could (or could not) be said? (Halliday, 2002: 117) Halliday provides a glimpse of his own language learning experiences, in part through a type of direct method in Chinese (Halliday, 2009b[1978]), as well as of his own problems learning another language. One problem was lexical memory: the only way he could learn a word was by using it “in a living context of speech” (Halliday, 2009b[1978]: 192). A second problem was, as the quote above implies, the process of resocialization into new and relevant contexts of situation, knowing what kinds of meanings can be exchanged in the culture of the new language. In 1945, after learning Chinese and serving in the armed forces, he taught his first course in Chinese (to air force officers) in the services language unit. His teaching experience also led him to reflect on language from a learner’s perspective: [A]s a teacher I was a lot more conscious of the need to provide explanations of problems faced by the learners, to try to develop some kind of

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coherent notion of a language, how it works, how it was learned, and so forth, in order simply to improve the quality of the language teaching. (Halliday & Hasan, 2006: 16) This chapter centres on the relationship between SFL and additional language development (ALD), or learning a language other than one’s first language. I use ALD and the term L2 (meaning second language, compared to L1, or first language), in both foreign (where the language being learned is not generally used in the wider community) and second (where the language being learned is that of the wider community) language learning/teaching environments. Obviously, these two environments are very different. The foreign language learning environment involves ALD mainly through classroom instruction, although there are learners who go beyond the classroom learning—for example, viewing films and reading books in the new language, and seeking opportunities to interact with mother-tongue speakers. In the second language environment, people most likely must learn the surrounding language because of a need for communicative interaction, such as schooling or work; their development often combines classroom learning with everyday interaction. In this chapter, the focus is on both foreign and second language learning environments, mainly on learning an additional language after the learning of an L1, so bilingual language development is considered only tangentially. Ryshina-Pankova (2018) draws on SFL’s tri-metafunctional characterization of language (ideational, interpersonal, and textual; see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3) to argue: Just like in the L1, L2 development can be defined first and foremost in terms of the three functional needs […] as meeting the challenge of knowledge construction, sharing and negotiating with others, and organizing this communication in a comprehensible way, and at the same time grappling with the necessity to use the relevant lexicogrammatical resources to achieve these goals. (Ryshina-Pankova, 2018: 10) This functional view of learning a new language is appealing to those of us who have embarked upon the endeavour and recognize that much more is involved than learning lexical, phonological, and grammatical rules, as we negotiate our identities within the culture of the new linguistic system. Given Halliday’s early interest in language teaching, I have long been intrigued by the low impact of SFL as it is fully theorized, with its robust model of language, on foreign language teaching. Chapter 3 has shown the deep and growing impact SFL is having on school language development, yet, comparably little can be found in the literature on foreign language teaching outside of academic contexts; we will see those exceptions in this chapter, while reviewing the applications to ALD.

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4.2 Language Teaching and Early Development of Systemic Theory The sparking of Halliday’s interest in language teaching through his experiences both learning and then teaching Chinese continued through the late’40s and ’50s, as he wrote his PhD on Chinese, teaching English to Chinese speakers in China, and onto his first post in General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh in 1958. Halliday’s ideas related to teaching a language other than the mother tongue were published in papers such as “General linguistics and its application to language teaching”, which was first delivered in 1960 as a series of lectures to teachers of French and then published in English in 1966 (Halliday, 1966[1960]), where he provides a description of language for teaching. Halliday’s “domain of linguistic sciences” (1966[1960]: 4) as concerns language description is illustrated in Figure 4.1. He divided language (a division based on Hjelmslev’s semiotic model; see Taverniers, 2011) into substance, or the material aspect of language, which can be phonic or graphic, and form, which refers to its organization through grammar and lexis. He connected form to its meaningful nature in situational use, via a category which he refers to in his early writing as ‘context’, to set it apart from traditional approaches to semantics. Halliday referred to the linguistic categories of substance and form (see bottom of Figure 4.1) as the ‘levels of analysis’ (p. 5) of descriptive linguistics, At the level of form, Halliday posited four general categories of grammar: unit, structure, class and system.1 The units, or “stretches that carry the grammatical patterns” (p. 7) of a language, are related to each other hierarchically, based on the notion of constituency, with rank indicating the position of the unit within the hierarchy. In English, the ranked units are sentence, clause, group, word, and morpheme. Halliday commented on the typical treatment of, for example, clause and group in the language teaching textbooks as “a great many negative rules” (p. 7) with rare explanations of what a clause or group actually is. Halliday noted that “scientific technical terms cannot be defined in this way, for each category is defined by its relations to all the others” (p. 7). Ranks relate to each other through constituency; each is composed of a unit or units from ranks below (e.g. a word is made up of morphemes, a group is made up of words); thus, ranks exhibit the LINGUISTIC SCIENCES Phonetics -----------------Linguistics ----------------------------SUBSTANCE

FORM phonology

grammar lexis

SITUATION (environment) context

extra-textual features

Figure 4.1  The domain of linguistic sciences (Halliday, (1966[1960]: 4).

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relation among the grammatical units, which show regularities in how they are put together, both within themselves and in combining to form higher ranks, thus leading to the second general category of grammar, structure. For English, clause structure consists of the abstract functions subject, predicator, complement, and adjunct. For Halliday, again, textbook definitions, such as “the subject is the person or thing that performs a given action…” are “neither precise nor practical” (p. 11); rather, it is the value of a given element in the structure of the clause that gives it its status. The third category of grammar, class, refers to elements that can be substituted for one another according to their function in the structure of a unit. That is, there are clause, group, word, and morpheme classes (e.g. ‘-ed’ could be substituted by ‘-s’ in a word, but ‘my daughter’ cannot be substituted by ‘will go’ in a clause); in this way, Halliday highlighted the paradigmatic nature of the structures. The fourth and final general grammatical category is system, or the closed set of choices available at any point in structure. Halliday illustrated the category of system by using examples from the possibilities for predicator in French, with the choices of, for example, active vs. passive voice, positive vs. negative polarity, and the various options related to the choice of tense. His linguistic descriptions also included lexis and phonology. He ended by comparing languages, using examples from French, Chinese, Italian, and English, emphasizing the need for both linguistic descriptions and contextual considerations for effective comparison. This early grammar, which became known as ‘scale-and-category’ grammar,2 was a continuation of Firth’s system-structure theory, and a precursor to what later became known as Systemic Functional grammar; at this early stage, the differences between systemic grammar and other traditional grammars in terms of how the notion of structure was handled were not very wide (Berry, 1975). However, the theory did not focus wholly on syntagms, as with many other linguistic (including applied) models, but it gave equal weight to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes, as systems were seen to be located in structures (Matthiessen, 2007).What further set apart Halliday’s grammar was its integrated nature, with meaning included at all levels and with all levels weighted equally (Stern, 1983). Halliday’s work connecting linguistics to additional language teaching continued through publication in 1964 of the book The linguistic sciences and language teaching, co-authored with Angus McIntosh and Peter Strevens, which set out to describe how language, exemplified through English, “works” (Halliday et al., 1964: x). At the time of publication, it was seen “as a kind of applied linguistics manifesto” (Widdowson, 2009: 194).While acknowledging throughout the book the primary importance of good teaching practice, the authors suggested that there are descriptions of language that can help teachers solve problems in teaching language. In addition to the linguistic categories included in the 1960 lectures, Halliday et al. added levels for linguistic description, as seen in Figure 4.2. A comparison of Figures 4.1 and 4.2 shows a splitting in the latter of both substance and form into two levels, general and specific, with context and situation differentiated and included as general levels; here they are “properties of language”

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Linguistics

Phonetics

Level (general):

SUBSTANCE

Level (specific):

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FORM

(phonic or graphic)

relation of form and substance

PHONETICS

PHONOLOGY

GRAMMAR & LEXIS

CONTEXT

(relation of form and situation) SEMANTICS

situation (nonlinguistic phenomena)

(vocabulary) SCRIPT

‘GRAPHOLOGY’

(writing system)

Figure 4.2  Levels for linguistic description (Halliday et al., 1964: 18).

and not just categories of linguistic analysis. Note that, in this early version of systemic linguistics, situation refers to the non-linguistic. Context mediates between situation, on the one hand, and the lexical and grammatical forms, on the other, through the specific level of semantics. Perhaps most notably for language teaching, Halliday et al. (1964) introduced the notion of register (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.4), or “variety of a language distinguished according to use”. Registers, considered collectively, take up the total potential of the language; after all, it is not as an abstraction but rather through being used in all its various situations that language is realized. Registers “differ primarily in form” as “the crucial criteria of any given register are to be found in its grammar and its lexis” (Halliday et al., 1964: 88). The authors provide a three-dimensional classification related to the situations of language use, where registers can be distinguished according to field, mode, and style (which later became tenor, via Gregory, 1967) of discourse. In this way, Firth’s agenda of mapping out “the statistical properties, of varieties of the language used for different purposes” was taken up (Halliday, 2003[1964]: 40), which could, the authors argued, prove useful to foreign language teaching, among other endeavours. Halliday et al. (1964) stressed the importance of knowing linguistics for language teaching and included a “methodics”, or “a framework of organization for language teaching which relates linguistic theory to pedagogical principles and techniques” (p. 201), through which they align teaching procedure to the levels of language, for example, by choosing a particular register and identifying its language items and then their staging and sequencing. However, they argued that knowledge of linguistics is not necessary for learning, which “will take place more readily if the language is encountered in active use than if it is seen or heard only as a set of disembodied utterances or exercises” (p. 181). Thus, from the start, Halliday highlighted the importance of success in communication over perfection in “getting things right and free of error” (2009b[1978]: 191), drawing on the distinction between language as resource and language as rule (see

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Chapter 1, Section 1.4.2; Chapter 3, Section 3.1). This perspective can be seen in writing by Byrnes (2009: 5): “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”. This focus on language in use and as resource, rather than on correctness of structures, is perhaps what put Halliday’s name at the forefront of the theorists behind Communicative Language Teaching (McCabe, 2017a; McCabe, Gledhill & Liu, 2015), to which we turn in the next section. Before doing so, I will briefly comment on Halliday’s language teaching; sadly, there is little record to shed light on how he put his early theorizing about language into practice. In a fascinating article on language teaching, Halliday (2005[1976]) unpacked the nature of the relationship between teacher, learner, and language by analysing the clause ‘The teacher taught the student English’ in several ways, using transitivity structures in doing so; for example, the verb ‘taught’ can be unpacked as different process types, including a mental process, as in “The teacher enabled the student to come to know English’ (p. 302). In unpacking the clause, Halliday also provided a glimpse into numerous different ways of viewing and teaching language, arguing that, given that language learning is demanding and different for different learners, any one method may not be the one and only truly effective one. He admitted a preference for viewing the ‘what’ of learning as a meaning potential, with the teacher’s role as one of helping learners build it up for themselves. Thus, whatever the approach, language teachers will always need to have ways of analysing language. Halliday (2014) explained that he was given no training in language teaching, and thus his early teaching of Chinese was modelled very much on how he was taught Chinese: structure drills with sentence patterns, pronunciation, listening, dictation, and some conversation. The one difference was that he tried to teach his students grammar, which he had not been taught. At the same time, he wrote: I am not advocating grammar classes – lessons where grammar becomes the primary content. Grammar is there to be called upon when needed, for providing generalizations and explaining things that the learners find difficult or puzzling. And it has its limits: not everything in a language can be illuminated by being placed in some functional context. But a great deal of it can, and for the adult learner this can be enlightening. So for the teacher, an understanding of the grammar is a valuable resource that may be called on at any time, not a distinct component of the course. (Halliday, 2014: 2–3) Thus, Halliday saw the understanding of grammar as resource as an important awareness for teachers, to use in the classroom as needed to explain how the language works. In the absence of any teaching notes and materials, we can only assume that he drew on his scale-and-category grammar. However, he also said:

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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) For Halliday, then, because of the complexity of languages, the whole system of an additional language is difficult to render teachable. At the same time, language teaching in the 1970s drew in part on his view of language.

4.3 Communicative Language Teaching and SFL Since the 1970s, Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has been the major paradigm for modern L2 pedagogy. For CLT, Halliday and Hymes have been cited as the two leading theorists moving L2 teaching away from a focus on grammatical accuracy and towards a focus on appropriateness to communicative situation (Brumfit & Johnson, 1979; Melrose, 1995: 3; Richards & Rodgers, 2001: 159–160). According to Widdowson (2009: 202), the “defining feature” of CLT became ‘how language functions externally in context”; however, this focus drew much more on Hymes’ (1972a) notion of communicative competence than on Halliday’s functional motivation of the meaning potential available in the language system (Widdowson, 2009); we now trace that difference in influence. Hymes’ theorizing on communicative competence was a reaction to Chomsky’s distinction between performance and competence (Savignon, 2008; see Chapter 1, Section 1.3). Hymes (1972a: 60) argued “[t]here are rules of use without which the rules of grammar will be useless”; in his view, competence needed to take into account sociocultural variables, such as who is speaking to whom, in which speech community, and to what end, variables which were left out of Chomsky’s competence. Hymes posited that, in addition to whether an utterance is formally possible, it is also important to establish whether it is feasible, appropriate to the context, and performable. Hymes’ concept of communicative competence was refined in its application to second language teaching, for example through the theoretical framework of Canale and Swain (1980), with the breakdown of communicative competence into three main competencies: grammatical, sociolinguistic, and strategic, to which Canale (1983) added discourse competence. More broadly, it led to a focus in language teaching/ learning on sociolinguistics and pragmatics, fields which Halliday laments as having to exist as separate from the formal structure of language to explain text/ discourse:

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Having grown up in opposition to linguistics, pragmatics has largely dispensed with grammar; what theoretical input it has had has been drawn from strands in philosophy and sociology rather than linguistics. In view of its undoubted achievements this may not seem to matter. Perhaps I am just being old-fashioned in deploring this split between two aspects of what to me is a single enterprise: that of trying to explain language. It seems to me, however, that both parts of the project are weakened when they are divorced one from the other. (Halliday, 2002: 10) Thus, Halliday’s conception of language as meaning-making in context, as a way of doing, does not need a separate pragmatics. In the 1970s, Halliday introduced the notion of stratification as it is now modelled in SFL. A precursor can be found in a 1966 paper (Halliday, 2002[1966]: 115–116), where “rank defines an inner series of strata, or substrata, within the outer grammatical stratum, with each rank characterized by a different network of systems”; thus, at that point, stratification related only to the lexicogrammatical stratum and referred specifically to rank. The stratified linguistic descriptions of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), as it has developed since its origins, bring together meaningin-context with the lexicogrammar, through the notion of realization; that is, lexicogrammar realizes semantics. When Halliday was asked in an interview about his statement that “can mean is a form of can do”, he explained: the key concept is that of realization. […] Just as there is a relation of realization between the semantic system and the lexicogrammatical system, so that can say is the realization of can mean, so also there is a relation of realization between the semantic system and some higher level semiotic which we can represent if you like as a behavioral system. It would be better to say that can mean is ‘a realization of can do’, or rather ‘is one form of the realization of can do’. (Halliday, 2013[1972]: 5, italics original) Within the stratal model of SFL, behavioural potential within a culture is viewed as realized through the semantic system, which is realized through the lexicogrammar, i.e. a meaning potential. We have seen that this realization happens simultaneously through the three metafunctions of language (interpersonal, ideational, and textual; see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3). In this sense, functions are not separate from grammar, as language is the way it is based on the functional principle “that language has evolved in the service of particular human needs” (Halliday, 1975: 16). Because of this motivation, the “functional principle is carried over and built into the grammar, so that the internal organization of the grammatical system is also functional in character” (Halliday, 1975: 16). Thus, Halliday clearly connected function and grammar; however, early functional work within language teaching kept them separate. For example, the functionalnotional syllabus (Wilkins, 1976) consisted of communicative functions of language, such as apologizing, requesting, or complaining, and notions or general concepts of time, cause, quantity, possibility, and location, into an ordered plan

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for teaching. In their application of the functional-notional approach, Finocchiaro and Brumfit (1983: 33) separated the functions and notions from the linguistic structures, because “[a]ny grammatical structure can be used to express any function, and the abstract functional categories of linguists like Halliday have no immediate pedagogical use, as currently formulated”. Thus, in CLT, while functions were loosely connected to Halliday’s theoretical motivation, the full systemic model was not brought into the picture. Stern (1983) suggests that this may have been because the scale-and-category model put forth in Halliday et al. (1964) for language teachers was not sufficiently detailed for translation into curriculum planning. In 1972, Hymes highlighted the need for a theory of language that would bring form and context together, as “an adequate theory of the functioning of language would not ‘start’ from either language or context, but would systematically relate the two within a single model” (Hymes, 1972b: xix). Schleppegrell (2004: x), throughout her book on school language, demonstrates that the SFL model of language fulfils that role. SFL, however, has only been very selectively translated into modern language teaching, as we see in this chapter, with little to say about grammar at the level of the clause/sentence, but with more to say beyond. Indeed, SFL has influenced the focus on text and discourse in English language teaching (ELT) literature. For example, Celce-Murcia and LarsenFreeman’s (1999) book on grammar for ELT includes Hallidayan linguistic notions mainly at the suprasentential level: thematic patterning (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3), given/new, cohesion and reference (Halliday & Hasan, 2013[1976]), genre, and register; they also briefly mention Halliday’s modelling of modality and his functions of sentence initial adverbs. Ryshina-Pankova (2018) reviews the literature of applications of SFL to advanced L2 learning with respect to the development of Theme-Rheme, grammatical metaphor (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.1), and appraisal resources (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.2). At the same time, the SFL focus on meaning in a sense gets in the way of tracing instructed ALD at early levels of proficiency. Through his work on CLD, Halliday came to view language practice as not being functional and thus “not an instance of language in use; it is not a kind of meaning” (Halliday, 1975: 22). Chapters 2 and 3 of this book have highlighted the role of interaction in language development; the focus in SFL on intersubjectivity and meaning in interaction has been productively applied to tracing children’s development, from young ages and on through school (see Chapters 2 and 3), with clear implications for how that development might be scaffolded. However, with respect to tracing ALD, this inter-organism view of language contrasts with the reigning interest during the latter half of the twentieth century within second language acquisition (SLA) studies on how individuals come to construct the linguistic system (mainly of morphosyntactic structures and lexical items) of the target language; in Chomskyan terms (see Chapter 1, Section 1.3), the interest has been in competence rather than performance. On the other hand, for Halliday,

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in an inter-organism perspective, there is no place for the dichotomy of competence and performance, opposing what the speaker knows to what he does. There is no need to bring in the question of what the speaker knows; the background to what he does is what he could do – a potential, which is objective, not a competence, which is subjective. (Halliday, 2013[1972]: 3) In theory, then, the objectivity of the potential should provide a clear pathway to trace ALD. Halliday (1987: 14) called for descriptions of learner language that would allow researchers to “be able to represent the system as variable in extent and in elaboration, in order to show how its power increased as the learner makes progress”. That is, within the SFL paradigm, ALD would follow the expanding meaning potential available to a language user over time, in this case to a learner of a language other than the mother tongue. One difficulty in following this potential is it is not as easy to follow a learner’s development as it is for a caregiver to do so through a diary study of a child. In this chapter, we review studies that have used SFL to trace ALD. We begin, as in Chapter 3, with the studies published in top-ranked journals, then look at further studies which specifically apply SFL to ALD outside of school-based contexts, and position SFL with respect to other perspectives on ALD.

4.4 SFL Research on ALD To provide an overview of the kind of published research which has been undertaken with SFL as the linguistic theory underpinning claims made about development, as in Chapter 3 I carried out a research synthesis of the SFL-based articles on language development from the top 60 journals in the category of ‘Linguistics’, as indicated by the journal impact factor for the year 2017 of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) (Clarivate Analytics, 2018). I searched the journals for the terms ‘SFL’, ‘SFG’, and ‘Halliday’, and then read the abstracts and kept those articles that met one of the following criteria: 1. They referred to change over time in individuals’ language use; these studies could take a longitudinal approach or report on end-of-intervention summaries of learner progress; or 2. They referred to differences across groups at different levels; these studies take a cross-sectional approach, comparing, for example, students in 1st and 4th year of university, or learners with different proficiency levels, or learnerproduced work that was rated differently (more or less successful/effective). Not included in this review were articles that used SFL for descriptive purposes of, for example, a corpus or text type; nor are articles included that make only a tangential reference to SFL; for example, studies on the use of corpora in the language classroom give a nod to Halliday, and some studies on academic language give Halliday a passing mention, but these studies did not meet the

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Figure 4.3  Number of articles published per year.

criteria of being underpinned in a significant way by SFL. Also not included, as in Chapter 3, are those studies that focus mainly on teacher talk. Finally, also not included are the whole books published as part of the monograph series in Language Learning (Christie, 2012; Coffin & Donohue, 2014). Appendix A of this chapter includes a list of journals with articles that fit the criteria, as well as the ranking of the journal and the number of articles; there were a total of 51 that fit the criteria. Appendix B provides a list from the 60 top-ranked journals that did not include any articles that fit the criteria. Figure 4.3 provides the number of articles per year: Ulla Connor’s “A study of cohesion and coherence in English as a second language students’ writing” was published in 1984 in Paper in Linguistics (now known as Research on Language and Social Interaction). Based on Halliday & Hasan’s (2013[1976]) Cohesion in English, Connor (1984) compared three essays written in English by L2 writers with three essays by English L1 writers to illuminate a possible developmental pathway of L2 writers. As seen in Figure 4.3, the next SFL-based developmental study appeared in 1999; the number since then has increased, with around five studies per year since 2013.3 If we compare this with Figure 3.4 (Chapter 3), there is quite a difference: SLD studies showed a growth

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and more recently a waning, while the number of studies published in Applied Linguistics journals is growing. In terms of language, as with the SLD studies, the majority of the ALD studies centre on English (42), with other languages including German (3), Spanish (2), Chinese (2), Swedish (1), Catalán (1), German and English (1), and Spanish and English (1). The articles can be divided into the following categories: cross-sectional only, end-of-intervention, cross-sectional and longitudinal, and longitudinal only. Each of these categories can also be divided into further types, including whether the study was based on a pedagogical intervention. We begin the review with the cross-sectional studies. 4.4.1 Cross-Sectional Studies Most of the cross-sectional-only studies did not include intervention. Three of these studies compared L2 to L1 writers, as in the case of Connor (1984), mentioned above. Connor found no difference in overall density of cohesion between the two cohorts, but the L2 writers demonstrated less variety in lexical cohesive devices than did the L1 writers. Kang (2005) also compares cross-linguistic differences in the use of cohesive devices (based on Halliday & Hasan, 2013[1976]) and written discourse features in the writing of forty-two Korean college-aged L2 English writers and twenty-eight American L1 writers of the same age. The participants all wrote a narrative essay in English, and, in addition, the Korean participants wrote one in Korean. Kang’s results, like Connor’s, showed fewer cohesive devices and other discourse features, such as nominalization, in the L2 essays; cohesive devices and discourse features showed similarity to their instantiation in Korean.The findings provide evidence of L1 transfer and L2 interlanguage in ALD with implications for writing pedagogy. The third cross-sectional study comparing L2 and L1 writers is Belz’s (2003) analysis of a 7-week email correspondence written in both English and German between three subjects (two German college-aged students and one American student), tracing their intercultural development using the appraisal framework (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.2) as a tool of linguistic analysis. She found differences in interpersonal positionings, or “culturally contingent patterns of interaction” (p. 26), in terms of in/directness and explicitness, which may have led to a truncation of the email exchanges, as each of the parties may have interpreted the others’ writing based on their own cultural norms. Belz does not suggest that the writers need to learn to write in the cultural pattern of the other, but rather that writers need to be aware of the differences. These L2 vs. L1 comparative studies raise the issue of approximation to L1 norms and interlanguage, which we return to in Section 4.7. Four of the cross-sectional studies with no intervention compared higher- vs. lower-rated essays. Maxwell-Reid and Coniam (2015), in an L2 English written exam context in secondary school in Hong Kong, with a total of sixty texts analysed, found differences in the ways in which the higher-rated texts drew on various story genres and on the genre of argument, as well as differences in the

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use of the expanded nominal group in creating those genres. Likewise, Murphy (2001) found differences in a study of around 100 paragraphs illustrating different text types (illustration, description, comparison/contrast, process, and persuasion), written by L2 English language learners at a university in Korea, based on cohesion (Halliday & Hasan, 2013[1976]), in the use of nominal demonstratives, which appeared far more frequently in the higher-rated texts. RyshinaPankova and Byrnes (2013), in a study of grammatical metaphor (GM; see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.1) in twenty-eight journalistic written texts at the end of a three-year German course at an American university, found that the number of GMs per T-unit or per clause did not distinguish quality; rather, the more successful texts deployed GMs in ways which were effective across the three metafunctions: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. Finally, Myskow and Ono (2018), in a study set at a university in Japan, analysed sixty-two in-class final exam biography genre essays, using the appraisal framework (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.2); they found some differences in the use of appraisal resources— for example, more Affect in the lower-graded texts—which they attribute, in part, to the higher use of words based on Japanese cognates from English; another difference was the greater amount of negative loading in the higher-rated essays. However, outside of those findings, use of appraisal resources across the two cohorts was fairly consistent; what marked the difference between the lowerand higher-graded essays was the use of evidence, whether feelings, activities, circumstances, transformations, or scale, which the higher-graders utilized to create more effective patterns of evidence. The comparisons between higherand lower-rated texts led the writers of these four studies to posit pedagogical suggestions for a genre-based approach to teaching, making explicit the ways in which the lexicogrammatical features, such as nominal groups, grammatical metaphor and appraisal resources, position writing most effectively in various contexts. In sum, these studies show that more is not necessarily better with the lexicogrammatical resources; it is, rather, a case of their strategic use. Three of the cross-sectional studies without intervention compare different age groups. Liardét (2013) analysed L2 texts written on globalization by first and fourth year university L2 writers, English majors at a Chinese university, for grammatical metaphor (GM) (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.1). The first-year learners produced far shorter texts with fewer instances of GM, while the fourth-year learners frequently used GM for textual cohesion and argument organization; at the same time, the fourth-year texts contained numerous congruent clause realizations, rather than metaphorical ones, suggesting opportunities to focus writers’ attention on packaging up meanings into nominalized forms. Pujol Dahme and Selfa (2017)4 compare fifty-four research reports in biology written in Catalán by high school twelfth-graders and university master theses’ writers; their findings include an increase in syntactic complexity and lexical density in the texts of the university writers, leading the authors to conclude that literacy, cognitive maturity and generic conventions interact in the development of a skilled writer. In a study of thirty-five online discussion postings written in Spanish in one undergraduate and one graduate course at an

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American university, McCabe (2017b) analysed differences in the use of Engagement resources from the system of appraisal (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.2) as well as the use of semantic waves (Maton, 2013) (see Chapter 3, Section 3.4.2). Differences were found in the use of Engagement resources, as the younger students were able to engage their classmates more fully through reference to their comments and experiences, while the older students had difficulty in interacting with their peers, mainly because of the denser material that they were expected to discuss, leading to more attributions to outside sources. The findings of these studies suggest that maturity has a role to play in the use of more effective lexicogrammatical resources, as does the level of cognitive complexity expected. Again, L2 writers may need focused attention on the ageand context-appropriate linguistic resources needed for achieving their goals in language use. Of course, the differences in age may also correspond to differences in level of L2 proficiency, of which there were four cross-sectional studies with no intervention. Coffin (2003) analysed two complaint letters, one written by a less proficient and the other by a more proficient writer, for a range of lexicogrammatical resources featured in each of the texts along metafunctional lines—that is, how the writers position their readers interpersonally, ideationally, and textually. She concludes that learners’ language competence can be indeed be fruitfully assessed using SFL. O’Dowd (2012) picks up on the metafunctional tracing of development, through her study of ninety response texts written in the USA by L2 writers in primary grades 6–8, across three proficiency levels: beginning, expanding, and reaching. She found differences in lexicogrammatical choices which demonstrate increasing complexity in the interpersonal, ideational, and textual metafunctions, serving as indicators of developing ability to construct meaning. In two separate studies of book reviews, Ryshina-Pankova (2010, 2011) analysed differences across levels of proficiency. In eighty-five book reviews written by learners of German at three levels, encompassing early advanced to advanced proficiency, as well as by L1 writers, Ryshina-Pankova (2010) found an increase in grammatical metaphor (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.1) across levels, with the highest amount in the L1 texts, while at the same time there was a decrease in the use of faded metaphors. In her 2011 study, Ryshina-Pankova analysed fifty-five book reviews for the use of Theme (Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3); differences in Theme choice included a move away from thematizing the writer of the review to the reader of the review, with development in the use of more impersonal resources for engaging the reader, such as ‘it’-type constructions. These cross-sectional studies lead to the conclusion that learners increase their metafunctional repertoire in numerous ways as proficiency increases, and that SFL provides discerning tools of analysis to model how these developments take place. In the corpus of research articles, there were three cross-sectional studies that included an intervention phase in the research design or as part of the context of the project. An example of the latter is Liardét’s (2016) study, also on grammatical metaphor (GM). The participants, both L1 and L2 writers of English at

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an Australian university, were involved in a genre-based pedagogy course that included explicit instruction of GM and its impact on texts; they wrote an argument essay at the end of a semester-long unit on Academic Communication for Business and Economics. The essays were divided into higher- and lower-rated essays; in each of these groups, three of the essays were by L1 writers and two by L2 writers. The lower-rated essays contained more clauses per text and fewer words per clause, while the higher-rated essays used GMs slightly more frequently per clause, and, more importantly, with greater textual impact; they showed, for example, more effective condensation of meaning into elaborate nominal groups; Liardét suggests that the lower-level students may need more support in using GM effectively. Coffin and Hewings (2005) is a study of asynchronous conferences between postgraduate students and their tutors, with one group’s tutor providing an intervention based on providing students with clear guidelines as to how they could comment on their peers’ messages. The results show that “structured tasks may result in increased student interaction” (p. 37). Llinares García (2007) created a research design in which a teacher in an experimental group included activities and role plays in order to encourage the use of specific language functions (based on Halliday’s child language functions; see Chapter 2, Section 2.3.2.2) on the part of a group of 5-year-old pre-school children, in an EFL environment; the children had one hour of English class daily. Results showed that the children in the experimental group used far more functions than children in a control group; they also initiated utterances more frequently and reduced considerably the use of the L1. These studies show two very different kinds of intervention: the first includes explicit instruction of a lexicogrammatical resource, with results that suggest a need for fine-tuning instruction depending on the students’ level, and the second two provide support for designing well-scaffolded tasks and/or an activity-rich environment to trigger certain types of meanings. Similar to these studies are those which report on results after an intervention; they are not included with the longitudinal studies as they do not provide data illustrating learners’ ability at the start of the intervention period. Bunch and Willet (2013) analysed five-paragraph persuasive essays written by forty students, the majority of whom were English language learners at different levels of proficiency, at the end of a two-week unit on the Reformation from a seventhgrade classroom in the United States. Classroom instruction involved learners in meaning-based approaches to writing and learning. Analysis of the final essays shows that students successfully used intertextual references related to curricular content and themes, and engaged with numerous oral, written, visual, cultural, and personal texts. Bunch and Willet argue that a meaning-based focus is more productive than an error-focused one, because by “shifting the focus to how students from non-dominant backgrounds use linguistic resources, we can uncover how they manage complex literacy tasks – and what challenges remain” (pp. 157–158).Thus, they advocate for supporting teachers in similar approaches to making meaning, so that they in turn can support their students’ learning to write in a second language. A second end-of-intervention study is that of Firkins,

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Forey, and Sengupta (2007), who collected data in the form of student texts and classroom video recordings (amongst other types) in their study of thirty-two secondary school students with some form of learning disability in Hong Kong; this research project involved genre-based teaching pedagogy consisting of twenty-four 35-minute sessions focused on recount genres over the course of two semesters. Their analyses of the data reveal that the students were able to understand, identify, and produce the lexicogrammatical features and patterns of procedural and information report texts. Thus, these two studies suggest that a pedagogy that includes an explicit focus on meaning-making leads to gains in successful and effective language use. 4.4.2 Longitudinal and Cross-Sectional Studies Four of the studies in the corpus of journal articles were both longitudinal and cross-sectional, three of which involved no intervention. Morton and Llinares (2016) analysed sixteen texts written in response to a prompt by the same four students at the end of each of the four years of secondary school (grades 7–10) at a bilingual school in Madrid, Spain, where students are taught subjects such as history through a foreign language—in this case, English. The essays were rated holistically by a subject expert; the researchers compared the use of appraisal resources by the four students over the four years as well as in the higher- and lower-rated essays. They found that the higher-rated texts showed more varied and appropriate appraisal resources to construct ‘historian’ voices; they also found that the increase in difficulty, especially in the final year, of the genres prompted by the task might have caused some challenges in using evaluative language. They further found, in some cases, a trade-off between accuracy and more adventurous use of language. Qi and Ding (2011), in one of the few research studies found in the corpus that focuses on spoken language, compared monologues by fifty-six Chinese university EFL learners at the beginning and end of a three-year period; they compared those two data collections with monologues by L1 speakers. They analysed the monologues for Butler’s (2003) categories of textual, interpersonal, and experiential formulaic sequences. The authors found no significant differences in accuracy and frequency of the EFL learners’ sequences between the first and third year; however, they did find greater variety of formulaic sequence use, with new sequences sometimes showing a lack of accuracy, again suggesting a trade-off between trying out new language and accuracy; they also found in the second data collection that the learners were closer to native speaker performance. These two studies raise the issue of accuracy as it is affected by both complexity and novelty, especially in a meaning-focused language pedagogy. Mazgutova and Kormos (2015) analysed both pre- and post-argumentative texts from thirty-nine students involved in a four-week university pre-sessional course (a specific type of intervention is not mentioned), with 15 hours of tuition per week; the students were grouped into intermediate and upper-intermediate proficiency level groups. Mazgutova and Kormos used available tools of

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analysis (such as Coh-Metrix 2.0) to analyse the texts for measures such as nominalisations, noun group complexity, and cohesion. They found that, while both groups increased in lexical diversity, the lower proficiency group improved in considerably more areas than the higher proficiency group; one area of marked improvement by the lower proficiency group was an increased use of complex noun phrases, while the higher-level students increased their use of nominalizations. Both cohorts reduced variety of syntactic structures, which the authors hypothesize may be due to a desire to create greater cohesion through grammatical means. Yasuda’s (2015) university study also examines thirty students in two groups at two different proficiency levels writing pre-and post-summaries at the beginning and end of a 15-week course, but in this case with explicit teaching through genre-based pedagogy. Both groups showed some improvement in summary writing; however, the higher proficiency group showed more gains, for example in grammatical metaphor.Yasuda suggests that differences may depend on the proficiency level, as explicit understandings of genres and language may be more helpful to more able students: i.e. a certain level of proficiency may be needed for gains to occur: [A]s a result of a more conscious attempt to search all of the available meaning-making choices and to strategically deploy linguistic solutions to meet the communicative demands of a writing task, more incongruent and metaphorical grammatical resources eventually become available to linguistically proficient writers. (Yasuda, 2015: 116) Comparing Yasuda’s interventionist study, with greater gains on the part of the higher-proficiency group, with Mazgutova and Kormos’ (2015) findings, which showed greater gains without intervention on the part of the lower-proficient learners, could tentatively suggest that genre-based pedagogy is especially helpful for learners beyond low proficiency. In addition to these combined cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, there were 30 longitudinal studies. Six of these studies were non-interventionist and simply traced the development of learners’ linguistic repertoires over a period of time. Pessoa, Miller, and Kaufer (2014) set out to trace precisely what develops in academic writing using SFL. They analysed 7 texts from eighty-six students, produced over an academic year, and interviewed twenty-three of the students on numerous occasions. The students reported gains in self-awareness of their reading and writing abilities and of academic writing features and expectations. Their writing showed increases in academic language, such as abstraction, text signalling, exemplification, and generalization, “leaving behind more descriptive, narrative, informal, and oral-like ways of communicating” (p. 151). At the same time, the texts showed that the students’ academic language development was not linear. Another university study, by Crossley, Kyle, and McNamara (2016), analyses change over time in the use of cohesive devices in essays written by fifty-seven students at three different points: beginning, middle, and end of a

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semester; they also analyse the relationship between the use of cohesive devices and human ratings of the texts. They found that the writers made gains in local, global, and text cohesion. However, they also found that the gains made were not always predictive of raters’ perceptions of text quality, a discrepancy which they attribute to the type of text (descriptive rather than argumentative; the latter is often expected in L2 writing environments) as well as to a possible focus on the part of the raters on language rather than content. A final longitudinal study of university undergraduate writing with no specific intervention is Liardét’s (2018) analysis of 130 students’ argumentative texts produced over the course of four semesters, for a total of 520 texts. Liardét used a combination of interpersonal grammatical metaphor (GM) (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.1) with the Engagement subsystem of the appraisal framework (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.2). The results show a drop in subjective interpersonal GM, such as ‘in my opinion’, and significant increases in objective interpersonal GM, especially through projecting clauses such as ‘it is essential that…’.These three studies suggest that the types of writing that students are involved in at university allow for academic writing features to emerge as part of the students’ repertoires; at the same time, a lack of explicit focus on those features which seem to be indicative of writing development may lead to lost opportunities and/or lack of clear assessment criteria. Three further longitudinal studies with no intervention involved younger learners, also in academic learning environments. Whittaker, Llinares, and McCabe (2011) trace the development of the writing ability of secondary school students, aged 12–16, learning history through English in two different bilingual schools in Spain, for a total of 174 texts collected over the four years.The authors focus specifically on participants’ use of the nominal group, its complexity, and its function in introducing and tracking participants throughout the texts, based on Martin’s (1992) system of identification, part of a further reformulation of cohesion at the level of discourse semantics. Over the four years, the texts showed decreases in pronoun and unmodified noun use, as well as in miscues in introducing and tracking participants; the texts also increased in textual cohesion and decreased in exophoric reference, which is more context-dependent and thus less expected in academic text. Shin (2014) followed the blogs of a secondgrade focal student in a US urban school, in a programme designed to support literacy development based on SFL. The teacher incorporated blogging into the teaching of written school genres to expand the audiences available and thus “to suggest authentic and meaningful purposes for student writing that reflected their life interests and issues in and out of school”. Findings from analysis of the student’s blogs showed that he was able to appropriate the purposes of blogging “for increasing his social and academic status among peers and for supporting peers in solving problems” (p. 75).The final longitudinal study with no intervention is Montanari (2004), which, like Qi and Ding (2011) and Llinares García (2007), mentioned in the cross-sectional studies, is one of the few studies in the corpus which focuses on spoken language. Montanari traced the development of bilingual children’s ability to narrate events in English and Spanish over a

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period of six months. The three children, aged 5–6, were of Hispanic descent, with Spanish considered to be their native language and English acquired through more formal contexts; still, because of their different life experiences, they each had differing levels of ability in the two languages. The two recorded narrations, from the beginning and end of a six-month period, demonstrated language proficiency effects. While the children showed the cognitive ability to include aspects of story, at times they also demonstrated a lack of linguistic resources, which affected, for example, the cohesion of the story; they were, however, able to express evaluation in both languages. These three non-interventionist studies end similarly to the university studies, with pedagogical implications, with Whittaker et al. (2011) calling for explicit focus on features of academic writing, Shin (2014) for opportunities to construct different kinds of social relationships through drawing on students’ personal life experiences, and Montanari (2004) for increased opportunities to tell stories in both languages so that learners can develop needed linguistic features. We now turn to the longitudinal studies that include SFL-based intervention to test the extent to which responses to a call for intervention demonstrate the power of SFL to mediate additional language development. 4.4.3 Longitudinal Studies The most frequent type of study reported on in the articles was longitudinal with an SFL-based teaching intervention; there were 24 of these studies, 8 of which are set at universities. Both Chen and Su (2012) and Yasuda (2017) analysed pre-and post-intervention summaries, written by forty-one students at the beginning and end of a 7-week period and by fifteen students involved in a 15-week programme respectively. Both studies demonstrate growth in summary writing ability; in the case of Chen and Su (2012), after genre-based pedagogy, students showed improvements in vocabulary and language use (accuracy), as well as significant increases in content and organization. Yasuda’s (2017) results included a 37% increase in attempted paraphrases, more instances of grammatical metaphor, and more sophisticated lexicogrammatical resources. In addition to summaries, other genres studied include descriptive texts written in Chinese (Cheng & Chiu, 2018) and emails (Yasuda, 2011) written in English, in both cases by L2 writers. Cheng and Chiu (2018) provide an in-depth case study of two students writing pre- and post-description texts after a genre-based unit consisting of two 3-hour sessions; both students demonstrated an enhanced ability to use the resources needed to construct an effective description. The emails written by seventy students over a 15-week period in Yasuda’s (2011) study increased in fluency and included more back up for claims, as well as increases in lexical sophistication, but not in lexical diversity. Parkinson, Jackson, Kirkwood, and Padayachee (2007) provided a university academic literacy course for students in South Africa whose L1 is not English, based on a scaffolded approach to teaching the features of the genres needed for success, such as laboratory reports, in a 26-week course. Pre- and post-proficiency tests, which consisted of

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multiple-choice reading comprehension questions as well as a writing task, showed that both skill areas improved significantly, an improvement that was particularly marked in the weakest 33% of the students. Rose, Rose, Farrington, and Page (2008) also used a scaffolding approach with Indigenous Australian undergraduate health science students: five students from a one-year preparatory program, eight students their first year of the degree program, and twelve in the second year.Their two-semester-long action research project included a pre-test designed to evaluated written academic abilities, a pedagogical intervention (in one unit of the preparatory programme and in two units for students in degree programmes), and written assessments at the end of each semester. The scaffolding for academic literacy intervention they used was modelled along the lines of R2L (see Chapter 3, Section 3.4.1). The assessment rubric consists of eleven criteria groups in five categories: genre, register, discourse, grammar, and graphic features (Martin & Rose, 2007), designed to provide both quantitative and qualitative feedback. Results from application of the rubric to the students’ texts show significant overall improvements in academic literacy abilities over all three groups. The numerical scoring was compared with standardized state school grade systems, and Rose et al.’s (2008) results showed consistent gains spanning four years of academic literacy, for example from junior secondary school literacy to a high school matriculation level or from middle secondary to undergraduate, after 60 hours of intervention. Rose et al. directly link these gains to the SFL-based scaffolding applied through intervention. Parkinson et al. (2007) suggest that there may have been other contributing factors to the significant improvement of their students after intervention; indeed, the results of the just-mentioned longitudinal studies are similar to those of the studies with no intervention. In fact, Parkinson et al. suggest that a different contributing factor may be that the students are immersed in university study in English. Yasuda (2011) specifically points out that in her study there was no control group, and thus the improvement may not have been because of the instruction. At the same time, she also includes in her study surveys and interviews with some of the students, whose comments suggest a raised awareness of genre conventions and features of effective written communication, an awareness which they came to through class discussions and analyses of sample texts in class. Interviews with students in Chen and Su’s (2012) study provide a similar corroboration for the positive results of genre-based instruction in their study. Thus, interventionist studies which suggest that improvements are based on instruction do need to proceed with great caution, mitigating any claims and providing further support through triangulation. A further set of longitudinal university studies use SFL to provide feedback for students to revise their written texts. Karlstrom and Lundin (2013) explain ‘Grim’, a word processing tool for advanced students of Swedish as a second language in a pre-sessional 3-week long university course. The course is grounded in genre-based pedagogy, and the tool is designed to help students revise their essays for greater effect. The researchers also included in their study video recordings of classroom dialogue, in a sociocultural-activity approach to

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understanding how students used the tool, which the researchers then revised based on those understandings. They discuss how the eighteen students in the course were scaffolded through both the tool and the dialogue into more effective written texts over the 3-week period. Similarly, Mahboob (2014) explains an online literacy support environment rooted in genre-based pedagogy at a university in Hong Kong. Over the course of two years, students in specific courses were assigned online tutors who gave them feedback on their essay drafts; the online bank of comments addressed both grammatical issues and genre problems at the level of the whole text. Survey data from the students suggest that they felt improvement in their writing, as well as enhanced understandings of academic writing. Lee (2002) operationalized coherence in writing based partly on Halliday and Hasan’s (2013[1976]) work on cohesion, and taught a first-year university writing course in English to students over the course of a semester in Honk Kong; she included a specific focus on coherence through materials designed to embody her operational definition. She collected pre-and post-revision texts from sixteen students, as well as student think-aloud protocols during revision, evaluation questionnaires, and interviews. The students’ written work demonstrated improvement in coherence, and students showed awareness of and positive attitudes towards coherence during revision. These studies demonstrate the importance of providing developing writers with clear understandings of meaning-making resources for effective writing so that they can articulate how their writing can be shaped more effectively through the linguistic choices they make. At the same time, again, the findings need to be read with caution, as there could be alternate explanations for improvements found in these studies, especially if, as we have seen, immersion in context brings about positive changes in individuals’ meaning-making repertoires. Most of the longitudinal studies were set in schools; given those settings, these studies might be best considered in the previous chapter. However, they are included here because they appear in applied linguistic publications and because they focus on additional language learners. Five of these studies took place in primary schools. Moore, Schleppegrell, and Palincsar (2018) is not really a longitudinal study of learner language development, but I cite it here because it is a design-based research study which exemplifies the type of study that several SFL research teams have been carrying out in schools (see Symons, Palincsar, & Schleppegrell, 2017, in Chapter 3, Section 3.5.3, for a related article in an education journal showing development in emergent bilingual students). Moore et al. (2018) narrate the process of a research team working with teachers in five primary schools, first through intense workshops to introduce SFL concepts and exemplify how they could be used in the classroom for discussion of creating meaning through text. Second, they collaborated with the teachers to design teaching materials, activities, and lessons, which were subsequently implemented in schools.The iterative process of design-based research was most prominent in the observations of the lessons by the researchers, followed by reflection and further collaboration with the teachers in order to overcome observed problems in the initial design through re-design. Throughout the process, they analysed a

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wealth of data, including pre-interviews with literacy coaches, professional development materials, curricular materials, observation logs, classroom videos and transcripts, student writing, teacher logs, and teacher focus-group interviews.Thus, the process included “iterative cycles of exploring and investigating, followed by design and construction, and then evaluation and reflection” (p. 1025). The researchers conclude that the DBR process demonstrated effectiveness of SFL metalanguage in helping students understand and produce literary response texts more effectively.They further conclude that DBR “offers valuable processes for enabling high-level theories such as SFL to be made usable” (p. 1044). While the other longitudinal studies in the corpus do not explicitly align with DBR, most are based on a process of working closely with teachers to create shared understandings through SFL of how meaning is made through language in ways valued by schools, and then implementation of resulting understandings in classrooms.With a fourth-grade elementary classroom teacher, de Oliveira and Lan (2014) identified ways in which a genre-based pedagogy could help students write about experiments, and developed activities and materials for the teacher to scaffold her students into writing procedural recounts. Data collected in their study included notes from meetings with the teacher, fieldnotes and transcriptions of classroom observations, and the learners pre- and post-genre writing samples. After the 3-month intervention period, a focal L2 writer in their study demonstrated an enhanced ability to use the language of procedural recounts through better signalling of its features, increased field-specific vocabulary, and reduced use of everyday language. The authors connect these gains directly to the teacher’s incorporation of genre-based pedagogy to support procedural recount writing, through the explicit talk about a model text to focus students’ attention on key features. Likewise, Harman (2013) drew on a teacher’s understandings of SFL from her MA assignments, as well as on audio and video recordings of classroom interactions, interviews, two focal student’s texts, instructional materials, field notes, and policy documents in a study of fifth-grade students writing literary narratives over a 5-month period. She also concludes that the teacher’s explicit focus on the language of the genre and on intertextuality led the two students to use different linguistic resources to build the lexical relations of narratives and other academic essays; they also became “agentive text makers” (p. 137) whose interest was sparked not only for writing narratives but also for explaining their writing processes to the researcher. These two studies use numerous data sources from within their studies to back up claims about the affordances of genre-based pedagogy. Two primary school-based longitudinal studies draw on outside data—comparison of external test results or with other classroom groups—which provide stronger evidence for the affordances of the meaning-based pedagogy. The schools involved already employed a genre-based pedagogy as part of the regular teaching routine.White, Mammone, and Caldwell (2015), in their study of three Australian primary schools, which used a whole-school genre-based approach,5 analyse pre- and post-texts after a term-long unit on narrative writing by a

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10-year-old focal student, and also compare the 2011 results from the nationwide Australian National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) for the three schools with those from other relevant schools. The results of the analysis of the student’s texts using an internal evaluation scale show a movement from scale 6 (associated with a 7-year-old L1 language user) to scale 8 (associated with a 9-year-old);6 the average NAPLAN scores for years 3, 5, and 7 show higher than average scores on the part of the three focal schools in all areas of literacy covered: reading, grammar, spelling, and writing.While the authors mitigate their claims for attributing these gains to genre-based pedagogy by pointing out that other factors may be involved, they also highlight the gains by a particular school in a lower socio-economic area and with large numbers of English-language learners (ELLs): consistently higher scores than schools in higher socio-economic areas and with fewer ELLs. These positive results lead them to conclude that there is a strong likelihood that the genre-based pedagogy played at least some role in the above-average NAPLAN results. Kerfoot and Van Heerden (2015) corroborate these results in their study of sixth-grade classes in South Africa; their data includes pre- and post-intervention writing samples from seventy-two students, pre- and post-intervention achievement results, field notes from classroom observations, and pre- and post-interviews with teachers. In one school they compare sixth-grade classes, one of which, Class B, spent more time immersed in genre-based pedagogy. Over a six-month period, students showed substantial gains in writing information reports, as these became more abstract, formal, and organized. The authors also draw on a student interview, in which he exclaimed “Why can’t we have English like this all the time?” (p. 251) to show positive effects on learner self-esteem and receptiveness. Finally, as reported by the West Cape Education Department, Class B also showed substantially improved results as compared to classes in similar schools and it is the only class in the school to show improvement in literacy results—more than twice that of other grade 6 classes. While, again, results need to be interpreted with caution, independent external assessments as part of the research design add further support for the effects of the pedagogy, given that “growth on standardized tests is a highly valued measure in contemporary international literacy education” (Humphrey & Macnaught, 2016: 811). Seven longitudinal interventionist studies were located in secondary schools. Like the final two primary studies just mentioned, two included external assessments. Humphrey and Macnaught (2016), like White et al. (2015), use NAPLAN results in their Australian urban school study, with over 97% of students from language backgrounds other than English. Their study spans an 18-month period of secondary school years 8 and 9. They include data in the form of sixteen pairs of pre- and post-texts, analysed using an internal measure with a maximum score of forty points, as well as instructional materials and audio recordings of lessons before and after teacher professional development. Analysis of these materials and recordings showed major changes in explicit use of metalanguage and modelling of genres following professional development. The students’ subsequent texts, as measured using the internal assessment rubric, showed

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substantial increase in the average student score, which nearly doubled from 11.6 to 21.7.The NAPLAN results also showed substantial average growth in persuasive writing between the years 2011 and 2013, by 36%. Furthermore, 67% of students had higher than expected growth, which was over 9 scaled scores higher than the average for schools across the state. A second study at the secondary school level which draws on external data sources is Forey and Cheung (2019).Their research study took place in an innercity school in the UK, with 52% of ELLs, and which had received government funding to reduce the attainment gap for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. The school had also received resources to support teacher professional development in the form of a 30-hour course on “How language works”, with an SFL genre-based focus. Forey and Cheung’s (2019) study focuses on the teaching of Physical Education (PE) by a teacher who had undergone the professional development programme. The researchers collected a wealth of data; the focus in this particular publication is on an 18-month period, in which they collected forty texts written by the students (twenty one year and twenty the next), as well as a post-lesson focus group interview with three students, and pre- and post- teacher interviews. These interviews demonstrate the positive impact that the genre-based pedagogy had on the teacher’s perception of student learning, corroborated by the students’ comments related to an enhanced understanding of the linguistic choices they make when constructing content in academic writing. The students’ writing showed increased nominalization and more effective organization. Furthermore, not only did external GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) results for PE improve significantly, with a pass rate above 75% compared with an earlier 14% pass rate, also the percentage of students (both L1 and EAL learners) obtaining grades A–C in five subjects including English and Mathematics increased steadily from 44% in 2014 to 62% in 2016. The authors conclude that these are attested advantages to students and teachers sharing a metalanguage which makes explicit the linguistic needs, as it allows teachers “to clarify and make visible the task requirements, to share a common analytical tool, to discuss the language and structure of the texts, and to provide a diagnostic tool for assessment and feedback” (p. 105). Other secondary school studies, while not drawing on external assessment, provide support for the benefits of an explicit SFL meaning-based pedagogy. Hammond and Macken-Horarik (1999) followed a year 10 Australian secondary school 10-week unit on biology; their data included a description of the unit, transcriptions from a lesson, and an in-depth case study of one student’s texts from throughout the unit. The objectives of the unit included developing the students’ understandings of the needed language and literacy resources to talk, read, and write about the content knowledge and issues. The researchers connect the teachers’ explanations in the classroom to an increasing control of the genre of explanation, and of the written mode more generally, by the focal student. They conclude that the ongoing development of critical writing in English is dependent on the ability to first control the literacy requirements of the discipline. Shum, Tai, and Shi (2016) follow the development of L2 students

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writing the discussion genre in Chinese in a secondary school in Hong Kong in a study using Reading-to-Learn (R2L) pedagogy (see Chapter 3, Section 3.4.1). A focal student’s pre- and post-writing tasks showed significant improvements in discussion writing, and semi-structured interviews with thirteen students yielded positive views towards the pedagogy as well as increased confidence in writing. Millin and Millin (2018) also use R2L pedagogy in their study of grade 11 students across three classes in two schools in South Africa; two of the classes were located within a school in a higher socio-economic area, and one in a school in a lower area. The intervention took place over ten lessons, involved using R2L to deepen students’ understanding of narrative and argument essays, and student writing was assessed pre-, during and post-intervention. The students’ writing showed marked improvement, with a highly significant (positive) difference in students’ literacy scores. The gains were greatest for students starting at lower levels, thus creating a levelling of differences between lower and higher performers. Spycher’s (2007) interventionist study is set at a secondary school in California, and in this publication she focused on one L2 writer’s growth in writing a current events report through a first draft and its subsequent revision, with a movement away from first- to third-person reporting on attitudinal meanings, more effective use of conjunction, and more lexical (rather than pronominal) resources for tracking participants in the text. Spycher writes that that one limitation of her study is its lack of consideration of transfer—that is, whether the student was able to use his understandings of writing in other contexts. It is important that SFL’s approach to teaching language in context includes going beyond simple understandings of a given genre to avoid decontextualized rote learning of a series of steps to produce a text. Achugar and Carpenter (2014) suggest that a response to concerns such as Spycher’s can be based on general transfer of understandings of how language works.They designed a literacy intervention for a multi-lingual secondary school history class, in which 15% of the students were designated ELLs; all of the students were placed in the class because of low academic achievement as assessed by the standardized state history exam. Achugar and Carpenter provided the teacher with advanced understandings of the SFL approach to disciplinary literacy during an intensive summer workshop, and three intervention sessions were designed collaboratively.These sessions focused learners’ attention through the use of metalanguage on the specific linguistic choices authors made in primary sources to represent and encode orientation towards events and participants. Data was collected in the form of pre- and post-implementation interviews with the teacher, classroom observations during the implementation, and pre- and post-assessments in the form of written tasks where students extracted information from a primary source, interpreting it and making inferences. All the students in the class showed gains in number of words produced (fluency), lexical density, and grammatical complexity; the latter included a wider range of clause types, and more expansion clauses, showing greater interpretation. At the same time, Achugar and Carpenter contend that, given that their study was not experimental, they cannot directly attribute changes in ways of using language to the intervention. Still, they argue,

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making explicit how language functions to mean in the context of the disciplines should provide the focus for future studies using experimental designs with a focus on classroom discourse. The authors further point out that there were differences across the cultural groups in the classroom due to their different lived experiences through language.The different linguistic repertoires provided a rich source for discussion of how language constructs meaning differently in different contexts, which is very useful for students’ secondary socialization into new ways of using language in an academic discipline such as history as well as for explicitly articulating understandings of language in context, which can help students make choices in transferring meaning-making resources to other contexts. Three studies are left in the corpus of research articles on additional language development which are underpinned by SFL theory. As we have seen, most studies focus on students’ literacy skills in English, overwhelmingly for academic environments. Gibbons (2003) also studied an academic environment in English, two fifth-grade classes in an Australian school, with 92% of students from language backgrounds other than English. She drew on 14 hours of audio recordings/transcription, collected for one unit across lessons of approximately 45–50 minutes each. She analysed these for how the register of science was constructed in the classroom—that is, how students were scaffolded into understandings and appropriate academic expressions of science through the teachers’ movements across the mode continuum, where meanings are expressed using a range of registers, from everyday oral language to the more abstract language of the register of science. Gibbons’ analysis traced how the student contributions in class were progressively transformed into the specialist school curriculum discourse. Similarly, Gleason and Slater (2016), in a university context of two third-year sections of Spanish, used classroom observations, participant interviews, and textual documents (such as classroom Powerpoints, assignment criteria, and student evaluations) to track how the use of the Teaching-Learning Cycle linked patterns of tasks and linguistic/discourse features, a linking which helped build students’ academic literacy in both languages, thus suggesting that there is transfer of genre understandings across languages. Finally, Smithers and Gray (2018), in one of two studies to consider general English language learning (i.e. not for a specific, such as an academic, purpose; the other is Coffin, 2003), used questionnaires and learner diaries of eleven Japanese adults, all over the age of 55, who were learning English as a hobby. Over a period of 6 weeks, one of the researchers taught this group of learners using an SFL-based ‘Meaning-order Approach to Pedagogical (MAP) Grammar’ (see Chapter 5, Section 5.2.3). The learners reported positive attitudes towards this type of grammar focus; they felt that they benefitted from the grammar instruction and that their quality of life improved. 4.4.4 Summary: Approaches and Issues We finish this section with some comments as to the overall findings of these studies with respect to ALD. First, most of the studies centred on educational literacy, based on various academic genres of written text. A handful of studies

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focused on some other aspect of school discourse, such as the construction of academic language through spoken discourse in the classroom (Gibbons, 2003; Montanari, 2004; Llinares García, 2007; Gleason & Slater, 2016), online interactive discourse (McCabe, 2017b), and journalistic texts (Ryshina-Pankova & Byrnes, 2013).These studies, then, could be considered alongside those included in Chapter 3, as they follow school-based language development. SFL, with its genre-based pedagogy, has much to offer for tracing and promoting additional language development in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) contexts. Second, a learner’s expanding repertoire of linguistic resources needs to be accompanied by discernment in the use of those resources: when is one or another most appropriate for effective rhetorical and registerial use? Thus, development cannot be traced as a discrete set of linguistic items that an L2 language user is familiar with; rather, it needs to follow the textual instances in which they are used in order to get a fuller picture of an individual’s L2 linguistic system. Furthermore, as with L1 users, developmental trajectories of L2 learners encompass increasing complexity of expression, which often goes hand-in-hand with maturity. In addition, the studies in this chapter, like those of the previous two, highlight the need for real interaction, authentic texts, and text-rich environments—including talk about language itself—for ALD to take place most fruitfully. At the same time, there seem to be benefits to SFL-based linguistic scaffolding, carefully tuned to the proficiency level of the learners, implemented through a pedagogy which helps learners notice the specific ways in which semiotic resources combine to create meaning in text, and some of the studies show the positive effects of this type of intervention on ALD. At this point, one might note methodological concerns with respect to the claims made for SFL-based intervention and language development in educational contexts, and whether the intervention made a difference or whether it is simply due to the immersion through the classroom in the language (Parkinson et al., 2007; Yasuda, 2011). Llinares García (2007) is the only study that uses a control and experimental group (as do Purcell-Gates, Duke, & Martineau, 2007; Pinto, Tarchi, & Bigozzi, 2016; Proctor, Silverman, Harring, Jones, & Hartranft, 2019; see Chapter 3). However, control groups are not always an effective methodological tool in educational research: given myriad differences in student characteristics, teacher characteristics and pedagogic practices found in classrooms throughout the school system, there would arguably be no guarantee that the ‘control group’ would, in fact, function as such, even if one was available. (Millin & Millin 2018: 4) Thus, keeping classroom variables constant is a challenge (if not an impossibility). At the same time, those outside SFL, especially those who count on experimental and statistical evidence to support claims, might not be convinced by claims made based on intervention studies that use their own measurement tools. In this sense, studies which incorporate outside test scores (cf. Humphrey & Macnaught

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2016;White et al. 2015), school grades/comparison with other school groups (cf. Forey & Cheung 2019; Kerfoot & Van Heerden 2015), or use a battery of available quantitative developmental measures (cf. Norris & Ortega, 2009) to compare SFL-based studies of ALD with those from other perspectives (cf.Vyatkina, 2012), along with qualitative analyses of learners’ meaning-making abilities in the L2 and their perceptions of these, provide robust ways of triangulating results.

4.5 Further SFL Studies: Beyond School More general discourse studies beyond those centred on academic contexts in the research synthesis are few: emails (Belz, 2003;Yasuda, 2011), monologues (Qi & Ding, 2011), complaint letters (Coffin, 2003), and adults learning general English as a hobby (Smithers & Gray, 2018). Moving beyond the parameters of the synthetic study, we find other SFL-based research studies responding to Halliday’s call for descriptions of ALD learner language to show its increasing potential. Perrett (2000) collected instances of texts over time in a cross-sectional study of oral interviews between adult migrants L2 speakers and native speakers of English. She analysed the texts using a system network of speech function (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.6) to show the choices the learners were able to make at different points in time, thus illustrating their increasing repertoire of meaning potential.While Perrett (2000) built up the system networks through the learners’ texts themselves, Praxedes Filho (2013), in a longitudinal study of Brazilian lowproficiency L2 English learners, used already existing clause systems networks (transitivity, mood and theme; see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3) to compare their personal-experience narratives with those written by first-language writers. The collection period spanned two years, with six data collection points, and results showed an increase in the systemic choices available to the learners over time. For languages other than English, Troyan (2016) and Abdel-Malek (2019) provide positive results following a genre-based pedagogy intervention based on SFL in a study of fourth graders learning Spanish and university students learning Arabic, respectively, in the USA. Both of these studies, which compared preand post-writing tasks, point to gains in understanding the audience’s needs and in using the stages and linguistic features of the focus genres (a description of a touristic landmark and a recount of habitual events, respectively). Huang & Mohan (2009) carried out a longitudinal intervention study of twenty-three children aged 8–10 learning Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language. They collected data in the form of, amongst other types, classroom video- and audiotapes, and two description texts, one collected at the end of Year 1, and the second at the beginning of Year 3. Their study design included formative assessment measures based on SFL in order to map growth in terms of meaning + wording. At the same time, they used SFL to analyse classroom processes: we examine how the teacher focuses on structures of ideational meaning, creates graphics that represent the structures of ideational meaning, uses the graphics to help students build knowledge of the field, helps students with

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ideational wording as they express the graphics in Chinese, and formatively assesses speaking and writing, ideally in ways that students can understand and even participate in. (Huang & Mohan, 2009: 25) Thus, Huang & Mohan (2009) focused attention on the processes of learning by tracing how “the carefully designed curriculum” (p. 25) created classroom interaction for instruction of meanings + wordings, as well as for teacher, peer, and self-formative assessments of wordings chosen to express meanings. They illustrate how the teacher first built up field (e.g. of  ‘family members’), including use of students’ L1 at early stages, and then provided the linguistic resources in Chinese to create meaning, using the students’ own knowledge of family, for example, to provide cultural meanings and their wordings in Chinese. For Huang and Mohan (2009), in addition to the benefits of the SFL pedagogic approach for embedding the cultural system within the linguistic system, the SFL modelling of formative assessment is also a radical change from other approaches: It [SFL] provides the functional formative analysis of student texts and adds the functional analysis of formative assessment processes. In addition it enables a functional analysis of the relation between assessment processes and instruction processes. Alternative approaches may recognize the SFL principle that learning is a semiotic process but they do not provide a linguistic analysis that enables us to trace the specific meanings of that process in the detailed evidence of its wording (Huang & Mohan, 2009: 36) That is, SFL provides for an analysis of classroom processes, which can be traced through to the students’ expanding repertoires. In one comparison of the same student’s sample Year 1 and Year 3 texts, Huang and Mohan (2009) found more errors in the latter, yet also triple the number of clauses, and a far greater range of lexicogrammatical resources to convey meanings, with more resources to express, for example, types of transitivity choices, as well as greater complexity of nominal and verbal groups: i.e., the students grew in ability to deploy register appropriate meaning-making choices. Colombi (2009) shows the benefits of using SFL as a contextualizing approach for working with Spanish heritage speakers in the United States who use Spanish in familiar and informal contexts and would like to use it in more professional settings. Through genre-based pedagogy, Colombi provides learners with tools and resources for analysing and producing texts that use more personal, concrete, and informal language to those that use more abstract, formal, impersonal and academic language. Moskver (2008) shows how a focus on genre and register allows for heritage speakers and advanced learners of Russian to work together in the same course and advance in their language abilities, as the classroom tasks were designed to “challenge the language learners in areas beyond their levels of

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linguistic comfort in colloquial register” (p. 127). Byrnes (2009) explains the five levels of Georgetown University’s ‘German as a foreign language’ writing curriculum, which is genre-based and designed to move students “from the grammar of speaking to the grammar of writing”, which involves “a gradual shift from specific events and sequences of events at specific times by human actors to general sequences of events in timeless settings, to cause-and-effect sequences involving abstract phenomena” (p. 63). She provides a longitudinal study of twenty-three students, comparing writing tasks from levels two (narrative), three (journalistic report), and four (written version of a public speech); a quantitative analysis of features of the texts uncovered noticeable and significant increases in noun use and grammatical metaphor—key linguistic resources for realizing that shift. Teruya (2009), like Byrnes, writes of the importance of enabling learners to experience the “intricate relation between text types and grammar” (p. 71), and describes his experience teaching Japanese to L2 learners in Australia, in which he raised students’ awareness of clause complexing from a meaning-based perspective, including understanding how clause functions such as Subject and Theme work together in Japanese in construing meaning in social contexts. Testimonials from his students demonstrate that they see their heightened ability to “think grammatically” as highly beneficial for their continued study of the language. Kawamitsu (2015) also used SFL for teaching Japanese as an L2 in the USA, in an approach he labelled Janru, based on genre understandings from SFL and on more traditional grammar structures from a typical Japanese L2 teaching textbook. Kawamitsu aligns these structures with SFL register variables and their typical lexicogrammatical realizations, which are then further aligned with generic stages; for example, the orientation stage of a narrative introduces participants and circumstances. In a longitudinal study which included a pedagogical intervention, the author used the Teaching-Learning Cycle (see Chapter 3, Section 3.3) to help students develop their writing of a personal narrative in an intermediate Japanese course at university level. Kawamitsu found that students used the metalanguage to provide feedback to their peers, and argues that the language they were building up through the genre-based approach allowed the students to make stronger links between reading and writing. Also, talk about one genre was useful in building knowledge about another genre, such as blog postings. Armour and Furuya (2013) carried out a non-intervention cross-sectional study of five adult Japanese L2 learners with different levels of proficiency each doing a role play with an expert speaker of Japanese. Their research questions centred on the contextual and/or systemic constraints on choices available for utterances, the reaction of the expert to errors, and the entry point into initial and new stages of L2 development. Analysis of the role play transcripts shows the limitations of the linguistic repertoire of learners at early stages, often clearly informed by the learners’ language textbook model dialogues, which could serve them up to the point that the role play no longer followed the modelled format; Armour and Furuya point out that textbook authors provide language in contexts which the authors have chosen, and transfer of that meaning potential to new contexts, such as role play, is difficult for learners. Their data also

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show the ways in which the expert notices errors and provides recasts and rewordings, scaffolding learners into understanding and apt expressions. Thus, they argue “it is the collaboration between interlocutors that is most likely crucial to how the novice actually develops his meaning potential” (p. 240). Rather than focus on errors, they focus on meaning-making problems in interaction, which a more expert interlocutor can help learners solve. These studies, and those in the previous section, demonstrate that the system-based models of SFL articulate expanding repertoires of meaning-making options in a learner’s language system, and highlight the role of interaction and scaffolding, much as with caregivers and small children, in that expansion.

4.6 Other Perspectives and SFL It goes well beyond the scope of this book to include all the different perspectives on ALD, and thus we limit discussion to the most salient. In measuring development, the constructs of complexity, fluency, and accuracy (referred to as CAF) in SLA are seen as the “major stages of change in the underlying L2 system” (Housen, Kuiken, & Vedder, 2012: 2); we consider them here in reverse order. Fluency, which is characterized as the “routinisation, lexicalisation and automatization of L2 elements leading to greater performance control over the L2 system” (Housen et al., 2012: 2), is equated with ‘ease’ and ‘eloquence’. Fluency is often measured in length (for example, number of words in a timed essay), and thus, while of interest to measures of L2 language abilities, is not tied to any one linguistic theory and therefore has not received special attention from an SFL perspective. Accuracy is the most straightforward of the CAF measures, and it involves an alignment of the L2 learner’s interlanguage with the target language system; it is also called ‘correctness’ and thus is often measured through absence/presence of errors. From an SFL perspective, accuracy has received little attention; it has even been suggested that, if syntactic accuracy is the goal (of instruction or investigation), then formal or more traditional views of grammar may be sufficient or even more apt (Derewianka & Jones, 2010). Within SFL, a focus on meaning is seen as more productive than a focus on form through errors (Bunch & Willet, 2013; Armour & Furuya, 2013); in fact, a focus on error can be “counterproductive in drawing attention to formal features that may not be crucial to meaning making while at the same time ignoring language that may be formally correct but ineffective in constructing a text” (Yasuda, 2017: 590). Nevertheless, Hamilton (2015) provides a framework of error analysis which locates learner errors within SFL metafunctions. For example, within the experiential metafunction, errors may be found within the expression of the various types of processes (material, mental, relational, verbal, existential, and behavioural; see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3) or in the expression of the participant or circumstance. Within the textual metafunction, errors can be found in indicating whether the referent is recoverable in the text or not (through, for example, the mis-use of articles; cf. Whittaker et al. (2011)) as well as in textual Themes, or the choice of adjunct to indicate the relationship of the

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upcoming clause to the previous text (‘moreover’, ‘however’, etc.). Hamilton’s (2015) integrated error analysis framework was empirically tested through a pilot study of forty randomly chosen texts from two data collection points: end of first- and second-semester exam argument essays in English from French L1 university students; the results allowed for a more in-depth understanding of the errors’ effect on meaning: traditional error analysis offers a solid grammatical perspective on second language production whereas an integrated SFG approach offers multiple views on the same phenomena: ranging from syntax, functional experiential roles in the clause to … the overall text structure. (Hamilton, 2015: 27) Adding to a more traditional view of syntactic errors, a more top-down view of error from the perspective of text and discourse creates an integrated view, which Hamilton further argues can be useful in language learning contexts to help students understand more fully how errors impact meaning. Liardét (2013), while avoiding the word ‘error’, includes in her study of grammatical metaphor “intermediate realizations” (p. 165), which show some infelicity in the construction of the GM, but which Liardét suggests are “forerunners or developmental markers of GM” (p. 165). Because of the focus on meaning, lexicogrammatical errors are seen in terms of what learners can do and can mean with the expanding repertoire and allow teachers to see where more support may be needed. Indeed, a focus on accuracy in terms of error-free text ignores the rich system that L2 learners build up through their internalizations of the L2 while also drawing on their own L1 linguistic systems. Gleason (2014: 470) points out that “[m]ulticompetent language users may break NS rules for language use, while at the same time drawing on a diverse repertoire of codes which allows them to effectively represent experience”. Gleason (2014) carried out a study of nineteen intermediate/advanced-level US university students learning Spanish from whom she collected data in the form of oral story recounts. She analysed the data for the generic features of story recounts, such as third-person pronouns, passive voice, and specific, descriptive details, as well as for transitivity features of process types, participants, and circumstances (as in Hamilton’s framework). The results showed variability across the learners in terms of, for example, their ability to use the linguistic resources most appropriate for the genre, as well as to include circumstances, which are important in creating narrative. Gleason (2014) argues that this type of meaning-focused assessment is important for learning how to communicate in an additional language: breaking grammatical rules leads to flawed forms but does not necessarily indicate unsuccessful communication. In fact, there is little evidence to suggest a direct link between erroneous grammatical forms and ability to communicate in a L2. Often times the most eloquent of speakers is able to convey meaning while breaking innumerable grammatical, phonological, or

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syntactical rules. This is not meant to imply that L2 learners should disregard grammatical forms, but rather to emphasize that linguistic evaluation must be viewed as integrated within an individual’s ultimate ability to extend their resources for making meaning in context. (Gleason, 2014: 478) Interestingly, Housen et al. (2012: 4) argue that accuracy could also usefully be interpreted as ‘appropriateness’ or ‘acceptability’; appropriateness to context and situation is certainly in line with SFL views of language use. Complexity refers to the internalization of “more elaborate and more sophisticated L2 knowledge systems” (Housen et al., 2012: 3). Syntactic and lexical complexity have received a great deal of attention in the literature on second language growth and have been widely used in L2 studies of writing development, which is most often measured within academic contexts, where complexity is seen as a goal to attain. However, optimal means of measuring complexity have changed over time. Initially, studies used the T-unit (the independent clause plus any other co-occurring clauses within the scope of its sentence) as a measure of syntactic complexity (see summary in Crossley & McNamara, 2014). However, Halliday (1987) drew attention to clausal complexity as a feature of spoken, rather than written, language: “[w]ritten language tends to be lexically dense but grammatically simple; spoken language tends to be grammatically intricate but lexically sparse” (1987: 66). That is, written language may be built by putting together structurally simpler sentences than spoken language, but will pack meaning into its clauses by using greater lexical density, which refers to “the proportion of lexical items (content words) to the total discourse” (Halliday, 1987: 60). Biber, Gray, and Poonpon (2011) provide empirical evidence for Halliday’s argument through a large-scale corpus-based study comparing academic writing and conversation, concluding that clausal subordination is more common in conversation, while academic writing features more phrasal complexity, especially in the noun phrase. Biber et al. (2011) posit a developmental trajectory over the life of individuals in the L1, with a move from conversational competence (which includes clausal complexity) at one end to academic writing competence (which includes phrasal complexity, especially within the noun phrase) at the other, the latter not achieved by nor a goal of all those who embark on the L2 learning process.They argue that, while some learners do not really acquire conversational competence, L2 learners will follow a similar pattern leading to greater ability to use the complex structures associated with academic writing. At the same time, measures of, for example, lexical density (ratio of content words to function words) may not always take into account the fuller context, differences amongst text types, and appropriateness to the task (RyshinaPankova, 2015), and thus lexical density on its own is not a reliable measure of complexity. Within the SFL model, complexity is seen as tied to increasing abstraction away from lived, concrete experience and towards constructing technicality in academic fields; a key linguistic resource for both abstraction and

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technicality is grammatical metaphor (GM; see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.1). Ideational GM includes nominalization as well as expressions of cause–effect through verbs (e.g. led to), for a total of thirteen sub-types of ideational GM (see Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999; Ferreira, 2020). An expanding repertoire in the contextualized use of ideational GM, then, is seen as a key indicator of language development (Ferreira, 2020). At the same time, simple counting of GM is problematic, as discernment in its contextualized use at any given moment in the unfolding of a text is also key: that is, more is not necessarily better (RyshinaPankova & Byrnes, 2013; Liardét, 2016; Ferreira, 2020). SFL insights into complexity based on its theoretical model, such as the stratification of semantics and lexicogrammar, provide a meaning-based perspective, which is promising for tracing development and for making developmental pathways explicit to learners, as a “mature command of language that opens up new opportunities for thinking in different ways, for interacting appropriately with a wider range of people, and for articulating new kinds of meaning” (O’Dowd, 2012: 329) In addition to CAF measures of development, it is also worth mentioning those of other usage-based models of language. Tyler (2010) compares SFL with discourse functionalism (DF) and cognitive linguistics (CL); these three models see an individual’s L2 system as emerging from situated, meaning-based interaction which is embedded in particular cultural contexts.Thus, they share five key tenets: (1) the primary purpose of language is communication, and therefore it is shaped by communicative uses; (2) context is multidimensional and complex, and includes the relationship between interlocutors; (3) language is a learned system; (4) meaning is created both through lexis and grammatical patterns; and (5) there is no separation between deep and surface structures, as all grammatical patterns create meaning in differing ways. A major difference between SFL and discourse functionalism and cognitive linguistics is the relationship the models establish between language and cognition; DF and CL explicitly recognize discourse producers’ cognitive processes in their models. Within DF, Tyler cites Chafe (cf. 1994), whose work, for example, on determiners and intonation brings in the role of memory and processing constraints.Tyler compares the SFL approach to Theme-Rheme, where Theme choice is located in the textual metafunction and explained by text producer’s choices in creating the flow of information, with Givón’s (1995) attribution of choice of Theme to cognitive and communicative forces, which are influenced in sometimes competing ways by iconicity, in terms of what the text producer finds most pressing and wishes to put first vs. the principle of given information as coming first.Thus, for Givón (1995: 16), “language and its notional/functional and structural organization is intimately bound up with and motivated by the structure of human cognition, perception and neuro-psychology”.7 Tyler (2010) places DF and CL on a continuum, with CL taking further the inclusion in the model of “human neural-physical architecture and human interaction with the social-physical world” (p. 278), drawing on evidence from psychology and neuroscience in their model of language (see, for example, Chapter 2, Section 2.4.5). Conceptual metaphor, polysemy networks, and

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memory play a key role in DF theory, as do schemas, or the abstract mental representations which we hold of repeated instances of experience. From an SFL perspective, Nuthall (2000: 296) (see Chapter 3, Section 3.5.3) connects memory to “genre-like knowledge structures”; that is, genres, which are “staged goaloriented social processes” (Martin, 1986: 246), serve to scaffold those mental representations. Nuthall’s view provides an example of Tyler’s (2010: 273) reference to Halliday and Matthiessen’s (1999: 7) perspective on the relationship between language and cognition: “Instead of explaining language by reference to cognitive processes, we explain cognition by reference to linguistic processes”. Halliday (1975) acknowledged that learning the system is a cognitive process, but the system itself is a social semiotic, or a system of meanings that emerges and takes shape in contexts of social interaction (see Chapter 2, Section 2.3.1). Nevertheless, critics found schemas to be a crucial missing component of coherence within Halliday and Hasan’s (2013[1976]) model of cohesion (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.3), where coherence is seen as built into the semantic configuration of the register variables of a text. CL argues for a more prominent role of, for example, sensory images in human cognition, which has led to insights about, for instance, our ability to take different perspectives on a situation (Tyler, 2010). With respect to L2 language teaching, Tyler (2010) connects SFL to the genre-based approach in its application to both education and modern language teaching; she highlights the applications of DF to approaches to L2 teaching of discourse (cf. Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman, 1999), and CL to teaching of vocabulary, for example, idioms, figurative language, phrasal verbs, and prepositions. Obviously, these are all important aspects of language learning, and it would be interesting to expand on this research to look more specifically at how the same aspect of language might be developmentally traced and/or taught differently within each of the theories.

4.7 Interlanguage and SFL Interlanguage, as defined by Selinker (1972), refers to the linguistic system constructed at any given point by an L2 learner, a system which is different from both the learner’s L1 system and the language system being learned. It is a frequently studied concept within SLA, and the solutions that learners come up with in creating meaning (such as overgeneralization in adding the past tense morpheme -ed to irregular verbs) have been attested in ALD (Ortega, 2003), suggesting that learners follow similar developmental trajectories in terms of a fixed, or natural, order of acquisition; both cognitive and formal linguistics have provided explanations for these developmental pathways. A related term in SLA studies is ‘fossilization’, which refers to the state of a learner remaining stuck at any given point in their interlanguage system, retaining differences with the target language system. From within SFL, few studies mention these SLA terms. SFL researcher Praxedes Filho (2013) is an exception; he argues that, as interlanguage research tends to focus on linguistic forms and provides little empirical evidence of an actual natural order, the gap can be filled from a meaning-focused

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SFL perspective. He uses the lexicogrammatical systems of transitivity, mood, and theme, for which he constructed rather delicate networks…the transitivity network contains 85 systems and 190 terms, with 7 levels of delicacy; the mood network has 74 systems and 162 terms, with 10 levels of delicacy; and the theme network has 68 systems and 164 terms, with 9 levels of delicacy … the total figures amount to 227 systems and 516 terms. (Praxedes Filho, 2013: 477) Delicacy allowed him to trace a learner’s growing lexicogrammatical complexification over time in systemic terms (through an increase in the systems taken up) in a given register (the personal experience narrative), and to define fossilization as a point at which the increase ends “before it reaches the size of a native speaker’s resource/choice repertoire relative to the same register” (p. 478). His comparison using the systems of L2 learners and L1 users of English leads him to liken ALD to Halliday’s Phase III of L1 language development (see Chapter 2, Section 2.3.3), as, with favourable learning conditions (whether in a classroom or outside of it), an L2 learner also “never stops being a learner by way of not refusing to accept the challenge of effectively participating in the day-by-day local contexts of social situation where her/his broader context of culture calls her/him to function within the L2” (p. 490). He further argues that the goal in the SFL view need not be one of native-speaker-like perfection, but rather of “augmenting her/his lexicogrammatical choice repertoire (success)” (p. 490). Indeed, from other (mainly formalist) perspectives, one implication of comparative studies of L2 speakers/writers with the L1 system is that of approximation to a ‘native speaker’ norm. Belz (2003: 25) cites Byrnes (1986: 190), in questioning the appropriateness of asking L2 learners to change their conversational style to the norms of the target language when those norms may be contrary to those of the L1 (citing the difference between German and Japanese conversational styles). Belz supports Byrnes in arguing for enhancing awareness of differences in norms, rather than imposing them. Indeed, the term ‘native speaker’ has come under heavy criticism from the ELT world. Davies (2003) notes that it was a necessary reference for the Chomskyan formalist view of language acquisition, as a norm to attain. However, he also highlights that Halliday does not use the term. Holliday (2006) emphasizes the ideological charge of the term, which is often equated within ELT to the English-speaking west, and to an idealized speaker with a higher level of culture.Thus, L2 speakers “are often considered handicapped and guilty of handicapping conversations with native speakers” (Chappell, 2010: 66). From the SFL perspective, with L2 learners and with learners who struggle in school because of a difference in the language experiences they bring from home to school,“our developmental continuum views our students’ performance from the perspective of what they CAN do rather than what they can’t” (O’Dowd, 2012: 344–345, emphasis original). From the SFL perspective, then, interlanguage is not an impoverished

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system, but rather, as Halliday sees all language development, a means of increasing one’s power and control (evidenced in the opening quote of this chapter). Learners need to feel that power, rather than feel diminished because of their errors. Many of the studies mentioned in this and the previous chapters demonstrate the potential of SFL to provide developmental pathways that take as a starting point learners’ existing potential to then build registerial and generic potential in new contexts and situations, including those of the L2.

4.8 Metalanguage A number of the ALD SFL studies mentioned showed gains in language use accompanied by the use of metalanguage (Gibbons, 2003; Achugar & Carpenter, 2014; de Oliveira & Lan, 2014; Kerfoot & Van Heerden, 2015; Humphrey & Macnaught, 2016; Moore et al., 2018; Yasuda, 2015, 2017; Forey & Cheung, 2019). The argument is crucial, as it is precisely through metalanguage that SFL linguistic theory is linked to pedagogy; SFL provides the link to explicit understandings of how language works, understandings that are seen as beneficial to the expansion of systems of meaning-making, that is, to language development. SFL-based approaches may be considered to belong to those strongly emphasizing the role of explicit knowledge, and, more precisely, of knowledge requiring the linkage between the lexicogrammatical core of language and those more global discourse phenomena realized by lexicogrammatical patterns. In summary, SFL-based approaches are often seen as emphasizing the positive and enabling role of explicit knowledge about language and its use. (Steiner, 1997) Hu (2010: 180) defines metalanguage as “technical or semi-technical terminology used to analyse or describe language”, and ties its “fall from grace” to communicative language teaching (CLT); nonetheless, metalinguistic knowledge, or “analysed knowledge about the L2” (p. 180), has been positively correlated through empirical rearch to L2 proficiency. Hu (2010) lists several advantages of metalanguage, as long as teachers do not teach it for its own sake, such as providing a bridge between L1 literacy understandings and L2 language learning, allowing learners to confirm or amend rules they may have internalized from their own hypotheses testing, contextualizing more precise explanations of language use, and helping learners to connect new L2 knowledge to already acquired knowledge. Hu (2010) does not advocate for any one approach to metalanguage, as long as it is not the “boring and sterile pedagogical practices of the grammar-translation type” (p. 181); rather, he calls for more empirical research on the effective integration of metalanguage into a “meaning-focused, communication-oriented L2 pedagogy” (p. 181). Some of the SFL studies mentioned in this chapter provide empirical findings that support the use of SFL-based metalanguage. For example, Humphrey and Macnaught (2016) found increasing independent use of a “bridging”

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metalanguage, which connects SFL technical terminology to instances of language patterns in texts and which further acknowledges the worth of everyday terminology to talk about structures and functions of language (e.g. ‘opening and closing the door’ to refer to concessive clauses in argumentative texts), by the teacher in their study, while students also increasingly used metalanguage to analyse texts, with significant gains shown by these students on independent external assessments. Forey & Cheung (2019; see Section 4.4.3) worked with teachers on metalinguistic terms such as genre, register, macroTheme, hyperTheme, Theme, and nominalization, and traced the use of the terms through their classroom data. The teachers in their study reflected on the benefits of focusing learner attention through metalanguage, and positive findings related to learner language development also received corroboration through external assessment. Other studies also show the benefits of having a way of talking with students about language itself; Firkins et al. (2007: 347) “developed with the students a metalanguage”, and Galloway et al. (2019) used the students’ own metatalk (Galloway, Stude, & Uccelli, 2015), incorporating it into metalanguage based on SFL. Thus, the research shows gains for using metalanguage, as in Chapter 3, mainly in educational contexts. We will return to metalanguage in Chapter 5, especially as related to ALD.

4.9 SFL and L2 Pedagogy The studies reviewed in this chapter have demonstrated gains in language ability following an SFL-based way of focusing L2 learners’ attention on language in the classroom; however, the evidence to support the claim is limited and is mainly for school-based/academic contexts, rather than for general ALD, such as those to which Hu (2010) refers.There is some case study evidence for the benefits of using an SFL-based linguistic and pedagogical approach to general L2 teaching (Moskver, 2008; Huang & Mohan, 2009; Colombi, 2009; Byrnes, 2009; Teruya, 2009; Kawamitsu, 2015; Troyan, 2016; Abdel-Malek, 2019); at the same time, within general ALD, the productive applicability of SFL for teaching seems clearer when learners already have a certain level of ability in using the L2. Thus, one question that arises with respect to applications of SFL to classroom teaching is whether a certain level of proficiency is needed to implement such an approach: “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 teaching German through an SFL approach has led her to an unequivocal ‘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

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language learners continually engage in making and fine-tuning formmeaning 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). Language teachers may find more traditional grammatical ways of talking about language easier to use at early levels simply because both teachers and students are more accustomed to them. At the same time, these ways tend to be tied to a focus on accuracy of structures, rather than on meaning-making (Derewianka and Jones, 2010). Language teaching research has consistently demonstrated that a lack of focus on form in solely meaning-focused learning environments tends to be ineffective for ALD; on the other hand, a focus on form through meaningfocused tasks/activities has been shown to help learners to notice, and thus be able to learn, features of the language system (Doughty & Williams, 1998). The question remains as to whether SFL can develop a general L2 pedagogy, a point which we take up in Chapter 5.

4.10 SFL and ALD: Summary and Critical Issues This chapter has reviewed SFL and its relationship to ALD starting from Halliday’s initial theorizing of SFL, which was accompanied by his own experiences teaching and learning an additional language. As regards tracking ALD, SFL productively follows increases in the range of meaning-making resources available to individuals for contextualized use, and thus provides a focus on development as an ability to make appropriate meaningful choices according to the goals of the language user.Thus, as in the previous chapters, the research here shows the SFL view of ALD as additive to already existing repertoires, coupled with a need for learning discernment in choosing semiotic resources, and adapted to learners’ language proficiency level.The research also shows the need for rich interactive environments for ALD, as was the case for CLD and SLD. The review of the literature also shows some evidence for the benefits of an SFL approach to teaching L2 learners, although the evidence is mainly from schoolbased or EAP contexts, rather than from general language learning. Thus, one critical issue which has emerged from this chapter is the lack of research on SFL-based approaches to gains in non-school-based ALD. Another concern is the overwhelming focus on English language learning; the studies on Arabic, Catalán, Chinese, German, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish included in the chapter show the potential for SFL-based research and pedagogy to be applied to other languages.

Appendix A JCR ranked journals (top 60) with developmental studies on learning an additional language, based on Systemic Functional Linguistics:

188 Developing Additional Languages JCR Rank

Journal Title

2 6 10 11 14 16 20 21 25 27

Journal of Second Language Writing The Modern Language Journal TESOL Quarterly Language Teaching Language Learning and Technology Language Teaching Research Computer Assisted Language Learning Assessing Writing Research on Language and Social Interaction International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism Language Culture and Curriculum System International Journal of Bilingualism Journal of English for Academic Purposes English for Specific Purposes Applied Linguistics Review ELT Journal Language and Education IRAL-International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

31 36 41 46 47 51 52 54 56 60

No. of articles 14 1 5 1 2 1 2 1 1 2 1 2 1 4 3 1 4 4 2 1

Appendix B Top 60 JCR ranked journals with no SFL-based developmental studies JCR Rank

Journal

1 3 4 5 7 8 9 12 13 15 16

Annual Review of Applied Linguistics Applied Linguistics Brain and Language Journal of Memory and Language Bilingualism: Language and Cognition Studies in Second Language Acquisition Language Language Acquisition ReCall English World-Wide Language Cognition and Neuroscience (tied with Language Teaching Research) Theoretical Linguistics Annual Review of Linguistics Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research (tied with Assessing Writing) Cognitive Linguistics Applied Psycholinguistics Journal of Child Language Journal of Fluency Disorders

18 18 21 24 25 26 28

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JCR Rank

Journal

29 30 32 33 34 35 36 38 39

American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology Journal of Communication Disorders Language Learning Journal of Linguistic Anthropology Journal of Sociolinguistics Mind & Language Journal of Neurolinguistics Journal of Phonetics International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders Journal of Semantics Language and Cognition International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology Language Testing Language in Society Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism Linguistics and Philosophy Computational Linguistics Phonology (tied with ELT Journal) Linguistic Inquiry Second Language Research Language and Speech Journal of Language and Social Psychology

40 42 43 44 45 48 49 50 52 55 57 58 59

Notes 1 This 1960 paper, perhaps because it was written to be spoken, does not include any references. In another paper, published in Word in 1961 (Halliday, 1961), Halliday acknowledges the influence of scholars such as J.R. Firth and Louis Hjelmslev on his theoretical framework. See Martin (2016) and Fawcett (2000) for a history of SFL. 2 In this account, I have focused on the grammar model as presented for language teaching purposes; in a paper written for other linguists, Halliday (1961) explains further the notion of ‘scales’, which model the relationships between the categories. While he does include the scale of rank (although not labelled as a ‘scale’) in his explanations for teachers, he does not include the other scales, ‘exponence’ and ‘delicacy’. Exponence relates the categories to the data; for example, formal items are members of classes (e.g. ‘the old man’ is an exponent of the nominal group), while classes are exponents of (i.e. they operate at the place of) an element of structure (e.g. the nominal group as Subject or Complement of the unit ‘clause’); in later SFL theory, the term ‘realisation’ is used (1961: 264). Delicacy refers to the depth of analytical detail. 3 The study was carried out in March 2019, so the full number of studies for that year is not included. 4 Technically, this study is of L1 mother tongue education in Catalán, and thus would fit better in Chapter 3. However, it is published in an applied linguistics journal, and thus is included in this chapter. 5 A whole-school genre-based approach uses genre-based pedagogy in all classroom contexts of the school, so for all students regardless of their linguistic background, as well as across the entire curriculum—that is, not just in English but also in social studies, natural science, etc.

190 Developing Additional Languages 6 The authors explain (p. 261) the linguistically based protocol for scaling literacy levels of English L2 students, which is by reference to the literacy level of an L1 student at a given age or year. For example, scale 7 is optimal/expected for students in year 3, scale 8 for year 4, etc. 7 Fawcett (1980) integrates cognitive processes into his SFL-based model of language; however, the SFL-based model that has been applied to language education stems from Halliday’s work and as advanced through genre-based pedagogy (see Chapter 3, Section 3.3)

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5 Developing Theory, Pedagogy, and Research

Language is a political institution: those who are wise in its ways, capable of using it to shape and serve important personal and social goals will be the ones who are ‘empowered’ (to use a fashionable word): able, that is, not merely to participate effectively in the world, but able also to act upon it, in the sense that they can strive for significant social change. (Halliday & Hasan, 1989: x) The opening quote by Halliday and Hasan epitomizes empowerment as the goal of language development. Chapter 1 recognized a view of development as value-laden, and in the SFL tradition of language analysis and pedagogy that value is tied up with individual and collective ability to make meaning in ways that allow for personal and societal growth. In this view, expanding our meaning-making resources in a language is key for participation, agency, and innovation. In this chapter, we bring together the different perspectives on child, school, and additional language development in terms of the major issues which emerge from their impact on theory and pedagogy in SFL, and end with directions for future research on language development.

5.1 Developing Theory We begin by weaving together a brief narrative of the impact of the study of language development of Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) theorizing, as has been mentioned throughout this volume.1 Chapter 4 highlighted the role of language teaching/learning in the development of Halliday’s initial scale-andcategory grammar, as demonstrated in his 1960 lectures to French teachers (Halliday, 1966[1960]). Figure 4.2 laid out an initial model of levels of language, inspired by Firth and Hjelmslev’s models.The general levels of language included substance, form, and situation, related to each other through more specific levels: phonology/graphology relating phonetics/script (substance) to both grammar and lexis (form), and semantics (then labelled ‘context’) relating grammar and lexis to situation. In those early days, the model included different levels of substance and form, and their hierarchical placement anticipated the stratified model of language, which later became a cornerstone of SFL theory, as currently

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modelled through nested tangential circles (see Figure 5.1). Also, Firth’s influence led to a theorizing of the dimensions of register, field, style (later called ‘tenor’), and mode (Halliday, McIntosh, & Strevens, 1964; cf. Bowcher, 2017). Based on the view of each of the dimensions as “representing an aspect of the situations in which language operates and the part played by language in them” (Halliday et al., 1964: 90), the concept of register provided “an early form of using realisation as a means of bringing context and text together” (Hasan, 2014). Still, in this early phase along the road to SFL theory, there was no explicit mention of stratification or of metafunction.2 Halliday further provided attention to lexis and grammar (later known as lexicogrammar) by describing the grammars of Chinese and English based on this early systemic model. These descriptions led Halliday to push the paradigmatic dimension of language further, to its gradual privileging over the syntagmatic, with the latter serving to provide the structures which realize the systemic choices in meaning (Matthiessen, 2007) (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.2). These descriptions led Halliday in the 1970s to posit the systems of theme, transitivity, and mood, which are bound together in clauses, representing, respectively, the textual, experiential, and interpersonal metafunctions. One difference from the earlier scale-and-category grammar, then, is that the clause functions subject, predicator, complement, and adjunct became aligned with the interpersonal metafunction, given their role in constructing the Mood of a clause in English. Thus, these descriptions, coupled with Halliday’s child language development (CLD) work, were behind the consolidation of the important concepts of metafunctions and stratification in SFL theory (Taverniers, 2002). Early childhood language carries out several specific microfunctions related to children’s interactive needs, where “proto-linguistic signs have one particular function, a ‘use-in-context’” (Taverniers, 2011: 1113). Over time, these specific functions coalesce and transform into the tri-metafunctional adult language. Furthermore, Halliday characterized the child’s language as functioning bi-stratally: an expression plane coupled with a content plane; thus, early child language can be distinguished from adult language because of the stratification of the content plane. The tangential circles on the left in Figure 5.1 demonstrate this stratification: the content plane is split into two—semantics and lexicogrammar, realized by the expression plane, phonology—embedded within a context (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 26). Chapter 3 traced the role of language development in pushing SFL theory to account for meaning-making in the high-stakes texts of schooling contexts. Theoretical developments through Martin’s revised stratified model (pictured on the right in Figure 5.1), based on work on the language of schooling and of workplaces, provide a greater focus on text than on clause through the stratum of discourse semantics and its accompanying modelling of, for example, interpersonal meanings through the appraisal framework. A further revision in Martin’s stratified model is placement of register and genre as a connotative semiotic above the denotative semiotic of language: “register (encompassing field, tenor and mode) contextualizes language and is in turn contextualized by

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genre

context

register semantics

lexicogrammar

phonology

discourse semantics lexicogrammar phonology

Figure 5.1  Halliday and Martin’s stratified models.

genre” (Martin, 1997: 7).These theoretical developments highlight a sticky point in SFL theorizing: the modelling of stratification, which is, at the same time, a key resource for demonstrating language development. 5.1.1 Stratification Focusing on the modelling of stratal relations between semantics and lexicogrammar in the interpersonal and ideational metafunctions leads first to a theoretical suggestion for the child language model, and secondly to a discussion of the tensions around stratification—tensions which extend to the concept of grammatical metaphor and to considerations of context. In this section, these notions are developed in turn. 5.1.1.1 Stratification in Child Language Development Taverniers (2002) emphasizes the role of child language development (CLD) in the modelling of stratification, while demonstrating the contradictory nature of Halliday’s explanation of the move from child microfunctions to the macrofunctions, the mathetic and the pragmatic. As a reminder (see Chapter 2, Section 2.3.3.2), the pragmatic macrofunction is the ‘doing’ function, consisting of the merger of the instrumental, regulatory, and interactional microfunctions of a child’s protolanguage during the transition phase of CLD towards the adult language. The mathetic macrofunction of language is the ‘learning’ function, consisting of the merger of the personal and heuristic microfunctions and the addition of a new microfunction, the informative, which appears late in the transition phase (for Nigel, at 22 months). The two macrofunctions, the pragmatic and the mathetic, create the conditions for the development of the interpersonal and experiential metafunctions, respectively, of the adult language (Halliday, 1975: 108). However, simultaneously the contrast between the mathetic and pragmatic—i.e. the assigning of a speech role by making the choice

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between the two macrofunctions, the mathetic ‘I’m telling you’ and the pragmatic ‘I’m requesting/asking/demanding you’ (Halliday, 1975: 109)—develops into the interpersonal system of speech function (Halliday, 1984).As a reminder, the initial difference between Nigel’s rendering of the two macrofunctions was one of intonation: a rising tone (demanding a response) for the pragmatic, and a falling tone (not demanding a response) for the mathetic. With the further development of dialogue during the transition phase, the informative microfunction introduces the possibility of a semiotic construction of experience, and therefore an exchange of information (and not just goods-and-services). Thus, opportunities open for children to establish roles of providing and requesting information for themselves and their interactants. In the contradictory explanations, then, the mathetic macrofunction is the precursor for the experiential metafunction, but it also simultaneously leads to the assigning of speech roles within the interpersonal metafunction. This theoretical contradiction is related directly to the development of stratification in child language and to the SFL concept of ‘trinocularity’ in stratal perspectives (Taverniers, 2002: 214; cf. Halliday, 2009: 79–80). Trinocularity refers to the angle from which we are viewing language: any stratum can be viewed ‘from above’ (e.g. semantics viewed from the perspective of context or lexicogrammar from that of semantics), ‘from below’ (e.g. semantics viewed from the perspective of lexicogrammar or lexicogrammar from that of phonology), and ‘from roundabout’ (at the same level, in terms of both paradigmatic relations and syntagmatic relations) (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014: 59). A key to the emergence of stratification in CLD is the appearance of the informative microfunction.Viewed from above (i.e. from the perspective of semantics), the informative is a different kind of function from the other six microfunctions (Taverniers, 2002), which are all extrinsic to language; the informative function, however, “has no existence independent of language itself ” (Halliday, 1975: 31). Thus, semantically it serves to construe experience, paving the way for the experiential metafunction. Simultaneously, it serves to create interpersonal meaning by bringing in “the new concept of asking information, as in an interactive move, in the pragmatic component” (Taverniers, 2002: 217, emphasis original). Thus, during the transition, “children internalize the notion of communication as linguistic interaction” (Taverniers, 2002: 252, emphasis original).This perspective shows the transitional linear development of a child’s ability to mean from Phase I to the end of Phase II (the transition phase). Now, when viewed from below, in Phase II lexicogrammar begins to emerge through the rapid addition of new lexical items.We saw in Chapter 2 that, while initially Nigel kept the pragmatic and mathetic functions distinct in his utterances, there were times when they were brought together in creating plurifunctional utterances, such as ‘Cake!’ expressing simultaneously ‘look, there’s a cake—and I want some!’(Halliday, 1975: 42): the mathetic followed by the pragmatic. Furthermore, during the transition, utterances begin to combine lexical strings that include intensification and evaluation, as in ‘very old trèe’, ‘loud noise’, and ‘big bang’ (Halliday, 1975: 108); it can be concluded that “the basic

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organization of the lexico-grammatical stratum is that of the adult linguistic system, although it is not yet as complex” (Taverniers, 2002: 220, emphasis original). Thus, during the transition phase, when analysed ‘from below’ children’s proto-structures are plurifunctional.Taverniers further argues that Halliday presents the transition mainly ‘from above’, and that “a perspective ‘from below’, focussing on the new level of lexis-(grammar), deserves equal attention” (Taverniers, 2002: 220). ‘From below’, during the transition phase children are involved in “combining the construal of experience and subjective assessment of experience in single utterances” (p. 230). Figure 5.2 brings together Taverniers’ (2002) perspectives on ‘lexis-grammar’. Taverniers (2002) suggests refining the CLD model by reinterpreting Halliday’s informative microfunction as an “overall intrinsic linguistic function” (p. 251, emphasis original), which would highlight a transitional dimension of emerging stratification. That is, the model of CLD could include this mediating function, allowing for a tracking of the development of language from the microfunctions, to the macrofunctions, through the intrinsic linguistic function, and on to the multifunctional adult language. This labelling of an intrinsic linguistic function also provides a central role for interaction (and not just input or output) in the modelling of CLD. 5.1.1.2 Stratal Boundaries Taverniers (2002) further shows that Halliday’s CLD work led to a difference in the way that the relationship between the lexicogrammatical and semantic strata are handled in SFL within the interpersonal and ideational functions. In one model, developed during the 1970s, the systems networks (transitivity, theme, mood) are located in the semantic stratum and the lexicogrammatical stratum

Perspective

Protolanguage

Transition

Adult language

‘from above’ = semantic

‘uses of language’

development of ‘informative’ function + dialogue

interpersonal ‘semantics’ of speech function

mathetic and pragmatic macrofunctions combined in utterances

the ‘lexicogrammatical’ networks organized into three metafunctions (paradigms of metafunctional structure)

mathetic and pragmatic macrofunctions realized through intonation

realization statements (functional structure) mapped onto syntagmatic structure (classes) + ‘lexical realization’

‘from around’ = systemiclexicogrammatical

not relevant

‘from below’ = expression structuralplane lexicogrammatical

Figure 5.2  Perspectives on the transition from protolanguage to adult language (adapted from Taverniers, 2002).

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provides the outputs. In another model (Halliday, 1984), in the interpersonal metafunction the semantic layer contains the system of speech function with realizations in the lexicogrammatical system of mood (see Chapter 1, Figure 1.6). Thus, there are differences in the modelling of the stratal relationships between the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions in SFL, with the ideational providing a system of semantic labels (process types and their participants; see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.3) which have their corresponding structural outputs in the lexicogrammar,3 while the interpersonal has two systems of labels, one each at the lexicogrammatical and semantic strata. Thus, while stratification has allowed for useful ways of talking about language development in terms of functional pathways (Halliday, 2002[1996]), the boundary between the two strata on the content plane, between semantics and lexicogrammar, has proven to be a rather fuzzy one, as acknowledged by Halliday: “I am not very clear on the boundaries here, between lexicogrammar and semantics. I tend to operate with rather fluid boundaries” (Halliday, 2013a[1972]: 9). Berry (2017: 48) notes that Halliday (1966) proposed realization statements both between and within strata. That is, within each stratum there are paradigmatic systems which are realized by syntagmatic structures.Viewed from below, just as a lower stratum realizes a higher stratum, structures realize the choices from systems. Viewed from above, “choices from a higher stratum ‘activate’ choices from a lower stratum and choices from systems ‘activate’ structures” (Berry, 2017: 49) How do these differences in vantage point impact the theory vis-à-vis language development? Margaret Berry has consistently asked that question in her applied SFL research: My general purpose in linguistics is to provide information which I hope will be helpful to teachers of English. Schoolteachers I have worked with have said that they see themselves as (a) extending the range of choices open to their students and (b) helping the students to make the choices appropriately. (Berry, 2016: 184) Berry (2013) carefully considers what is needed in a linguistic theory to achieve this goal, providing four main criteria (pp. 371–372): (1) that the model focus on choices in meaning (and especially relevant from Halliday’s model is the inclusion of experiential, interpersonal, textual, and logical meaning); (2) that the theory be “as simple as possible if one hopes that it will be useful to teachers in the classroom” (p. 372); (3) that it contextualize meaningful choices, specifying the circumstances in which choices from textual data are made; and (4) that it indicate how these choices are realized within the theory as a whole. Berry’s considerations include the need for choice at the level of the semantics and realization of those choices at the level of form, i.e. a theoretical model where the system networks (e.g. of theme, transitivity, and mood) are pushed towards the semantics, and the lexicogrammar provides the structural outputs of those systems. In

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her discussion, Berry draws on what is known as the ‘Cardiff Model’, an SFLbased model led by Robin Fawcett (cf. Fawcett, 2000). This model includes a stratum of semantics, with meaning selections realized through forms at the level of syntax and phonology. While Berry does not align her ideal model for language teaching fully with Fawcett’s, she laments, as he does, the move away from an account of the level of form, such as that included in Halliday (1961) (as applied, for example, in Berry, 1975), where the elements subject, predicator, complement, and adjunct are seen as syntactic outputs (cf. Arús Hita, 2017, for a similar proposal, as Mood structure does not apply to Spanish, and thus this part of the theory is not amenable to comparison/translation across languages). This section points to struggles within SFL theory which come from its applied nature: Systemic theory is explicitly constructed both for thinking with and for acting with. Hence—like language, again—it is rather elastic and rather extravagant. To be an effective tool for these purposes, a theory of language may have to share these properties with language itself; to be non-rigid, so that it can be stretched and squeezed into various shapes as required, and to be non-parsimonious, so that it has more power at its disposal than is actually needed in any one context. (Halliday, 1985: 197) Applying this stance to stratification, “[t]he number of strata…that we recognize, and the kind of relationship between the strata, will tend to depend on the question we are asking and the problems we are trying to solve” (Halliday, 2003[1985]: 196) He further explained his view of the stratal boundary between the grammar and the semantics: many fundamental aspects of language can be explained if one models them in stratal terms, such as metaphor (and indeed rhetorical resources in general), the epigenetic nature of children’s language development, and metafunctional unity and diversity, among others. But this does not force us to locate the boundary at any particular place. One can, in fact, map it on to the boundary between system and structure, as Fawcett does (system as semantics, structure as lexicogrammar); whereas I have found it more valuable to set up two distinct strata of paradigmatic (systemic) organization. But the point is that the boundary is indeterminate – it can be shifted; and this indeterminacy enables us to extend the stratal model outside language proper so as to model the relationship of a language to its cultural and situational environments. (Halliday, 2002[1996]: 411) Given the ‘appliability’ of SFL (Halliday, 2008; cf. Mahboob & Knight, 2010), we have come to a kind of crossroads here. If the theory is designed to be applied to language development, then is theoretical elegance a necessity? Even if not,

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when does stretching and squeezing the theory to fit the requirements of the needs (e.g. of tracing/promoting language development) go too far beyond the theory? These are questions that the SFL community must continue to debate in moving forward.We now add more stratal-related issues to the debate agenda: grammatical metaphor and context. 5.1.2 Grammatical Metaphor As seen in various studies mentioned throughout the chapters, grammatical metaphor (GM; see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.7.1) is a key site of language development, related to abilities for building up abstraction in interaction. GM is also a key reason for stratification in the SFL model of language. As illustrated in Figures 1.7 and 1.8 (Chapter 1), GM is viewed as non-congruent mappings across the semantic and lexicogrammatical strata; for example, a nominal group such as ‘the importance of grammatical metaphor’ encodes a figure, and figures can be congruently realized through a full clause, e.g. ‘grammatical metaphor is important’. Thus, ideational GM is seen to take place when a nominal group encodes, for example, a process (e.g. ‘application’) or a quality (e.g. ‘importance’), rather than encoding a prototypical participant. Thompson (2015) highlights a problem with stratification as revealed by GM, which is precisely the problem of the indeterminate nature of transitivity categories such as ‘participant’ and ‘process’, treated as both semantic and lexicogrammatical by Halliday and Matthiessen (1999, 2014). Note that Martin’s model sidesteps this problem by including the process and participant categories clearly within the lexicogrammatical stratum, and by including modified categories in the discourse semantics: sequence, figure, entity, event, and setting (Hao, 2015). The models characterize GM as a tension across the strata, in the mismatch between the semantics and the lexicogrammar. Nominalization (such as ‘importance’) is often seen as the main means of creating ideational GM; however, it is not as straightforward a realization as that statement implies. First of all, not all instances of nominalization or of transcategorization are examples of grammatical metaphor (Derewianka, 1995). Fontaine (2017: 5) exemplifies this point with examples (1, 2) and (3): 1) The examination of the patients took a long time. 2) The examination took a long time. 3) The examination was on the table. Sentence (1) is a “complex event nominal”, as it has an argument structure (a verbal meaning followed by an object, thus clearly implicating an agent) which would solidly fit into the SFL notion of grammatical metaphor, where a nominal group encodes the figure ‘the doctor examined the patients’. (3) is a “result nominal”, referring to “an actual concrete object and therefore does not have an event meaning” (Fontaine, 2017: 5); rather, it is an entity that warrants no further unpacking. However, (2) is a “simple event nominal” with no argument structure, or figure, apparent as in (1), but which could, in theory, be unpacked as such depending

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on the context. In that case, it would, it seems, make it a borderline case of grammatical metaphor. Consideration of the metaphorical nature of an expression “depends on its context of use. The same word may be an example of transcategorisation in one context and an example of grammatical metaphor in another” (Derewianka, 1995: 113). One suggestion for cases such as (2) is to consider nominalizations that have lost sight of their original expansion into a clause as ‘faded’ or ‘dead’ metaphors (Derewianka, 2003; Byrnes, 2009), or, in discourse semantic terms, ‘technical entities’ (Hao, 2015) and thus not strictly GM: i.e. not really an example of unexpected couplings across strata (a semantic figure encoded as a lexicogrammatical nominal group). Hao (2015) notes the ‘fluid boundary’ between ‘live’ and ‘dead’ metaphors, suggesting that a term in a scientific field which has a formal definition can be seen as “technicality rather than ideational metaphor” (p. 88) in her analysis of biology texts. However, context is (again and obviously) an important factor: [f]or the insider a technical term such as division of labor may largely have lost its metaphorical quality while for someone just learning about various ways of organizing economic activity it would be important to “unpack” who is doing the dividing, for what purpose, with what intentions or consequences. (Byrnes, 2009: 53) Given the role of both technical terms and GM in mediating between more concrete and more abstract forms of ideation, Ferreira (2020) includes both in a developmental study of GM in second-language university writers’ texts. Derewianka (1995:115) sees transcategorization (both phylogenetically and ontogenetically) as being of interest, as it might function “to provide a precursor/gateway to grammatical metaphor per se”. A further consideration when taking into account technical terms are abstract nouns which are not examples of transcategorization; “an abstract term such as warfare, campaign or future generalizes more than one action, forming a cover term for many different participants, activities and activity sequences” (Ravelli, 1988: 142). It is “not, therefore, surprising that a fuzzy boundary exists between abstractions and grammatical metaphor, as one is a step towards the other (as confirmed ontogenetically)” (Ravelli, 2003: 60). In a longitudinal study of school children, focused on repertoires of resources for abstraction in writing about history, Whittaker and McCabe (2020) include both, given the benefits of tracing development through the fuzzy boundary of what is considered as GM. Furthermore, Whittaker and McCabe, following work by Liardét (2013, 2016) include lexicogrammatical construals which are not fully those of the L1, such as in example (4) 1) the grow of the cities made people go to the cities, this make the rebirth, also make by development of trade While the student writer clearly does not fully dominate the lexicogrammatical forms (e.g. ‘growth’), he shows an ability to create abstract meaning through grammatical metaphor. In this sense, the stratification of the content plane into

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lexicogrammar and (discourse) semantics, while theoretically debated within SFL, is a highly productive concept in tracing language development through its focus on increasing means of semiosis. It does not view the students’ current means of semiosis as deficient; several of the studies in previous chapters (e.g. Qi & Ding, 2011; Bunch & Willet, 2013; Morton & Llinares, 2016; see Chapter 4) show that sometimes novelty in expression and complexity of ideas can result in non-standard forms of the language, thus showing the pathway of development of expanding meaning, where linguistic resources perhaps need fine-tuning. As we saw in Chapter 4 (Section 4.7) language teaching/learning in SFL centres around what students can do, not around what they cannot. In this sense, the flexibility of a model of language for describing meaning choices in context allows analysts to explore more profitably learners’ developmental pathways. While suggesting, perhaps, a lack of precision in the theory, it is precisely because language is not idealized into hard-bound categories that the theory can effectively trace language development from a meaning-based perspective. 5.1.3 Context Berry (2013) also views the overall SFL model as optimal for working with teachers because it elucidates choices at the level of context, as well as the effect these have on choices at the level of meaning and thus on form. We saw in Chapter 3 that Martin models the relationship between context, register, and genre differently than Halliday does. Would Halliday’s flexibility extend to Martin’s stratified model, with its supervenient layers of genre and register (Figure 5.1)? Before answering that question, we need to tie context to the theme of language development. First, we examine Halliday’s view of context, especially with regard to language development: If the context is theorised in linguistic terms as another stratum in the organisation of language itself, this enables us to model its variation and complexity, taking account of the differing situational contexts for different levels and kinds of teaching/learning activities, as well as the processes and the institutions of education and the different cultures within which these are located. (Halliday, 1998: 1) This quote again highlights the relationship between SFL theorizing and language teaching/learning. Halliday’s (1998) model of context is laid out in Figure 5.3 (as adapted slightly by Bowcher, 2018). Reading from the bottom up, language (i.e. semantics realized by lexicogrammar realized by phonology realized by phonetics) realizes context, and that relationship can be unpacked from two perspectives: that of system, and that of text. The linguistic system as a whole, which consists of the build-up of all of the instances of texts, condenses all of the meaning potential of the context of a culture, while an instance of a text realizes the meaning potential of a given context of situation. Reading from left to right,

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instantiation

REALIZATION: activation/construal

CONTEXT

LANGUAGE

SYSTEM

INSTANCE

context of culture

context of situation (cultural domain)

(situation type)

(register)

(text type)

language as system semantics lexicogrammar phonology phonetics

language as text

Figure 5.3  Language and context; system and instance (adapted from Halliday, 1998 and Bowcher, 2018).

culture is instantiated in situation (i.e. “culture is the paradigm of situation types”, p. 16), just as system is instantiated in text.Viewing from the system end, we find registers, or functional varieties of language (see Chapter 1, Section 1.4.4) which are related to particular cultural domains.Viewing from the instance end, we find text types, which are related to particular situation types. Thus, in Halliday’s model, a culture is constituted by all of its “possible semiotic situations […] taxonomies of institutions and of doings and happenings, manifested as possible clusterings of values of field, tenor and mode” (Halliday, 2005[2002]: 256). Halliday reminds us that the context of situation is more than simply a setting within a culture (Halliday, 1998: 10). Rather, it refers to the patternings of activity (field), the participants (tenor), and the role language plays (mode). The material setting “is a “dormant” source of semiotic potential [which] ‘becomes’ semiotic when it is ‘illuminated’ in the text” (Bowcher, 2018). However, in the ‘situational’ approach to language teaching, pedagogic materials “tended to relate exclusively to the setting and not to the culturally defined social processes that lay behind it” (Halliday, 1998: 11). Communicative approaches, on the other hand, are based on a context of situation, not just on setting, and thus are designed to illuminate “language that is effective in relation to the social activity and the interpersonal relationships” (p. 12). Thus, understanding language in context involves much more than, for example, a setting such as a restaurant triggering certain language. Note that, for Halliday, the context of situation refers to the variables (field, mode, and tenor); these variables affect register, and register is itself a part of language, i.e. it is included in the stratum of semantics (Halliday, 2013b[1985]). Martin, on the other hand, includes register as a layer above discourse semantics; i.e., for Martin, register refers to “the semiotic system constituted by the

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contextual variables field, tenor and mode” (Martin, 1992: 502). Another difference between the models is that, for Halliday, the relationship between context of culture and context of situation is one of instantiation (where all of the possible constellations of field, tenor, and mode add up to a culture), and for Martin, it is one of realization (genres, posited at the level of context of culture, are realized by registers, posited at the level of context of situation). Furthermore, in Halliday’s model, there is no explicit mention of genre—it is “peripheral to Halliday’s linguistics” (Gardner, 2017: 475)—and there is some uncertainty in his writing as to where exactly it fits in (Martin, 1992; O’Donnell, 2019a). It seems to be connected to the register variables, perhaps most notably as an aspect of the register variable mode (Halliday, 1978: 145). Halliday deemed mode “the symbolic organization” of the context of situation, and glossed it as “the particular status that is assigned to the text within the situation; its function in relation to the social action [field] and the role structure [tenor], including channel or medium, and the rhetorical mode” (1978: 143, italics original); rhetorical mode referred to “what is being achieved by the text in terms of such categories as persuasive, expository, didactic, and the like” (Halliday, 1989[1985]: 12). At other times, Halliday appears to “disassociate genre from any one contextual variable” (Martin, 1992: 500). In a similar vein, Hasan (1989[1985]: 55) introduced the term contextual configuration (CC), which refers to the combination of the register variables in a given situation (e.g. the combination of variables when a parent praises a child through speech can be compared to when a parent scolds a child through speech). Hasan related text structure to the CC, rather than to any one variable (cf. Tann [2017] for more on the differences between the models). According to Martin (2014), the differences in the two forms of SFL modelling are far fewer than the over-arching important similarities, such as the view of grammar as a meaning-making resource and the focus on text as semantic choice within a context, in a theory designed as an appliable linguistics especially to aid others in their language development with a goal of creating greater equity and social justice. However, others show disagreement with Martin’s assessment of the differences. It has been noted that this difference within SFL modelling can cause confusion, and Martin’s position has been critiqued (cf. Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Hasan, 1995): My own view is that the stratification of genre and register, the collapsing of the social and the verbal, at both these planes, which in turn entails a questionable view of language, has a highly deleterious effect: It moves the whole issue of text structure and its activation from active, feeling, reacting participants co-engaged in some interaction to given forms of talk that represent the ways things are done in our culture, as if the culture is unchanging and as if the participants are simply pre-programmed. (Hasan, 1995: 283) Christie (2016) mentions Halliday and Hasan’s lack of acceptance of Martin’s position, as well as their concession to its strengths. Martin’s response to criticism again reduces the problem of difference in modelling:

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There is nothing theoretically or descriptively at stake here in the terminology as far as my model of context and Halliday’s is concerned. All strata instantiate, including register and genre, in my stratified model of context […], just as context of culture instantiates (as context of situation) and semantics, lexicogrammar and phonology instantiate as text in his; there is no disagreement there. Where there is disagreement, what is at stake is whether we need a stratified model of context or not – for Halliday, no; for me, yes, absolutely. (Martin, 2014: 17) The notion of ‘context’ itself is obviously a challenge in a linguistic theory which sees context as realized, at least in part, through language. In her theoretical considerations for a model which can be applied to teaching, Berry (2013, 2016) aligns herself with projects such as that of Hasan, which seek to elucidate system networks based on contextual configuration. Space limitations preclude any discussion here of the challenges of what needs to be included in these networks (cf; Berry, 2016; Bartlett, 2017; Bowcher, 2018); issues include what is relevant (or not) from the material setting, and how to account for “non-contextual and non-material features of the environment [which] have their effect on talk [and which] need not be materially present or conventionalised” (Bartlett, 2013: 351). Martin’s model sidesteps these issues, as it moves from the semiotic construct of genres as “staged, goal-oriented social processes” (1992: 505) realized as patternings of registers functioning within a culture. It could be argued that Halliday’s model allows for the same focus, via the context of situation. However, as we have seen, there is disagreement as to whether ‘rhetorical modes’, which can be equated with genres, are a feature of the register variable of mode or of field or of a combination of the three variables. The notion of genre has provided a ‘way in’ to unravelling the role of language in constructing/deconstructing how fields of activities and social roles and relationships are organized into texts (whether solely verbal or multimodal), and has thus been proven to provide a clear and valuable pathway for fostering language development in a range of institutional contexts, above all those of education (Gardner, 2017; Chapters 3 and 4, this volume). Genre simplifies, which is an important consideration for a model of language applicable to developmental contexts. This is not to say that the discussions of where genre belongs in the model should stop and settle on Martin’s model. Far from it. Lukin, Moore, Herke, Wegener, and Wu (2011) argue for a clearer delineation between Martin and Halliday’s positions, as there is a tendency for Halliday’s view of register to become obscured in the wake of frequent application in educational contexts of Martin’s model, which many take as ‘the’ SFL model. The discussions within SFL (O’Donnell, 2019a), and considering the criticisms from without (van Dijk, 2008), ultimately serve to push linguists to greater understandings of the dialectic between language and context. However, the applied work in education of a model which explicates the realizational relationships between genres, registers, discourse semantics, and lexicogrammar has proven advantageous, as we have seen

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throughout Chapters 3 and 4. Still, it is worthwhile to consider theoretical implications in the application of the theory to language development. One of those implications is the possibility, raised by Hasan in the quote above, that ways of ‘doing’ in a culture become reified in a genre model. Nonetheless, Martin’s model does not preclude an additional stratum of context beyond register and genre, In early writings around his model, Martin includes a stratum of ideology above genre which was explicitly articulated to address issues of heterogeneity and change in ways of meaning-making, as it is “the tensions produced by the unequal distribution of meaning potential that forces a culture to change” (Martin, 1992: 575). SFL in general (whether it be Halliday’s or Martin’s model) has been criticized for precisely the same thing as Hasan is criticizing it for. Bartlett writes: diversity in language is, in fact, underplayed in current SFL theory, which ultimately posits not only une langue une, but also une culture une in characterising variation in terms of differences in frequency of selection with a single overarching context of culture – an approach that is hard to reconcile with the diverse and overlapping linguistic practices identified within and between often super-diverse speech communities (Bartlett, 2017: 279) This quote suggests that attempting to set up system networks at the level of context of situation could in theory reify in the same way as genres are seen to do. These theoretical considerations have led straight into pedagogical ones. Thus, we leave any further discussion of this important point of reification for the section on pedagogy. 5.1.4 Summary: Developing Theory The different ‘dialects’ of SFL, based on Halliday’s, Martin’s, and Fawcett’s models, have worked together for years; the flexibility of the model, and its applied nature, have not driven major wedges between them, and the dialogue between them have enriched, for example, understandings of the connection between context and language. However, as an overall linguistic theory, it is not without its flaws. Harder (2010) rejects SFL as a theoretical contender for his goal of adding an essential dimension of meaning in society to Cognitive Linguistics because of its “inherent user-orientation” (p. 128).This orientation has meant the positing of categories, such as ‘offer of goods-and-services’ in the speech function semantic system with no corresponding mood choice in the lexicogrammatical system (Andersen, 2017), leading Harder to question the validity of categories within SFL, which is best understood essentially as a toolbox for the process of dealing with segments of linguistic reality, with outcomes whose value is determined by what use they can be put to in concrete cases rather than a systematic attempt to validate a particular version of the theory. (Harder, 2010: 133)

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This is because, Harder argues, “it is designed for users, not scientists” (p. 133). Indeed, applications to language development continue to drive new developments, such as recent and continued work on functional metalinguistic terms (Martin, 2017), relating register variables to the concepts of semantic density and gravity in Legitimation Code Theory (see Chapter 3, Section 3.4.2) and these applications are proving to be of growing value in educational contexts. Applications of SFL to pedagogy are taken up in the next section.

5.2 Developing Pedagogy Some critical issues with respect to pedagogy that have emerged throughout the book include, the nature of interaction, metalanguage, applications to L2 teaching/learning, and critical orientations to text and language use in society. 5.2.1 The Nature of the Interaction The research reported on in this book has highlighted the vast importance of the nature of the interaction. Rich interactive environments have proven vital in allowing for development of meaning-making resources. With respect to child language development (CLD), the SFL view of how children develop language is inextricably tied to contexts of social interaction; while it may seem odd to include mention of pedagogy in connection to children’s development of language in the home, the ways in which interaction takes place have an instructive effect on children which they carry over into school. The detailed SFL studies reported on in Chapter 2 demonstrate how, over time, children’s meanings and lexicogrammatical resources expand to fit their functional needs for comprehending others and expressing themselves in interaction. Henrichs (2010), based on observations of twenty-five children, from ages 3 to 6, in interaction in L1 Dutch in four different types of tasks, found that some parents created a type of interaction which provided opportunities to explore something new with their child, thus creating register variables in the discourse which were more reminiscent of the valued responses in school settings. Halliday (2004[1969]: 275) notes that Bernstein (1970), from a sociological perspective, connected the ways in which parents created question–answer routines to children’s success in formal education (see also research by Hasan (2009) and Hasan and Cloran (1987) in Chapter 2, Section 2.4.2). The register variable of tenor, Henrichs (2010) concludes, plays an essential role in creating these opportunities, and thus the way in which adults establish the tenor of the discourse has a “strong influence on the nature of the conversation, and on the opportunities created for children’s own creative contributions to the particular discourse” (Henrichs, 2010: 202), allowing for potential transfer to new contexts and co-construction of knowledge. The importance of rich social interaction for language development had gained currency at the time of the early SFL work on CLD. Lieven (1978) reported on differences between a mother who responded more quickly and

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frequently and who expanded on her daughter’s utterances and another who seemed less responsive to her daughter’s speech; the two children also seemed to have learned to converse differently and about different things. Lieven ended her article speculating on what later effects these differences might have. Nelson (1981), who reported on Lieven’s study, amongst others, wrote: Thus, how and why mothers use language may be as important for the child’s pattern of acquisition as what kind of language they use. For example, the mother who has a 3-or 4-year-old to cope with, as well as a 1-or 2-year-old, will use characteristically different language in interaction with both children than will the mother who has only one child of 1 or 2 years. A larger percentage of the function of language that the younger sibling hears is likely to be directive and centered around the child’s own activities—to be, in effect, pragmatic and expressive. Thus, the child is likely to conclude that language is a pragmatic medium that is useful for social control and social exchange, and this conclusion is likely to be shored up by exchanges with siblings. On the other hand, a child who is exposed to a mother who teaches through relevant questioning is likely to conclude that language is basically a cognitive or referential medium. (Nelson, 1981: 181) Peterson, Jesso, and McCabe (1999) summarize research on narratives, a decontextualized use of language which requires talking about something which is not in the immediate environment, an ability which is crucial for literacy development and thus success in school.They cite several studies which demonstrate the difficulties some children have when their narrative skills do not match the discourse needs that schools demand. The pre-existing skills that children bring to school are affected by the ways in which parents foster conversational exchanges with their children, with some parents encouraging extended narrative through elaboration and questions eliciting further details about the events and the context, and others moving on to new topics and asking fewer, simpler, and more redundant questions. Hasan and Cloran’s (1987) SFL study (see Chapter 2, Section 2.4.2) found differences in the semantic choices that mothers made in interaction with their children, choices which influenced subsequent choices by children. One of the differences they found was between open-ended Wh-questions and yes/no questions, the former tending to correlate with more responsiveness and elaboration from the mother. Children’s language development, when based on rich interaction, can hold them in good stead for future adaptation to new environments which call on their meaning-making resources. The importance of interaction is currently upheld by numerous studies of child development from outside SFL. Romeo et al. (2018: 7870) provide evidence from neuroscience that “greater adult-child conversational experience, independent of SES and the sheer amount of adult speech, is related to stronger, more coherent white matter connectivity” in regions of the brain that are critically connected to language; the difference was made not through amount of

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exposure to language, but rather by the number of conversational turns—the greater the number, the stronger the effect on brain. Thus, the development of language pathways in the brain “is environmentally influenced, specifically by early, dialogic interaction”, leading the researchers to call for intervention programmes which boost conversational interaction between parents and their children. Indeed, different coding orientations (Bernstein, 1973) or semantic orientations (Hasan & Cloran, 1987; Hasan, 2009; see Chapter 2, Section 2.4.2) in the home may be amenable to change. In an intervention study, Peterson et al. (1999) provided guidance for an experimental group of mothers on optimal prompting and interactive style, stressing in the intervention behaviours such as spending a lot of time talking about a single topic and asking lots of Wh-questions and few yes/no questions. The results showed differences in the interactive style of the mothers and a significant increase in the children’s (average age 3;6 at the start of the study) vocabulary scores in the experimental group as compared to the control group. The children in the experimental group also showed gains in the long term in narrative skills, such as context-setting and providing decontextualized frames of time and place, and also were able to create longer and more informative narratives, thus demonstrating the facilitative effects of a more responsive interactive style between parents and their children, even when talking about everyday topics. Peterson et al. (1999) compare this study with school-based intervention studies, which were nowhere near as successful, as it requires much greater sustained interaction than is possible for school professionals to consistently provide. In addition to the gains for literacy development, the quality of the relationship between parents and their children benefits from a rich, elaborative style of interaction, and “elaborative reminiscing” can further benefit children’s social- and self-understanding (Wareham & Salmon, 2006: 535). Hassinger-Das, Bustamante, Hirsh-Pasek, and Golinkoff (2018), recognizing that “young children learn best in active, meaningful, engaged and socially interactive contexts”, have designed urban projects to encourage rich interactive environments for children. Findings from these community-based projects show a significant increase in STEM language use when compared to a control group. The research from schools (Chapter 3) shows similar results for teacher–student interactions. Rich play contexts in educational settings provide children with opportunities to try out literacy events (Schrader, 1989) and encode meanings in using a variety of resources, including multimodal (Varelas et al., 2010). Differences in experiences with books in the home are seen to make a difference to register understandings which are then taken into school (Spiegel & Fitzgerald, 1990; Duke & Kays, 1998). Amount of experience interacting with and through different genres in classrooms is also related to children’s meaning-making repertoires for both comprehension and production (Cox, Shanahan, & Tinzmann, 1991; Kamberelis, 1999; Kamberelis & Bovino, 1999; Duke & Kays, 1998), as well as to internalize and recall knowledge (Nuthall, 2000). Research in schools shows that there may be a tendency for teachers to ask fact-related questions or to ask questions which elicit less complex genres (Llinares & Pascual Peña, 2015).

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Recommendations for pedagogy from SFL-based studies thus suggest incorporating metacognitive questions by, for example, asking for reasons (Llinares & Pascual Peña, 2015), or using more open-ended inquiries (Keys, 1999;Tan & Seah, 2011), and preparing learners for success by familiarizing them with the stages and phases of the genre of a text before they read (Martin, 2006; Rose, 2006). The research reminds us that classrooms provide rich interactive environments across a variety of registers, not just formal academic ones (Leung, 2014), that also affect learners’ meaning-making repertoires, and which they can profitably learn from (Falk-Ross, 2000). Another potential site for register development is when children bridge the information gap between home and school (Wollman-Bonilla, 2000), given the need to decontextualize and recontextualize information and concepts from one context, with different configurations of especially mode and tenor, to another. Through teacher–student interaction in the classroom itself, knowledge can also be classified and framed (Bernstein, 1990) in varying ways, while students’ contributions can be received as New or Given, thus contributing more or less positively to students’ pedagogic subject positioning (Maeng & Kim, 2011).The expansion of meaning-making resources through interactive experiences in classrooms is connected to learners’ identities, both inside and outside academic contexts (James, 2013). Dialogic approaches which incorporate exploratory talk have been advocated, for example, in content-and-language-integrated-learning (CLIL) environments as an “extremely effective instrument for encouraging cognitive and language development” (Llinares, Morton, & Whittaker, 2012: 63). More broadly in learning environments, exploratory talk is seen as leading to continually increasing “one’s understanding in order to act effectively and responsibly when faced with challenging situations” (Wells & Ball, 2008: 168), and can lead to increased agency of their learning (Solomon & Black, 2008). At the same time, dialogic interaction is not unproblematically established in classrooms. Some students negatively view engaging in classroom talk as part of who they want to be: that is, not all students engage with the identity of a ‘good’ learner (McCabe & Hidalgo, 2016).Teacher expectations also play a role in constructing learner identity; research (cf. Snell & Lefstein, 2018) has found that teachers use different forms of interaction based on their perceptions of student ability, applying more “controlling forms of interaction” (Black, 2004: 40) with those perceived as having lower ability, which can be exacerbated in the case of learners whose first language is different from the classroom language. Learners also bring with them norms of interaction which may differ from those of the school (Delpit, 1988). It may be beneficial for teachers to have “a heightened interactional awareness” (Llinares & Morton, 2017: 142), for example through understandings based on the assigning of speech functions, leading to ways of scaffolding learner participation towards success. Unpacking with groups of learners the ways in which the interaction itself constructs interpersonal positionings through varying construals of tenor could also raise awareness of how language works inside and outside of classrooms, thus increasing critical awareness (see Section 5.2.4).

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The studies reviewed in this book centred on additional language development provided less of a focus on interaction, and more on the benefits of an SFL-based pedagogy to transform meanings into texts and wordings in the target language. Several of the studies in Chapter 4 do mention the affordances of immersion in an interactive environment towards increases in meaning-making repertoires in another language (Llinares García, 2007; Yasuda, 2011), as well as the advantages of scaffolded teaching interventions (Gibbons, 2003; Spycher, 2007; Firkins, Forey, & Sengupta, 2007; Parkinson, Jackson, Kirkwood, & Padayachee, 2007; Rose, Rose, Farrington, & Page, 2008; Chen & Su, 2012; Bunch & Willet, 2013; Harman, 2013; de Oliveira & Lan, 2014; Humphrey & Macnaught, 2016;Yasuda, 2017; Cheng & Chiu, 2018; Millin & Millin, 2018; inter alia). These studies draw in varying degrees on SFL metalanguage, with many stressing the benefits of raising to conscious awareness the effect of semiotic choices in context, allowing for meaningful interaction about language in the classroom (Hammond & MackenHorarik, 1999) which can increase learners’ self-esteem (Kerfoot & Van Heerden, 2015; Shum, Tai, & Shi, 2016) and agency as language users (Forey & Cheung, 2019), an agency which can be transferred to other contexts and languages (Achugar & Carpenter, 2014; Gleason & Slater, 2016). 5.2.2 Metalanguage Chapters 3 and 4 highlight the role of SFL metalanguage in school-based and additional language development.The metalanguage has emerged from a socialsemiotic view of language, which highlights the non-arbitrariness of the lexicogrammatical choices in texts: those choices are motivated by meaning-making needs within contexts of situations and contexts of cultures; thus, its application in classrooms raises awareness of language as resource, rather than language as a set of rules. Symons, Palincsar, and Schleppegrell (2017: 104) emphasize using metalanguage “as a tool for talking about text with students and not just as a labeling exercise”, which reminds us of the dangers of using SFL metalanguage to teach a set of grammatical concepts in a decontextualized way or as a set of prescriptive elements for producing language. However, a linguistic model which embraces meaning as central to language, coupled with a pedagogy that makes explicit the connections between forms and meanings at all levels, while not fail-safe in its application, does provide some guarantee that embodying the concepts in practice allows for meaningful articulations of the role of language in constructing experience, social relationships, and texts in context. Achugar, Schleppegrell, and Oteíza (2007) hypothesized that SFL metalanguage makes clear how curricular content is constructed through language, and provide examples of three contexts in which teachers were trained in SFL metalanguage, and in its capacity for making explicit how the meanings needed for talk and writing about history in school are constructed through academically valued lexicogrammatical choices. They demonstrate metalanguage as a specific tool for teachers to pass on understandings to their learners at the level of meaning, not just of lexicogrammatical choice; that is, teachers

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did not just tell students the language that should be used, but rather provided explanations for why, in a given context, certain linguistic choices were more appropriate for constructing meaning. Thus, teachers and learners can critically grasp the power of language as a meaning-making tool, and not just a set of forms. It does seem possible to suggest, then, that SFL provides a metalanguage which allows for talk about language in terms of its meaning-making resources and, therefore, provides a means for learners to monitor their own and other’s use of language. The resulting “metalinguistic awareness contributes to students’ developing abilities to engage in effective construction and critical analysis of their own and others’ spoken and written texts” (Hammond & Gibbons, 2005: 19), allowing them to become “increasingly independent learners” (Hammond & Gibbons, 2005: 8), with SFL metalanguage “intended to function as permanent ideational scaffolding for text reception and production – a resource to be drawn on when a teacher is not to hand” (Martin, 2006: 115). That, of course, depends on how teachers are educated in the pedagogical theory, as “if teachers do not understand the orientation of the model toward whole texts in their contexts of use then the pedagogy is at risk of becoming restricted to teaching normative structures and grammatical labels in isolation from meaning” (Derewianka and Jones, 2010: 14). Putting together these different perspectives to implement an SFL focus in the classroom, teachers need a basic but solid understanding of SFL theoretical concepts. At the same time, its metalanguage is complex, and “only a fraction of SFL’s rich descriptions of grammar and discourse systems are essential for teachers’ practice. Much of their detail is only marginally useful for classroom teaching, despite the semiotic labour required for teachers to learn and recontextualise it for their practice” (Rose, 2020: 274). Careful recontextualization of the metalanguage embodying the contexts has been created through both genre-based pedagogy and Reading to Learn (see Chapter 3) for both professional development and classroom use in educational contexts (Rose, 2020).The pedagogy provides approaches to texts and practices from the various stratal perspectives, for example, in terms of their genre stages and phases, where the metalanguage used for mapping tends to be familiar to teachers. In a recent literature review of applications of SFL in educational contexts in the USA, Accurso and Gebhard (2020) found that professional development programmes tended to introduce teachers to SFL metalanguage as needed to introduce relevant concepts, and also included ways of using it in classroomfriendly ways. Researcher practitioners have also found ways of weaving students’ metalanguage with SFL-based concepts, in a view of metalanguage “as meaningful patterns of language used by teachers and learners when participating in learning activities in academic discourse communities” (Galloway, Dobbs, Olivo, & Madigan, 2019: 14). The focus on meaningful patterns of language suggests that this type of metalanguage can allow for transfer of understandings across contexts and languages, and further allows for considering what it means to continue language development across our life-spans (Foley & Thompson,

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2016), not just in academic contexts. However, as we have seen, applications of SFL metalanguage to additional language development outside of educational purpose contexts have been sparse. 5.2.3 Applications to Additional Language Development (ALD) While the application of SFL and its metalanguage to educational contexts has been carefully elaborated towards successful pedagogy and research, there is far less evidence of its application in additional, or L2, language development (ALD) outside of these contexts. That is, the successful applications of SFL to language development have mainly centred around the high-stakes literacy events of schooling. In the late 1970s–early 1980s, when the communicative approach to language teaching was in upward swing, with a resulting split between communicative situations/acts and grammar (see Chapter 4, Section 4.3), Fawcett suggested that SFL could provide the connection between the two: […]if the material in syllabuses were to consist of a series of more and more complex system networks for each of the various functional components into which the grammar may be divided, together, of course, with their realisations in syntax, lexis and intonation, then we would have a helpful marriage of (1) the new emphasis on meaning and (2) the swing back to the emphasis on grammar. (Fawcett, 1981: 33) At that time, he called for work on “a relatively simple presentation of the fullest system networks and realisations rules for as much as possible of, for a start, English” (p. 33). A response came from Melrose (1995) through his proposal for a topical-interactional syllabus based on SFL. While much of the genre-based work reported on in this book has focused on written genres (because of the applications to school literacy development), Melrose’s proposal was based on spoken interaction (central to communicative language teaching), informed by work on oral genres (such as shop encounters) (cf.Ventola, 1984, 1987; Martin, 1985) and a more dynamic view of the unfolding of genres over time, for a process model of language. Melrose (1995) gives examples of snippets of interaction sequences (such as renting accommodation) which demonstrate the connections between social discourses/practices and language, as the former are “articulated by components of the situation, which are in their turn articulated by interactional processes, which are realized by language and non-verbal codes” (p. 103). However, his proposal was not taken up, perhaps because the book provides much valuable theoretical background on SFL and on communicative syllabus proposals of the era, but little which would indicate how a complete course would play out, and thus it is not a practical text for language teachers.Ventola’s (1984) response to a call such as Fawcett’s (1981) focuses on delicacy, which refers to the rightward movement through a system network towards greater and greater specificity of choice. She illustrates how one might

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teach L2 learners about social behaviours in face-to-face service encounters in English, moving from the most general elements of all service encounters, or the least delicate genre network features, such as greeting, service bid (‘Can I help you’), pay, and closing, amongst others, which combine more general field, mode, and tenor choices. These more general genre and register features already allow for predictions to be made as to “the type of social process that will be created and how language, i.e. a text, realizes this process” (Ventola, 1984: 281). From these more general choices, over time teachers can add on ever more delicate choices at the mutually dependent levels of genre and register, with their concomitant effects on lexicogrammatical choices for their realizations—for example, the more specific service encounter of booking travel arrangements—thereby expanding students’ repertoires of meaningful expression. While Ventola’s response seems viable, it also has not been embodied in a comprehensive language course. In order to create the marriage between meaning and grammar, learners need exposure to it “trinocularly, from all stratal angles” (Matthiessen, 2006: 37, looking at grammar not only ‘from below’—as with traditional grammar—and at meaning ‘from above’—as with much communicative language teaching—but also from ‘from within’, i.e. from the perspective of “the internal organization of a given stratum as a linguistic subsystem” (p. 37). It is this latter angle which has tended to be ignored in language teaching, and it is one which SFL focuses on in its descriptions. For example, from within the strata of context of culture, genre families have been taxonomized in English (Martin & Rose, 2007) and in other languages (e.g. Spanish; Salmaso, 2017), which can help L2 learners, who “need to gain a clear understanding of the nature and stages of the social process under attention and how it is like or unlike comparable social process in their own culture” (Painter, 2001: 172);The focus on genres provides insights into the L2 culture, as well as a basis for teachers and learners to map out course goals. Register variation is a complementary rich angle for language work in the classroom, as the variables of field, tenor, and mode and how they are constructed through the lexicogrammar illuminate the situational contexts in which genres are used. For example, Macken-Horarik (1996: 235–236) characterizes the register of three key “domains in which learning occurs”: the everyday, the specialized, and the reflexive. The key to focusing attention on grammar ‘from within’ is the notion of choice; at the level of lexicogrammar, choosing one way of saying something over another realizes meaning differently across the metafunctions through its construal of a particular register matched to the communicative goals of a particular context of situation.The strata of SFL can bring together the linguistic choices with these goals in the classroom: If learners are taught to shunt between the planes of genre, register, and language during their learning process, the recognition of interrelated patterns becomes easier, thus enabling learners to make useful predictions about the relevant genres and registers, while at the same time learning the linguistic means to realize the social meanings they want to express. (Ventola, 1984: 280)

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Some SFL-based L2 teaching takes as a point of departure text and genre. For example, Feez (1999) models a text-based syllabus design as a way of adapting the genre-based approach to teaching L2 English. Teachers choose topics based on the needs/interests of learners and identify texts within relevant genres; the teacher then works with learners on the lexicogrammatical features of the genres, as well as on the skills and strategies needed for the situation/register, through activities and tasks designed for learning and assessment. The teaching follows the Teaching-Learning Cycle (see Chapter 3, Section 3.3), with an added ‘Linking to other texts’, to show similarities and differences across genres (including those of the L1), thereby recycling genres and features throughout the syllabus. Jones and Lock (2011) provide examples across different levels (from beginner to advanced) of how texts can be used and adapted in the English-asan-L2 classroom using SFL-based language concepts, such as mood, transitivity/ ergativity, cohesion, process types, and text macrostructures. These suggestions presuppose that teachers have basic knowledge of SFL, which Jones and Lock provide with a minimal amount of technical terms. This metalanguage does not need to be passed directly on to learners, but it can help teachers and, in turn, learners to link language forms to meaningful use. Saraceni (2008) illustrates the use of short texts in the classroom, analysed with students through the lens of transitivity (e.g. labelling Actors and Goals in a material process), helping students to unpack aspects of meaning such as intentionality conveyed through the language choices. This kind of grammatical focus in the classroom may be beneficial for students to stop thinking of grammar as a set of rules and “as something that helps them express their ideas” (p. 171). O’Donnell (2019b), on the other hand, has not found helpful an approach which focuses mainly on the metafunctions through the systems of transitivity, mood, and theme in teaching learners at lower levels of proficiency, and suggests that it might be fruitful to focus on a multitude of micro-systems in a meaningcentred approach to teaching English. For example, he suggests working with a micro-system such as probability and then showing the learners the slots in a clause where its expression can be realized, while discussing the different meanings that result. Also moving from meaning to lexicogrammar, Arús Hita (2008) provides an example lesson for teaching modality in which, amongst other tasks and activities, students are given a simplified system network for modality (see Figure 5.4), and, depending on their choices across the subsystems, they suggest the modal verb they could use to express the meaning. For example, from the three simultaneous subsystems, they could choose ‘probability’, ‘high’, and ‘positive’, leading to the lexicogrammatical realization must. Arús Hita argues: system networks reflect choices that we actually make when we speak and L2 learners are, unlike native speakers, aware of those choices. Native speakers make their linguistic choices in an intentional yet automatic or unconscious way, which contrasts with the more or less conscious way – depending on their proficiency level – in which foreign language speakers make their

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probability MODALITY TYPE

usuality obligation inclination

high modality

VALUE

median low

negative POLARITY

positive Figure 5.4  Simplified version of the semantic system of modality (based on Arús Hita, 2008: 374).

choices. Therefore, provided that they avoid complex terminology, e.g. by using probability instead of epistemic, system networks give learners the opportunity both to relate the lexicogrammar to semantics and to recreate the mechanics of actual speech production (Arús Hita, 2008: 374) Other expressions of probability, such as adverbs (certainly, probably) can be introduced at higher levels of proficiency. The systems networks allow for comparison with the learners’ L1 to avoid errors which can occur through direct transfer of meanings into wordings. Gibbons and Markwick-Smith (1992) also advocate teaching modality based on a system network; after an instructional intervention with Chinese L1 learners of English whose writing showed lack of modality, the learners demonstrated increased production and understanding of the system, an effect which continued even after a twomonth break from their English classes. In both of these applications, the authors incorporate contextualized instances of real language; for example, Gibbons and Markwick-Smith (1992) show the role of modality in creating persuasive and opinion texts.

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Moving from the clause, rather than from the genres, registers, or meanings, is perhaps a more familiar undertaking for additional language learners and teachers, especially at lower levels of proficiency. A “meaning-based pedagogic grammar” (MAP grammar) is put forth by Akira Tajino (2018) for purposes of teaching English. Based on the ideational metafunction, Tajino takes the grammar of the transitivity of the clause and converts it into more everyday language: David

planted

a flower

in the garden

Participant

Process

Participant

Circumstance

Who

Does

What

Where

This approach, “a meaning-order approach to pedagogical grammar” (p. 1), explains the grammar of the clause in English from the order of meanings as laid out in Figure 5.5. Figure 5.5 shows the horizontal, or syntagmatic axis of language, where classes of items are sequenced on a chain; the grammatical items that can fill in the slots provide the vertical, or paradigmatic axis, as in Figure 5.6. Tajino explains that even the metalinguistic terms in Figure 5.6 could be avoided by, for example, simply substituting the possibilities available for each slot; for example, in the ‘does(is)’ slot, auxiliary verbs include can (do), may (do), should (do), must (do), and so on. He further illustrates how the different grammatical moods map onto the horizontal axis, which provides the connection to the interpersonal metafunction of language and focuses learners’ attention on the relationship between the order of meanings in English and, thus, the textual metafunction. One argument behind this pedagogy is that global errors (e.g. errors in word order) cause more communicative problems than local errors, such as omitting the third-person-singular present tense -s ending.Yanase (2018) argues that MAP Grammar approaches language from the language user’s perspective (rather than from the analyst’s, as in much of linguistic theory) because it uses meaning compression: its syntagmatic dimension provides for almost all possible grammatical sentences and thus compresses the potentiality of meaning made available through the paradigms created by each of the slots. Several studies in Tajino’s (2018) book provide empirical evidence of significant gains in learning (e.g. relative clauses) after MAP Grammar instruction (cf. also Smithers & Gray, 2018, Chapter 4), as well as of receptive and productive skills. Also included are ways of practically implementing MAP at different levels and for different age groups, through graphic organizers and lesson plans, and connections with other aspects of SFL, such as cohesion and genre. In essence, MAP grammar centres on a syntagmatic (chain axis) sequence of clause transitivity slots with corresponding paradigmatic systems of class items (e.g. ‘article’, ‘adjective’, ‘noun’, α

WHO

DOES(IS) WHO(M)/WHAT/(HOW) WHERE WHEN

Figure 5.5  MAP Grammar: The order of meanings (Tajino, 2018: 14).

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conjunction subordinate clause α

article adjective noun pronoun to-infinitive gerund WHO

verb tense progressive aspect perfect aspect auxiliary verb subjunctive DOES(IS)

article adjective noun pronoun to-infinitive gerund WHO(M)/WHAT/ (HOW)

adverb adverb WHERE

preposition preposition WHEN

Figure 5.6  MAP Grammar: Vertical and horizontal axes (Tajino, 2018: 14).

‘pronoun’…) that could fit into those slots. While the model is put forth as meaning-based, effectively it focuses mainly on the lexicogrammatical stratum of language, as the paradigmatic slots consist of further structural items, a simplification that is often needed especially at lower levels in foreign language teaching. Whatever the starting point into language, the question remains as to which metalanguage to use in the classroom. The argument with MAP Grammar is that its six tags (Figure 5.4) are designed so that “teachers avoid using metalanguage to teach grammar and allow learners to gain a better understanding of how grammatical items are associated with one another via the meaning order of sentence structures” (Smithers & Gray, 2018: 5). At the same time, one could argue that the tags themselves become a metalanguage, albeit one which is perhaps more readily available to learners. Bloor and Bloor (2013: 20–21) note that talking about language creates a metalanguage; using the MAP tags carries behind it a meaningful approach to language which still must be unpacked in the classroom, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the students’ needs at different stages of development. On one end of the metalinguistic spectrum, we have the simplified six MAP tags for classroom teaching, and, on the other, the 516 terms that Praxedes Filho (2013) used for analysing language development through three key SFL system networks (theme, transitivity, and mood; see Chapter 4, Section 4.7). Once again, we can see why some perceive SFL as “too full and too rich for teaching and learning” (Bourke, 2005: 93), leading Bourke to suggest that other descriptive grammars, such as Greenbaum and Quirk (1990), whose terminology is more familiar to students, are more apt for classroom language teaching. However, this viewpoint may be informed by working from the structures towards the meaning, rather than the other way around, which is the approach advocated by SFL-based educationalists. As explored in this section, different SFL researchers suggest varying ways into the target language, without clear agreement on a comprehensive SFL-based course for teaching an L2 across levels of proficiency. Such curricula exist; for example, the Department of German at Georgetown University4 has worked out a series of courses designed to take students from initial through advanced levels of German across four years based on a functional approach to language, using a content focus coupled with a genre approach to move between context and language features. While some of this approach and its positive effects on student learning is available (Crane,

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2006; Ryshina-Pankova, 2018), the full approach, as far as I am aware, is not available to the public. Thus, a critical issue for SFL is the careful contextualization of the role of SFL and its metalanguage for the teaching/learning of an L2 (see Troyan, Sembiante, & King, 2019, for suggestions for world language teacher education). SFL still has some distance to go to provide teachers and learners a way of leaving behind traditional grammatical labels that carry with them the baggage of a focus on correctness of form and not on meaning, as it does not yet provide a consistent focus for L2 language development that teachers can apply in the general language learning classroom, including all of the departure points: genre, register, semantics, and lexicogrammar. Obviously, learners need to come to grips with the target language through all of these levels, and thus foreign-language teachers need linguistically sound descriptions at least as much as mother-tongue teachers do; but equally obviously, it is important for these descriptions to mesh not only with each other but also with the mother-tongue descriptions so that they all fit together into a coherent view of language. (Hudson, 2004: 120) It is worth speculating on whether an SFL focus on the L1 could help understandings for learning an additional language, as suggested by, for example, Achugar and Carpenter (2012). In this sense, McNamara (2015: 472) acknowledges the “highly productive relationship” between SFL and Applied Linguistics (by which he means additional language teaching), in part due to its illuminating work which “demonstrate[s] that the challenges facing second language students in primary and secondary classrooms are in many respects no different from those facing mother tongue students”. However, McNamara (2015) notes that SFL may be lacking a critical social perspective, leading us to a further pedagogical issue: that of creating critical orientations towards texts. 5.2.4 Critical Awareness of Language for Social Justice SFL-based teaching approaches have been seen as “being naive in their proclivity to reproduce, rather than challenge, hegemonic discourses” (Gardner, 2017: 484, based on Luke, 1996). It is also seen as privileging these discourses at the expense of other ways of making meaning, and thus of positioning school learners who do not ‘have’ academic language as being, in some way, deficient (Flores, 2020). However, from its start, the applied SFL view has been one of eschewing negative characterizations of dialectal varieties, as these characterizations are clearly harmful, especially if taken on by the speakers of those varieties: those who are made to feel ashamed of their own language use suffer “a basic injury as a human being: to make anyone, especially a child feel so ashamed is as indefensible as to make him feel ashamed of the colour of his skin” (Halliday et al., 1964: 105).The deficit view is also dangerous in more subtly creating longer-lasting effects of lowering the

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quality of education and diminishing opportunities for rich interaction (Varelas et al., 2010). Halliday considered that “linguistics cannot be other than an ideologically committed form of social action” (Halliday, 2003[1985]: 189) He attributes this principle to Basil Bernstein, whose work in the sociology of education has been closely linked to SFL. Bernstein, and, mainly by implication but also by direct mention, Halliday, along with those who have invoked Bernstein’s work from within an SFL tradition, have come under sharp attack by critics because whatever differences may (be thought to) exist in children’s speech, the conditions and demands of formal education will make sure that familiarity, experience and proficiency with regards to the literacy practices of the school will define their educational career, to the advantage, naturally, of those children whose families have the background, the experience, the motivation, the connections and the means to prepare, support and guide them through. The Bernsteinian language deficit position obscures this powerful engine of social reproduction by shifting the critical ‘spotlight’ […] from the education system itself, as the main communicational mechanism of social stratification, onto the pupil. (Jones, 2013) It can be argued that this conclusion is reductionist of Bernstein’s framework of codes and socialization,5 which also focuses on how educational knowledge is selected and transmitted. Bernstein did see a role for the educational system in bridging differences between coding orientations: If the culture of the teacher is to become part of the consciousness of the child, then the culture of the child must first be in the consciousness of the teacher. This may mean that the teacher must be able to understand the child’s dialect, rather than deliberately attempt to change it. Much of the contexts of our schools are unwittingly drawn from aspects of the symbolic world of the middle class, and so when the child steps into school he is stepping into a symbolic system which does not provide for him a linkage with his life outside. (Bernstein, 1971: 154, italics original) Bernstein raises two parallel issues here. One is that the semiotic world of school tends to align with that of the middle class, and those who are not wise in its ways may have more difficulty in adapting to it. The second is that the semiotic world of the child is equally as symbolic a system as that of the school. Individuals develop their repertoire of linguistic resources through use, through meaningful encounters in social interaction with others. This sociological and interactional view suggests that, for both Bernstein and Halliday, it is far from necessary to hold at fault pupils themselves for social stratification; rather, they would argue, much as Jones does, that some children are socialized within the home into the types of language practices associated with a school system that has evolved to serve the needs of those who hold greater power. Those analysing the language

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of education from within the SFL perspective would argue that, by making explicit these practices, schools can serve to provide somewhat greater access to the social mobility (ostensibly) provided by the educational system. That still leaves the marginalization of the child’s home culture as an issue, and perhaps, rather than making explicit the coding orientation of schooling to children for whom it is less familiar, changing the education system to make it more inclusive is a more productive way forward. However, the critiques of explicit pedagogy do not tend to make clear how that might be done, at least not to an applied linguist. Interestingly, the critiques tend to use precisely the kind of abstract, context-independent language that Bernstein hypothesized as elaborated code, which abstracts away from everyday experience and everyday language, and which has been well described through SFL. Therefore, it seems that one needs to be well versed in the coding orientation used in academic contexts to be able to effect change. Perhaps, then, those best positioned to bridge understandings of language between home and school are educationalists who have an understanding of language as a semiotic system, as a set of meaning-making resources, and who thus can celebrate semiotic repertoires resulting from children’s interactional and cultural experiences. Halliday clearly rejected the deficit view when rejecting the acquisition metaphor (see Chapter 1, Section 1.1): [Language acquisition] seems rather an unfortunate term because it suggests that language is some kind of a commodity to be acquired, and, although the metaphor is innocent enough in itself, if it is taken too literally the consequences can be rather harmful. The use of this metaphor has led to the belief in what is known as a “deficit theory” of language learning, as a means of explaining how children come to fail in school: the suggestion that certain children, perhaps because of their social background, have not acquired enough of this commodity called language, and in order to help them we must send relief supplies. The implication is that there is a gap to be filled, and from this derive various compensatory practices that may be largely irrelevant to children’s needs. (Halliday,1974: 13) The view upheld by SFL is one not of deficit, but rather of repertoire (Snell, 2013), a view underlying that of language development. Children develop their repertoires of meaning-making through communicative interaction with others, and there are differences in the types of interactions, and thus the meaningmaking resources, readily available to children from all kinds of cultural backgrounds which foreground different kinds of interactions. All language is embedded within social contexts, and “the role of social experience is key in shaping and understanding the options for language use that children experience and learn” (Schleppegrell, 2004: 28). In Section 5.2.1, several studies were mentioned which found variations in the ways that children experience language, variations which influence their own uses of language. The studies reviewed in

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this book have not unequivocally shown that there are sociolinguistic factors at play in these differences. Some studies (e.g. Purcell-Gates, Duke, & Martineau, 2007) did not find SES to be a factor in children’s learning, and it is worth highlighting that in Lieven’s (1978) study (Section 5.2.1), no social class difference was reported on, as, obviously, interactive style is not a defining characteristic of one social class or another. Rather, the point is that variation in interaction can lead to variation in how children perceive the role of language, and thus how they use language. Nonetheless, some studies have found variability across socioeconomic situation (Hasan & Cloran, 1987; Cox, Fang, and Otto, 1997; Hasan, 2009; Henrichs, 2010), a finding which non-SFL studies corroborate (e.g. HirshPasek et al., 2015). Variation has also been found in adaptability to the interactional styles of schooling based on children’s socio-economic background, with middle-class children participating most often in productive classroom interactions, as they “had inherited the ‘right kind of cultural capital’” (Black, 2004, in Snell and Lefstein, 2018). It seems, then, that learners “with sufficient economic and social capital will adjust to new criteria, just as they have adjusted to previous changes: flexibility is one of the benefits afforded by capital” (Potts, 2018: 203). Obviously, it is naive to assume that just by teaching genres as forms for learners to emulate any kind of real empowerment through learning will take place, that they will be afforded that capital outside of the institutions where it resides. It is also naive to think that SFL holds the key to creating social justice in the world through teaching children about language, as if impoverished living (and thus study) environments and poor nutrition were not vitally important. However, linguistics does have a role to play, and it is worth quoting Halliday at length on this point: The underlying causes of educational failure are social, not linguistic; but there are obvious linguistic links in the causal chain, and it is reasonable— indeed necessary, if only to help get the picture straight—to look to linguistics as a contributory source of ideas and practice. The point I would make is that, given the nature of the problem (and of language), the contribution of linguistics will be indirect and global rather than direct and local. In other words, it is by trying to raise the general level of community discussion of language, and the general efficacy of language education in school, more than by special language-stimulating projects aimed at particular groups, that linguistics can be of most help in the cause of education for a just society. This is not to belittle the importance of special programmes designed to help those who are at risk. It is simply that here the guiding considerations are pedagogical rather than linguistic. Linguistics comes in, once again, as background knowledge and ideology: providing descriptions of languages, and of varieties—dialects and registers-–within languages; and, in the process, helping to raise the status of those languages and varieties that are part of the symbol-package by which a particular group is marked off, and marked out, for discrimination and abuse. (Halliday, 2007[1981]: 335–336; emphasis added)

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Clearly, then, the SFL view of language in school is rooted in the rejection of institutional bias against the ways of speaking brought from home to school, and has argued, as a counter to that bias, for the fostering of critical language awareness, rather than simply teaching a standard dialect to augment or replace a home language. Rather, language is viewed “as the semiotic resources with which an individual makes meaning of their world, their personalized meaning potential”, and thus “students’ access to their home language is simultaneously access to their existing knowledge and their full capacity to mean” (Potts & Moran, 2013: 453; emphasis original). Nevertheless, SFL genre-based pedagogy has been characterized as focusing on final products through its teaching of overt textual markers (Frankel, 2013), suggesting that it may not encourage students “to analyze, evaluate, and manipulate genres in the context of their specific social purposes” (Frankel, 2013: 19). It may very well be that there has been “some misapplication of the genre exemplars by which they have ended up being treated as fixed recipes to be rigidly adhered to by students” (White, Mammone, & Caldwell, 2015: 60). This misapplication has led researchers to prefer other approaches which are based on what is perceived to be “a different assumption […] – not to master genre itself, but as a means of learning the course material and the ways of thinking that define the discipline” (Carter, Ferzli, & Wiebe, 2004: 397–398). However, Carter et al. assume erroneously that the goal of SFL is one of mastering genres in and of themselves. On the contrary, it is aligned precisely with Carter et al.’s goal, as an SFL-based approach reveals how “developing new ways of using language also leads to new ways of thinking and new forms of consciousness in students […] so they can participate in new contexts of learning” (Schleppegrell, 2004: 18). In fact, in evaluating the SFL genre-based approach, Frankel notes that its proponents advocate for an approach which connects genre to social purpose and intended meanings, in a curriculum designed to provide access to learners who may have been marginalized by teaching practices which do not make explicit the powerful genres of schooling. Accurso and Gebhard (2020) delineate two different perspectives within the SFL community on what critical language awareness is, as evidenced in their literature review of SFL-based professional development programmes in the USA. For some, critical understanding refers to “a more conscious awareness of the meaning-making resources and decisions that authors in different disciplinary contexts draw on and for what purposes” (p. 6), while for others it is “an ability to critique meaning-making resources and decisions based on the workings of power, politics, and ideologies” (pp. 6, 10). Many researchers cited in Chapters 3 and 4 adhere strongly to the view that providing students with a solid foundation in the first kind of understanding aligns with the goals of schooling in creating a society with greater equity of access to semiotic resources. Hammond and Macken-Horarik (1999) argue that this first understanding is necessary for the second to happen. Potts (2018: 204) highlights the need for discernment in how texts (as genres, or configurations of register, whether strictly verbal or multimodal) serve to construct knowledge and social positions: “To critique, one must

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learn how power functions in texts and discourse; to create, one must not only understand but also develop control over the semiotic resources in which genres and registers are realized”. Schleppegrell concurs with this view: Having gained control of the registers, students can then manipulate them and use them to construct the diversity of meanings that reflect their own cultural contexts and goals. Getting control of the academic registers can enable students who are now marginalized to participate in constructing new kinds of meanings. Functional linguistic analysis provides a framework and tools to enable students to develop strategies to analyze the ways language is used in school to serve dominant interests and silence others, and to examine how institutions and social organizations are maintained and reproduced through the use of language. (Schleppegrell, 2004: 162) The SFL-based literature on applications of genre pedagogy clearly eschews simply copying a genre recipe as it does not lead to a deep understanding of genres, much less to an ability to critically engage with ways of making meaning. In fact, reflection literacy (Hasan, 1996) has also been put forth as a goal within SFL pedagogy. Reflection literacy recognizes that “enabling literacy education to go beyond reproduction to empower students to participate in knowledge production requires that pedagogy engages systematically with relations between ways of knowing and ways of saying” (Williams, 2016: 339).Therefore, within an SFL pedagogical framework,“there is no sudden move at any specific point from mainstream to critical literacy. There is throughout students’ schooling a gradually developing critical orientation as they work with a range of texts in different genres and registers” (Macken-Horarik, 1996: 118). Meaning matters most in an SFL-based pedagogy, and teachers who are versed in its concepts can work with learners via verbal and multimodal texts to unpack how expression forms construe different registers (i.e. varying configurations of field, tenor, and mode), and how different registers activate different sets of expectations of expression forms. The goal of the SFL project is a visible pedagogy that makes explicit the ways in which language varies across contexts and situations, and how it serves to construct contexts and interactions; in other words, language choices are never neutral. If applied as it is meant to be applied in the classroom, it serves to educate all students in that understanding, so that students from register majority backgrounds can perceive their positions of privilege, where these come from, and how their cultural (and linguistic) capital serves to position them as privileged users of language within academic settings.6 In other words, when there is a shared metalanguage for talking about language, then there can be greater understanding of how language is used to reify the status quo and to maintain positions of power, and, equally, to maintain inequities and marginalization—an understanding which can then, hopefully, lead to change. Establishing reflection literacy as a priority “has the potential of questioning all voices, listening to all voices and probing into all assumptions” (Hasan, 2008: 125)

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Harman (2018) has edited a collection of papers that applies an SFL-based critical approach to language development in school-based contexts. Almost every chapter includes classroom data which shows teachers and students interacting through and about language in ways that confirm identity and increase agency, illustrating how learners (in this case, emergent bilinguals) can expand and control their repertoire of meaning-making resources. The teachers adapt the metalanguage in varying ways to express the concepts, and the theoretical conundrums of where genre and register are located in the model do not seem to affect their applications of the overall theory. The analyses of the classroom exchanges demonstrate a scaffolded exploratory and embracing attitude towards participants’ contributions, thus also utilizing an interactive style that promotes self-esteem and positive identity formation (see Section 5.2.1). The result is a volume that makes clear that discriminating, de-professionalizing, and alienating institutional discourses circulating in schools are not impenetrable to change. Rather, there is always room for students, teachers, and researchers to collaborate in enacting counterdiscourses and creating new learning spaces where students and teachers are able to engage in powerful textual practices in service of equity. (Gebhard, 2018: vi) Nonetheless, genre-based pedagogy began by describing the genres of schooling, and not “other texts that might be culturally important in students’ lives” (Cope & Kalantzis, 1993: 15). The studies by Wollman-Bonilla (2000) (Chapter 3) and Shin (2014) (Chapter 4) suggest that when children write for a real audience, such as their family or peers, they can appropriate aspects of the genre to achieve their goals while also taking into account their readers. This demonstrates the potential for classrooms to incorporate authentic interactions, rather than having students produce decontextualized texts as examples of a genre. Classrooms need to be open to all kinds of genres as purposeful, contextualized social activities which are realized through registerial, discourse semantic and lexicogrammatical resources of verbal language, as well as through other semiotic means (cf. Zammit, 2007, on children’s magazines and multimodal texts; Zappavigna, 2012, on social media; Martin & Zappavigna, 2019, on paralanguage). In this way, learners can see that it is not just the genres of schooling that can be described using the metalanguage, but that all means of semiosis (across varying modalities) can be analysed and compared, not to evaluate one as superior to another but rather as different configurations of semiotic choices to achieve different purposes in different contexts. Bartlett (2013: 343) puts forth an alternative approach to “empowering marginalised groups through training them in the dominant code”, drawing beyond SFL on ethnographically and sociologically based descriptions of environments and individuals’ roles within them. In describing alternative coding orientations (Bernstein, 1973), “the various codes in play need to be described in their own terms as each relates language to society in a locally specific way” (363). Applying Bartlett’s suggestion

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to the classroom, strengthening through the descriptions the cultural capital of discourses beyond school, the framing of the dominant voice can weaken, “ultimately break[ing] down the classifications” (p. 361) that it imposes. That is, the classroom can provide the space for hybrid discourses and multiple repertoires, which can perturb the context, as Bartlett suggests, in productive ways. The key here, again, is in the descriptive metalanguage, which allows for explicating choices of constructing field, mode, and tenor, and thus the dialectic between language choices and contexts. Papers in Harman’s (2018) book which explore translanguaging practices (e.g. Khote; Brisk & Ossa Parra) and others (cf. Kartika-Ningsih & Rose, 2018) in classrooms using SFL theory (Matthiessen, 2018) are examples of the kind of research which can show the potentials of such an approach: A culturally sustaining SFL does not view school and home literacies as binaries in opposition to each other; instead, it acknowledges that both linguistic codes are different ways to communicate context-specific meanings […]. Halliday validates both home and academic ways of meaning making in pointing to how language varies contextually, hence reconciling the cultural/academic binary. What is important is allowing community knowledge and meanings into academic spaces – developing a permeable curriculum that encourages voices representing the home and community (Khote, 2018: 157).

5.3 Developing Research Several pathways for future research related to language development have manifested themselves through the discussion in this chapter in each of the three areas of language development. With respect to CLD, it would be worth incorporating Taverniers’ suggestion of modelling the informative function as an intrinsic language function (rather than as a microfunction) in child language studies (see Section 5.1.1.1), reinterpreting analyses of already existing data or initiating new studies of the late transition period. Such studies might provide more precise detail as to how children move from the macrofunctions to the metafunctions through interaction, given the potential of the informative function to allow children to assign speech roles. How children do so in different interactive environments may help to shed light on different dialogic styles and their effects on the transition to adult language. Furthermore, SFL can provide linguistic descriptions for studies of CLD in neuroscience and psychology. For example, Romeo et al. (2018) show that conversational turns affect how children’s brains process language. Hirsh-Pasek et al. (2015: 1082), in their study of sixty low-income children, conclude that with “the right scaffolds, low-income toddlers can and do become successful language learners”. The rich, detailed linguistic descriptions, such as those of Henrichs (2010) and Painter (1984, 1999), amongst other studies of CLD within the SFL tradition, can provide a

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more robust picture of how it is that children could and do use and expand their meaning-making resources of language and other semiotic modes in social interaction, and how caregivers scaffold that development in dialogic interaction. Hassinger-Das et al. (2018), in their study of a community-based project designed to immerse children in rich interaction around STEM topics (see Section 5.2.1), were not able to pinpoint exactly what it was in the prompts or activities that allowed for an increase in caregiver–child discourse and engagement. An SFL-based study of their data, with a focus on the meaning-making interactive sequences, can shed light on what it is in the language of the interaction that creates the opportunities, as perhaps can the types of measures of language that lead to success in school, such as the language of generalization and abstraction, often through grammatical metaphor—the kinds of developments that Painter (1999), for example, outlines in her son Stephen’s increasing meaning-making repertoire (see Chapter 2, Section 2.5), which are important for school-based literacy. Finally, empirically based studies of the transition between home and school are needed in a variety of contexts. The trajectory of research on SLD has shown itself to be very rich in scope and evolution, and responsive to the criticisms related to limitations of genrebased pedagogy and critical orientations to text.The design-based research projects that are growing in number (cf. Moore, Schleppegrell, & Palincsar, 2018; see Chapter 4, Section 4.4.3) provide substantial evidence of the benefits of an approach which uses an iterative process of design and implementation of SFL metalanguage in the classroom, working closely with practitioners to fine-tune through evidence-based praxis. Macken-Horarik, Love, Sandiford, and Unsworth (2018) use SFL principles, such as metafunctions, stratification, system, and rank, to provide explicit ideas and examples for teachers to navigate the complexities of an ever-growing digital world. Gebhard (2019) presents a rich resource of applications of SFL to teacher education for an increasingly global and diverse society, including procedures for analysing classroom interactional data and for applying the Teaching-Learning Cycle while considering community topics and funds of knowledge. The thick descriptions of how the metalanguage mediates understandings about language and how it needs to be fine-tuned to the general context of school and the local context of the specific classroom have also been applied to critical language awareness contexts, such as those in Harman’s (2018) book, mentioned in Section 5.2.4. In developing theory and research together, data from those studies can help shed light on features of context in terms of Bartlett’s (2013: 351) “cline of influencing factors”, which moves along a range of options, from “in semiotic context” or “physically present”, at one end, to “from shared culture” or “imagined/desired”, at the other. Given that this view of context can illuminate how alternative discourses can be “smuggled into” to the dominant discourse (p. 354), the classroom data can serve to test Bartlett’s model, while the model can help explain how change can be enacted while classroom communicative goals can be shared and met. As to ALD, there is still a dearth of studies tracing developmental trajectories in individuals learning an additional language outside of school contexts. As

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outlined in Section 5.2.3, there is also a lack of consensus as to how to effectively apply SFL to general language learning classrooms, and thus there is scope for development of materials based on SFL for that purpose. Furthermore, as we have seen throughout the book, there is a need for SFL-based analyses of the development of languages other than English in all areas, in children, schools, and language learners around the world (cf. Moskver, 2008; Byrnes, 2009; Karlstrom & Lundin, 2013;Yigitoglu & Reichelt, 2014; Kawamitsu, 2015; Shum,Tai, & Shi, 2016;Troyan, 2016; Lindgren,Westum, Outakoski, & Sullivan, 2017;Whittaker & García Parejo, 2017; Cheng & Chiu, 2018; Ryshina-Pankova, 2018; AbdelMalek, 2019; Troyan, 2021; inter alia). Obviously, studies can draw on SFL typological/topological descriptions of other languages (Martin & Doran, 2015; Mwinlaaru & Xuan, 2016; Martin, Doran, & Figueredo, 2020), and their application to language developmental trajectories and to pedagogy can serve to test and further push theoretical considerations, just as applications to English have. Finally, the list of journals in Appendices B in Chapters 3 and 4 show a wide variety of highly ranked journals which did not have publications related to SFL. Expanding the sites of publication of SFL-based articles related to language development can spark dialogue with other researchers: as a single example, Roehr-Brackin and Tellier (2019) found overlap between language-analytic ability and metalinguistic awareness, which they suggest can mutually influence each other; from a theoretical perspective, they also suggest that L2 learning might be a factor (among others) in the development of metalinguistic awareness. Perhaps SFL-based researchers could apply a similar quasi-experimental-type study to test the relationship between children’s metalinguistic awareness as based on SFL and their language learning aptitude. Perusing the high-ranked journals for opportunities to publish research based on SFL developmental pathways and pedagogy can provide channels of communication with other research paradigms. This section is in no way designed to diminish the quality and reach of the amazing amount of SFL theorizing and research on language development that is already available and in the pipeline in the journals included in this volume, as well as numerous others, and in books, theses and online sites.This book provides testimony as to the already-existing incredible reach of SFL theory, pedagogy, and research to support developmental pathways towards increasing meaningmaking resources to help us effectively interact in and act upon our world. I look forward to watching the fascinating SFL-based language development story as it continues unfolding, in my own language development, in that of my students, and in classrooms, research, and continued conversations around the world.

Notes 1 Obviously Halliday’s motivations behind theoretical decisions were not solely related to language development; cf. Matthiessen (2007), Martin (2016) for fuller accounts of the history of the development of SFL theory. As we saw in Chapter 4, explanations for teachers have not presented the theory as fully as it has for linguists.

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2 Left out of the account in this volume of SFL-based language teaching/learning is intonation, with only a brief mention in Chapter 2. Halliday (1970) and Halliday and Greaves (2008) are examples of the extensive work in this area. However, this agenda has not been taken up in the language development literature, except for the mentions of the functional role of intonation in child language development in Chapter 2. 3 Halliday and Matthiessen (1999) have suggested a different set of labels at the semantic level, and Martin’s stratified SFL model includes the clause labels at the level of lexicogrammar. Still, the fuzziness remains, and the SFL community itself is split on whether they analyse process types on semantic grounds or on grammatical reactances (O’Donnell, 2019a). 4 See https://german.georgetown.edu/undergraduate/curriculum/# 5 While many of Jones’ (2013) criticisms of Bernstein’s restricted and elaborated code are well documented in showing a possible Bernsteinian bias towards seeing the latter as a kind of superior code, Jones’ conclusion is reductionist. 6 Teaching at a private American university in Europe, I have found that my students are consistently surprised by the revelation that all language varieties are created equally, that all are equally capable of developing the meaning-making resources to embody the interactive needs of their speakers. Many, while language majority speakers in the USA, express reservations about their own language use, which they tend to perceive as ‘deficient’, based on their prior schooling.These two considerations, when put together, tend to galvanize them towards embracing diversity and desires for enacting social change through educating others about language as a semiotic resource.

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Index

Page numbers followed by “n” refers notes numbers. For works with more than three authors, only the first author is included in this index. English does not have its own entry, as it is the basis for the great majority of the work included. Abdel-­Malek, M. 176, 186, 234 abstraction: about language 10–11, 23, 47, 63, 75, 103, 152, 153, 155, 157; through language 25, 27, 83, 96–97, 107, 137, 165, 171, 174, 177, 178, 181–182, 206–207, 227, 233 academic language see register, academic accuracy 155, 164, 167, 179–181, 187 Accurso, K. 218, 229 Acevedo, C. 106 Achugar, M. 173–174, 185, 217, 225 acquisition 2–3, 9, 10, 18, 20, 31, 40, 42–45, 47, 49, 75, 79–80, 131–133, 157, 183, 184, 227 agency, language user 137, 170, 199, 216–218, 231 Ambridge, B. 79 Andersen, T.H. 66, 125, 212 Anderson, K.T. 134 Andersson Varga, P. 107 appraisal 27–28, 84, 157, 160–162, 164, 166 Arabic 176 Armour, W.S. 178, 179 Arús Hita, Jorge 205, 221–222 Asp, E. 7, 14, 48 Aspinwall, J. 102 assessment 162, 166, 168, 172, 176–177, 180 Atkinson, D. 86 authenticity 18, 113, 127, 135, 166, 175, 231 Bahasa Indonesian 70–71 Ball, T. 216 Bamberg, B. 114–115

Bamberg, M. 78 Barnes, D.R. 101 Barrett, M. 65, 67–68 Bartlett, T. 21, 211, 212, 231–233 Bates, E. 49, 66 Bateson, M.C. 46, 52 Beal, J.C. 96 behaviourism 41–43, 45, 49, 80, 131–132 Belz, J.A. 28, 160, 184 Bernstein, B. 5–6, 56–58, 74, 98–99, 106–107, 111, 131, 133, 215, 216, 226–227 Berry, M. 101, 152, 204–205, 208, 211 Bever, T.G. 45 Biber, D. 181 Bigozzi, L. 124, 126, 175 bilingual development 70–72, 128, 164, 166–167, 231 Black, L. 216 Bloomfield, L. 41–42 Bloom, L.M. 43, 46, 50, 62, 63 Bloor, M. 224 Bloor, T. 224 Bourke, J.M. 224 Bovino, T.D. 119–121, 127, 134, 215 Bowcher, W. 140n4, 200, 208–209, 211 Braine, M.D. 43 Brisk, M. 105, 232 Britton, L. 135, 136 Brown, E. 123 Brown, R. 43, 46, 47 Brumfit, C. 155, 156 Bruner, J. 4 Budwig, N. 3–4, 75, 76, 78–79

Index Bühler, K. 47, 55 Bullowa, M. 45–46 Bunch, G.C. 163, 179, 208, 217 Butler, C.S. 12, 79–80 Byrnes, H. 2, 27, 154, 161, 175, 178, 182, 184, 186–187 Caldwell, D. 170, 229 Canale, M. 155 Carpenter, B. 173–174, 185, 217, 225 Carrell, P.L. 29 Carter, M. 229 case grammar 48; see also semantic functions Catalán 161–162 Celce-­Murcia, M. 157, 183 Chafe, W. 182 Chappell, P.J. 184 Chen, H. 105 Chen, I.-A. 135, 136 Chen,Y.-S. 167, 168, 217 Cheng, F.-W. 167, 217, 234 Cheung, L.M. 28, 136, 172, 176, 185, 186, 217 child language functions 110, 163; see also microfunction; macrofunction Chinese 1, 53, 149, 151, 154, 167, 172–173, 176–177 Chiu, M.-C. 167, 217, 234 Chomsky, N. 9–12, 42–45, 48, 50, 155, 157, 184 Christie, F. 98, 99, 101, 103, 104, 106, 136, 210 Clark, D.J. 110 Clark, U. 105, 131 Cloran, C. 73–74, 98 code-­switching 71, 118; see also translanguaging Coffin, C. 4, 5, 27, 28, 104, 105, 134, 162, 163, 174, 176 cognition 1, 123, 167, 182–183, 190n7 cognitive development 4, 5, 50–51, 80, 82, 120, 216 cognitive linguistics 182, 212 coherence 29–30, 113–115, 118, 124, 126, 130, 138, 169, 183 cohesion 17, 28–30, 113–119, 124, 126, 130, 138, 157, 160–161, 165–167, 169, 183, 221, 223 cohesive harmony 115, 117–119, 130, 138 Collins, J.L. 29, 116–117 Colombi, M.C. 27, 105, 177, 186

249

Communicative Language Teaching 154–157, 185, 219, 220 competence: communicative 64, 128, 155; linguistic 10–12, 43, 46, 155, 157–158; narrative 124, 126 complexity 72, 82, 120, 161, 162, 164, 173, 175, 181–182 Connor, U. 29, 159, 160 construction-­based approaches 80–82 content-­and-­language-­integrated-­learning (CLIL) 106, 216 context 12, 18, 19, 20–22, 29, 46, 48, 49, 51, 57, 64, 66, 68, 71, 75–77, 83, 96, 97, 99, 104, 151–153, 157, 182, 200–201, 207–212, 232, 233 continuity 43, 52, 67, 74–75, 78, 96–98 conversation 46, 95, 96, 130, 181, 184, 213–215, 232 Cope, B. 133, 210, 231 Córdova Jiménez, J. 107 Cox, B.E. 29, 117–119, 215, 228 Crain, 44–45 Crane, C. 224–225 Crossley, S.A. 165–166, 181 Crowhurst, M. 29, 114 Crystal, D. 99, 102 culture 19, 21, 51, 56–57, 84, 103–104, 125, 184, 208–212, 220 Dąbrowska, E. 81 Daneš, F. 30 data 4, 10–12, 18, 31, 41, 45, 46, 67, 70, 72–74, 78, 81, 109–110, 112, 121, 125, 136–137, 164, 170–172, 176, 180, 231 Davies, A. 184 delicacy 14, 31n1, 184, 189n2, 219 Delpit, L.D. 134, 216 de Oliveira, L. 170, 185, 217 de Saussure, F. 7–9, 11, 12 de Silva, J. 131–132 Derewianka, B. 27, 28, 84, 136, 179, 187, 206, 207, 218 design-­based research (DBR) 170 development 2–7, 20, 31, 208 Dewey, J. 133 dialogue 63–64, 69, 83–84, 202, 203 diary study 39–41, 45, 52–53, 66, 70–72, 79, 81, 82 Diessel, H. 81 Dik, S. 79 Ding,Y. 164, 166, 176, 208 discourse functionalism (DF) 182 diversity 134, 212, 230; lexical 165, 167

250 Index Donohue, J. 4, 5, 105, 134, 159 Donovan, C.A. 120–121 Doran,Y.J. 106, 234 Dore, J. 38, 48, 66 Doughty, C. 187 Doughty, P. 100–102, 111 Dreyfus, S. 105 Drury, H. 137 Duke, N.K. 124, 127, 175, 215, 228 Dutch 134–135, 213 Eggins, S. 103 Eisele, J. 44 Ellis, R.A. 137 ergativity 76–77 error 10, 99, 115, 132, 133, 163, 177–181, 185, 222, 223 experimental research see research methods Falk-­Ross, F. 127–128, 216 Fang, Z. 29, 117, 228 Fawcett, R.P. 101, 189n1, 190n7, 205, 212, 219 Feez, S. 131–132, 221 Ferreira, A.A. 5, 25–27, 182, 207 Ferzli, M. 229 field 83, 105, 106, 176–177 Figueredo, G. 234 Fillmore, C.J. 46–48 Finocchiaro, M. 157 Firkins, A. 163–164, 186, 217 Firth, J.R. 13, 21–22, 57, 152, 153, 189n1, 199–200 Fitzgerald, J. 115, 117, 215 Flores, N. 225 fluency 167, 173, 179 Foley, J. 218–219 Fontaine, L. 206 Forey, G. 17, 30, 136, 164, 172, 176, 185, 186, 217 formalism 9–12, 79–81, 183, 184 formal vs. informal language use see register Forsyth, I. 100, 102 Frankel, K. 229 Freedle, R. 46 French 151, 152, 180 Fries, P.H. 29, 30 Fulcher, G. 116 Functional Grammar (FG) 79 Furuya, R. 178, 179 Gallagher, C. 97 Galloway, E.P. 107, 136–137, 186, 218

Garcia Parejo, I. 106 Gardner, S. 105, 131, 140n4, 210, 211, 225 Gebhard, M. 105, 135, 136, 218, 229, 231, 233 genre-­based pedagogy (GBP) 103–106, 131–136, 189n5, 229–232; examples of 121, 134–135, 163–165, 167–172, 176–178, 221 German 70, 160–162, 178, 184, 186–187, 224–225 Gibbons, J. 222 Gibbons, P. 174, 175, 185, 217, 218 Given-­New 17, 30, 48–49, 64 Givón, T. 182 Gleason, J. 174, 175, 180–181, 217 Gledhill, C. 12, 154 Glenn, C.G. 116, 120, 121 grammatical metaphor 24–27, 84–85, 97, 161–163, 165–167, 178, 180, 182, 206–208, 233 Gray, B. 181 Gray, J.W. 174, 223, 224 Greaves, W. 235n2 Greenbaum, S. 224 Greenfield, P.M. 38–39, 48–49, 53, 65 Gregory, M. 153 Gruber, J.S. 48 Halliday, M.A.K. 1–5, 7, 9, 12–15, 17–27, 29, 31n1, 32n6, 38–39, 45, 47–77, 79, 84, 86n7, 94–96, 98–101, 103, 108, 110, 113–117, 122, 126, 131, 133, 137, 149–161, 163, 169, 176, 181–185, 187, 189n1, 189n2, 190n7, 199–206, 208–213, 225–228, 232, 234n1, 235n2, 235n3 Hamilton, C.E. 179–80 Hammond, J. 172, 217, 218, 229 Hao, J. 206, 207 Harder, P. 212–213 Harman, R. 105, 170, 217, 231–233 Hasan, R. 4–6, 19, 29, 73–74, 98–99, 113–117, 120, 123, 130, 138, 160, 161, 169, 183, 199, 200, 210–212, 214, 215, 230 Haspelmath, M. 43 Hassinger-­Das, B. 215, 233 Hellal, P. 39 Henrichs, L.F. 96, 213, 228, 232 Hermansson, C. 134 heuristic microfunction see microfunction Hewings, A. 26, 163 Hipkiss, A.M. 107 Hirsh-­Pasek, K. 215, 228, 232

Index Hodge, B. 101, 102 Hodgson-Drysdale, T. 135 Holger, D. 85 Holliday, A. 184 holophrastic phase 46, 48, 61, 62 Hood, S. 28 Hoogeveen, M. 134–135 Housen, A. 179, 181 Huang, J. 176–177, 186 Hudson, R. 225 Hu, G. 185, 186 Humphrey, S. 28, 105, 131–132, 171, 175, 185–186, 217 Hymes, D. 155, 157 hyperTheme 30, 113, 186 Iddings, J. 105 identification, system of 166, 173 imaginative microfunction see microfunction immersion 132, 134, 135, 169, 175, 217 informal language see register informational text 119–121, 124–125, 127, 135, 164, 171 informative microfunction see microfunction Ingram, D. 40, 41, 46–48, 65, 76 innateness 11, 43–45, 48, 76, 79–80 input 44, 50, 72–74, 79, 86n4, 203 instantiation 15, 209–211; cline of 18–19 instrumental microfunction see microfunction interactional microfunction see microfunction interlanguage 160, 183–185 intersubjectivity 5, 7, 51–53, 57, 66, 67, 97, 157 intervention 4–5, 104–106, 111, 112, 126–130, 134–137, 162–164, 167–178, 215, 217, 222 intonation 24, 47, 48, 61, 63, 68, 72, 124, 235n1 Italian 124, 126 Jakobson, R. 42, 45, 50, 55 James, B. 129–130, 134, 216 Japanese 161, 174, 178–179, 184 Jeong, H. 136 Jesso, B. 214 Johnson, K. 155, 157 Jones, I. 116 Jones, L.G. 45 Jones, P.E. 226

251

Jones, P.T. 179, 187, 218 Jones, R. 221 Kalantzis, M. 133, 210, 231 Kamberelis, G. 119–121, 127, 134, 215 Kang, J.Y. 160 Kaplan, B. 3–4, 78 Karlstrom, P. 168–169, 234 Karmiloff-­Smith 50 Kartika-­Ningsih, H. 232 Kaufer, D. 165 Kawamitsu, S. 178, 186, 234 Kays, J. 124, 215 Kellogg, D. 122, 129 Kerfoot, C. 171, 176, 185, 217 Keshavarz, M.H. 71–72 Keys, C.W. 111, 129 Khote, N. 232 Kim, C.-J. 111–112, 216 King, N. 225 Knight, N. 205 Korean 160 Kormos, J. 164–165 Kress, G. 30, 85 Kubinski, W. 81 Kuiken, F. 179 Kyle, K. 165–166 Labov, W. 50, 104 Lancaster, Z. 28 Langacker, R. 81 Lan, S.-W. 170, 185, 217 Larsen-­Freeman, D. 2, 7, 157, 183 Lasnik, H. 44 learning 1–7, 38, 43–44, 49, 62–64, 79–80, 82–84, 96, 107, 125, 129, 149, 150, 153–154, 177, 186–187, 220, 227, 229; deep 131, 137, 138 Leblanc, L.A. 42 Leckie-­Tarry, H. 97 Lee, B. 38 Lee, I. 169 Lee, S.H. 28 Lefstein, A. 216, 228 Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) 106–107, 213 Leopold, W.F. 39, 42, 52 Leung, C. 137, 216 Levelt, W.M. 39–42 Lewis, M. 46 lexical density 161, 173, 181 lexical development 40, 61–63

252 Index Liardét, C.L. 27, 28, 161–163, 166, 180, 182, 207 Lieven, E.V. 79 Lin, A.M. 107 Lindren, E. 234 literacy 25, 27, 95, 98, 100–103, 106, 110, 118, 127, 128, 131–136, 166, 168, 171; critical 133, 230–232; reflection 230 Liu, X. 28, 154 Liu,Y. 107 Llinares, A. 28, 105, 163, 164, 166, 175, 208, 215–216 Lo,Y.Y. 107, 136 Lock, G. 221 logico-­semantic relations 71, 111, 122, 130 logogenesis 3 Lorch, M. 39 Luke, A. 225 Lukin, A. 19, 211 Lundin, E. 168–169, 234 Lust, B. 44 MacKay, D. 100, 102, 103 Macken-­Horarik, M. 172, 217, 220, 229, 230, 233 Macnaught, L. 105, 171–172, 175–176, 185–186, 217 macrofunction 62–64, 68–70, 72, 73, 75, 77–79, 82, 201–203, 232 macroTheme 30, 113, 186 MacWhinney, B. 49 Maeng, S. 111–112, 216 Mahboob, A. 105, 169, 205 Malinowski, B. 21, 55, 57, 86n6 Mammone, G. 170, 229 Marckwick-­Smith,V. 222 Martin, J.R. 4, 22–23, 27–28, 30, 103–107, 126, 131, 136, 166, 168, 183, 189n1, 200, 201, 206, 208–213, 216, 218–220, 231, 234 Martineau, J.A. 127, 175, 228 mathetic macrofunction see macrofunction Maton, K. 106–107, 137, 162 Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. 11–15, 19, 22, 26, 152, 182, 183, 200, 206, 220, 232, 234n1 Matychuk, P. 72–73 Maxwell-­Reid, C. 30, 160 Mazgutova, D. 164–165 Mazuka, R. 44 McCabe, Alyssa 214 McCabe, Anne 27, 28, 107, 154, 162, 166, 175, 207, 216

McCarthy, D. 41 McCulley, G.A. 29, 113 McNamara, D.S. 165–166, 181 McNamara, T. 225 McNeill, D. 43 Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) 72 meaning-­making 2, 4, 6, 7, 12, 15, 18, 26, 28, 30, 39, 53, 61, 62, 64, 75, 84, 94, 97–98, 104, 121, 130, 156, 165, 169, 179, 185, 187, 199, 210, 213–218, 227, 229, 231, 233; see also semiosis Melrose, R. 155, 219 metafunctions 15–18, 56, 57, 70–72, 82, 110, 129, 150, 156, 161, 162, 179, 200–202; ideational/experiential 63, 113, 204, 223; interpersonal 27–28, 63, 68, 77, 84–85, 204, 223; textual 29, 30, 64, 68, 112, 113, 182 metalanguage 102, 104, 106, 107, 112, 136–137, 172, 178, 185–186, 217–219, 221, 224–225, 231–232 Mickan, P. 105 microfunction 53–68, 71–73, 76, 78, 84, 86n7, 201–203, 232 Miller, R.T. 165 Millin, M. 106, 173, 175, 217 Millin, T. 106, 173, 175, 217 modality 79, 84, 221–222 mode 83, 97, 114, 117–118, 174, 210, 216 Mohan, B. 176–177, 186 Montanari, S. 166–167, 175 mood 13, 14, 16, 17, 23–24, 26 Moore, J. 135, 136, 169, 185, 233 Moran, M. 229 Morris, D. 55–56 Morton, T. 28, 105, 164, 208, 216 Moskver, K.V. 177–178, 186, 234 Moya Guijarro, A.J. 85 multimodality 30–31, 85–86, 110, 112, 136, 215, 230, 231 Murphy, T. 161 Mwinlaaru, K.V. 234 Myhill, D. 136 Myskow, G. 28, 161 narrative 64, 82, 104, 112, 114, 116–121, 123–126, 170, 173, 178, 180, 214, 215 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 113–114 National Assessment Program–Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) 171–172 native speaker 184 Nelson, K. 39, 47, 81, 214 Nesi, H. 105

Index Neuner, J.T. 29, 116 Newson, J. 66 nominalization, nominalized forms 25, 97, 137, 161, 165, 172, 182, 206–207 Norris, J.M. 176 North, S. 123 Nuthall, G. 125–126, 183, 215 O’Donnell, M. 210, 211, 221, 235n3 O’Dowd, E. 162, 182, 184 O’Hallaron, C. 136 O’Halloran, K.L. 30 Ong, W.J. 117 Ono, M. 28, 161 ontogenesis 3, 45, 47 Ortega, L. 176, 183 orthogenetic principle 78 Ossa Parra, M. 232 Oteíza, T. 217 O’Toole, M. 30 Otto, B.W. 29, 117, 228 Painter, C. 27, 28, 45, 51, 66–69, 75, 77–79, 82–86, 220, 232, 233 Palincsar, A.S. 128, 136, 169, 217, 233 Pappas, C.C. 120, 121, 123 Paprotté, W. 49 paradigmatic axis 7–9, 12–15, 82, 152, 200, 202, 204, 205, 223–224 Parkinson, J. 167–168, 175, 217 Pascual Peña, I. 215–216 Pea, R.D. 3–4 Pearce, J. 100 Pellegrini, A.D. 116 performance 10–11, 155, 157–158 periodicity 30 Perrett, G. 176 Persian 70 personal microfunction see microfunction Pessoa, S. 165 Peterson, C. 214, 215 phonology 22–23, 42, 50 phylogenesis 3, 207 Pienaar, P.T. 102 Pine, J.M. 79 Pinto, G. 124, 126, 134, 135, 175 Pivot: constructions 81; grammar 43–44, 46 play 46, 60, 61, 109–110, 215 Plum, G. 103 Poonpon, K. 181 Potts, D. 228–230 poverty of stimulus 44–45, 50, 79

253

pragmatic macrofunction see macrofunction Praxedes Filho, P.H. 176, 183–184, 224 Principle of Non-­coreference (Principle C) 44–45, 80 procedural text 127, 135, 164, 170 Proctor, C. 128, 134, 175 Prosser, M. 112–113 proto-­structure 46, 62–63, 68–69, 203 protolanguage 24, 32n8, 40, 50, 52, 57, 59, 66, 68, 75, 84, 200–201, 203 Purcell-­Gates,V. 127, 133–135, 228 Qi,Y. 164, 166, 176, 208 question types 74, 98–99, 112, 121–122, 213–216 Qui, S. 69 Quirk, R. 224 Ramos, K.A. 106 Ravelli, L. 207 realization 13–14, 21–23, 25, 51, 80, 101, 156, 203, 204, 209, 210 register 19–20, 96–98, 103, 106–107, 119, 127–128, 153, 200, 201, 209–212, 220, 229–230; academic 128, 137, 166, 172, 230; formal vs. informal 3, 95–98, 100–101, 137, 174, 177–178, 181–182, 216, 232; instructional vs. regulative 106; variables see field, mode, tenor regulatory microfunction see microfunction Reichelt, M. 234 research methods 31, 41–42, 44–45, 65, 72, 81, 126, 128, 134–135, 163, 173–176, 215, 234 Roehr-­Brackin, K. 234 Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) 79–80 role play 163, 178 Romeo, R.R. 214, 232 Rose, D. 85, 104, 106, 136, 168, 218, 220, 232 Rothery, J. 103–105 Royce, T. 31 Russian 43, 177–178 Ryshina-­Pankova, R. 27, 150, 157, 161, 162, 175, 181, 182, 224–225, 234 Salmaso, G. 220 Salmon, K. 215 Sampson, N. 17, 30 Saraceni, M. 221

254 Index Sautter, R.A. 42 Savignon, S. 155 scaffolding 4–5, 104, 106, 107, 119–121, 123, 126, 129, 168, 175, 179, 183, 218, 232–233; predictive 113 Schaub, P. 100 Schleppegrell, M. 99, 128, 135, 136, 139n1, 157, 169–170, 217, 227, 229, 230, 233 Schlesinger, I.M. 76, 78 Schrader, C.T. 109–110, 215 Seah, L.-H. 110, 121, 216 Selinker, L. 183 semantic density 107, 213 semantic functions 47, 76 semantic gravity 107, 213 semantic variation 5–6 semantic wave 107, 137, 162 Sembiante, S.F. 225 semiosis 3, 4, 31, 83, 125, 208, 231; see also meaning-­making semiotic mediation 4–5 Sengupta, S. 164, 217 Shanahan, 118–119, 215 Shatz, M. 40 Shi, D. 172–173, 217, 234 Shin, D.-S. 166, 167, 231 Shin, J.-Y 122, 129 Shum, M.S.-K. 172–173, 217, 234 Sinha, C. 49 Skinner, B.F. 42, 45, 80 Slater, T. 174, 175 Slobin, D.I. 43, 76–78 Smith, B.A. 30 Smith, J.H. 38–39, 53, 65 Smithers, R.W. 174, 223, 224 Smolkin, L.B. 121 Snell, J. 216, 227, 228 Snow, C. 72, 73 socialization, language 6, 56–57, 74, 75, 95–96, 98–99, 101, 120, 133, 149, 174, 226–227 Solomon,Y. 216 Spanish 6, 7, 31n3, 105, 106, 128, 161–162, 166–167, 174, 176, 177, 180–181, 205, 220 speech acts 48, 53, 66, 86n5 speech function 23, 66, 69, 85, 176, 202–204, 212, 216 Spiegel, D.L. 115, 117, 215 Spycher, P. 173, 217 Sriniwass, S. 70–71 Stein, N.L. 116, 120, 121

Steiner, E. 185 Stenglin, M. 105 Stern, C. 40–41 Stern, D.N. 46 Stern, H. 152, 157 Stern, W. 40–41 stratification 22–24, 103, 156, 182, 199–208, 210–211 Stude, J. 137, 186 Su, S.-W. 167, 217 Sulzby, E. 117, 118 Swain, E. 28 Swain, M. 155 Swedish 135, 168–169 Symons, C. 128, 135, 169, 217 syntagmatic axis 7–9, 12–15, 70, 82, 152, 200, 202–204, 223 system networks 13–14, 101, 176, 203–204, 211, 212, 219–222 Tai, C.P. 172–173, 217, 234 Tajino, A. 223–224 Tan, S.-C. 121, 216 Tann, K. 210 Tarchi, C. 124, 126, 175 Taverniers, M. 24, 56, 151, 200–203, 232 Taylor, C. 30 Taylor, C.E. 136 teacher professional development 107, 171, 172, 218, 229 Teaching-­Learning-­Cycle (TLC) 105, 126, 135, 174, 178, 221, 233 Tellier, A. 234 Tenbrink, T. 70 tenor 213, 216 texture 29, 123; see also coherence Theme-­Rheme 16, 17, 30, 48–49, 71, 123, 182 Thomas, A. 112, 136 Thompson, B. 100 Thompson, G. 206 Thompson, L. 219 Thornton, G. 38, 100 Thornton, R. 44–45 Tinzmann, M.B. 118–119, 215 Tomasello, M. 80–82 Torr, J. 27, 52, 69–70, 73, 79, 84 transfer 123, 160, 173, 174, 178, 213, 217, 218, 222 transitivity 16–17, 47, 48, 60, 76–79, 83, 154, 176, 177, 179–180, 184, 200, 203, 204, 206, 221, 223, 224

Index translanguaging 232 Trevarthen, C. 51, 66 Troyan, F.J. 176, 186, 225, 234 Uccelli, P. 137, 186 Unsworth, L. 31, 112, 233 usage-­based approaches 80–81, 182 van Dijk, T. 114, 211 van Gelderen, A. 134–135 Van Heerden, M. 171, 176, 185, 217 van Leeuwen, T. 30, 85 Van Valin, R.D. 79–80 Varelas, M. 110, 213, 226 Vedder, I. 179 Veel, R. 27, 103 Ventola, E. 103, 219–220 Vygotsky, L. 4, 5, 120, 122 Waletzky, J. 104 Walsh, P. 99 Wareham, P. 215 Watson, A. 136 Webb, C. 112–113 Webster, J.J. 38, 53

255

Weir, R. 55 Wells, G. 73, 216 Werner, H. 78 White, P.R.R. 22–23, 27–28, 170–171, 229 Whittaker, R. 27, 28, 105, 106, 166, 167, 179, 207, 216, 234 Wiebe, E. 229 Willet, K. 163, 179, 208, 217 Williams, G. 5, 51, 136, 230 Williams, J. 187 Williamson, M.M. 29, 116, 117 Wollman-­Bonilla, J.E. 126, 134, 135, 216, 231 Wood, K. 100, 102 Woodward-­Kron, R. 129, 134 Xuan, W. 234 Yasuda, S. 165, 167, 168, 175, 176, 179, 185, 217 Yigitoglu, N. 234 Zammit, K. 231 Zappavigna, M. 231