Women in Social Semiotics and SFL: Making a Difference [1 ed.] 9780367356026, 9781032057439, 9780429352270

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Women in Social Semiotics and SFL

This book showcases interviews with nine women who have made pioneering contributions to social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics (SFL), highlighting how these women have taken the discipline into new and innovative directions, and the enduring impact of their work. The volume features interviews with a generation of scholars inspired by the prominent linguists Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan in Sydney, reflecting on their achievements in the advancement of theory, knowledge, and practical application as well as the establishment of research centers in different parts of the world. A consistent interview format helps to illustrate the different directions the work of these scholars has taken and their different takes on key concepts to the discipline such as register, genre, text and context, and multimodality. Taken together, the interviews offer insights into key strands of social semiotics and SFL scholarship and give inspiration toward moving the field into new theoretical and applied directions. Reflecting on the groundbreaking work of renowned women scholars in social semiotics and SFL and their continued global impact, this book will be key reading for students and scholars in these fields, as well as those in the areas of language pedagogy, literacy, and multimodality. Eva Maagerø (born 1951) is professor of Norwegian at University of South-Eastern Norway, Department of Languages and Literature Studies. Her research interests are social semiotics, systemic functional linguistics, multimodality, and literacy. She has published extensively and co-authored Social Semiotics; Key Figures, New Directions (Routledge, 2015). Ruth Mulvad (born 1948) is former associate professor at National Center for Reading, University Colleges in Denmark. She has researched SFL-based teaching and learning across the curriculum in primary and secondary school and in teacher education. She has published on SFL in education, theoretical texts, and teaching materials. Elise Seip Tønnessen (born 1951) is Professor Emeritus in Department of ­Nordic and Media Studies, University of Agder, Norway. Her research interests include literacy, multimodality, and children’s literature and media culture. She has co-edited Multimodality and Aesthetics (Routledge, 2019) and co-­authored Social Semiotics; Key Figures, New Directions (Routledge, 2015).

Routledge Studies in Linguistics







For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Linguistics/book-series/SE0719.

Women in Social Semiotics and SFL Making a Difference

Eva Maagerø, Ruth Mulvad, Elise Seip Tønnessen

First published 2022 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 © 2022 Taylor & Francis The right of Eva Maagerø, Ruth Mulvad, Elise Seip Tønnessen to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them 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 A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-35602-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-05743-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-35227-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429352270 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Preface

vii

1 Introduction

1

2 Frances Christie

9

3 Beverly Derewianka

34

4 Mary Macken-Horarik

54

5 Kay O’Halloran

76

6 Clare Painter

96

7 Mary Schleppegrell

118

8 Diana Slade

136

9 Terry Threadgold

156

10 Eija Ventola

180

11 Discussion

201

Index of Names

223

Preface

This book consists of a collection of interviews with nine scholars from Australia, Europe, and USA. The first interviews were conducted in July 2018, the last two in January 2020. The interviewees have their background in Michael Halliday’s social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics. The work of Halliday has had an immense influence on the understanding of language and other meaning making systems around the world since the 1960s. The nine interviewees belong to the generation after Halliday. In their research and practical work, they have refined and developed Halliday’s theories and concepts further by taking social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics to new contexts and new fields such as education, multimodality, health, politics, law, tourism, digital communication, etc. Their contribution to the position social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics has among researchers, students, and practitioners today is significant. In the interviews, they state that they want to make a difference with their work. The nine scholars are all women. An aim of this book has been to shed light on the work and contributions of female researchers; as female scholars ourselves, we have had a special interest to get insight in how these nine female scholars have found their way into academia, what their interests have been, and what kind of trajectories they have followed in their research. As scholars in social semiotics, we have followed the emergence and development of the field through decades. This has resulted in three interview books: one covering the founding generation, containing interviews with Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan (published in Norwegian, 2001), and two covering the following generation (Social Semiotics; Key Figures, New Direction (2015)) and the present volume. We want to thank the nine interviewees for the time they spent with us when we conducted the interviews, and for their openness and their readiness to share their knowledge and thoughts with us. The personal meetings with these nine scholars have informed us about social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics in ways that books and articles could never accomplish. The interviews were conducted in Boston, Canberra, Cardiff, Helsinki, Liverpool, and Sydney. This fact meant long

viii Preface journeys for the three of us behind this book. The journeys gave us rich possibilities for discussion, exchange of ideas, and friendship. We are grateful that we have been able to make this book together. Eva Maagerø, Professor, University of South-Eastern, Norway, Department of Languages and Literature studies Ruth Mulvad, former Associate Professor, National Center for Reading, University Colleges, Denmark Elise Seip Tønnessen, Emeritus Professor, University of Agder, Norway, Department of Nordic and Media Studies.

1

Introduction

In this book, the reader will meet interviews with nine scholars who are well known all over the world for their extensive and important work. They are frequently quoted by researchers and students and their publications are present in the reading lists of university courses in all continents. Their work is also well known by practitioners in several fields and has led to new and better ways of working with language and texts in different areas of society. The nine scholars are in alphabetical order: • • • • • • • • •

Frances Christie Beverly Derewianka Mary Macken-Horarik Kay O’Halloran Clare Painter Mary Schleppegrell Diana Slade Terry Threadgold Eija Ventola

Six of the scholars are born in Australia; three of them come from another continent, Mary Schleppegrell from the USA, Eija Ventola from Finland, and Clare Painter was born in England and immigrated to Australia after her graduation. However, Terry Threadgold has spent much of her working life in Cardiff in Wales, and Diana Slade has worked for several years in Hong Kong. Kay O’Halloran stayed many years in Singapore, and is now in Liverpool in England. Eija Ventola has her doctoral degree from Australia and has held positions in both Germany and Austria before she returned to Finland. However, all nine scholars have international networks and partners they cooperate with. In their positions at different universities, new generations of students have met them as teachers, and at many international conferences, seminars, and meetings around the world, researchers have got to know them, learned from them, and been inspired by them. Their careers have taken different paths, but they are all united in having social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics as the foundation DOI: 10.4324/9780429352270-1

2 Introduction of their work. The British linguist Michael A.K. Halliday is the founder of social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics; the nine scholars belong to the generation after Halliday. They have all been connected to him in one way or another and have been influenced by him; some directly by being a student at his department of linguistics at the University of Sydney, and having him as a teacher; others by discovering his works early in their career, such as Mary Schleppegrell who found Halliday’s Introduction to Systemic Functional Grammar already in the middle of the 1980s in the Center for Applied Linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington. In the interview, she tells how this changed her studies and research. Belonging to the generation after Halliday, means that all the nine scholars are now in their sixties or older. They can look back at their scholarship and reflect upon their work, what they have achieved, and which goals they have had. One important aim of the interviews in this book has been to present these reflections. Social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics is a strong direction in the field of language and text studies today. In all continents, scholars work with Halliday’s way of describing language and understanding meaning making. Scholars have developed Halliday’s work further, nuanced it, and brought his ideas to new fields and new contexts. Many scholars could therefore have been presented in this book. The selection we have made is based on some criteria: the scholars should all represent the generation after Halliday and thus be able to look back on a long career. To describe how academic life develops has been another aim of this book. In addition, the selected scholars should have contributed significantly to social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics in their field. We wanted them to represent different fields in their applied research, and the nine selected scholars work in education, health communication, digital communication, politics, and tourism. Last but not least, we wanted all scholars to be females. The reason for this last criterion is that the team behind this book are females, and we simply wanted to shed light on the large academic contribution from female scholars. Even if several other female scholars could have been included in this book, these nine scholars were our primary choice. The book consists of interviews with the nine scholars, this short introduction and a final chapter where we discuss some of the topics we found especially interesting across the interviews. All interviews have been conducted with the help of an interview guide where most questions have been similar for all the interviews; some questions have, however, varied according to each interviewee’s scholarship. Each interview starts with a short presentation of the scholar. After the interview, the reader finds a reference list consisting of the titles mentioned in the interview, and also a short list of the publications each interviewee sees as their most important contributions to the field. Our aim has been to conduct interviews that may serve as an introduction to central scholarships,

Introduction  3 and inspire scholars, students and practitioners in further education to move into new theoretical and applied fields. The interview form has its strength in that it serves well as an introduction to complex academic work. The book will also shed light on central questions in the history of social semiotics and SFL. The interviews have been recorded and transcribed, and then edited by us. Each scholar has commented on the interviews before we have revised and completed them. In this way, we hope that the interviews have kept the personal ‘voice’ of each scholar. The reader will therefore not meet standardised texts even if, as mentioned above, several of the questions we asked each scholar were the same.

The Beginning In 1975 Michael Halliday was offered a position as a foundation professor at the new Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia. His wife, Ruqaiya Hasan, was at the same time offered a position as senior lecturer at Macquarie University, also in Sydney, and took later a position as professor of linguistics there. The couple moved from Britain to Australia in 1976 and remained there throughout their whole working life. Michael Halliday died in 2018 and Ruqaiya Hasan in 2015. Halliday and Hasan have had a tremendous influence on the development of theoretical and applied linguistics in Australia and worldwide. Halliday succeeded in making the Department of Linguistics attractive to young ambitious researchers and students nationally and internationally. In the interview with Diana Slade, she refers to Halliday’s dream of getting a community of people from around the world to develop systemic functional linguistics and related disciplines. In this community, there was also room for younger researchers. A new generation of scholars from Australia and other parts of the world met, discussed, and developed their ideas, and made Halliday’s dream come through. In this stimulating context, two networks were established in the 1980s: The Newtown Semiotic Circle and LERN (the Literacy and Education Research Network). The participants in The Newton semiotic circle were especially interested in theoretical issues. The members were among others Anne Cranny-Francis, Robert Hodge, Gunther Kress, Jay Lemke, Jim R. Martin, Paul Thibault, Terry Threadgold, and Theo van Leeuwen. They gathered in Gunther Kress’ house in Newtown, which gave name to the circle. The participants of the LERN network were mainly interested in questions about how social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics could be applied above all in education. The members were among others Bill Cope, Mary Kalantzis, Gunther Kress, Mary Macken-Horarik, Jim R. Martin, Joan Rothery, and Diana Slade. Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan showed interest in both networks. The two networks have had a strong impact on the participants’ personal

4 Introduction career, but they have also contributed to further development of social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics in general. The participants were mostly a generation younger than Halliday and Hasan, and in the beginning of their career. The networks helped them raise new questions to the theory and to its application in several fields. They saw new research possibilities, and not least they tried out their own concepts and ideas among fellow scholars. In this way, this new generation of scholars has taken Halliday’s and Hasan’s ideas to new frontiers. The members took positions at different universities in Australia and in different continents, and spread the knowledge and potential of social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics all over the world. They have contributed to the rich work on social semiotics we see in many different fields and places today. The interviews in this book point in different ways to the engaging and stimulating social semiotic networks of the 1980s and 1990s in Australia as several of the scholars interviewed in this book participated in one of the two networks, or cooperated with Halliday, Hasan, or members of the networks later. The interviews show also cooperation between the scholars we have interviewed and their large networks (see the index at the end of the book).

Social Semiotics and Systemic Functional Linguistics Social semiotics is a social theory of meaning making and communication. The term social semiotics was first introduced by Michael Halliday in his book Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning in 1978. Halliday builds on the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who defined semiotics as the life of signs within society. Semiotics for Halliday is the study of meaning making systems, and he sees language as the most fundamental meaning making system for homo sapiens. In his book, Halliday emphasises the social aspect of signs. Semiotics has to be located in social practices because meaning making unfolds in the social and will always be a social process. It follows that he sees language as a system of meaning making signs that come into existence in social practices in a community. Language is not a frozen system of signs and rules; it does not arise in the minds of individuals. It is an evolving and dynamic meaning making system that is shaped by what is needed when people communicate with each other in different social contexts. It is shaped by its usage: language is as it is because of what it has to do (Halliday 1978). The way language has developed and the whole inner organisation of language has evolved from its functions in society. When Halliday refers his semiotics as social semiotics, he emphasises the fact that the inner features of language, the grammar, is included in this social approach, not only the different ways

Introduction  5 of using language. According to Halliday (2004, p. 21) grammar is “the central processing unit of language, the powerhouse where meanings are created”. The use of language works back on the system shaping it and evolving it over time. The whole language system is a social construction. Language is not only functional; it is also systemic. The language system can therefore be seen as a meaning potential offering the users a set of options for their communication in given social contexts. While structure is the syntagmatic ordering in language, the systemic dimension is the paradigmatic order of language. The entry of a clause has consequences for the rest of the clause. Halliday (2004, p. 23) states: “A language is a resource of meaning making, and meaning resides in systemic patterns of choice”. A text is a product of selections in a large network of systems. It is selected from the total set of options that constitute what can be meant (Halliday 1978, p. 109). Social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics can be understood as two different levels. While social semiotics is a general theory about meaning making in social contexts, systemic functional linguistics is a description of language as a social construction where all elements contribute to make meaning. Metafunctions Some of Halliday’s basic concepts continue to have a strong position in the work of the next generation of social semioticians, also in the work of the scholars interviewed in this book. In an interview in 1999 (Maagerø and Tønnessen 2001, p. 26), Halliday was asked about how universal his grammatical theory is, and which concepts that could be used to describe any language. Halliday has primarily worked with English and Chinese when he developed his theory. He said that he did not normally use the characteristic ‘universal’ about his grammar. He has tried to make a clear distinction between theoretic and descriptive categories. Theoretical categories are systems, structures, strata, rank, and not least the three metafunctions. Such categories are theoretical because they cannot be proved or disproved, but they are important ‘tools’ in the description of a language. Halliday’s three metafunctions are three fundamental ways of meaning that are present at the same time in all use of language: the ideational, the interpersonal, and the textual metafunction. The ideational metafunction is the potential of language to represent the world around us and inside us; it consists of two dimensions: the construction of experience and the logic where one aspect of experience is related to another. The interpersonal metafunction is the communicative meaning of language as “language is always enacting our personal and social relationships with other people around us” (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014, p. 30).

6 Introduction The textual metafunction relates to the construction of texts. Halliday calls this metafunction a facilitating function as the two other metafunctions depend on the textual to “build up sequences of discourse, organizing the discursive flow, and creating cohesion and continuity as it moves along” (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014, p. 31). Some scholars in the generation after Halliday have transferred the metafunctions to other semiotic systems, for example, to images, stating that images represent, interact, and have a composition parallel to ideational, interpersonal, and textual meaning in verbal language. The scholars interviewed in this book use the metafunctions as important categories in their work. Their view on the metafunctions is discussed in the final chapter. Context of Culture and Context of Situation According to Halliday, language operates always in contexts. Context extends along the cline of instantiation “from the overall contextual potential of a community to the contextual instances involving particular people interacting and exchanging meanings on particular occasions” (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014, p. 32). Inspired by Malinowski’s work, (1923) Halliday uses the notions context of culture for the contextual potential of a society and context of situation for the instantiation of this potential. This is a parallel to language as system and text as an instantiation of the system. Halliday’s description of context of situation is characterised in terms of field, tenor, and mode. Field is what is going on in the situation, the social activity and the domain of experience the activity relates to. The tenor refers to who is taking part in the activity, and the relations between the participants. The mode relates to the role language and other semiotic systems play in the situation, and the division of labour between language and other meaning making systems. Field, tenor, and mode are related variables that influence the language use in the situation. They configure a certain register that is functional in the specific situation. Register is a semantic concept. It can be defined as a complex of meanings that are normally associated with a special combination of field, tenor, and mode in a certain situation. The relationship between language use and context is, however, dynamic. A change in register can change the context from, for example, more formal to less formal. Hasan (1985) has pointed this out clearly in her notion contextual configuration where she emphasises the strongly intertwined relations of the context variables and the realised language. If one variable slightly changes, the situation changes and hence the language. According to Halliday & Matthiessen (1985, 2014), there are systematic correspondences between context variables and the three metafunctions: the field resonates with ideational meanings, the tenor with interpersonal meanings, and the mode with textual meanings. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014, p. 34) says that “the correspondences between

Introduction  7 context and language are based on the functional organization of both orders of meaning”. In the interviews, the nine scholars are asked about context and register, and their views are discussed in the discussion chapter. Multimodality Halliday and Hasan have focused on verbal language in their work. In linguistics, text is an instance of the linguistic system, and in systemic functional linguistics, the term text includes both spoken and written instances of the linguistic system (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014, p. 46). Halliday has, however, opened up for the fact that social semiotics includes other meaning making systems than language, for example in the last version of his Introduction to Functional Grammar from 2014 (revised by Christian Matthiessen) where the extension of the sense of text to other semiotic systems is discussed. The following quote from 1985 can serve as an early example of Halliday’s view on text: The important thing about the nature of a text is that, although when we write it down it looks as it is made of words and sentences, it is really made of meanings […A] text is essentially a semantic unit. (Halliday 1985, p. 10) The understanding of text as a unit of meaning includes, as we see it, a multimodal approach integrating other semiotic systems such as visual and auditory meaning making (images, design, sound, music, colour, etc.). Several of the scholars in the networks mentioned above, and not least Kay O’Halloran among our interviewees, have developed Halliday’s social semiotics in their work with other meaning making systems, and also, in how different meaning making systems work together and support each other in rich configurations of meaning in multimodal ensembles. Especially visual meaning making has received much attention in multimodal research. One reason for this focus may be the role images play in social media and generally in digital media. In this introduction, the content of the book and how the interviews were conducted is presented. The connection between the interviewees and the social semiotic community founded by Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan and also between some of the nine scholars and the Newtown Semiotic Circle and the LERN network in Sydney in the 1980s and 1990s has also been briefly introduced. Further, some of the basic concepts in social semiotics and systemic function linguistics have been explained primarily for readers who are less familiar with Halliday’s theory. Hopefully the presentations of these concepts make it easier to follow the interviews as these concepts are also fundamental in the work of the nine scholars represented in this book.

8 Introduction

References Halliday, M.A.K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic. The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. Edward Arnold. Halliday, M.A.K. (1985). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Edward Arnold. Halliday, M.A.K. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar (3rd ed.). Revised by Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen. Edward Arnold. Halliday, M.A.K. (2014). Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar (4th ed.). Revised by Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen. Routledge. Halliday, M.A.K. & Hasan, R. (1985). Language, Context and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective. Cambridge University Press. Maagerø, E. & Tønnessen, E. S. (2001). Samtaler om tekst, språk og kultur. Cappelen Akademisk Forlag. Malinowsky, B. (1923). The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages. In C. K. Ogden & I. A. Richards (eds). The Meaning of Meaning. A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. Harcourt, Brace & World, 296–336.

2

Frances Christie

Frances Christie is Emeritus Professor of Language and Literacy Education, the University of Melbourne. She has inspired and influenced educators all over the world as a keynote speaker at countless conferences, as instructor at international courses, and through her publications. She taught English and history in Australian schools, and in the UK before she started working in a teacher education programme at the University of Sydney in the 1970s. She worked in a national Language Development Programme in Canberra, later moving to Deakin University. Here she edited a series of books as course literature for the new degree programmes she designed, which soon became central works in the field of social semiotics and gained an invaluable importance for the prevalence of SFL in education all over the world. Later she moved to Northern Territory University and in the early 1990s to the University of Melbourne where she worked as Foundation Professor of Language and Literacy Education until her retirement in 2003. As an academic, she first studied young children learning to read and write. She researched pedagogic discourse in the later years of schooling, and also turned her attention to researching strategies for teaching knowledge about language (KAL) in secondary English classrooms.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429352270-2

10  Frances Christie She has studied writing development from Kindergarten to Year 12 and has also worked on knowledge structure and disciplinarity. The interview took place in Boston, USA, July 2018.

Academic Life Story Please Tell Us about Your Education, Special Interests, and How You Ended Up in Your Field? I was a schoolteacher, and I did not really aspire to be more than a schoolteacher. After the usual rough start, you have in getting into the classroom and dealing with bunches of 40 adolescent kids, I went on to enjoy teaching English and history. Like a lot of teachers of my generation I found that the traditional school grammar that I knew and was good at and enjoyed, was not necessarily relevant when you were teaching children, particularly kids in rural high schools. After teaching some years in London I returned to Australia. I started to read around the topic, and I commenced studies for a master’s degree in Education, at the University of Sydney. For that degree I traced the history of the teaching of English in the Anglo-Australian tradition and I therefore knew quite a lot about how the study of English emerged in schools and what values it appeared to represent. How Were You First Introduced to SFL/Social Semiotics? When M.A.K. Halliday arrived and offered his MA in Applied Linguistics I was attracted to his notions of a functional grammar. I was in fact excited by his arrival, for I had read his book Learning How to Mean (1975). I therefore enrolled to do the new MA as soon as I had finished the MEd and commenced attending master’s classes in the new Department of Linguistics, which I found very interesting. I am not saying that I immediately understood everything I read. Michael Halliday taught the functional grammar and Jim Martin was teaching register theory. He was a young, shy, long-haired Canadian fellow with a soft voice, who used to turn into the board to speak, and with his left hand write right across the board. You could not read his writing, and you could not hear his voice. That was a fun experience. We were about 25 students in the first class we had with Michael Halliday, and he opened by saying: ‘For my opening class, we’re going to address the question: “Why do English speakers use the passive voice”?’ I was really intrigued: to say to me that this was a problematic issue, with my background and all the teaching of English I had done! Of course, I realised eventually that this was his way of introducing the textual metafunction. Michael was a great teacher, a very modest, gentle and quiet man in the class.

Frances Christie  11 In the manner of Michael’s teaching style, we were invited to do any kind of research essay we wanted as part of an early unit of study. As the first task I did for him, I chose to look at the differences between speech and writing, which to me as a teacher had become a very important preoccupation, because I found it hard to teach about the differences. At a camping weekend with some friends in the summertime I asked: ‘Would you mind if I record our conversation?’ I recorded this ordinary breakfast conversation about coffee and toast or whatever it was. As one who had done this for the first time, I was utterly stunned by how different speech was from writing. It was one of those lightbulb moments in my life. When I went to say something to Michael about this, he said very gently: ‘Oh, that is everybody’s experience when they come to it for the first time’. Of course, such differences as those between speech and writing were what he and his colleagues were working on at Cambridge at the end of the Second World War. One of his colleagues, Jean Ure (Ure and Ellis 1979) coined the term ‘register’ to refer to changes in language depending on context. Ure took the term from music theory and it was early built into systemic theory. It is joyful to study and learn about language, as I found when I commenced my MA studies. The experience was so surprising, I thought, because I had worked so much with language and had lived with it from childhood. Then I was told all sorts of new things about it. Learning about language as a new object of study in a very different way was exciting for me. I finished my MA in applied linguistics in 1982 and moved immediately to a doctoral programme in the same department at the University of Sydney. At this stage in my life, I had two masters’ degrees – one in education, one in applied linguistics, and that was enough to get entry to a university position well away from Sydney. I started my PhD at a distance. I was Jim Martin’s doctoral student, but I was returning to Sydney for seminars with both him and Michael Halliday and then back to my university, Deakin University in rural Victoria. While You Were Doing Your MA in Linguistics You Also Worked with Curriculum Development. How Did That Experience Influence Your Thinking? Before I went to Deakin University, I worked for three years, 1978– 1981, at the national Curriculum Development Centre in Canberra where I co-ordinated the national Language Development Project in all Australian states. This project addressed the problems of language and literacy among students in the primary and junior secondary years. There is a significant learning step when children move from the primary to the secondary school, to a different kind of curriculum, with different demands upon the learning as the curriculum changes in secondary

12  Frances Christie school. Many children often drop behind, because of the so-called ‘literacy achievement gap’ in the English-speaking world. The Project was intended to generate action research programmes in the states, developing curriculum materials to improve the teaching of literacy. Michael Halliday was a consultant for this project. We adopted Halliday’s model of language development which involves three aspects: (1) learning language (i.e. the basic resources of sound and grammar, commenced in infancy); (2) learning through language (i.e. simultaneously learning to use language to shape experience, create relationships, make sense of the world); and (3) learning about the language (i.e. learning about the resource that is one’s language, including its grammar, its spelling system, and its sounds.). Teaching about language follows the other two and it is particularly the responsibility of the school, involving literacy and all the knowledge that literacy opens up. This model became almost notorious in Australia. There was, in some quarters, immense hostility to teaching knowledge about language (sometimes called ‘KAL’ for short). A progressivist way of thinking had become fashionable, which stressed ‘promotion’ or ‘facilitation’ of children’s ‘growth’ in language, but denied the value of teaching knowledge about it, on the grounds that this compromised children’s independent self-expression in language. Looking back, I think it was in some way a post-world war phenomenon. The war was over, the ‘cold war’ was diminishing, and we were all in some sort of brave new world, hoping and expecting that communities would be free, promoting children’s ‘growth’ in language (see Christie and Macken-Horarik 2011, pp. 180– 184 for some discussion). Constructivism came in, progressivism and process learning came in too, in much curriculum theory in Australia. I came into the Language Development Project in the 1970s, and walked straight into a situation, where there were so many people, particularly in the English-teaching profession who would shout at you across the room: ‘We will not have any knowledge about language in our classroom!’ Furthermore, Michael Halliday’s assertion that ‘learning language is learning how to mean’ was very disturbing to many teachers. What did he mean by such a statement? Meaning, he said, is encoded in the language system. Now that was immensely threatening and disturbing to some, who might have had rather uncertain views about meaning, but nonetheless thought it rested somewhere else! My role was made quite challenging because of the debates the model caused. What Did the Years at Deakin University Add to Your Experience? Deakin University is a distance education institution. We were all involved in writing course materials. Looking back, I can see that I arrived

Frances Christie  13 at Deakin at a fortuitous time. It had been a teacher’s college and was now turning into a university and new programmes of study were being developed. I seized the opportunities it gave me. At the master’s level I created two new courses, whose course books were published in the period 1985–1990. I actually conceived the two courses as an introduction to SFL theory with a strong pedagogical interest. I thus commissioned the writing of the books and this meant approaching all the writers to talk to them about what was involved. The courses were designed in sequence so that students could take up the second one only if they successfully completed the first. Course books for the two courses at Master’ level, Deakin University, commissioned by Frances Christie: Language and Learning Frances Christie (1985). Language Education Clare Painter (1989). Learning the Mother Tongue Michael Halliday & Ruqaiya Hasan (1985). Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective1 Jay Lemke (1985). Using Language in the Classroom Michael Halliday (1985). Spoken and Written Language Ruqaiya Hasan (1985). Linguistics, Language and Verbal Art Sociocultural Aspects of Language and Education David Butt (1989). Talking and Thinking: The Patterns of Behaviour Gunther Kress (1985). Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural Practice Jim R. Martin (1985). Factual Writing: Exploring and Challenging Social Reality Cate Poynton (1985). Language and Gender: Making the Difference Gunther Kress & Theo van Leeuween (1990). Reading Images The course books were each about 40,000 words in length. The Deakin University Press distributed them to students in the courses I taught, but they also sold them to anyone who wanted to buy. They were sold extensively around the world and were in time often cited in the literature. At the bachelor’s level programme, I chaired a course team that created a course called Children Writing. This course introduced many perspectives, since the team members held different views, though the contributions I created used SFL theory. I wrote some course sections (Christie 1984) and so did Joan Rothery (1984). I commissioned Jim Martin to write a course reading, called Language, Register and Genre (1984). This created international interest and has been republished in many other contexts ever since.

14  Frances Christie I did chase after the various writers to get the books written. They were all busy and they were now being asked to write course books for me. Furthermore, they would, for the most part, be original documents and that was quite a tall order. I clearly recall talking to Michael Halliday about how we had nothing original to say to our students about how writing differed from speech. We needed a grammar of speech and writing to offer teachers to work with, and that was why he wrote Spoken and Written Language (1985), which became very influential. I also recall talking to Ruqaiya Hasan about her contributions looking at the language of verbal art, for I argued that we had few tools to give teachers for discussion of literature in schools. I commissioned her to write Linguistics Language and Verbal Art (1985). I held similar conversations with all other contributors. As a matter of funny personal history, Michael and Ruqaiya were so busy that I went and stayed with them for about three days while we jointly created Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective (1985). It was conceived as an adaptation of a book with a similar title that appeared in Japan using papers that Halliday and Hasan had given at a Conference in Japan (see note 1). Looking back, I can only say that Michael and Ruqaiya were very gracious in allowing me to come to stay for three intense days. I also arranged for Jim Martin to fly down to Deakin for a few days while he developed the course reader mentioned earlier. I think I was immensely lucky. Chance and choice certainly played a role in my life. It was a little bit by chance that I got the job at Deakin University after having three years at the Curriculum Development Centre in Canberra. I was seen as a bit provocative, because I was using this model of language development that Halliday had created, I had an unfinished PhD, and they employed me nonetheless at Deakin University. And then I got to create these teaching programmes as well as undergraduate programmes in teaching and writing with course books for that as well. So that was a great moment in my career, really. And a fairly significant moment, I have to say a little immodestly, for systemic theory, because it generated a series of course books that created an immense international interest. Systemic theory was really there on the table now, nudging its way into educational practice and demanding that people looked at it. And it was taken up by a lot of English schools and universities around the world. Not long before his death, I visited Michael in the retirement home where he ended his life. I often visited and I enjoyed our talks. He said to me, ‘You know, looking back, I think the decision Ruqaiya and I made to come to Australia was one of the best decisions we ever made’. He went on to say that he was ‘quite proud’ that he had created the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. I was quite moved by this, and I responded by saying that their decision to come to Australia had had a major impact in my life, as well as the lives of many other people. He and

Frances Christie  15 Ruqaiya, I said, helped me gain the knowledge and the intellectual skills to build a quite different career from the one I might otherwise have had. I will always remain deeply grateful to them both for the opportunities they opened up in my life. They were two fine people, and they were also genuinely original scholars of great distinction.

Literacy What Does the Term ‘Literacy’ Mean to You? The word ‘literacy’ is historically very recent. If you track through the Oxford Dictionary of English, ‘literacy’ as a word emerged in the latter part of the 19th century. The word ‘literate’ was there for centuries, but ‘literacy’, the noun, is a very recent phenomenon historically. When I trained and started my teaching in the 1960s as a high school teacher, we did not use the word literacy, we spoke about people as literate. We did not talk about ‘language’ either, but mainly about ‘English’. Talk of ‘language’ and ‘language education’ (the term I prefer) dates from the late 1960s and 1970s and it reflects the upsurge of research interest in language in those years, stimulated in part by the ease with which language could be recorded and studied with the new recording technologies. Terms such as ‘language education’, ‘language and literacy’ became quite common. In fact, the term ‘language and literacy’ became fashionable after the 1970s and the chair that I was appointed to in the early 1990s at the University of Melbourne was a Chair in Language and Literacy Education. I was always a little uncomfortable about using the term ‘language and literacy’, because clearly literacy is simply a dimension of language. I thought it was an unnecessary dichotomy, though I note the term has generally prevailed. Why did the term ‘literacy’ become a term that was useful in the late 20th and 21st centuries? There clearly was some kind of shift going on in the culture, and as I have noted, research interest in language had caused a renewed interest from the 1960s on. Curriculum authorities began to talk of ‘language education policies’ and ‘literacy’ became common. Adoption of the term ‘literacy’ has the benefit that it stresses the unity of written language, avoiding a historically established tendency to see the activities of reading and writing as separate, and needing to be taught separately. In addition, use of the term draws attention to the fact that literate language is different from speech. From that point of view, it seems to me that the term can be useful. How Has SFL Contributed to the Understanding of How Children Learn to Read and Write? Functional grammar gives you a way of looking at the text that you are teaching the children to read or write, thinking about it always as a text,

16  Frances Christie and not as discrete isolated words. Seeing even a very simple children’s story book as a text is an important notion, for it means one must engage with how the language makes meaning. That is very much a systemic perspective. One of the projects that Michael Halliday led in his period in Great Britain led to the wonderful early childhood programme called ‘Break Through to Literacy’. That involved very young children learning to read and write, shaping and/or reading texts that were meaningful, and moving away from decontextualised simple sentences of the sort we once had in the classroom, where we, for example, exercised particular vowel sounds, like: ‘Look at Spot. Spot is my dog’. I am literally quoting. ‘My cat is on the mat’. That kind of stuff. We encouraged a movement away from that, towards real, constructive, proper meaningful written texts. We created the view that children could be writing very quickly, even though they might write badly and with poorly controlled letters. With teacher assistance they could gain confidence. All this was based on the principle that language is deeply part of identity, we were encouraging children to use the language as part of their identity and experience, while learning to frame experience in the written mode. Perhaps the biggest single thing that Michael Halliday gave us is an understanding of the grammar of speech and writing, so that we can guide children’s movement from the spoken mode to the written mode. Jay Lemke once said that learning written language is like learning a second language. I think that overstates the case, but I can see why he said it. The two are grammatically very different. What kind of help does SFL give us in education? It gives a way of thinking about the fact that language is organised to give different meanings depending on the ‘content’ – the discipline area, that science requires different meanings from history, from English literature, from mathematics, geography, and so on. It enables us to think of each of those bodies of knowledge, as being differently constructed in the language. You are really learning the code of that discipline by turning to its language. How Broad Is Your Concept of Literacy? How Do You Feel about Extensions Such as Multimodal Literacy? Well, that is an interesting issue. Literacy became a word which is sometimes used metaphorically. It has been drawn into many discussions, so that terms like ‘financial literacy’ have appeared in Australia. There is also something they call ‘visual literacy’. We all use metaphors all the time, so there is nothing unique in using a metaphor here. But I prefer to retain literacy for the written language in the interest of recognising what we do with written language. History might overtake people like me and decide that the term can be used more flexibly and metaphorically.

Frances Christie  17 I think the notion of ‘financial literacy’ is rather funny, because all it really means is being able to handle your finances and not going broke. Up till the mid-20th century, people were very preoccupied with written language in books. By the latter half of the 20th century, because of the growth of film, television, and the digital world in which we now live, one can see that these developments in the culture have pushed language and have also made semiotic modes available that were not available when we were dealing primarily with the written language in books. All that does put pressure on the literate mode, and thus it changes some aspects of the notion of literacy. That is wonderful, because that is just part of the natural development and change of human communities. However, I don’t believe that the literate language is going to disappear, and it still needs to be taught. How Important Is Critical Thinking and Critical Literacy in Your Thinking? To be critical is not necessarily to be destructive or negative, though ‘critical literacy’ sometimes tends to mean that. If you are going to be critical, you have to really understand what you are critical about. I do think that we should be teaching students in schools and in universities to have a critical capacity, to reflect upon what they are learning, to question it, to argue about it and discuss it. I cautiously endorse critical literacy, but I think it often has become a rather empty slogan without a principled interest in language behind it. You can always give opinions, but some opinions are better than others, because they have better evidence behind them.

In the Classroom Working with Students at School Level, How Do You Apply SFL? One fundamental principle must apply, which is that you always work from texts. It does not matter whether the object is to get at reading or writing, or if the object is to teach some important point about language, whether it is an aspect of the spelling system, or an aspect of its tense-system, or an aspect of any other area of the language that one thinks is important. You start with texts which could of course have visual elements, and that are relevant to the age group and have some significance about them, so that you can engage with the meanings. Because I have a very strong view that the teacher’s role is interventionist and not one that is facilitative, then the text is selected for a good reason, which I explain to a class of students, whether they are six-year-olds or

18  Frances Christie 17 or 18. This is selected because it is relevant to the topic in history or relevant to what we are doing in science, etc. The other issue of the classroom is that, clearly you make different decisions depending on the age group. You can do lots of lovely things playing with language while working on reading and writing together with the teacher. Because young children have yet to learn to read and write independently, the teacher can do a lot of scaffolded work with the students, encouraging eventual independence. I am a great believer in teaching spellings as a necessary part of the programme as children move up the school. But you find contexts for doing it, creating spelling words, spelling games, and using your sense of how the spelling system and families of spelling words work. In middle school, which is the upper primary to junior and secondary years, there is quite a strong case for teaching knowledge about the language. One aspect of grammar you can teach formally is the notion of Theme in English. We are lucky because Theme come first in the English clause. You do not have to get into technical discussions about Theme. You can highlight this through looking at thematic progression through a text. This is useful, because it guides reading, and it can also guide teaching writing, because it can be used to teach students to control the organisation of the text they start to produce. You can also work with ways to look at the nominal group structure or the verbal group structure and how to expand them. The nominal group is itself a wonderful resource to compress and expand meaning and to play with kids in school. You can play with nominal group structures; you can play with prepositional group structures. You can also work on the differences between speech and writing, as in an example from my research in Melbourne. A secondary teacher got all the kids in the class to tell the funniest thing that ever happened to them (in itself a wonderful exercise in oral storytelling!). In a subsequent lesson he asked them to write their stories up as written narratives. It points out strikingly the difference in grammar between speech and writing. The English tense-system is the most complex tense-system in the world, because of the enormous gradation of tenses, so Michael Halliday told me. I often thought about that in my years in teacher education at the University of Melbourne. A large proportion of my students were mother tongue speakers of English, and even at that level I found some students had difficulties with the English tense-system, at least when it came to handling written language. It can be hard for everyone. I was ok with it growing up, I got a good grasp of it fairly early, but I come from a literate household where we would talk about language a lot and I was well taught at school. Tense is a very legitimate thing to teach and can be made enjoyable. It is essential when you start doing things like English literary discussion, because the convention applies in literary discussion in English at least, that when you are talking about the literary text, you

Frances Christie  19 do it particularly in the present tense, even though the object we are discussing is written in the past tense. I worked on a project for three years in high schools in Melbourne and was very interested to discover when we did that, that some of the teachers seemed to be very confused about tense. We needed to run some workshops, my colleague and I, in reviewing tense, in how you deploy it differently in different kinds of writing. The project led to two books for teaching language in schools, including aspects of tense (Christie and Soosai 2000, 2001). Developmentally, in the primary years, children need to master the spelling system, and this takes all the years of a primary education. Furthermore, there are at least two grammatical features that children need to control in writing over the primary years in order to enter a secondary education with some proficiency. One is Theme, even though children don’t formally use the term; without a sense of Theme (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004) and thematic progression, it is difficult to control effective movement from paragraph to paragraph. The other necessary feature is control of Reference (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004), which involves building sustained internally coherent texts, creating overall unity. You don’t need to teach terms such as Theme and Reference, but you can play with what they represent, by shaping different texts and examining how they create meaning. I decided right back when I did my PhD, that Theme and Reference are two critical grammatical features children must learn by the end of primary school. However, when you make the transition from primary to secondary school, other grammatical resources come into play, most notably grammatical metaphor (Halliday and Matthiessen 1994, 2004) and this can be challenging for many students. The term ‘grammatical metaphor’ is one Halliday created and it refers to the ways in which congruent (‘normal’) grammatical forms are given a non-congruent or metaphorical expression, bringing about a subtle shift in meaning. Grammatical metaphor may be ideational or interpersonal, and some examples will illustrate the point. To take ideational grammatical metaphor first, we can display congruent meanings in these two (made up) clauses which express ideational (or ‘content’) meanings: ‘The soldiers invaded town//and then destroyed all the buildings’. The meanings can be said non-congruently or metaphorically thus: ‘The soldiers’ invasion of the town led to (was followed by/caused) the destruction of the buildings’. Note these things about the second formulation: the two clauses in the first version have been collapsed and the meaning expressed in the conjunction ‘and then’ is now re-expressed in the verbal group, ‘led to’. The actions realised in verbal groups, ‘invaded’, ‘destroyed’, are now re-expressed in nominal groups, ‘the soldiers’ invasion’, ‘the destruction of the buildings’. The latter tendency of turning actions into things is part of the process by which we create phenomena, about which we can argue and/or

20  Frances Christie explain all sorts of matters in the social and natural worlds. Grammatical metaphor in this ideational sense is key to the construction of a great deal of written knowledge in all the subjects of a secondary education: history, English literature, the sciences. While the capacity to use grammatical metaphor can appear by late childhood to adolescence, many children struggle with it, well into the secondary years, especially in reading and writing. Interpersonal grammatical metaphor occurs when interpersonal meanings are expressed in a non-congruent way and a large number of resources are available in English to create such a metaphor. One example will suffice, drawn from an early childhood teacher, addressing her class: ‘The main requirement is for various things to be done’. In a nonmetaphorical way, this actually means: ‘You are required to do various things’. Interpersonal grammatical metaphor is important developmentally, because children need to master interpersonal norms. Moreover, the interpersonal resources of modality and mood are important for constructing a great deal of argument about controversial or debatable subjects (‘it may be suggested that…’, ‘the speaker was probably right’) and learning to control these resources is relevant, especially in the later secondary years. However, it is ideational metaphor that is particularly challenging for secondary students. And How Would You Apply SFL When You Are Working with Students at the University Level? In a classroom with my master’s students I would introduce SFL theory, I would say something in a preliminary way about register itself and the notion of different ‘text types’ or genres. Then I would go on with the metafunctions as a point of departure for teaching the functional grammar to students formally in the university context. As you work through the metafunctions at university level, you make constant reference to register, so that you introduce different texts, oral and written, and at the same time you relate them to the register choices that create them. Long years of practice showed me that it is best to start with the interpersonal metafunction. Then I found that the natural progression from that was to do the ideational (experiential and logical) and then the textual last. But there is no right way at all. Michael Halliday taught me starting with the textual metafunction and others of my acquaintance have told me they always started with the experiential. What If You Work with Teachers? For teachers in in-service teaching programmes, I would not teach SFL formally. Differences between speech and writing would probably be

Frances Christie  21 where I would start. This is of course quite different from the work pattern in a department of linguistics, and also different from the work of the master’s programme in an Education faculty referred to above. The differences between speech and writing are a useful topic for teacher education in-service programmes, and here I would draw on that wonderful book of Michael Halliday, Spoken and Written Language (1989). What Do You Consider Were Your Most Important Projects in Schools? I have had several projects and preoccupations across my career: first, my PhD research on literacy development in the early primary school; second, a study of English classroom discourse in the upper primary and secondary school; third, a study of strategies for teaching knowledge about language in the secondary English classroom (Christie and Soosai 2000, 2001); fourth, a study of written discourse across all the years of schooling (Christie and Derewianka 2008); fifth, drawing on Bernstein (e.g. 2000) work on knowledge structure (Christie and Martin 2007) and relatedly, work on disciplinarity (Christie and Maton 2011), with particular reference to knowledge structure in school subject English. In the first project I deliberately took up work in the junior primary school, because I had been a high school teacher myself. I wanted to find out how young children learned literacy. I studied the same population of 50–55 children over three years in early primary school. So, it was a fairly significant amount of data. I followed their progress in writing over those years. You learn a lot from your PhD about what not to do next time. When I looked back over the data I had collected, I realised that I should have gone back and recorded the classroom texts a bit differently. I did record the oral texts when I was looking at teacher-student-interaction preparatory to writing and I analysed the patterns of talk. The students typically had a reading activity, which led to some discussion and then to the writing task. While I followed the writing development of these children fairly conscientiously across the three years, I realised in hindsight that I should have done much more systematic tracking of the nature of the oral language. That became a second research project. I did quite a big second project that ran again for three or four years, in upper primary and secondary high school classroom discourse analysis, tracing long sequences of classroom talk with good teachers in the major subjects of English, history, and science. There is a significant challenge you face in undertaking classroom discourse analysis: on what basis will you select the passages of talk to record? You have to have a principle, a conscientiously established basis for selecting the passages of discourse you do. Otherwise, you are at risk of selecting texts in either an arbitrary manner or perhaps a random one. Why do we select this, and why not that? By contrast, if you are looking at written texts, even though we know that a written text always comes from some context, it is there as

22  Frances Christie an item on the page, and it has some kind of a beginning-middle-end structure that you can study. But spoken discourse is necessarily longer and the overall pattern is such that identifying the ‘stages’ or ‘phases’ is harder. I wrote the book Classroom Discourse Analysis (2002) to offer an account of how I addressed these problems. A classroom text, I argued, can be studied in terms of genre theory (e.g. Martin 2006). Units of curriculum work in the Australian classroom typically extend over a week, a fortnight, a month, or sometimes a school term. Much depends on the age of students, the subject being taught, and the predilections of the teacher. There is an overall structure to the unit of curriculum work. The classroom activity is understood as constituting curriculum genres, and, depending on the scale of the enterprise, the genres can constitute aspects of a larger unity called a curriculum macrogenre. After recording classroom talk in a range of classrooms in schools in two Australian cities, I amassed a considerable body of talk. Using the functional grammar, you trace the changes in the discourse across such bodies of text. You find there is a very deliberate progress in stages, or phases, or however we want to call them, across the unit of work. At least, if the curriculum unit works successfully you find evidence for this, in that there will be linguistic changes in the classroom text, and these mark the different phases in the curriculum genre. That is, the nature of the language used by teachers and the students changes over the time. In fact, one of the most important pieces of advice Michael Halliday ever gave me was: ‘When you are doing classroom discourse analysis, you need to always ask the question: what was the language like at the beginning of the unit? What was it like in the middle? What was it like at the end?’ You have then got something to guide how you look at the nature of the discourse. I found you could trace the shifts in the language, signalling new phases, while also signalling emergence of new understandings in the students’ language. Commonly, among all students of all ages, they are asked to produce written texts, reports, or sometimes oral reports, and these I analysed as elements of the genre or the microgenre. I learned a lot about the authority of the teacher through that work. I mean authority in the authoritative, not the authoritarian sense. Good teachers are authoritative. It does not mean that the teacher is always at the front telling you what to do. It does mean that the more competent the teacher is proving to be, the more he/she scaffolds the learning and the responsibility for the learning is taken up increasingly by the students. That is expressed in the changing discourse. I learnt from the work on classroom talk, that one must make careful decisions about the principles for selections of classroom talk. You have to be able to explain, as I did in my book, the basis on which you have made your selections of classroom talk.

Frances Christie  23 Through all of that work I had an enduring interest in the nature of written language and how it changed over the years of schooling. I wanted to use the understandings I got from my classroom research across the primary and secondary schools, and I wanted to turn back with the knowledge I had about grammatical differences between speech and writing. My aim was to see what goes on developmentally in control of literacy in young writers from say age 6–7 to age 18. And that led to the research and the book that I wrote with Beverly Derewianka: School Discourse (2008). I am quite proud of the fact that we achieved a reasonably comprehensive account which demonstrates how you can apply the functional grammar, in Michael Halliday’s terms. It enables you to study what is going on in the written texts of children of the age of 5 or 6, paired with children of 8–12, paired with those from mid-primary up to university. I think this is one of the major achievements of Halliday’s work: that we can say something useful and constructive about literacy progress across all the years of schooling. That was not available when I was at school or when I started to work in teacher education. You could know this kid is not writing particularly well and I would try to find ways to intervene. We had some resources to assist the child of course. But I did not have the knowledge to guide them that we have since achieved. The fourth project, developed in later years, has involved me in addressing the question of what constitutes knowledge and how it is constructed. Working first, with Jim Martin and later, with Karl Maton, we organised two conferences at the University of Sydney that led to two edited volumes: F. Christie and J.R. Martin eds. (2007) Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy; F. Christie and K. Maton eds. (2011) Disciplinarity. Functional Linguistics and Sociological Perspectives. Taking Bernstein’s discussion of knowledge as a point of departure, both books sought to argue the significance and value of discipline structure, and to challenge what have become various post-disciplinary positions in universities, while in schools, several constructivist and/or progressivist positions have diminished the cause of knowledge. I have also written about authority (Christie 2004) and about knowledge construction in subject English (Christie and Macken-Horarik 2007, 2011) What Is Your View on the Relations between Theory and Practice? Good theory is, I believe, informed by practice. Good practice is only ever informed by theory. There is a dialectic, an intimate relationship between them. I suppose that Halliday took that from Marxist thought originally, but he always said that there are so many false dichotomies between the two of them. But having said that, you have to teach the theory, at least at the university level. However, the theory develops out of practice.

24  Frances Christie

SFL and Learning Your Teaching and Research Have Been in an Educational Setting. How Do You Think That Has Influenced Your Work? Obviously, educational linguistics is different from linguistics in the linguistic faculties. Some very obvious things can be said, at least in the Australian context. Sometimes there is hostility and at other times indifference to what linguistics offers in a faculty of education. I never worked in a university-context where I had significant numbers of colleagues who used the SFL theory. I had a few at the Language and Literacy Department in Melbourne where I was head. We had specialists in different languages, including English as a mother tongue and a second language and I enjoyed good relations with all of them. One thing is that you tend to be one of the relatively few with an interest in SFL. Another difference is that an Education faculty creates a context, a professional setting, which I was happy to embrace, where the goals and the priorities of the normal linguistics department do not apply. The faculty of education understandably is primarily concerned to produce teachers. This immediately gives you a different frame of reference. It does not involve a compromise, but it certainly means devising a curriculum that is educational and pedagogic in character. That has been a challenge I have always enjoyed, and I have also learnt from my colleagues with other professional backgrounds. Where and How Do You Find That SFL Most Importantly Contributes to Learning? SFL has a number of quite important dimensions as a theory of learning. First of all, Michael Halliday’s model where he points out the relations between ‘learning language, learning through language, and learning about language’. This statement was born at a time when, among specialists in English teaching, there was often an overt hostility to any teaching of knowledge about language: it was an amazingly anti-intellectual and disempowering position. When it appeared, Halliday’s statement about language learning clearly asserted a role for teaching and learning about language. But apart from that, the most important thing for education that Michael ever said was that learning language is learning how to mean. If he had said nothing else, that would have been enough, because as soon as you think of language in terms of learning how to mean – you have shifted your focus on language and understand it in a new way. It happened for me. You see the notion of human identity differently; you see a human as a creature born predisposed to make meaning. That is the nature of humanity. We have to make meaning to engage with others

Frances Christie  25 and even enter into anything like normal intimate and social relationships. That is a profound shift in thinking about human identity for me and that is fundamental to the learning theory. Is There a Cognitive Component to That? I do not mind using the word cognitive. Some other systemicists can be dismissive about it and refuse to use the word ‘cognitive’. However, take a close look at Halliday and Matthiessen’s book Construing Experience through Meaning: A Language-Based Approach to Cognition (1999). This book argues that language is our principal meaning-making resource, and in that sense, it can be thought of as a ‘cognitive resource’. When we use language, we engage in meaning-making activity, and such activity can include constructing what we call the bodies of ‘knowledge’ which are taught in schools. The issue of meaning-making is profoundly important in Halliday’s theory. We are born as meaning-making individuals with a range of semiotic means of gesture, of facial expression, body language, etc. It is a very fundamental learning theory, learning how to mean. Halliday’s theory has consequences for thinking about learning language in schools. You see the carer or teacher as having an active role in mentoring and guiding the language learning. None of us learn alone, we need to be taught by others, which is not to say that it is all a oneway process. In fact, it means quite the opposite. It means learning in the interaction, the interplay between caregiver and child or teacher and student. The meaning is of course negotiated and constructed in the exchange, and that happens when you are reading a book too. The learning theory actively requires a role of a teacher or a guide for the learning to be successful. That is a great shift in thinking in much 20th-century educational psychology. It is not a Piagetian model; it is much more of a Vygotskian model. The point is that we are jointly constructing meanings. We behave in the usual human way. That is also what happens in the classroom. The role of the teacher or the mentor is absolutely critical. It means knowing what the goal is, where you want to go in terms of what this educational enterprise or project is all about. That is all part of my learning theory. You Have Also Written about Basil Bernstein I admire Bernstein very much. As a man with a working-class Jewish background from a poor area of London, he was interested in and disturbed about the manner in which children of poor background tended not to succeed in school. That moved him towards the science of sociology.

26  Frances Christie There was an extraordinary convergence in history in the 1960s at the University of London. Basil Bernstein was there, and Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, and Mary Douglas, the English anthropologist. Mary, the practising Catholic, Ruqaiya, the lapsed Muslim, Basil, a lapsed Jew, and Michael, a one-time member of the Communist Party. What a combination of thinking! They all came from very divergent intellectual backgrounds. It was a period after the Second World War, when Europe was recovering. Ruqaiya had gone to Britain to pursue a higher degree and met Michael in Edinburgh. They all converged in different departments at the University of London: Bernstein, Hasan, Halliday, Douglas. And all had this sense of the social construction of experience, which was an enormously enlightening perception of human experience. That perception has remained with me after reading all these scholars and talking to all, except Mary Douglas, and it has helped shape my thinking intellectually ever since. I have already said that I used Bernstein’s theory in my own model of classroom discourse. We had him visit Australia. When I went back to London many years later, and he was dying, I was writing that book on classroom discourse. I talked to him about my classroom discourse analysis, which was based on his model of pedagogic discourse. In many ways, his kind of ideology, his kind of view of human experience and relationships correlates very closely to a systemic functional model, and indeed to the Vygotskian view of behaviour. I got interested in Bernstein, because as a young teacher in my early teaching career, I often heard Bernstein being criticised in Australia, because he was said to have claimed that working-class people were intellectually inferior to middle class. It was a strange confusion and rested on a serious misreading of what he had said. When Halliday and Hasan arrived in Australia, they talked a lot about Bernstein, with whom Hasan had worked closely. What he set out to do was to address the fact that children of different social class orientations in the British context performed differently in the school system. He wanted to explain how that came about, and came up with his notion of different meaning codes: restricted and elaborated codes of meaning-making. A restricted code will occur when talk between caregiver and child is constrained, not tending to promote expansion on aspects of experience, as happens with an elaborated code. Children of working-class background tend to learn restricted codes, while middle-class children tend to learn both restricted and elaborated, and they will tend to respond positively to situations where the elaborated code is expected, as in a school. The elaborated code invites elaboration upon experience, but children from backgrounds where this code is not encouraged can be disadvantaged in school. You can hear how the elaborated code works: I sat in an aircraft a while ago, flying from Sydney to Canberra. There was a young man who

Frances Christie  27 got in with his son. They sat next to me in the plane. It is about a 25 minutes’ flight time. The little boy of about three or four started a conversation about the plane he had seen being pulled from a hangar on the tarmac and the talk lasted for the whole flight. It was a lovely example of the parent, unconsciously, elaborating upon and extending what the child was saying. He was also thereby extending the child’s knowledge of his world, while encouraging him in the view that this was a good thing to do. It was nonsense to say that parents – or children – who didn’t use the elaborated code were intellectually inferior. The claim that Bernstein made, was that those children who functioned with the elaborated code, tended to function better in the school, because the school tends to work with, promote and rely upon the elaborated code (Bernstein 1971). Ruqaiya Hasan (1984, 2009) and Geoff Williams (1999, 2005) have both provided evidence for the operation of different meaning codes in Australian families. Hasan developed the term ‘semantic variation’, to refer to the ways meaning (‘semantics’) is encoded differently in the language use of caregivers and children of different social class groups (Webster 2009). Williams became interested in the way in which programmes in the primary schools can usefully intervene to help children come to terms with the codes of schooling. It can be done, provided the teacher has a sense and appreciation of it.

Genre Is Genre an Important Concept for You? I will go back a little bit in history and time. Shortly after Ruqaiya Hasan and Michael Halliday had arrived in Sydney, Ruqaiya organised a working conference at Macquarie University. John Sinclair was there as a speaker, and Ruqaiya spoke. We had workshops to work in little working groups at points during the conference. I was working on a classroom text and we were looking through the structure of this text, and I remember saying: ‘A classroom text is a genre, isn’t it?’ This was a real startling discovery for me. Ruqaiya had written a paper which I remember reading with attention, which was called ‘The nursery rhyme as a genre’. Contrary perhaps to what you might expect, I did not take genre theory originally from Jim Martin, I took it from Ruqaiya. I knew about genre from my degree at the University of Sydney of course, but in the context of English literature. It was a really startling observation that you could look at classroom talk or casual conversation as something you would call genre. In the book Language, Context and Text (1985) Ruqaiya Hasan talked about what she called ‘contextual configuration’, and she introduced the term ‘genre’. I began to understand that for Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan genre and register are interchangeable. The one conflates

28  Frances Christie with the other. Jim Martin, having been influenced by his Canadian background, conceived of the genre as functioning on a different level of experience from register. I did my PhD with Jim and I used his model of genre and register, which proposed that register and genre operate on different planes of experience: genre relates to context of culture, while register relates to context of situation. I found the model useful for an educational linguistics. Michael did not agree with Jim, though he did not express his disagreement in press; he told me once he had no interest in writing about why he thought other people were wrong. Ruqaiya Hasan did write about her disagreement (1995), for like Michael, she rejected Jim’s arguments, arguing a position much like that she and Halliday had in their volume Language, Context, and Text (1985). I am emboldened to say in this context that I learnt a great deal from Michael, Ruqaiya and Jim, and always saw myself as moving fairly eclectically across what each of them gave me. I was not ever interested to pursue the often fierce arguments about the differences in the discussions over register and genre. They are important theoretical issues, but from the position of an educational linguist they are not central.

Achievements and the Future Which of Your Academic Achievements Makes You Most Proud? I am pleased with the description of pedagogic discourse that I wrote, Classroom Discourse Analysis. A Functional Analysis (2002). I am also pleased with the description of writing development that Beverly Derewianka and I achieved in School Discourse (2008). I am also pleased with the volume I later wrote, Language Education throughout the School Years: A Functional Perspective (2012) and two textbooks for schools I co-wrote with a colleague, Anne Soosai (2000, 2001), Language and Meaning I and II. I am also pleased with the work I have done addressing the issue of authority in schooling (2004), issues of school knowledge and its construction (Christie and Macken-Horarik 2007), and the issue of disciplinarity with special relevance to school subject English (Christie and Macken-Horarik 2011). And What Would You Have Liked to Do That You Have Not Yet Done? I would like to go back into secondary school and look more closely at what goes on in the teaching of English literature particularly. Part of a chapter on Disciplinarity and School Subject English (2011) that I cowrote with Mary Macken-Horarik traces developments in the teaching of secondary English literature over the last century and more, and I am

Frances Christie  29 troubled at the directions some of the recent work on English teaching has taken. Like Mary I believe English literary studies offer a valuable way to explore human experience through literary language. My unfinished project involves revisiting some of the purposes and values of teaching English literature. In the Book Chapter, ‘Disciplinarity and School Subject English’ You Say That Schools Try to Make Students Interpret the Texts in Ways That Everybody Could Agree on. But You Seem Quite Critical to That? Yes, and I am still thinking about this. My concern has been that students of English are often asked to adopt particular stances or ‘gazes’, to use Bernstein’s term (Bernstein 2000), regarding a piece of literature, without developing any of the skills needed to appraise the language used in the literary piece (Christie 2016). Students are often asked in examination questions to respond to literary pieces ‘in their own words’ but the terms of the questions actually constrain the interpretation adopted. The issue is one of apprenticeship into a field – in this case the field of literary discussion and interpretation – and in my view it is defensible to see teaching and learning literature as about teaching and learning how to respond to literature. But I am not persuaded that much of the teaching actually develops the necessary knowledge and skill to appraise literary texts well. I note by the way that Mary Macken-Horarik and her colleagues (2018) have recently written a good book on English teaching, which is worth consulting. Drawing on the functional grammar, it offers some good principles for teaching students to appraise literary texts skilfully. If I think about my own experience for a moment, I certainly read literature carefully because of the values it offers me. My sense of engagement with human beings is very much enriched by reading great literature. So why am I criticising examination questions which invite students to appraise literature and respond to the feelings, values, and interpretations about human experience in them? I think it is a valuable thing to do. But do not kid yourself, as many English teachers would claim, that the students are not constrained in their response. It is not a’ free choice’ at all – If free choice is the right term to use? Being constrained by the terms of the question to respond in a particular way to literature may be a necessary part of being apprenticed into the business which is ‘how to respond to literary texts’. But the principles for responding to literature are not always made clear. Do you see the point I am making? There is a set of principles that the musician, for example, has employed in composing a great piece of music, which the interested person understands and hence responds accordingly to the craft in that musicianship. Well, literature is verbal art. Should we not be persuading

30  Frances Christie students to make the same kind of considered response? If so, we should invite more than fairly vague generalisations about the piece of literature, as many questions appear to do, and teach for a much more careful appraisal of literature as verbal art (see Christie 2016 for more detail). One aspect of learning to appraise literature as students grow and mature should be learning to appreciate the literary traditions which help shape literary texts, either as representative of the traditions, or as challenging aspects of them. The contemporary English novelist, Ian McEwan, has said that ‘those who love literature rather take for granted the idea of a literary tradition. In part, it is a temporal map, a means of negotiating the centuries and the connections between writers’, and he went on to say, ‘above all, a literary tradition implies an active historical sense of the past, living in and shaping the present’ (McEwan 2006, cited by Moore 2007, p. 125). It is this sense of living literary traditions that I would hope would inform the teaching of English, evident by the secondary school, and very much a part of university studies of English. Subject English for the schools should be taught with a sense of the literary traditions. That is what my schooling and my first degree did for me. I know where Shakespeare fits as an English Renaissance figure. I know where the playwrights like Sheridan fit in the 18th to early 19th centuries. I know where the novelists like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens fit. And when I say ‘fit’, I know the kind of traditions they generated, and I know some things about the traditions from which they came, and sometimes changed. To have that background, is to be able to respond to the contemporary English novel with some knowledge. I am not at all sure that a lot of the contemporary teaching of English literature does that very well, because there is a tendency now to take a play or novel and just view it in a rather contextless – even arbitrary – way. Where is the sense of the historical context from which it came and the kinds of values it sought to express? Without some sense of the wider historical traditions helping to shape English literature, there is a risk that English turns into low-level social studies. What Do You Think Will Be the Main Challenges and Opportunities for SFL and Social Semiotics in the Future? Well, clearly going on developing a new methodology for dealing with the increasingly multimodal and digitalised world. If we are thinking about educational issues, then much more work needs to be done on what constitute the disciplinary bases of the school subjects. Issues of social class and educational inequality remain important. SFL theory has always been subversive, and because of that, it has not always been well received in some departments of linguistics. But that need not matter. SFL theory has always worked well in collaboration with other traditions

Frances Christie

31

of scholarship in sociology, education, and other branches of the social sciences. I think it is clear that systemics has grown a lot in influence in Latin-America, in China, in parts of Europe, Australia, and Asia. Michael Halliday was very much an optimist himself, and he used to say that systemic functional linguistics was actually the linguistics of the 21st century, because he believed that the emergence of the computer technology and the huge computer databases that we now have, would make possible detailed analysis of the nature of language and the historical changes in language, so that, using the functional grammar, we will have a scientific mode for analysis of language in many areas of life: government, industry, medicine, community.

Note 1 This volume is a revised version of some papers originally presented in May 1978 by M.A.K. Halliday and R. Hasan at the Graduate School of Languages and Linguistics of Sophia University, Japan, and afterwards published under the title, Text and Context: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective. Working Papers in Linguistics, Number 6, 1980, Sophia University.

References Bernstein, B. (1971). Class, Codes and Control (Vol. I). Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identify. Theory, Research, Critique (Rev. ed.). Rowman and Littlefield. Christie, F. (1984). Language Studies: Children Writing. Reader. Deakin University Press. Christie, F. (2002). Classroom Discourse Analysis: A Functional Perspective. Continuum. Christie, F. (2004). Authority and its role in the pedagogic relationship of schooling. In L. Young & C. Harrison (Eds.), Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. Studies in Social Change (pp. 173–201). Continuum. Christie, F. (2016). Secondary school English literacy studies: cultivating a knower code. In K. Maton, S. Hood & S. Shay (Eds.), Knowledge-Building. Educational Studies in Legitimation Code Theory (pp. 158–175). Routledge. Christie, F. & Derewianka, B. (2008). School Discourse: Learning to Write across the Years of Schooling. Continuum. Christie, F. & Macken-Horarik, M. (2007). Building verticality in subject English. In F. Christie & J.R. Martin (Eds.), Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy. Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives (pp. 156–183). Continuum. Christie, F. & Macken-Horarik, M. (2011). Disciplinarity and school subject English. In F. Christie & K. Maton (Eds.), Disciplinarity. Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives (pp. 175–196). Continuum. Christie, F. & Martin, J.R. (Eds.). (2007). Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy. Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives. Continuum.

32  Frances Christie Christie, F. & Maton, K. (Eds.). (2011). Disciplinarity. Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives. Continuum. Christie, F. & Soosai, A. (2000, 2001). Language and Meaning, Books I and II. Macmillan. Halliday, M.A.K. (1975). Learning How to Mean. Hodder Arnold Halliday, M.A.K. (1985). Spoken and Written Language. Deakin University Press. Halliday, M.A.K. & Hasan, R. (1985). Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective. Deakin University Press. Halliday M.A.K. & Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. (1999). Construing Experience through Meaning. A Language-Based Approach to Cognition (Open Linguistics Series). Continuum. Halliday, M.A.K. & Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar (3rd ed.). Hodder Arnold. Hasan, R. (1984). The nursery rhyme as a genre. In Nottingham Linguistics Circular, 13, 71–102. Reprinted in C. Cloran, D. Butt & G. Williams (Eds.). (1996). Ways of Saying, Ways of Meaning. Selected Papers of Ruqaiya Hasan (Open Linguistics Series, pp. 51–72). Cassel. Hasan, R. (2009). On semantic variation. In J. Webster (Ed), Meaning in society and i Sociolinguistics. Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan (Vol. 2, pp. 41–72). Equinox Macken-Horarik, M., Love, K., Sandiford, C. & Unsworth, L. (2018). Functional Grammatics: Re-conceptualizing Knowledge about Language and Image for School English. Routledge. Martin, J.R. (1984). Language, register and genre. In F. Christie (Ed.), Children Writing: Reader (pp. 21–30). Deakin University Press. Martin, J.R. (2006). Genre, ideology and intertextuality: a systemic functional perspective. Linguistics and the Human Sciences, 2(2), 275–298. Moore, R. (2007). Sociology of Knowledge and Education. Continuum. Rothery, J. (1984). The development of genres – primary to junior secondary school. In F. Christie (Ed.), Language Studies: Children’s Writing: Study Guide (pp. 67–114). Deakin University Press. Ure, J. & Ellis, J. (1979). Register in descriptive linguistics and linguistic sociology. In O.U. Villegas (Ed.), Issues in Sociolinguistics (pp. 197–244). Mouton. Webster, J. (Ed.). (2009). Semantic Variation: Meaning in Society and Sociolinguistics. The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan (Vol. 2, pp. 197–244). Equinox. Williams, G. (1999). The pedagogic device and the production of pedagogic discourse: a case example in early literacy education. In F. Christie (Ed.), Pedagogy and the Shaping of Consciousness (pp. 88–122). Continuum. Williams, G. (2005). Semantic variation. In J. Webster, C.M.I.M. Matthiessen & R. Hasan (Eds.), Continuing Discourse on Language (Vol. 1, pp. 457–480). Equinox. Central publications These are the publications that Frances Christie herself considers to be her most important ones. Christie, F. (1993). The ‘received tradition’ of English teaching: the decline of rhetoric and the corruption of grammar. In B. Green (Ed.), The Insistence

Frances Christie  33 of the Letter. Literary Studies and Curriculum Theorizing (pp. 75–106). Falmer Press. Christie, F. & Martin, J.R. (Eds.). (1997). Genres and Institutions: Social Processes in the Workplace and School. Cassell Academic. Christie, F. (1999). The pedagogic device and the teaching of English. In F. Christie (Ed.), Pedagogy and the Shaping of Consciousness (pp. 75–106). Continuum. Christie, F. (2002). Classroom Discourse Analysis: A Functional Perspective. Continuum. Christie, F. (2002). The development of abstraction in adolescence in subject English. In M. Schleppegrell & C. Colombi (Eds.), Developing Advanced Literacy in First and Second Languages: Meaning with Power (pp. 45–66). Lawrence Erlbaum. Christie, F. (2004). Authority and its role in the pedagogic relationship of schooling. In L. Young & C. Harrison (Eds.), Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. Studies in Social Change (pp. 173–201). Continuum. Christie, F. (2012). Language Education throughout the School Years: A Functional Perspective (Language Learning Monograph Series). Wiley-Blackwell. Christie, F. (2016). Secondary school English literacy studies: cultivating a knower code. In K. Maton, S. Hood & S. Shay (Eds.), Knowledge-Building. Educational Studies in Legitimation Code Theory (pp. 158–175). Routledge. Christie, F. & Derewianka, B. (2008). School Discourse: Learning to Write across the Years of Schooling. Continuum. Christie, F. & Macken-Horarik, M. (2011). Disciplinarity and school subject English. In F. Christie & K. Maton (Eds.), Disciplinarity. Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives (pp. 175–196). Continuum.

3

Beverly Derewianka

Beverly Derewianka is Professor Emerita at the University of Wollongong, School of Education, New South Wales, Australia. Through her research, she has contributed to the use of systemic functional grammar in school, to genre-based approaches to language learning and to literacy development by students with English as their first language or as an additional language. She has studied writing development of children from early childhood to adolescence with emphasis on writing in the subjects English, history, and science. She has extensive practice as a teacher in primary and secondary school and in teacher education, and her research is based in close cooperation with schools and teachers. Another interest has been

DOI: 10.4324/9780429352270-3

Beverly Derewianka  35 curriculum development and the relationship between policy, practice, and research. Beverly Derewianka has played a significant role in this field both in Australia and internationally. The interview took place in Boston, July 2018.

Academic Life Story Starting with your academic life story: What is your educational background, and how did you come to enter this field? I came in through modern languages, as we used to call them in those days. These days I guess they are called world languages. I was a teacher of French and Italian and had learnt German, Latin, and Indonesian (Bahasa). I was lucky to have a very inspirational professor of Italian, Frederick May at Sydney University, who approached language in terms of meaning and what it does. I can still remember him explaining the subjunctive in terms of exploring hypothetical situations rather than simply learning it as an obscure grammatical form. And then my next bit of luck was to go on to a master’s degree and have Michael Halliday as my professor and Jim Martin as my tutor. So, I think I have been awfully fortunate all through my career to have mentors like that. And then of course there was Frances Christie, Joan Rothery, and colleagues. I was caught up in all that excitement when they were just beginning to present their preliminary research into children’s written genres in the early 1980s. Until then nobody paid much attention to writing, it was all about reading. Writing was just invisible. These scholars brought writing to the fore in a way that we never imagined it before. Did you have any teaching experience before you did your master’s? Yes, I started off teaching English and History – for which I was not trained. But you had to just pick it up! I also taught a little bit of French along the way. And then I got a job teaching ‘Italian by correspondence’, as we used to call it. We had The Correspondence School for students who wanted to study subjects where there were not enough enrolments in the school, and so it was provided by distance. And then, after that, I taught Italian in a Catholic secondary school for several years. From there I became a consultant in community languages with the Department of Education for a couple of years. By this time people had become interested in the maintenance of migrant children’s mother tongue. So, we were developing Italian programmes for migrant communities, along with bilingual programmes and English as a Second Language. How did that master’s program and meeting Michael Halliday and Jim Martin change the way you looked at language and teaching?

36  Beverly Derewianka Well, we typically had been drawing on traditional grammar or using a structuralist audiolingual programme or a communicative approach or we had been reading about Noam Chomsky and his generative grammar. But SFL gave us a way of talking about meaning in context rather than simply syntactic structure or lists of functions and notions. We encountered the notion of register – the field, tenor, and mode in any situation – and the relationship between these contextual variables and the choices that we make from the language system. And from Jim Martin we learned about the social purposes for which language is used and we had a way of talking about texts and how they were organised in achieving their purpose. So rather than teaching our students traditional grammar or creating tree diagrams, we were able to make language come alive in real contexts.

Classroom Experiences Could you elaborate on how you applied this grammar for meaning in your work? We had no models to go by, so we were just finding our own way and seeing what the teachers and the kids responded to. It was really just a matter of trying things out and seeing what worked and what did not. But we were able to draw on the findings of seminal projects such as Write it Right (1994) that dealt with explicitly teaching aspects of functional language and genre to students in disadvantaged schools. So, we experimented with jointly constructing texts and writing model texts to deconstruct in class. And we moved away from using settings such as ‘buying a ticket at the airport’ to real-life situations relevant to the students’ school and community lives. At this point you were in teacher education in Wollongong. And that takes us to the classroom. When you work with students, how do you apply SFL? One of my earliest postgraduate students was the teacher of my son at the time, when he was seven years old. Because we had a contact with that school, I was allowed to come in as a mother and observe and videotape the lessons. I guess that was my first real opportunity to do classroom research in some depth. It resulted in the article ‘Rocks in the Head. Children and the Language of Geology’ (1990) that describes the class studying different types of rocks. They went on an excursion to observe the rocks in the local area, they did experiments to investigate the properties of rocks, they developed a labelled class rock collection, they read about the formation of rocks, and so on. Their teacher planned opportunities for the children to develop and use the language needed to observe, describe, define, compare, contrast, group, classify, and generalise. And they wrote a recount of their excursion, an account of their experiments, and an information report classifying the different types of

Beverly Derewianka  37

Figure 3.1 Changes in register as the students moved through the teaching and learning cycle (from Derewianka, B., 2020 [1990]. Rocks in the Head: Children Learning the Language of Geography, PETAA Paper 218, Primary English Teaching Association of Australia).

rocks. That was my first attempt to implement a version of the teaching and learning cycle, reflecting how the register changed as students and teacher moved through the various activities – how the students’ knowledge of the field developed from the everyday to the more technical, how they moved from their spoken, conversational language to the more academic written mode, and how the tenor changed as they took on different roles, becoming increasingly independent (Figure 3.1). That article about ‘Rocks in the head’ has been translated to Danish and used by Danish teachers. What is the main change since then? While I think that was a useful way in, more recently I have been working with a version of the original model of the teaching and learning cycle developed by Joan Rothery (1994) and her colleagues (Figure 3.2). Following David Rose (2006) in Reading to Learn, I include a stage of the cycle where students are taught how to read the more complex texts that they will be drawing on in their writing. I also make visible the role of the oral mode in developing students’ academic understandings through such practices as dialogic teaching. At the heart of the cycle, I like to place formative assessment, where the teacher is able to observe and respond to students’ evolving understanding of the field and genre through a process of returning to their early drafts each time they learn

38  Beverly Derewianka

Figure 3.2 A teaching and learning cycle (Rothery 1994).

Building knowledge of the field

Supported reading

Learning about the genre

Independent use of the genre Independent construction

Supported writing

Deconstruction

Joint construction

Figure 3.3 Adaptation of the teaching and learning cycle (Derewianka 2020).

something new from their reading, discussion, learning about the genre, and relevant language features (Figure 3.3). Now I am retired, but still quite busy. Because of our national testing results, there is a concern that the quality of students’ writing is decreasing. So, I am working with the education systems in various states around writing in the middle years – that transition point from primary

Beverly Derewianka  39 to secondary school. The teachers are really receptive, and the schools are very supportive both in terms of providing resources and personnel. So, some 30 years after the development of the teaching and learning cycle, teachers are still discovering it and excited about the difference it is making to their students’ learning.

Genre-Based Pedagogy Are you doing this work within the paradigm of genre-based pedagogy? Yes. Following the work of Jim Martin and his colleagues, teachers were no longer talking about every text being referred to as a ‘story’ and we saw great uptake of genre pedagogy at that point across Australia, in most states. And then came a phase where it became taken for granted, a stage where teachers thought: ‘I’ve got this list of genres that I have to teach’. Six genres – recounts, information reports, explanations, narratives, arguments, and procedures. They would teach recount in year one and procedure in year two, and so on. And it would have nothing to do with the actual curriculum that they were working on. It was just imposed on top – as an item to tick off their list. It had become an orthodoxy and teachers started to question it. But we now see a turn-around and teachers are rediscovering genres, and in a much more flexible way and embedded in actual curriculum tasks in the various learning areas. Can you tell us about how you move from the formulaic teaching to the more flexible, dynamic? Rather than teach a genre formulaically as an end in itself, out of context, we generally start by analysing the literacy demands of the curriculum. We look at the units of work that the teachers are implementing and identify a genre that is relevant to the writing task. So it is not something in addition to what they would be doing. Rather it involves teaching the language and literacy resources that students need in order to achieve the outcomes of the unit of work. So, if they are learning about the consequences of global warming, for example, they would be composing a particular type of explanation. They are taught how to build their field knowledge by, for example, taking notes from documentaries, being taught how to strategically and critically read texts on the issue and how to discuss it in an informed way. And then how to shape their understanding of the topic into a coherent text, mindful of how the genre is typically organised and some of its key language features – in this case, for example, the language of cause and effect. Instead of seeing genres as rule-based ‘recipes’, teachers now recognise that, while there is an inevitable element of predictability, some genres are more predictable than others. A lab report, for example, is deliberately predictable whereas free verse is less so. And within the more predictable broad stages of a genre, they can find less predictable ‘phases’ that allow for choice and flexibility. A narrative, for example, might

40  Beverly Derewianka move through such stages as orientation, complication, and resolution to achieve its purpose of entertaining – creating suspense to engage the reader. But we might then find some less predictable phases within those broader stages such as descriptions of the characters or setting, a comment by the author, a character’s response to an event, interactions between the characters, and so on. Teachers can also see that some texts are hybrid or macro-genres or a complex of ‘mini-genres’. And they are starting to see that a genre is not simply a ‘type of text’ but they represent processes rather than static ‘objects’ – or to quote Martin, they are ‘how we get things done, when language is used to accomplish them’ (1985, p. 250). How does your understanding of genre inform your work? In the projects I am involved in, we typically start by developing a culture in the school of valuing writing as a key tool for learning. So, changing mindsets is important, getting teachers to buy into the project itself, and that takes quite a long time, to get all the principals on side, to create a supportive structure. And then we focus on student motivation and engagement. How do we get the kids excited about writing as opposed to resenting it? We want all that to be in place before we can introduce the work on genre. Then we start designing the curriculum units. We are simply working with what they are doing at the time and embedding a literacy focus, looking at what would be an appropriate genre or genres relevant to the topic and tasks. We look at the demands overall; not only the writing, but the reading and oral interaction facilitating the learning, and the multimodal aspects. We then investigate how to integrate these elements into the unit drawing on the teaching and learning cycle. One upper primary class, for example, was investigating sources of electrical energy. Working with a science teacher from the local high school, the teacher identified that this topic would involve a variety of genres: an information report on the various sources of energy (a classification taxonomy); an explanation of how energy is produced by each source; and a discussion of the pros and cons of each energy source. In developing the classification taxonomy, the teacher modelled to the class how to make notes from a variety of readings, using a graphic organiser. She then led the class in a joint construction activity, drawing on the students’ notes to collaboratively create a text outlining the types of energy sources. To investigate how each energy source works, the class watched videos, analysed diagrams, and listened to a guest speaker from the local wind farm. Their teacher read texts with the class, inviting the students to actively participate in the reading. The students then worked in groups, with each group composing an explanation (including diagrams) of how a system works – how a particular source produced energy. One group, for example, investigated how a wind turbine works and how the

Beverly Derewianka  41 electrical energy is transported to people’s homes. Another group explained how a geothermal energy plant works. Each group then shared their findings with the class in a multimodal presentation. Finally, the students debated the pros and cons of the various energy sources. Each student then wrote a discussion weighing up the advantages and disadvantages before concluding with an on-balance decision as to their preferred option. Over the unit of work, students were engaged in a range of sources of information as they built their field knowledge. They were taught how to read texts strategically and how to interpret diagrams. They listened to experts in the field, both in person and in documentaries. They observed the teacher’s drafts of her model text, recognising the value of revising in the writing process. They were guided to deconstruct the model texts – how they were organised and selected language features. They participated in jointly constructing texts with the class and collaboratively composed texts in their groups. And they wrote texts independently and self-assessed their writing using the class success criteria. The teacher reflected that previously the students would have been left much more to their own devices, with little explicit literacy teaching and without a clear idea of the various genres that the task involved. (See Derewianka 2020 for further details.)

Text and Context We would like your comments on the central concepts of text and context. What is the relation between text and context? Well, what Halliday (1999) has proposed is that a text is an instance of language in use in a particular situation. The text embodies choices made from the language system and these choices vary in interaction with the context. The relationship between text and context is not one-way, it is not a deterministic one of the context determining the choices we make, but a reciprocal one where the language choices that we make both create the context and reflect the context. That is, the context is not a given, but as Halliday notes, the situation and the text come into being together: ‘Language does not passively reflect a pre-existing social reality. It is an active agent in constructing that reality’ (Halliday 1999, p. 16). How, then, can we analyse context? Halliday sees context in terms of two strata – the context of culture and the context of a particular situation within that culture. He likens a school, for example, to a cultural institution governed by norms and values. But we can also see a school as a site where these norms and values are instantiated in situated practices such as lessons and other educational events – and how these, in turn, both reflect and shape the culture of the school. A bit like the example I gave previously, where the literacy culture of the school provided the context for the values reflected

42  Beverly Derewianka in classroom activities and how the classroom activities fed back into the school culture. In another example, Halliday states that the context of culture for any educational activity can include the discourse/s or patterns of meaning related to an educational field such as science or history. Or going further, we can identify the education authorities and their policies as providing a particular context of culture, with schools as instances of particular situations in which the culture is enacted. While at the level of the cultural context we might be concerned with norms, beliefs, practices, behaviour, ideology, and values (e.g. Hasan 2014), Halliday views the context of situation as concerned with the social activity (the field), the relationship between participants in the social activity (the tenor), and the role that the text is playing in the activity (the mode). Any particular configuration of the field, tenor, and mode in a certain situation is referred to as the register. And this is where we can start seeing the relevance of Halliday’s theory to educational practice. In education, learners have to develop a repertoire of resources for making meaning – drawing on the potential provided by the language system. They build their understanding of educational discourses such as history or science (part of the cultural context) through their interactions with the texts they engage with, in the context of specific situations in the school. In any task, they will encounter a certain register – extending their understanding of a particular field, using language to develop particular roles and relationships, and operating in a variety of modes. Now at this point we need to return to the language system. Halliday refers to the cultural context as an environment in which language as a system evolves from the myriad of instances of language in use in specific situational contexts. So, we have culture as the broad context within which language as system evolves, while specific situations (instances of the culture) are the context for language-in-use as particular texts – and these feed back into the system, reshaping it in response to human interactions over the centuries. So, we see language as a dynamic, open system that is constantly renewing itself through the interplay between language as system and language in use. To take this further, Halliday has suggested that the language system has evolved to serve certain functions in our lives. Put simply, a network of linguistic resources has evolved to represent ‘what is going on’ (the ideational metafunction), ‘who are taking part’ (the interpersonal metafunction), and ‘what the language is doing’ (the textual metafunction). We can now see the link between the register variables in the context of situation and the choices made from the metafunctions in the language system: the field (or ‘topic’) being developed is realised by choices from the ideational metafunction; the tenor (or ‘roles and relationships’) is realised by choices from the interpersonal metafunction; and the mode (or ‘where the language comes in’) is realised by choices from the textual

Beverly Derewianka  43 metafunction. So, when designing a unit of work, teachers need to consider the part that language (in spoken, written, multimodal, digital modes) is playing in building knowledge of the field and in enacting tenor relationships between people (from face-to-face interactions through to the more distant interactions between reader and writer) – and then to identify and teach the relevant language resources that students need to weave these into text and to achieve the outcomes of the task. In this model, what is the relation between genre, register, and the language system? Now that is a challenge. There are of course several approaches to genre, from the traditional literary genres to the various linguistic schools. In systemic functional linguistics, we also find different views, but the one that has resonated with teachers in Australia is that proposed by Jim Martin. Whereas others might locate genre within one or other of the register variables, Martin sees genre as an overarching pattern of field, tenor, and mode configurations (as in Figure 3.4 – representing Martin’s relationship between strata). He views genres as sets of commonly recurring practices in the culture that have evolved to serve particular social purposes. That is, they are goal-oriented social processes that unfold in relatively predictable ways in achieving their purpose. Your overview of genres is a very detailed one. How easy is it for teachers or students to work with such a detailed variety of genres?

genre

CONTEXT

register

LANGUAGE

Figure 3.4 A functional model (adapted by Derewianka, based on Rose and Martin 2012, p. 8).

44  Beverly Derewianka As I mentioned earlier, the original research had reported on only a handful of genres commonly found in primary school. Since then, researchers have identified many more purposes for which students need to use language in order to achieve the goals of the various areas of the curriculum. They have analysed curriculum documents across all learning areas and all years of schooling. They have analysed the tasks that teachers set, the students’ written texts, the texts they read, and even the genres that students engage in beyond the school setting. The Write it Right project, for example, investigated genres of secondary school and the workplace, uncovering a wide range of purposes for which students are expected to write. More recently, in my work with Pauline Jones, we identified the kinds of purposes for writing expected when students are undertaking inquiries, such as in problem-based learning or investigation projects or even experiments. These are typically macro-genres, incorporating a range of ‘mini-genres’. So, we now have a fairly comprehensive account of the genres typical of the various curriculum areas across the years of schooling (as, for example, in Christie and Derewianka 2008). And yes, this can be quite daunting for teachers when they first come across a list such as in Table 3.1. And of course, we also need to include spoken and multimodal genres. But when the genres are grouped into ‘families’, it is not really so challenging. If, for example, the task was to explain the factors leading to the Second World War, then the teacher (and students) will recognise that the task requires an explanation genre. But then we need to decide what type of explanation is involved – explaining a chronological sequence? Explaining a theory? Explaining a system? Explaining a simple cause and effect relationship? Explaining the consequences of an input? Or – as in this case – explaining the multiple factors leading to an outcome? Each of these explanations will have a slightly different purpose and will be organised differently to achieve that purpose. I recently did a series of workshops with teachers just on the family of explanation genres. Each workshop dealt with a different type of explanation, looking at how to recognise where they appeared in different areas of the curriculum, how they were structured, some key language and multimodal features, and how to integrate such understandings into the teaching and learning cycle. Even the students were able to identify which type of explanation would be most appropriate for a particular task. The feedback was very positive in terms of the depth, clarity, and specificity. They now felt more confident in designing their units of work. So, when I am working with teachers, we are able to look at each curriculum task and interpret which genre is best suited for that task. And in fact, while the detailed list of the genres might at first appear overwhelming, once they have worked with it for a while, they find it more useful than having an overly simplistic set of genres. In our national curriculum, for example, the genres are described as persuasive,

Beverly Derewianka  45 Table 3.1  Some common purposes for writing in school (developed by Derewianka, unpublished)

Storying

Factual stories

Genre family

Purpose

Personal recount

Recounting an event in which you participated Objectively recounting an incident or event Recounting one’s own life stages, including empathetic recounts Reflecting on significant events in one’s life Recounting life events, often with an evaluation of the person Recounting historical events Recounting and explaining historical events Resolving a complication in a story Recounting an event/series of events using literary language Sharing an emotional, amusing incident Stories for performance Carefully crafting language for an aesthetic or emotional response Reacting emotionally to a text or work of art Providing a summary, analysis, and evaluation of a literary or visual text Assessing the merit of a text, artefact, idea, or proposal Persuading someone to accept your position Persuading someone to take action Weighing two or more points of view Disputing an accepted position Telling someone how to do something Researching a topic in some depth, often involving a variety of genres (a macro-genre) Devising a solution to a problem

Factual recount Autobiographical recount Memoir Biography Historical recount Historical account Imaginative stories

Narrative Literary recount Anecdote

Evaluating

Verbal art

Drama scripts Poetry

Response

Personal response Review Critical analysis

Argumentation Argument Hortatory Discussion Inquiring

Inquiries

Challenge Procedure Investigation report Problem-solution report Design portfolio

Experiment report

Designing and creating a product, service, performance, or artwork (typically a macro-genre) Carrying out an experiment and reporting on the findings (Continued)

46  Beverly Derewianka Genre family Explaining

Explanations

Describing

Description Information reports

Purpose

Sequential explanation

Explaining why something happens or how something works in a linear or cyclical sequence Causal explanation Explaining how something works or why something happens System explanation Explaining the components of a system, their functions, and how they work together Factorial explanation Explaining the factors that lead to a particular outcome Consequential Explaining the effects of a explanation particular input Theoretical Explaining a theoretical principle explanation Particular description Describing a particular person, place, or thing Descriptive Describing a general class of things Comparative Comparing and contrasting two or more things Classifying Classifying things into ‘types of’ Compositional Describing parts of wholes

informative, and imaginative – and many teachers think that there are only three genres, without realising that these are simply labels for much larger groupings of genres. How about the work with literature in the English classroom? How does that relate to your work on genre? Well, of course it is vexed. For many secondary English teachers, the term ‘genre’ still refers to just the traditional literary genres. And that is, of course, a core component of English – particularly in the secondary years where they have to study such genres as narratives, literary recounts, short stories, memoirs, biographies, and various types of poetry – what Hasan (1985) refers to as ‘verbal art’. Are such literary genres perhaps more for reading in the English classroom? One writes about literature, but do you ask the students to write literature? The Australian curriculum does expect them to compose a range of literary genres. There is a whole strand of the curriculum dedicated to literature, which includes creating literary and imaginative texts. Even from early primary, students are asked to innovate on a poem or write a story in response to a stimulus such as an image or a ‘story starter’. The national assessment programme includes writing a narrative as a major part of the writing component. And even in the senior secondary final

Beverly Derewianka  47 exams, students are expected to compose a literary genre of their choice accompanied by a reflection on the process they experienced, including how they organised the text, the stylistic or authorial choices they made, and whether they successfully achieved their purpose. And beyond composing literary genres, the English curriculum requires that they respond to literature in various ways – a personal response, a review, an analytical response, a critical response or a response comparing texts (e.g. a movie versus the source novel). They also need to write expository and discussion genres in response to current issues. So, while there is a lot of reading in subject English, there is also a great deal of writing in response to what they are reading, including creative responses.

Language and Grammar What is your emphasis when you approach language? It depends on such factors as the language requirements of the task or the genre, on the expectations of the curriculum, or the identified needs of the students. And then we need to keep in mind the distinction between the constrained and the unconstrained skills. When is it appropriate to focus on the ‘basics’ such as spelling, punctuation, and phonics, and when is it more appropriate to focus on the unconstrained skills that relate more to creating and interpreting meaning? I guess in general my approach would be to identify the demands of the task in terms of the genre and its features and then to consider what is relevant in terms of the register – whether to focus on the language required to build students’ knowledge of the field, whether the task involves an emphasis on the tenor relationship between author and reader, or whether to concentrate on the mode – the degree to which the text is ‘spoken’ or ‘written’, various cohesive devices, multimodal aspects, and so on. We would typically work with authentic texts from the level of the whole text, including patterns of language at the text level, through to phases within the text (for example, how to write dialogue in a narrative or how to write the steps in a procedure), and down to the level of the sentence, including clauses, groups, and vocabulary items. How is grammar useful in the classroom? And is it most important to the teachers or to the students? I think that initially teachers are more comfortable at the level of genre and to a certain extent register – particularly in the context of a particular task. And it is hard for them to go down into the level of grammar in relation to that context. To understand the model of grammar from a functional perspective is challenging. It is a complex model and a new way of thinking about grammar. So rather than teaching them about the model in all its complexity and the theory behind it, I start with one or

48  Beverly Derewianka two examples that are relevant to a unit of work they are designing at the time. In writing a description of their house, for example, a class of newly arrived primary students from migrant and refugee backgrounds were introduced to expanding the nominal group to enhance their description. Having explored the various resources of the nominal group, they were able to compose sentences such as ‘My home is a big, old, white two-storeyed house with a small backyard where we play with our dog’ – and to then use similarly rich nominal groups to describe the rooms in their house, creating extended texts generally considered beyond the reach of such young students with English as their Second Language. (See Dahlsen and Jones 2020, for further detail.) Once the teachers can see the evidence of how students’ writing improves, even with a focus on just one aspect of grammar, they are keen to find out more. So, I would say that a knowledge of grammar and how to teach it is important for the teachers – and that ultimately it is important for students to have a way of thinking and talking about language. You have published an article where you compare the contribution of traditional and functional grammar (Derewianka and Jones 2010). What would be your main argument for functional grammar? The traditional model of ‘school grammar’ and the way it was taught was not very useful, with its focus on the parts of speech and the correction of mistakes, taught through inauthentic sentences out of context. So, we can probably dismiss traditional grammar in that sense. But I would say it is quite legitimate to focus on form and in fact that is what we do in the functional approach to grammar. SFL uses a lot of the formal categories, but very closely associated with their meaning and function. We could look at a clause from a functional perspective in terms of how it represents our experience of the world – the processes taking place, the participants in those processes and any surrounding circumstances. But we can then look at how a participant can take a variety of grammatical forms, including nouns, nominal groups, and pronouns. Or we can see how a circumstance can take the form of an adverb (yesterday), adverbial group (very regularly), a prepositional phrase (on the preceding day), or occasionally a nominal group (the following week). To create a dichotomy between formal and functional is not very helpful. You need both. So, I would say that functional grammar allows us to go beyond grammatical form to consider the kinds of meanings such forms can make. It allows us to see how grammar functions in various ways – to represent our experience of the world, to interact with others, and to shape texts that are coherent and cohesive. It also allows us to see patterns of grammar at the discourse level, going beyond the sentence. How important is metalanguage in the classroom? I do think that metalanguage is very important. I do not think you can get very far without it. But I always start by using everyday commonsense

Beverly Derewianka  49 terms, so the teachers can see that this is not anything strange. The metalanguage makes their work with language explicit, visible, and concrete. When I go into a classroom, I can hear students talking about their choice of process type in their narratives, or how they have made their text more cohesive by attending to their ‘sentence openers’ (Theme), or how they have used modality in their persuasive text rather than a bare assertion, or they tell me that they are ‘building their field knowledge’, pointing to a poster of the teaching and learning cycle. Metalanguage allows them to be specific when conferencing with the teacher about their writing or identifying a linguistic feature in the text they are reading. So, a shared language for talking about language is important. Which concepts would you use for the metafunctions for example? Well, they are built into our national English curriculum in Australia now. There is a major strand devoted to language, with the metafunctions referred to as ‘expressing and connecting ideas’ for the experiential/ideational metafunction. We use ‘interacting with others’ for the interpersonal metafunction. And ‘organizing texts’ for the textual metafunction. This is by no means ideal, but because it is now a mandated element of the curriculum, we have an entry point for expanding on it in professional learning workshops, support materials, and teacher education courses. How do you see the connection between theory and practice? With practising teachers, I tend not to ‘front load’ the theory – I do not get into a lot of theory to begin with. I have learned over time that teachers, as soon as you start talking theory, tend to switch off. So, I background the theory until they have had a little bit of experience of trying things out in the classroom and seeing what works. And then gradually I will say: well, do you know what you have just been doing? And then I introduce the theoretical concept. Once they have experienced it, they can make those connections between theory and practice. Ultimately I think theory is important because otherwise they are unable to provide a rationale for the decisions they make in designing tasks and they are left to the mercy of the latest fad – ‘baubles’ dangled in front of them often over the internet or by commercial interests. In your work you are using SFL in practice. What has practice done to your understanding of SFL? I am constantly learning from the teachers; the things they come up with that I would never have thought of doing. I am amazed at their inventiveness. Of course, they need some structure to work within, but once they can feel confident about that, then they come up with all kinds of ways of introducing things to students and working with the students. So, I am learning what resonates with teachers and students, what they find useful and interesting – and this causes me to reflect on the theory. I am always having to go back to the theory to clarify and deepen my understanding and to see how others are applying it.

50  Beverly Derewianka

Policies You have worked a lot with curriculum development. Yes, I was on the writing team for the first English syllabus for our state primary schools. And then an ongoing involvement with the National English Curriculum, where I had major responsibility for the Language strand from Kindergarten to Year 10. And more recently working with the national Language Learning Progressions that have just been developed. How has your experience with classroom research and with practicing SFL in the classroom inspired your work with the policy documents, and what have you achieved? Well, it is very hard to have an influence on policy. There is a lot of inertia – people are comfortable with doing what they have always done. So, trying to introduce something as complex as SFL is a challenge – when it is much easier to just underline the noun or correct subject-verb agreement. So, it has taken years – in fact, decades – of the SFL educational linguistics community collecting data from classrooms and providing evidence of its usefulness. Even getting a recognition of different genres was hard, but now they are taken for granted pretty much internationally. Acceptance by policy makers of functional grammar has been tougher, but even there we have had some breakthroughs, as I mentioned previously with the glosses for the metafunctions – which are then spelled out in some detail in accompanying elaborations. But policy design is never ideal. There are so many things competing for attention – phonics, spelling, comprehension strategies, handwriting, digital media, writing processes, literature, and so on. So, grammar is not always seen as a priority. And even when you do manage to insert it, there are so many compromises in keeping everyone happy – especially bureaucrats who are not necessarily familiar with developments in theory, research or even classroom practice. Basil Bernstein (1990) sees it as a process of recontextualisation, where competing theories from the academic field of knowledge production are selectively appropriated and interpreted by policymakers in the curriculum reproduction field and are, in turn, implemented in the pedagogic field of the classroom. And at each point in this process there are border skirmishes and ideological struggles within and between fields. I guess I would want to think that it might not be seen as such a ‘top down’ process, but one which involves more reciprocal relationships between the fields, where the classroom experience feeds back into policy and is an integral part of knowledge production.

Learning and Literacy Where and how would you say that SFL contributes to learning? Ultimately, most learning is mediated through language and other semiotic modes. I think that SFL provides us with the resources for

Beverly Derewianka  51 enhancing students’ learning by, in Halliday’s words, not only learning language but learning through language and about language. Teachers working with the teaching and learning cycle, for example, report that the focus on developing students’ knowledge of the field and the associated language has led to much deeper understanding of the topic, as evidenced in their writing. Recent work on classroom discourse by Australian SFL researchers such as Pauline Jones, Frances Christie, David Rose, and Barbara Parkin has also contributed to student participation in their learning. And of course, the greater clarity about genres has resulted in learning that is much more focused and explicit. How about visual literacy? Do you for example discuss how one reads a diagram? Oh yes. We cannot assume that students know how to interpret the complex diagrams in subjects such as science, math, and geography. Images are so much part of the texts that students read and compose these days. And it is not just diagrams, maps, charts, tables, graphs, and symbols. Many of the picture books these days include sophisticated illustrations that students can appreciate, analyse, and interpret, particularly in relation to the surrounding text. A great deal of research is being done in Australia into the multimodal aspects of texts by people such as Len Unsworth, Yaegen Doran, and Jon Callow. More specifically, how about the role of literacy in disciplines and subject teaching across the curriculum? In secondary school in particular it is inevitable that you have to work with the literacy of the different disciplines. Each content area has its own way of exploring the world, its own specialised knowledge, its ways of using language, and its typical genres. When working with science teachers, for example, it is hard to convince them that they need to be responsible for their students’ literacy development. They think that is the role of the English teacher or they see it as simply teaching technical terms. But when you demonstrate that in learning the language and genres of their discipline, the students are actually learning how scientists use language to inquire, explain, investigate, hypothesise, describe, and so on, they are more convinced to give it a go. Again, there has been a great deal of SFL work into the characteristic literacies of the different subjects. There is a lot of research going on in classrooms and with students, but how about research on the ways that we are teaching the teachers? We are probably not doing enough. But frankly, I am not convinced about introducing SFL in pre-service teacher education. I know this is a bit of heresy for me to say, having taught SFL to pre-service teacher students for 30-odd years, but I do not think they are ready for it in any detail – beyond the level of genre and some basic understandings of language. They have not got the classroom experience to be able to imagine what SFL might do in a classroom. It is different with in-service teachers, they can see its immediate relevance, and they can implement it

52  Beverly Derewianka and see how it works. So, I think we are not doing too badly in terms of working with practising teachers and providing research-based intensive courses offered by people such as David Rose, John Polias, and Brian Dare, along with those offered by the Primary English Teaching Association of Australia and the NSW Teachers Federation. But such courses can only reach a limited number of teachers – it is not as if you could say that a majority of Australian teachers are familiar with SFL.

Achievements and the Future Summing up: What is it that you have done that you are most proud of? I have trouble thinking along those lines, because I see myself as part of a collegial movement, and I just feel privileged to be part of that. Others have been the trailblazers and have worked at extending the theory. I feel that my role is to make it accessible to teachers and in the process to improve students’ literacy outcomes. And I am happy with that. Finally, what do you think will be the main challenges and opportunities for SFL in the future? In educational contexts, I guess keeping true to its core values so that it does not become what teachers perceive as just an alternative set of terms for traditional grammar. From its beginnings, it has been concerned with issues of equity and social accountability, providing all learners – and particularly those from disadvantaged and marginalised backgrounds – with the resources they need to succeed in schooling and having access to the opportunities afforded by a rich education.

References Bernstein B. (1990). Class, codes and control. The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse, Vol. IV. Routledge. Christie, F. & Derewianka, B. (2008). School Discourse: Learning to Write across the Years of Schooling. Continuum. Dahlsen, B., Jones, R. (& Derewianka, B.) (2020). Supporting new arrivals. In H. Harper & S. Feez (Eds.), An EAL/D Handbook: Teaching and Learning across the Curriculum When English Is an Additional Language or Dialect, (pp. 41–62). Primary English Teaching Association of Australia. Derewianka, B. (1990). Rocks in the head. Children and the language of geology. In R. Carter (Ed.), Knowledge about Language and the Curriculum. Hodder and Stoughton (pp. 197–215). (Reprinted in 2020 as a PETAA Pen, Primary English Teaching Association of Australia.) Derewianka, B. (2020). Exploring How Texts Work (2nd ed.). Primary English Teaching Association of Australia. Derewianka, B. & Jones, P. (2010). From traditional grammar to functional grammar: bridging the divide. NALDIC Quarterly, 8(1), 6–17. Halliday, M.A.K. (1999). The notion of “context” in language education. In M. Ghadessy (Ed.), Text and Context in Functional Linguistics [Series: Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 169] (pp. 1–24). John Benjamins.

Beverly Derewianka  53 Hasan, R. (1985). Linguistics, Language, and Verbal Art. Deakin University Press. Hasan, R. (2014). Linguistic sign and the science of linguistics: the foundations of appliability. In Y. Fang & J.J. Webster (Eds.), Developing Systemic Functional Linguistics: Theory and Application (pp. 1–30). Equinox. Martin, J.R. (1985). Process and text: two aspects of human semiosis. In J.D. Benson & W.S. Greaves (Eds.), Systemic Perspectives on Discourse (Vol. 1, pp. 248–274). Ablex. NSW Department of Education. (1994). Write it Right: Exploring Literacy in School English. NSW Department of Education. Rose, D. & Acevedo, C. (2006). Closing the gap and accelerating learning in the Middle Years of Schooling. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 14(2), 32–45. Rose, D. & Martin, J.R., (2012). Learning to Write/Reading to Learn: Genre, Knowledge and Pedagogy in the Sydney School. Equinox. Rothery, J. (1994). Exploring literacy in school English. (Write it right resources for literacy and learning). Metropolitan East Disadvantaged Schools Program. Central publications These are the publications that Beverly Derewianka herself considers to be her most important ones. Derewianka, B. (2011). A New Grammar Companion. Primary English Teaching Association of Australia. Derewianka, B. (2019). A relevant pedagogic grammar for today’s classrooms. In X. Gao (Ed.), Second Handbook of English Language Teaching (pp. 1–25). Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer. Derewianka, B. (2020). Growing into the complexity of mature academic writing. In H. Chen, D. Myhill & H. Lewis (Eds.), Developing Writers across Primary and Secondary Years: Growing into Writing (pp. 213–232). Routledge. Derewianka, B. & Jones, P. (2016). Teaching Language in Context (2nd ed. – expanded with new material and chapters). Oxford University Press. Christie, F. & Derewianka, B. (2008). School Discourse: Learning to Write across the Years of Schooling. Continuum Press.

4

Mary Macken-Horarik

Mary Macken-Horarik’s last position was as Senior Research Fellow at Australian Catholic University, where she worked within the Educational Semiotics and Literacies research concentration. Her work on the domains of literacy has inspired teachers and teacher educators all over the world. She is now adjunct Associate Professor at the university, a title awarded ‘in recognition of her international reputation and scholarly expertise in the field of Senior Secondary English Curriculum’. Previously she has worked with English and Multiliteracies Education in the School of Education at the University of New England in Armidale, NSW, and as a Senior Lecturer in English education at the University of Canberra, ACT, Australia. She worked for several years as a teacher of school English and did her doctoral work on the specialised literacy practices of secondary English. Her research spans literacy education, systemic functional grammar, reading pedagogy, critical discourse analysis, and multimodality. Her special interest in systemic functional semiotics is taken into practice exploring the potential applications in creative and DOI: 10.4324/9780429352270-4

Mary Macken-Horarik  55 interpretive tasks in school English. Her research interests also include narrative writing, assessment, and English as a second language (ESL). The interview took place in October 2019 in Sydney, Australia.

Academic Life Story We will start with your academic life story. How was it that you ended up in your field? Well, it depends how you characterise my field. I had a literary background and was a teacher of school English for five years in three different secondary schools in New South Wales. I was always interested in language and because of questions I was facing as a teacher linguist working in a remote Aboriginal community, I began my master’s degree at Deakin University in 1985 with Frances Christie. It was a marvellous course taught remotely and introduced me to the thinking of systemic functional linguists like Michael Halliday, Ruquaiya Hasan, Jim Martin, and Gunther Kress. There was great excitement at that time about the possibilities of genre-based literacy education for making the demands of writing more visible, especially for children without access to middle-class discourses. It might have ended there but, following my return to Sydney, I got a job as a curriculum officer with the Literacy Education Research Network (called LERN for short), working at the School’s Directorate of New South Wales. My task was to write a series of curriculum booklets outlining the potential of genre-based approaches to writing for teachers. It was a huge challenge for me as a teacher with a rudimentary background in linguistics and meant that I had to produce materials that reconciled different perspectives on genre, register, and grammar, and their role in writing pedagogy. For example, how explicit did we need to be about grammar, genre structure, or pedagogy? How to balance the concerns of context and language in the writing classroom? The conversations with Gunther Kress, Joan Rothery, and Jim Martin in the LERN project marked my entry into the world of social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics. We produced four booklets for teachers out of this initial intervention in the teaching of writing and I am still quite proud of them (Macken-Horarik et al. 1989). I started my PhD first at Macquarie University with David Butt and then transferred to Sydney University to enrol in the School of Semiotics to work with Jim Martin. I was lucky because I was awarded a scholarship supporting women returning to study after having children. It was difficult attempting a PhD with two babies, and it took a long time, but I managed it. I completed my thesis, entitled Construing the invisible: specialized literacy practices in junior secondary English and graduated in 1997 from the University of Sydney. For several years, I worked on contract at the University of Technology Sydney and in 2001, I took on a

56  Mary Macken-Horarik senior lectureship at the University of Canberra. In one research project, I applied my model of literacy domains to the learning of pre-service teachers and began a project with Wendy Morgan exploring the linguistics of poststructuralist English. At the same time, Frances Christie and I were in dialogue with sociologists like Karl Maton who had moved to Australia and was developing his legitimation code theory drawing on Bernstein’s code theory primarily (Bernstein 2000). It was a fertile period of my academic life. I was learning about how to teach reading to children struggling with literate discourse building on the inspiration of colleagues like Brian Gray, Wendy Cowey, and (later) Misty Adoniou. Then in 2007, inspired by research done by Len Unsworth in multimodality, I moved to Armidale with my family and took up an Associate Professorship at the University of New England. It was there that I developed the concept of a ‘good enough’ grammatics for school English, which led to several publications and many good conversations with teachers, children, and fellow researchers (see below). These days I continue to think and write about these matters more informally. I hold a position as Adjunct Associate Professor with the Australian Catholic University.

The Field How were you first introduced to SFL and social semiotics? It is a wonderful question, because I love to think about those days where I did not know that I was starting something so important to my life’s work. One of the moments was in my diploma of education in 1978 when Michael Halliday gave a guest lecture to education students at the University of New South Wales. Now, I had spent the whole of my teacher training attending lectures and having a lot of fun but learning almost nothing about education. Progressivist discourse was dominant at that time and I assumed that the task of the teacher was simply to set up a positive environment and students would learn even if we did not teach them anything explicitly. Halliday’s talk about language change in China was a revelation, not just because it was interesting in its own right but because it challenged the benevolent inertia of progressivism. I thought ‘He has taught, and I have learned’. It was a preview of what was to come when I learned about how literacy can be made visible to students – actually taught as well as learned. I mentioned earlier that I worked as a teacher linguist in a remote part of the Northern Territory. In the bilingual programme operating at Wadeye school in 1984, Aboriginal children were learning to read and write in one of the local languages – Murrinhpatha – and then to transfer understandings of print to later learning of English. My job was to develop a bilingual literacy programme in both languages. What a challenge! The Master of Education provided a way of thinking of genre

Mary Macken-Horarik  57 and register, context and text that helped me to imagine how it could be done. The Deakin series of books that Frances Christie edited (see the interview with Frances Christie), were wonderful and life-changing resources in this enterprise. What influence on your work has come from cooperating with other scholars in the SFL-community? Or outside? I am a scholar who works best in dialogue and I have been profoundly influenced by conversations and collaboration with scholars in SFL and beyond. In my field of education, Joan Rothery, Frances Christie, Sally Humphrey, Susan Feez to name only a few have developed their approach to SFL through collaboration with teachers and students. Michael Halliday modelled this openness to dialogue for all those who studied or worked with a functional approach to language. At the heart of SFL is an interest in solving problems in the real world. In a key article on grammar and grammatics, Halliday wrote that ‘we can evaluate a theory by seeing how far it helps in solving problems where language is centrally involved’ (Halliday 1996/2002, p. 401). And if we are to solve problems in education, health, or information sciences, we have to cooperate with others who have an interest in solving problems. Dialogue is inherent in the vision of language as a social semiotic. The LERN project launched me into research in genre-based literacy. Well, the most personally rewarding aspect of this was the work I did with teachers who were experimenting with materials we produced. Working in the territory between linguistics and education has meant that I have become a theorist of the ‘between’. In 2011, I led a large Discovery funded by the Australian Research Council (DP110104309) to investigate the quality of a grammatics that would be ‘good enough’ to meet the demands of school English in an era of national curriculum. I was lucky to be working with Len Unsworth, who is an expert on multimodal education, and with two wonderful educational linguists, Kristina Love and Carmel Sandiford and our collaboration was crucial to the success of the project. What do you think is your main contribution to SFL and social semiotics? I am an educational linguist so my main contribution to SFL and social semiotics is an educational one. I have spent most of my professional life moving between theory and practice, theory and curriculum, knowledge about language and linguistic know how. We can learn so much from one another if we listen well. I think SFL has not done well with English teachers who find its technicality forbidding. At the same time, many in SFL remain frustrated by the implicit pedagogy of English, finding it locks many students out of the privileged knowledge code. In many ways, we work across incommensurate paradigms and have what Karl Maton calls ‘code clash’ (Maton 2007, 2014). My contribution has been to try to translate one code (linguistic) for another (pedagogic) and to

58  Mary Macken-Horarik understand where tools from SFL or social semiotics are useful to school learning. I continue to think and write about this, even now. How would you characterize SFL compared to other theories of language? SFL is one of several functional theories of language that emphasise language in use. But SFL takes the extra step of showing how use or function shapes the internal architecture of language. It allows us to relate language to the social world, via what has been called the ‘context-metafunction-hookup-thesis’ (Halliday 1978; Hasan 2014). So, the tenor we adopt in ‘external’ social relations activates interpersonal meanings internal to language; the field we are in influences ideational meanings and mode of discourse influences textual meanings. I find this aspect of SFL a powerful ‘way in’ to the context-text relationship and have not found this in other theories of language, even functional ones. It puts meaning making at the centre of its design of language and this makes it so much more productive for educational purposes. In my own work, the ‘hookup’ between contextual variables and meaning choices was central to the theory of literacy domains (see Macken-Horarik 1996). Of course, SFL is not just a theory of language but can be applied to other modes and this gives it a powerful portability. When you talk about SFL as portable, do you mean that it carries easily across domains? Yes, I do mean that, but I do not mean that this happens automatically, because it is a highly elaborated theory of language. We have to decide what aspects of the theory can be applied and at what level of delicacy we can make it portable. Genre is a highly transferable construct, along with field, tenor, and mode and associated metafunctions. I think Jim Martin’s notion of periodicity has proved portable too, especially for helping students organise compositions (Martin and Rose 2007). When it comes to disciplinary literacies, most teachers work with what James Gee calls ‘mid-level generalizations’ (2000). Just having an idea of context is too broad but categories like genre, field, tenor, and mode allow us to highlight different dimensions of a context we will focus on in teaching and learning. In a literacy unit, for example, they enable us to orient our students to types of text they will focus on in a field of knowledge, the roles they will take up in their writing and features of written language they will learn about. The notion of ‘mid-level’ tools is one aspect of portability. The other has to do with reframing knowledge through alternative metalanguages. In the grammatics project we introduced teachers to appraisal systems like Attitude and Graduation. When students in one Melbourne school learned about Force, they reframed it in terms like ‘turning up the volume’ and ‘bumping up the jam’. Technicality doesn’t have to be forbidding. I teach periodicity as a form of ‘signposting’ of intentions in development of texts. You can teach Theme in this way too. We need

Mary Macken-Horarik  59 to reframe technical metalanguage so learners can hold onto it. My colleagues Sally Humphrey and Lucy Macnaught (2015) refer to this as ‘bridging metalanguage’ – very useful in teaching linguistics to the uninitiated. In your view, what is the difference between social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics? Social semiotics is the theoretical stance informing systemic functional linguistics. The concept of choice as motivated, the idea that meaning is multifaceted and that social processes shape semiotic ones are key in both social semiotics and SFL. The idea that texts embody social practices and that social processes shape texts is central to both too. But social semiotics is the larger field and SFL is the linguistic outworking of a social perspective on semiosis. Theorists like Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen who are primarily social semioticians employ tools of SFL, but these are motivated in social rather than linguistic terms. Many scholars with an interest in discourse analysis would turn to social semiotics rather than SFL because it demands less investment. Language is a complex object of study and the complex architecture of SFL can be forbidding to scholars because it is so elaborated in its internal organisation. But this explicitness is important for educational linguistics. I read Gunther Kress or Theo van Leeuwen (1996) for the fresh air of new thinking about social semiotic processes and for their engagement with contemporary theory. But I turn to Jim Martin, Frances Christie, Susan Feez, or Sally Humphrey for tools to tackle practical problems in education. The two fields not only overlap but complement one another in important ways. What is meaning? And how is that related to knowledge? Meaning is something we make. It is a sense-making process and an outcome of the sense-making that we do. Once we have such an approach to meaning, then anything can become meaningful. I really like Halliday’s idea on knowledge: to know something is to turn it into meaning. I agree with Gunther Kress that we cannot have a theory of learning without a theory of meaning, even if this is implicit. In his book about multimodality, Kress argues that ‘signs made “outwardly” are the best evidence that we can get for understanding the “inner” processes of learning’ (Kress 2010, p. 183). With a systemic functional perspective on knowledge, we discovered that teachers can make use of homologies between signs and knowledge in literacy teaching. For example, in the genre-based literacy-project, we showed how genres mirrored and produced particular kinds of knowledge. For example, if teachers were interested in scientific classification and precise description, the information report was a great way to get kids in. Explanation was more dynamic and was appropriate to sequences of processes that were temporally or causally related. For me, this homology between text and knowledge-structure is the most exciting thing about genre work and I

60  Mary Macken-Horarik pursued this in my research on text response. In learning to interpret literary texts, students rely on symbolic relational processes, elaboration, and nominalisation. Meaning and knowledge are mutually informing: to work on one is to build the other.

SFL and Learning Where and how do you find that SFL most importantly contributes to learning? SFL is vital to my understanding of learning as a semiotic process. I think of learning as a new way of making sense, turning experience into meaning. Michael Halliday stresses this in a paper arguing that we can model learning on the basis of key features of language learning (Halliday 1993). When students understand something, they construe it in some ways. They simultaneously make it in the mind and in the sign. In my own work on interpretation, I have been able to read students’ meanings and to understand their approach to a literary text on the basis of their wordings. SFL has enabled me to interpret what students have learned by giving me tools for analysing meaning choices in their texts. My research has been part of a much larger enterprise inspired by child language studies within and outside SFL. The teaching-learning cycle emerged through a confluence of studies focusing on learning ‘how to mean’ (Halliday 1975, 1993; Painter 1986, 1999), research by Brian Gray into conditions of successful literacy learning by Aboriginal children (Gray 1986, 1990) and genre-based literacy projects focused on factual writing led by Jim Martin (1985, 1993) and Joan Rothery (1989). This led to a flowering of new understandings about the intimate connection between language and learning. How important are the metafunctions? They are important and help us think about how every act of meaning is at once an act of representation, an interaction and discourse. In school English we often talk about polysemy and the theory of metafunctions gives us a principled way into this notion of polysemy and a way of making polysemy explicit for students. While teachers accept that meanings are multiple, they don’t have ways of connecting these to wordings, or (multimodally speaking) other forms of expression. In the grammatics project, we invited participants to view metafunctions as ‘lenses on meaning’. Each lens allows us to see different things in texts. For example, when we ‘put on’ our experiential lens, we perceive ‘what is going on’, who or what is taking part and in what circumstances. So, if someone asks what a current novel ‘is about’, they are probing experiential meaning and our reply will typically be a summary of story line, major characters, and their situation. An interpersonal lens highlights different aspects of meaning – whether a narrative hooks us in, is ‘a page turner’ or a bore. The textual lens brings different features into

Mary Macken-Horarik  61 relief – the organisation of a composition. Here, we focus on page layout, patterns of verse and chorus in a song, metre in a poem, dialogue, and so on. It will come as no surprise that the textual lens is important in a discipline focused on literary craft. We have written about this approach to metafunctions in our book about functional grammatics (Macken-Horarik et al. 2018b). Is there a cognitive component in your understanding of language development? I think meaning making is a cognitive process, occurring interiorly but shaped by social processes. We can think about the semiotic and the cognitive as different perspectives on one process. But the conversation between SFL and cognitive linguists has yet to take off. There are helpful overtures in Gunther Kress’ concept of the ‘interests’ of the learner. Michael Halliday hints at it in the metaphor of ‘construal’. Construal is an interior action, thinking that results in meaning. In my own studies, it is clear that that students’ talk and texts reveal much of their current thinking, what they see as ‘criterial’, to follow Kress’ formulation (2010). In his work with Christian Matthiessen, Halliday explores cognition in semiotic terms (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999) and this is productive. But if I am honest, I think cognition has largely been left out of the picture and that is an issue for an educator, who is engaged in the business of encouraging thinking. One of the reasons is historical, because Michael Halliday, in contradistinction to Chomsky’s approach to language, was saying that language was a social process, and this is especially relevant in educational fields. The dialogue has not really begun, except in work around evolutionary perspectives, on semogenesis. There is a wonderful collection of papers in a book emerging from a conference on development and evolution, edited by Geoff Williams and Annabelle Lukin (2004). So, we are in early days. Are there other theories of education that have inspired your work? Yes, the social constructivist theories of Lev Vygotsky and Mikhail Bakhtin. The pedagogy associated with SFL, the teaching-learning cycle1 of modelling, joint and independent construction, was profoundly influenced by Vygotsky’s notion of interaction and dialogue as the key to learning. Bakhtin’s work on the inherent dialogism of a narrative was crucial to my understanding of how narratives invite responsiveness in readers. Bernstein’s work on code theory has been very important too. It helped me to connect the hidden curriculum of English with the social class of students and to understand why some students can ‘read’ the hidden injunctions behind apparently open questions and succeed where working class or boundary students could not. More recently, Karl Maton’s work on legitimation code theory, LCT, has extended my understandings of English as a ‘knower code’. What potential does LCT carry? And how does LCT in your view relate to SFL?

62  Mary Macken-Horarik LCT is a social realist sociology of knowledge-practices in education. It emerged out of the dialogues between Karl Maton and his colleagues Rob Moore and Johan Muller. More recently the dialogue between Karl Maton, Jim Martin, Sue Hood and others has led to a fuller account of how knowledge is produced, how it is built over time and how we understand the knowledge-structures of different disciplines. I find LCT useful because it helps to account for resistance among English teachers to theories of language like SFL. English is segmentally organised. Knowledge building does not occur in cumulative ways but through a kind of immersion in texts and the knowledge base on which this immersion is founded tends to be left implicit. If SFL is a knowledge code, English is a knower-code. English legitimates its knowers through cultivation of sensibility, particular approaches to literary and other texts. The symbolic reading that I have continued to uncover as crucial to success in English is not taught so much as rewarded. LCT enables us not just to react to the code clash between SFL and English, but to explain it.

Text and Context How would you define the concept of text? Does your concept of text include multimodal texts? To start with the last question first, my concept of text definitely includes multimodality. A text is an artefact I produce out of a conversation, out of an act of meaning. But it is also a process in which I produce meaning. I think SFL has been crucial here in its insistence that a text is both product and process. This is a broad definition of texts and we need a synoptic and a dynamic perspective on text – a theory of textuality perhaps. Much of the educational work on text has foregrounded the product aspect of textuality. I am talking to you now, and that is a text as well but how do we capture its fluidity and its on-goingness. Michael Halliday defines a text as anything that has texture and structure and so does Ruqaiya Hasan. Cohesive links mark what is text and non-text. And that works as far as it goes. But there are questions around text that emerge once we start to analyse discourse. I confronted this when I began to investigate media texts produced during the notorious ‘Children Overboard affair’ in the early years of the 21st century. The conservative government in Australia at that time was prosecuting a harsh border protection regime and seeking the support of the populace to turn back the boats taking refugees to Australia. Anyway, I was analysing front-page news which involved a series of texts, all working together to impute ill intent to refugees. They were accused of throwing their children into the water in order to secure rescue by the Australian navy. In fact, they were in the water because their boat was sinking. The ‘news’ involved

Mary Macken-Horarik  63 heavily cropped photos of adults and children in the water and inflammatory headlines and caption. Now the national scandal is one thing but dealing with the images, captions, and headlines and later additions to these in other news broadcasts and papers raised theoretical issues (Macken-Horarik 2003). Given the mutually referential semiosis, I had to assume that the whole front page was a multimodal text. Kress and van Leeuwen had drawn attention to the need for a capacious approach to coherence (see Kress and van Leeuwen 1998) so I was able to draw on this in my analysis. This was an important project for me, not just because the issues were so urgent (and remain so) but because it challenged my assumptions about what a text is. To what extent is the whole front page a text? Where do I draw the boundaries? How do we refer to the chain of texts that issue from one ‘story’? Text is a necessary but problematic category and poses challenges not just for discourse analysts but for educators, especially around where you draw the boundaries, and how you describe the semiotic phenomena within these. What kind of toolkit do you need when you approach a multimodal text? I think that this toolkit is still very much under construction, especially in education. First of all, the toolkit has to enable us to take account of all meaning-bearing modes in a text. This varies according to genre and medium. The tools for analysing still images like posters are better developed than those for moving images, though John Bateman and colleagues are doing wonderful work on film semiotics (Bateman and Schmidt 2012). Gunther Kress, Theo van Leeuwen, and Michael O’Toole originally draw on the systemic functional toolkit to analyse paintings, images, sound, music, and so on. But their work remains a promissory note when it comes to multimodality. In Australia, we now have a national curriculum requiring teachers to introduce students to multimodal texts using a visual metalanguage. So the issue is firmly on the table. The grammatics project involved some fascinating work on literary reading of picture books and graphic novels (Macken-Horarik and Unsworth 2014; Unsworth and Macken-Horarik 2015). The systemic functional approach utilised by Painter, Martin, and Unsworth in their book – Reading Visual Narratives (2013) – was pivotal here. There are big unanswered questions for educators though when it comes to multimodality. We need educational research. I am still trying to think about these issues from the point of view of SFL and school English (Macken-Horarik 2016). How do you understand the relation between text and context? The relationship between text and context is an enduring question for me. It is not a simple thing, because while contexts generate texts, what I say or write also ‘produces’ a context. Or perhaps better, it evokes it. The latter aspect – the production of a context – is something Joan Rothery and I needed to think about in our workshops for teachers in the

64  Mary Macken-Horarik Disadvantaged Schools Program (DSP). In developing resources based on SFL, we had to help teachers understand how various registers coalesce in certain domains of practice and how these registers and associated genres were related to these contextual domains but also affirmed them by means of text. Working with Joan, Jim, and others at the DSP helped me theorise the literacy domains and thus make contextualisation more principled (Macken-Horarik 1996, 1998). If teachers could guess with a high degree of probability language choices likely in a given context, they could plan learning more effectively. But can we develop a model of context that aligns the disciplinary preoccupations of teachers with Halliday’s theory of context (Halliday 1991/2007)? That is what I am working on these days. And how do we work with these relations in the classroom? Initially, Joan Rothery and I used the domains to help teachers plan for and teach literacy in everyday, specialised and reflexive contexts. Teachers told us they found them helpful for reflecting on where they found students and where they hoped to ‘take’ them educationally. Later, initiatives like the DSP ‘Write it Right Project’ continued to build understandings about genre and register for workplace and school settings (Christie and Martin 1997). More recently, I have become interested in how children’s talk and writing project a version of a context that may or may not align with their teacher’s understanding. There are often asymmetries we need to understand if we are to induct ‘boundary’ students into school discourse. It is heart breaking to realise that some students who could with a more visible pedagogy produce an appropriate text are locked out because the context they are ‘in’ is left implicit (Macken-Horarik 2020). How useful is Halliday’s concept of register in your work? Register has been a point of contention in SFL. Jim Martin identifies field, tenor, and mode as register variables, whereas Michael Halliday insisted that register is semantic, and context is social. I tend to think that Halliday’s idea is important, because I want to distinguish between situation and meaning, situation and language. Some argue that if we focus on writing, it does not make much difference whether you are distinguishing between situation and language, because you are looking at the construal of a situation in a text, so they amount to the same thing. I use field, tenor, mode as tools for modelling the situation shaping a particular register. For me, the term, register, refers to the configuration of meanings associated with a context of situation. But we can produce a situation by means of text, especially where texts are constitutive of their own situation. Am I avoiding the issue?

Genre What is your definition of genre?

Mary Macken-Horarik  65 There are different accounts of genre around, some of them more useful than others. Initially, genre was defined as a goal-oriented social process in which language is involved. It has changed to become far more about prototypical patterning in text that relates to the social. I think the larger definition is preferable. In many classrooms, genre is recontextualised as text-type, with a very formulaic pattern of stages. It has led to a reductive version of genre, one that English teachers have (rightly) rejected. Genre was a powerful, educationally transformative way of thinking about choices and meaning in text. When we first began the work in the LERN project and at the DSP, it was so helpful to have access to categories that mapped the influence of social purposes on the structure of texts and I think teachers and students found it a revelation. However, when we went into secondary schools, the easy symmetry between purpose and text-structure broke down. We simply could not work with it in the same way. English teachers said: You don’t always start a narrative with an orientation. In detective fiction you start with a crisis or complication. You are leaving out those open-ended choices in a narrative that are resonant without being resolved. Resolution is too rigid a structure for us in English. Not only do you not help us account for more complex, open-ended narratives, you haven’t done any linguistic work on poetry, dramaturgy or larger texts we work with. Basically, they sent us back to the drawing table and said: ‘Become useful to us or we cannot work with you’. The notion of genre as poly-functional, as involving structure, addressivity, and construal of experience, is increasingly important to me. I have always been aware that much of the power of the narrative or poetry or drama, lies in its latent patterning, which genre-structure cannot begin to get anyway near. We need a linguistics that is attentive to the ‘not-said’, or to the ‘said very subtly’, as well as the ‘said more directly’. Appraisal theory goes some way towards it, but only some way. And we need a more relational account of this too (Macken-Horarik and Isaac 2014). How do you consider genre-pedagogy in the development of reading and writing in school? Very important, but only a step. Teachers in the LERN-project and later initiatives at the DSP found it incredibly useful, especially in writing pedagogy. David Rose has built on this but extended the functional model to reading in collaboration with Jim Martin and, earlier, Brian Gray (Rose and Martin 2012). One of the papers I wrote was called ‘Something to Shoot for’ (2001), and in many ways it is a reductive account of English and science. Even so, the majority of Australian teachers we surveyed claim that genre gave them something to ‘go for’ in teaching

66  Mary Macken-Horarik students how to structure a text (Macken-Horarik et al. 2018a,b). It gave them something, but it does not go far enough.

Literacy What is literacy for you? Literacy is a social practice. It is also a technology that deploys resources for meaning in certain ways. Although I have worked in the field of literacy education all my professional life, I have trouble with defining it now. In Australian curriculum, literacy encompasses reading, writing, speaking, and listening and in fact all forms of communication. This can become problematic, so we tend to add a modifier and refer to print literacy, multimodal literacy, technological literacy, and so on. Perhaps it is a term that has become so vague that it has outworn its usefulness.

In the Classroom Working with students and teachers, how do you apply SFL? This has been the work of my last ten years. In 2009, I was invited to be an adviser and then in 2010 a writer of the national curriculum. I became intimately acquainted with the big questions of language for Australian students. Building on earlier work by colleagues like Beverly Derewianka, I grappled with questions of terminology, scope, and detail. What had to be in the curriculum? How should language be related to literature? What about multimodal grammar? These questions were live ones. People are still wrestling with them. I mentioned earlier that in 2011, I was awarded a large discovery grant to investigate the character of a grammatics that would be ‘good enough’ for school English. Grammatics is Michael Halliday’s term for one’s theory of grammar (Halliday 2002). The national curriculum was now expecting teachers to teach knowledge about language systematically and was functional (if not systemic functional) in orientation. This put the heat under our project, especially as we were working simultaneously with teachers across four key years of schooling (Years 4 and 6 in primary school and Years 8 and 10 in secondary school). It was a challenging process. Also, we were aiming to relate the grammatics to narrative (in 2011), persuasion (in 2012), and text response (in 2013) and to include multimodal texts as I mentioned above. So, the term ‘good enough’ came to mean ‘really good’. We could ill afford to leave participating teachers to their own devices, especially as many had no firm grounding in linguistics. The question then became, what kind of theory of grammar do ordinary teachers need, if they are going to teach this national curriculum effectively? And how do they change students’ understandings and capacities to write using functional grammatics?

Mary Macken-Horarik  67 For three years we worked with the same group of about 21 teachers in remote schools, regional schools in New South Wales and in Victorian schools. And the wonderful thing for me was that the dialogues were ongoing. We had panel discussions that were very vibrant and honest. Teachers would come back from trialling aspects of the grammatics and talk about what they learned and challenge us (me particularly) when they did not think a concept worked. I believe that the teachers learned as much from each other as they did from the linguists. We interviewed students too, how they understood things and talked to them about their writing and the sense they made of multimodal texts. It was a very, very generative interface between SFL and English and I continue to ponder the conversations we had. But there are problems with the grammatics because issues emerge once you start a project like this. How much grammatics? How much scope in a four-day in-service can you give to a grammatics-project? What tools for what purposes? You have to make selection from the large apparatus that is SFL. Do we start as English teachers with text? Why are we calling it grammatics? It is in a sense a textually oriented intervention: how does grammatics relate to the larger patterns in text? Jim Martin would say: ‘You are dealing with a discourse semantics, do not call it grammatics’. Yes, we could have constrained the scope of the grammatics and yielded to the discourse semantics once we left the region of the clause. But I think we made the right decision to situate work on grammar within the larger framework of texts in contexts. My hunch was: Let us take it as far as it can go. Given that Jim has developed his discourse semantics on the basis of metafunctions, let us take the metafunctions in the grammatics in new directions. Let us work with stratification and system too – these are all relevant to grammar and semantics. Also, teachers in our project often had a decontextualised and correctionist view of grammar so it was salutary to widen their perspective and to relate grammar to the rhetorical aspects of composition. So, for example, ‘let’s see what we can do with process types or elaboration and push these grammatical concepts in the direction of rhetoric’. You can’t do this if you are working with an impoverished grammatics. Some teachers did amazing work. I observed that those with the most interesting results were the ones who turned the theory into resources of their own and introduced it to students with a bridging metalanguage. The big finding that I had not expected, was the metabolising of knowledge by teachers and this turned up in the interviews with their students too (Macken-Horarik and Unsworth 2014; Unsworth and Macken-Horarik 2015).

68  Mary Macken-Horarik There were three major theoretical findings in the grammatics project: The first is that Halliday’s trinocular view of grammar is incredibly important. You have to view the grammar ‘from above’, from the point of view of context (say narrativity or persuasion), ‘from below’, in terms of form (visual or verbal realisations) and you have to view the grammar ‘from roundabout’ (as related systems of choices). The teachers we worked with were happy to think about grammatics from above, perhaps because they are used to an emphasis on context. With some exceptions, most found concepts like focalisation or representation helpful for motivating attention to particular grammatical choices. They engaged with several systems of meaning, including transitivity, tense, projection, and expansion. What they had most trouble with was form – grammar seen from ‘below’. Secondary teachers especially felt insecure about their capacity to identify a nominal group, a verbal group, even subject and finite. I wish we had had more time to help teachers identify constituents carrying meaning but we did not and many said that they needed more on this. The second finding is related to this and deals with the SFL notion of stratification. If teachers are going to do the work of English, they need to be able to shift from form to function and meaning. If you are going to understand how a character is created, for example, in the text, you cannot just look at form. You have to look at choices in arrangements and patterns of meaning in the larger text. The teachers have to be able to shift from formal patterning, to the appearance of choice in a visual or verbal medium, to the arrangements of those choices in patterns in grammars. The grammatics had to widen to take in text-wide patterning. The third finding has to do with the creation of an interface between functional grammatics and English. Teachers needed a grammatically founded metalanguage they could put to work in teaching narrative, persuasion, and text response. The work on multimodal texts provided a portal, appropriately given our need for an interface. Len Unsworth’s workshops on ‘image grammatics’ provided participants with a metalanguage that was portable across modes and relevant to key concerns of the discipline such as literary craft, rhetoric and interpretation. And it seemed to open a door for students as well (Unsworth and Macken-Horarik 2015). How important is the use of metalanguage? The metalanguage is very important. It does not matter to me if it is not extremely technical. What matters more is the understanding being developed by the student through the metalanguage. One example comes to mind. A young Maori student talked to me about point of view and started to teach me about the eye. Focalisation in images is linked to the gaze and to the eyes. If he gets the technicalities wrong, does that matter? No. What matters is that he understands that point of view is being created through choices for gaze, and that he can see that working

Mary Macken-Horarik  69 in the texts that he engages with every day: videogames. That is the crucial thing. For me, SFL is the metalanguage I have been involved with. And it has certain affordances and limits. We need to understand that it occludes as well as reveals things in the world. So certain things that you see with, say, an ideational lens, you might miss if you had another metalanguage. But also, the metalanguage starts to ‘think you’ after a while. It gets inside and you think in those terms. You might assume that you see everything, and you do not see everything at all. As your work clearly shows, theory feeds into practice. Can you also give some examples of how practice feeds back into theory? One example that really affected my understanding of voicing in text is the challenge that Wendy Morgan, a theorist and educator in Queensland, gave me in relation to students’ work. At that time in Australia, the growth-model of reading and writing was still dominant, where teachers were less interested in the structure of the great work and more in responses students gave as readers, the reader-response model. The students doing the Extension Literature course in Queensland were learning that reading is a practice, that a text is something we produce out of a reading, and that our reading could be reader-centred, author-centred, text-centred, or world-context-centred. Before I looked closely at student work samples produced during this course, I was of the opinion that the heart of achievement in English was the thematic interpretation where the text itself was read as abstract, embodying axiological values and patterned in certain ways. Wendy Morgan asked me to have a look at some of the students’ texts. It blew my mind, because in fact the students introduced to the poststructuralist reading of literature were doing so much more powerful work than the ones who were just reading texts as a self-contained artefact. They were theorising their own interpretive processes, rationalising them, intervening in texts in powerful ways to change the ending, to think about what would happen if the protagonist was a woman, and then talking about what they could learn from the process. In short, students were looking at reading as something that could be theorised in different ways, and theorised along with great theorists like Roland Barthes or Stanley Fish. Wendy and I wrote two papers about the value of a well-structured poststructuralism for secondary English (Macken-Horarik and Morgan 2008, 2011). That is one example where the practice of analysis challenges the received understandings of the theory: how does attribution change when you are talking about something theoretically, when you are intervening in it? How does the notion of the personal voice change in the course of a profound engagement with theory? Another example is the work I did on the Children Overboard Affair that I mentioned earlier. This involved a whole lot of work on images alone, front page news and political interviews. It was one of those projects that take on a life of their own and continue to unfold in some ways

70  Mary Macken-Horarik like a crime story. What I caught in 2001 as I gazed at the images of boat people in the water without captions, without attribution but with sensationalist headlines imputing murder to refugees, was the tail of a dragon that I am still holding onto every time I listen to news about offshore detention or caption-less photos of refugees today. The cruelty of a government prepared to make human shields of people seeking asylum is semiotically on show almost 20 years later. But the practice of analysis I undertook, guided by earlier work of Theo van Leeuwen, particularly his analysis of visual racism, shaped my sense that linguistics is a far more challenging enterprise than we realise at the outset. You have to engage and then you find that everything you thought, the tools you have been using perfectly happily for language no longer work, or they work only a bit, or they are in trouble. Trouble is where the learning is, in SFL and in all things. Trouble is good.

The Future Which of your academic achievements makes you most proud? For all its problems, the grammatics project makes me proud. I was part of the beginning of the theorising, of the metabolising with teachers, and of the writing of the book Functional Grammatics (2018), and many papers that we have written out of it. I am so happy to have been part of the educational work that began with genre and went on from there. The grammatics project was just the icing on the cake in a way. It was so hard and so interesting. I am also proud of the work that I did with Frances Christie on disciplinarity in subject English. Fran and I were in dialogue with Karl Maton and Johan Muller at a time when Fran had organised a conference and follow up book and focused on disciplinary knowledge. While the work resulted in two co-authored chapters, I am proud of the way it sharpened my sociological thinking and helped me understand the difficulty linguists had faced in asking English teachers to learn more about how language works (Christie and Macken-Horarik 2007, 2011). And what would you have liked to do, that you have not yet done? I do not know that we have ever come close to understanding ineffability in texts and in contexts; the silences in meaning-making. In the Northern Territory, early in my work on the masters’ course, I was taping some interactions with teachers in a joint planning session. There were three white teachers and two Aboriginal teachers, planning a lesson. I had good data and I had a silence, because the Aboriginal teachers did not speak at all during the whole session. They were in a way there semiotically in an embodied way, but they were not there verbally. What kind of semiotics would capture the contribution of those indigenous teachers? And what kind of semiotics would acknowledge the silences that are produced out of these differences in power, in structure, in

Mary Macken-Horarik  71 agency in those contexts? Developing such a social semiotics seems to be something very much needed in a time of intense racism and an international context of Black Lives Matter. The book that I am writing at the moment aims to create a social semiotics and an SFL that is good for school English. Its current title is Social Semiotics and School English: New Territory, New Cartographies and is soon to be published by Springer. It imagines what social semiotics might look like for school English. Is it possible to build a social semiotics that is light enough to carry for teachers, but powerful enough to do important work? That toolkit has not been developed, but should be, and I hope to do something about it in my book. Halliday’s model of context I find very helpful in this enterprise (1991/2007). When kids are learning a foreign language or mother tongue or learning to process and interpret and produce text, he talks about the importance of building a model of the situation that is behind the text to understand how this text builds language, patterns, choices, and so on in the system, and then more broadly in the culture. We need a semiotically principled account of language learning and Halliday’s model is a productive starting point. But teachers don’t think about context in this way. They are focused on what I do in my classroom with my kids, what resources I need, how I assess learning, how I engage them in the first place. Engagement is the first thing – what I call desire. Halliday does not deal with any of those things in his model, or only in a very indirect, abstract way. If you bring these two approaches to context together, you get an interface model of context that is an outcome of both. You think of disciplinary practices in culturally salient ways building on Halliday. You think about language from the point of view of design principles. You think about texts in terms of repertoires of meaning. You think about situation in terms of rhetoric. Halliday does not talk about rhetoric explicitly in his model of situation, but we need that if we are going to talk about how we produce text. I guess we are back at the beginning again – the importance of dialogue if linguists and teachers are going to be able to talk to one another and make mutual sense. When you talk about texts as repertoires of meaning, are you then saying that teachers need a model that is relevant to different disciplines in school? Yes, but I am also saying teachers need an understanding of repertoire that is both linguistically principled and pedagogically useful. What does it mean when we talk about repertoire? Repertoire is a stock of ways of meaning. We can think about a repertoire in terms of genre and register, so that is a way of bringing the two things together. A repertoire is a series of genres I can work with; ways of thinking about meaning that are very expanding. It is the interface between the Hallidayan and the teacherly preoccupations that I am trying to build, because many times teachers and students have very vague notions of what context might mean and

72

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linguists have very technicist models of what registers might mean. You have to model their concerns, and then show how they relate to one another. I have retired now from academia, but this work still excites me. It has a life within me that is bigger than just the profession I was part of. And what do you think will be the main challenges and opportunities for SFL and social semiotics in the future? The first thing is that the dialogue has to go on and has to be conducted in terms that are accessible to everybody. Some people are better at this than others. Gunther Kress for me was a master dialogist in speaking to people from many different fields in ways that made sense and speaking out of social semiotics. It is crucial that dialogue makes sense to everybody, that it is non-technicist, that it is elaborative, articulate, inclusive. The second thing is that there are arenas in which we have only the beginnings of understanding, the area of multimodality. People like Len Unsworth and Jim Martin have put them on the agenda as ‘intersemiosis’. How does a text that is visual, verbal, even sound, how do they work? John Bateman and others have begun to do important work on film semiotics, but none of that has filtered through or been metabolised by educational linguists or educational semioticians for school English, although the work on picture books that was led by Clare Painter is a major step forward. So, the area of multimodality would be the second thing. The third thing would be to understand student semiosis better, the growth of semiosis in students’ work. We have very synoptic accounts of meaning but no accounts that would model the changes in meaning. We do not even have ways of imaging that yet. I am writing a paper for Nicolai Elf (2020) at the moment, about the boundary students whose work I have always seen as problematic. And I am starting to think: how do you look at their work in ways that see their resourcefulness and the cleverness and the good sense in what they are doing? In a sense, I am revisionist in my own work now.

Note 1 See Figure 3.2 in the interview with Beverly Derewianka in this volume.

References Bateman, J. & Schmidt, K. (2012). Multimodal Film Analysis: How Films Mean. Routledge. Bernstein, B. (2000). The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse: Class, Codes and Control (Vol. IV). Routledge. Christie, F. & Macken-Horarik, M. (2007). Building verticality in subject English. In F. Christie & J. R. Martin (Eds), Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy. Functional Linguistic and Socialogical Perspectives (pp. 156–182). Continuum. Christie, F. & Macken-Horarik, M. (2011). Disciplinarity and school subject English. In F. Christie & K. Maton (Eds.), Disciplinarity. Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives (pp. 175–196). Continuum.

Mary Macken-Horarik  73 Christie, F. & Martin, J.R. (Eds.). (1997). Genre and Institutions: Social Processes in the Workplace and School. Cassell. Gee, J. P. (2000). Identity as an analytic lens for research in education. Review of Research in Education, 25, 99–125. Gray, B. (1986). Aboriginal education: some implications of genre for literacy development. In C. Painter & J.R. Martin (Eds.), Writing to Mean: Teaching Genres across the Curriculum (Occasional Papers 9, pp. 188–208). Applied Linguistics Association of Australia. Gray, B. (1990). How natural is ‘natural’ language teaching: employing wholistic methodology in the classroom. Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 12(4), 3–19. Halliday, M.A.K. (1975). Learning How to Mean: Explorations in the Development of Language (Explorations in Language Study). Edward Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. Edward Arnold. Halliday, M.A.K. (1991/2007). The notion of ‘context’ in language education. In J. Webster (Ed.), Language and Education (The Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday, Vol. 9, pp. 269–290). Continuum. Halliday, M.A.K. (1993). Towards a language-based theory of learning. Linguistics and Education, 5, 93–116. Halliday, M.A.K. (2002). On grammar and grammatics. In J. Webster (Ed.), On Language and Linguistics (The Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday, Vol. 3, pp. 384–417). Continuum. Halliday, M.A.K. & Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. (1999). Construing Experience through Meaning: A Language Based Approach to Cognition. Cassell. Hasan, R. (2014). Towards a paradigmatic description of context: systems, metafunctions, and semantics. Functional Linguistics, 1(9), 1–54. Humphrey, S. & Macnaught, L. (2015). Functional language instruction and the writing growth of english language learners in the middle years. TESOL Quarterly, 50(4), 792–816. Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Routledge. Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design. Routledge. Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (1998). Front pages: the (critical) analysis of newspaper layout. In A. Bell & P. Garrett (Eds.), Approaches to Media Discourse (pp. 186–219). Blackwell. Macken-Horarik, M. (1996). Literacy and learning across the curriculum: towards a model of register for secondary teachers. In R. Hasan & G. Williams (Eds.), Literacy in Society (pp. 232–278). Longman. Macken-Horarik, M. (1998). Exploring the requirements of critical school literacy: a view from two classrooms. In F. Christie & R. Misson (Eds.), Literacy and Schooling (pp. 74–103). Routledge. Macken-Horarik, M. (2001). “Something to shoot for”: a systemic functional approach to teaching genre in secondary school science. In A.M. Johns (Ed.), Genre in the Classroom: Multiple Perspectives (pp. 17–43). Erlbaum. Macken-Horarik, M. (2003). Working the borders in racist discourse: the challenge of the ‘children overboard affair’ in news media texts. Social Semiotics, 13(3), 203–383.

74  Mary Macken-Horarik Macken-Horarik, M. (2016). Building a metalanguage for interpreting multimodal literature: Insights from systemic functional semiotics in two case study classrooms. English in Australia, 51(2), 85–99. Macken-Horarik, M. (2020). Tracking and mentoring semogenesis in boundary students. In N. Elf, m.fl (Eds.), Grænsegængere og grænsedragninger i nordiske modersmålsfag. Syddansk Universitetsforlag og Nordisk Netværk for Modersmålsdidaktisk Forskning. http://www.universitypress.dk/images/ pdf/9788740833003.pdf. Macken-Horarik, M. & Isaac, A. (2014). Appraising appraisal. In G. Thompson & T. Alba- Juez (Eds.), Evaluation in Context (pp. 67–92). John Benjamins. Macken-Horarik, M., Love, K. & Horarik, S. (2018a). Rethinking grammar in language arts: insights from an Australian survey of teachers’ subject knowledge. Research in the Teaching of English, 52(3), 288–316. Macken-Horarik, M., Love, K., Sandiford, C. & Unsworth, L. (2018b). Functional Grammatics. Reconceptualizing Knowledge about Language and Image for School English. Routledge. Macken-Horarik, M., Martin, J.R., Kress, G., Kalantzis, M., Rothery, J. & Cope, B. (1989). An Approach to Writing K-12 (Vol. I–IV). Literacy Education Research Network and Directorate of Studies, NSW Department of Education. Macken-Horarik, M. & Morgan, W. (2008). Getting “meta”: reflexivity and literariness in a secondary English literature course. In English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 4 (Vol. 6, pp. 22–35). Retrieved from https://files.eric. ed.gov/fulltext/EJ832201.pdf. Macken-Horarik, M. & Morgan, W. (2011). Towards a metalanguage adequate to linguistic achievement in post-structuralism and English: Reflections on voicing in the writing of secondary students. Linguistics and Education, 22(2), 133–149. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2010.11.003. Macken-Horarik, M. & Unsworth, L. (2014). New challenges for literature study in primary school English: building teacher knowledge and know-how through systemic functional theory, for special issue of Onomázein: Revista semestral de lingűística filogía y traducción, 230–251. http://onomazein. letras.uc.cl/Articulos/N_ALSFAL/ESP_12_Macken.pdf Martin, J.R. (1985). Factual Writing: Exploring and Challenging Social Reality (republished by Oxford University Press, 1989). Deakin University Press. Martin, J.R. (1993). Life as a noun. In M.A.K. Halliday & J.R. Martin (Eds.), Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power (Critical Perspectives on Literacy and Education, pp. 221–267). Falmer. Martin, J.R. & Rose, D. (2007). Working with Discourse: Meaning Beyond the Clause. Continuum. Maton, K. (2007). Knowledge-knower structures in the intelectual and educational fields. In F. Christie & J.R. Martin (Eds.), Language, knowledge and pedgogy. Functional linguistic and sociological perspectives (pp. 87–108). Continuum. Maton, K. (2014). Knowledge and knowers: Towards a realist sociology of education. Routledge. Painter, C. (1986). The role of interaction in learning to speak and learning to write. In C. Painter & J.R. Martin (Eds.), Writing to Mean: Teaching Genres across the Curriculum (Occasional Papers 9, pp. 62–97). Applied Linguistics Association of Australia.

Mary Macken-Horarik  75 Painter, C. (1999). Learning through Language in Early Childhood. Cassell. Painter, C., Martin, J.R. & Unsworth, L. (2013). Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children’s Picture Books. Equinox. Rose, D. & Martin, J.R. (2012). Learning to Write, Reading to Learn: Genre Knowledge and Pedagogy in the Sydney School. Equinox. Rothery, J. (1989). Learning about Language. In R. Hasan & J.R. Martin (Eds.), Language Development: Learning Language, Learning Culture (pp. 199–256). Ablex. Unsworth, L. & Macken-Horarik, M. (2015). Interpretive responses to images in picture books by primary and secondary school students: exploring curriculum expectations of a ‘visual grammatics’. English in Education, 49, 56–79. Williams, G. & Lukin, A. (Eds.). (2004). The Development of Language: Functional Perspectives on Species and Individuals. Continuum. Central publications These are the publications that Mary Macken-Horarik herself considers to be her most important ones. Macken-Horarik, M. (1996). Literacy and learning across the curriculum: towards a model of register for secondary teachers. In R. Hasan & G. Williams (Eds), Literacy in Society (pp. 232–278). Longman. Macken-Horarik, M. (2001). “Something to shoot for”: a systemic functional approach to teaching genre in secondary school science. In A.M. Johns (Ed.), Genre in the Classroom: Multiple Perspectives (pp. 17–43). Erlbaum. Macken-Horarik, M. (2003). Working the borders in racist discourse: the challenge of the ‘children overboard affair’ in news media texts. Social Semiotics, 13(3), 203–383. Macken-Horarik, M. (2006). Recognizing and realizing ‘what counts’ in examination English: perspectives from systemic functional linguistics and code theory. Functions of Language, 13(1), 1–35. Macken-Horarik, M. (2008). Multiliteracies and ‘basic skills’ accountability. In L. Unswsorth (Ed.), New Literacies and the English Curriculum: Multimodal Perspectives (pp. 283–308). Continuum. Macken-Horarik, M. (2009). Multiliteracies, metalanguage and the protean mind: navigating school English in a sea of change. English in Australia, 44(1), 33–42. Macken-Horarik, M. (2020). Tracking and mentoring semogenesis in boundary students. In N. Elf, m.fl (Eds.), Grænsegængere og grænsedragninger i nordiske modersmålsfag. Syddansk Universitetsforlag og Nordisk Netværk for Modersmålsdidaktisk Forskning. http://www.universitypress.dk/images/ pdf/9788740833003.pdf. Macken-Horarik, M., Love, K., Sandiford, C. & Unsworth, L. (2018). Functional Grammatics. Reconceptualizing Knowledge about Language and Image for School English. Routledge. Macken-Horarik, M. & Morgan, W. (2011). Towards a metalanguage adequate to linguistic achievement in post-structuralism and English: reflections on voicing in the writing of secondary students. Linguistics and Education, 22(2), 133–149. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2010.11.003.

5

Kay O’Halloran

Kay O’Halloran is Chair Professor in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. Prior to this, she worked at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Curtin University, Western Australia. She is Visiting Distinguished Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. While in Singapore, she established the Laboratory for Research in Semiotics at NUS and the Multimodal Analysis Lab in the Interactive & Digital Media Institute and took the position of director there. This was a research laboratory designed to develop new digital tools for multimodal analysis. Kay O’Halloran is internationally known for her innovative work on multimodality. She has contributed to the understanding of mathematical and scientific discourses and conducted research on multimodality in several fields, such as the design of brand communications, fashion, social media, theatre performances, English for academic purposes, and picture books, and she has been engaged DOI: 10.4324/9780429352270-5

Kay O’Halloran  77 in work with multimodality in the classroom and multimodal literacy. Together with Kevin Judd, she has developed Systemics 1.0 software for linguistic analysis. She has explored other software applications for visual and audio analyses with students and research fellows in Singapore, resulting in Multimodal Analysis Image and Multimodal Analysis Video software. One of her latest fields of interest is multimodal approaches to big data analytics in areas which include extremist discourse in online media, recruitment strategies for extremist foreign fighters, and multimodal rhetoric in online news and social media. She is currently working on the cloud-based Multimodal Analysis Platform (MAP) for big data analytics in Liverpool. She is interested in methodological issues, particularly in the use of mixed methods approaches to multimodal research. The interview took place at the University of Liverpool in January 2020.

Academic Life Story Please tell us about your education, special interests, and how you ended up in your field? I will start with my education. I completed a Bachelor of Science (1979) in mathematics at the University of Western Australia in Perth, Western Australia. A year after I had started my degree, I was awarded a scholarship to become a teacher and was bonded to work as a high school mathematics teacher for several years. After I had finished my degree, I completed a Diploma in Education (1980) in order to qualify for teaching. I taught in various high schools in Australia for about ten years. In these years, the mathematics curriculum in Western Australia changed, and I could see that the change had a detrimental effect on the students’ ability to learn mathematics. I therefore went back to university and completed a Bachelor of Education (1st Class Honours) (1991) in mathematics education. I needed to analyse more closely what was happening in mathematics classrooms, so I started my PhD in 1992 at the University of Western Australia, having been awarded an Australian Postgraduate Research Award. I read about different approaches to educational theory and classroom interactions, a field I was very familiar with because I had been teaching for so long. Specifically, I was looking at differences in mathematics classrooms based on social class, gender, and school system (i.e. private schools and state schools). I had taught in low-performing schools in deprived areas, and I knew that students did not achieve the same level of success compared to students from upperand middle-class areas. Then I met Jay Lemke who had been in Australia working with Michael Halliday. I explained my research interests and he said: “You should go and see Michael O’Toole”. I then met with Michael O’Toole, and he talked about the social semiotic perspective and his work on the language of displayed art. This meeting had an impact

78  Kay O’Halloran on me. I ended up transferring from the University of Western Australia to Murdoch University so I could complete my PhD under Michael O’Toole’s supervision. This is how I was introduced to systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and social semiotics. I was working with mathematics and so I was looking at language, images and symbolism. Social semiotics provided the theory that I needed in order not only to understand the mathematics itself and mathematics discourse, but also to analyse what was happening in different mathematics classrooms based on socio-economic status and gender. My academic career has moved from the hardcore sciences into education and then into humanities. I feel very fortunate because I can bring together insights from various fields. I still to this day find the social semiotic, systemic functional approach productive in terms of understanding communication from multiple perspectives. Could you also tell us about the places you have worked? After I had finished my PhD (1996), there were no university posts available in Perth, and so I did some relief teaching in high schools. In 1997, I secured a position with Eija Ventola who was working at the Martin-Luther-University in Halle in Germany at that time. Shortly after arriving in Germany, I was offered a position in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore, and I moved from Halle to Singapore in 1998. I worked in Singapore for 15 years and had many opportunities there. I built up my research lab, the Multimodal Analysis Lab, in the Interactive Digital Media Institute (2007–2013). I secured several large grants and supervised many brilliant postgraduate students during this time. I was able to set up the research infrastructure in the lab with excellent facilities, and I was working with computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians trying to develop digital approaches to multimodal analysis. After that, I went back to Perth for six years, and had a position as Professor in linguistics and multimodal analysis in the School of Education at Curtin University. I moved to the University of Liverpool in 2019. I am Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Communication and Media in the School of Arts. With the experiences I have had, I feel that I can mentor colleagues and help to build research infrastructure here. The Multimodal Analysis Lab in Singapore is well known. How was the work there? As I said, I had many excellent postgraduate students in Singapore, and I set up the Laboratory for Research in Semiotics in the Department of English Language and Literature, and following that, the Multimodal Analysis Lab in the Interactive & Digital Media Institute. We managed to get our own building for the lab. It was only a house, but it was wonderful. It had many rooms, and I built up the infrastructure with computers and equipment and I recruited many researchers and students to work on various projects. We started developing software for

Kay O’Halloran  79 multimodal analysis, text and image and video. From there, we ended up developing spin-off technologies in the form of multimodal analysis software, and I started up the Multimodal Analysis Company. The company did not bring any money, in fact the opposite, but the tools are still being used for postgraduate projects and for other research projects around the world. We basically provided a digital platform to develop theoretical frameworks and code the analysis, making it possible to store and retrieve the semiotic choices in order to map the patterns. It was hard work and I am eternally grateful to members of my research team, in particular Alexey Podlasov, Sabine Tan, Marissa E, Brad Smith, and Stefano Fasciani. Also, I am grateful for to Kevin Judd for his contributions over many years, since the days of my PhD when we worked on the prototype version of Systemics for linguistic analysis. When you develop your own digital tools and work with talented colleagues like Kevin Judd and other scientists, you really learn what you can and cannot do with these sorts of platforms. When I left Singapore, we finished off the multimodal analysis software, and then the lab closed. We learned a lot from working in interdisciplinary groups. I learned the hard way, which is the way you do not forget. If you bring together people from different disciplines, there has to be a will to learn from each other, and some sense that everyone is getting something from it. I am fortunate because I have managed to work with excellent researchers, otherwise none of this work in Singapore would have been possible. What about your time at Curtin University in Perth? I had a brilliant team at Curtin University as well. I want to mention Sabine Tan who was my MA and PhD student in multimodal analyses and my research fellow in Singapore, and Peter Wignell who is from Sydney, and was trained by Jim Martin. Peter also worked in Singapore for a few years, covering for me in the Department of English Language and Literature at NUS while I was running the lab. Together, the three of us formed the Multimodal Analysis Group at Curtin University. Michael Wiebrands joined the group to work on a project on 360 degree video. We were a tight and highly productive team, and these were exciting times. At Curtin University, the Curtin Institute of for Computation had been established under the directorship of Andrew Rohl. The institute had data scientists, in particular Kevin Chai and Rebecca Lange, who worked with us on certain projects. That helped us to do a lot in short time. Again, teamwork was crucial. When you work with teams, especially with teams from different disciplines, you can move into spaces that you could not do otherwise. When people come together, you can do much more than you can traditionally do on our own. It is of course much more enjoyable too. Sabine, Peter, Michael, and I shared ideas through discussions and by trying things out with colleagues from the Curtin Institute for Computation. Once we had completed some results, one person would work on a paper and pass it to the others for feedback.

80  Kay O’Halloran We went actually through a review among ourselves before we sent the paper to a journal. I enjoyed it so much. I am very pleased with our collaboration, and we still work together today. You also have connections to Shanghai. I had a Visiting Distinguished Professorship at Shanghai Jiao Tong University at the Martin Centre for Applicable Linguistics (2017–present). I worked quite closely with Professor Zhenhua (Eddie) Wang. It has been interesting to see the Martin Center grow, due to the hard work by Eddie and his wonderful team. I visit to give talks and workshops, demonstrate software, help students with their projects, and run seminars. In 2018, we held a conference on multimodal analysis with Jim Martin, Theo van Leeuwen, John Bateman, and myself as keynotes. Unfortunately, I have not been able to visit recently due to international travel restrictions with the COVID-19 pandemic. What plans do you have for your new department? I like very much the research areas in the Department of Communication and Media. We have four research clusters: discourse, data, and society; screen and film studies; culture, space, and memory; and media, politics, and society. The Department has expanded rapidly over the past few years and there are many new junior colleagues with different perspectives and approaches, which makes it very exciting. I have helped to develop a new postgraduate provision with three new programmes and three revised programmes, each sharing a common structure. In addition, I will try to establish an interdisciplinary research institute. Also, I am working to develop big data approaches to multimodal analysis. I am working with Gautam Pal and Minhao Jin to develop the Multimodal Analysis Platform (MAP) for big data analytics of online news media and social media, funded by a grant from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld University, Germany. Big data and artificial intelligence lie at the heart of important issues in communication today. We have to step up what we are doing and go beyond the traditional approaches and not just looking at one or a couple of texts. We must test our theories and our frameworks on larger datasets with a view to improving them. I have adopted this approach for many years now.

SFL and Social Semiotics Let us move to your field and to how you first started to work with systemic functional linguistics and social semiotics. As already mentioned, Jay Lemke was the key, because he was in science education and knew about social semiotics. Jay has a PhD in physics, and he understood what I was trying to do in my PhD work. He had been to Sydney in the 1980s, and he knew Michael O’Toole from a conference in Perth. The introduction to Michael O’Toole and his work

Kay O’Halloran  81 changed everything. Through Michael, I met the systemic community. It changed my life and my thinking. Once I found systemic functional theory, I felt that it made sense to me. This is something I could use, and I have worked with SFL and social semiotics since those days. Many people who study educational contexts do not have the tools to analyse what is going on in the classroom. Michael O’Toole opened up a whole new world to me. Michael O’Toole also introduced me to Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan. I used to talk with Michael Halliday because he was very interested in the mathematics side of my work. Michael Halliday’s work in scientific writing is central to much of my research in mathematics. He conceptualised the semantic shift which occurs through grammatical metaphor in scientific writing. This is a foundational insight which I have used in my multimodal approach. Grammatical metaphor reveals the functions which language has evolved to serve in scientific writing. I believe that language in science can be very abstract and metaphorical, because there are other semiotic resources, namely, mathematical symbolism and the images, which fulfil other functions. That is, the dynamic aspect of the world is encoded symbolically using different sorts of grammatical structures, and images provide an overview of those relations. Michael thought about that. We never got to a conclusive answer, but I, for my part, am pretty sure that you cannot explain the semantic shifts that occur in scientific language without considering the functions of mathematical symbolism and images and how the three resources work together. Michael’s work is foundational and pivotal to me in terms of understanding mathematical discourse and scientific writing (Halliday and Martin, 1993), and beyond that, how we use language and other semiotic resources to construct reality. Michael Halliday had great hopes for digital technology. Definitely. Michael had an interest in computer-based approaches to language from way back. He tried to model how language was used and make sense of it using corpus-based approaches and probabilistic models. Can you elaborate on how Michal O’Toole’s work influenced you? Michael O’Toole is a seminal figure in the development of multimodal studies. Michael developed a social semiotic approach to displayed art in the 1990s. Specifically, he developed the social semiotic approach for sculpture, architecture, and painting and applied the approach across the arts. In other words, he took the SFL-model for language with Halliday’s three metafunctions and extended it to other semiotic resources in the arts. I took my lead from that and extended it to mathematical symbolism and mathematical images, but also looked at how the semiotic resources work closely together. I traced movements across the three semiotic resources to show how the semantic field expands. Also, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen are pioneering figures in multimodality.

82  Kay O’Halloran They published the first edition of Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design in 1996 but there was an early version of the book published by Deakin Press in 1990. I used this book and Michael’s book Language of Displayed Art to develop a similar model for mathematics in my PhD work. Also, I studied the history of mathematical semiotics and mathematical discourse. You can see how the language, images and mathematical symbolism change over centuries to the versions we have now. Importantly, it is possible to trace how the symbolism evolved to the contemporary form of grammar that we have today. This has not been a straightforward process and there have been many arguments about which forms of mathematical symbolism should be used. It is a fascinating topic which reveals much about the nature and functions of mathematics.

Meaning Meaning is an important concept in social semiotics. What is meaning to you? Meaning is what is conveyed in acts of semiosis. We live in this semiotic world of meaning, which is not tangible, but yet we are immersed in it. In fact, we structure and view the world through the meanings which arise from semiotic choices. The meanings are cultural, and we build upon them when we communicate with each other. The question is how we capture meaning to make it tangible in order to show what is happening in multimodal discourse, with a view to opening up other possibilities. This is the challenge which we have not overcome. We understand how resources are structured to make meaning, but it is a complex task to show the large-scale patterns of meaning. It is particularly important in the digital world of today. Everyone has a voice, and people are giving away much information about themselves, which is picked up and used for different purposes. This is why I am interested in multimodal approaches to big data. We need to capture patterns across space and time, and I think we can do that in profound ways which have not been possible before. In this regard, multimodal theory and technology need to come together. Is meaning the same as knowing? Knowing is psychological and mental. If you know something, you can try to express it, but it does not mean that you are successful in communicating what you know. I am doing my best in this interview to make meaning. I know certain things, but I do not know how well I am explaining them to you and how well you are understanding what I mean. On the other hand, we make sense of the world through semiotics and so we are constrained by the resources at hand. Social semiotics and the systemic functional framework have allowed me to know more about the world and how it works than I could have got through any

Kay O’Halloran  83 other sort of theory. It is a useful model, because semiotic resources are conceptualised as sets of systems of meaning (the potential) and multimodal discourses (the actual) following the principles of Michael Halliday’s theory.

Multimodality Let us move to multimodality where you have done most of your work. In mathematics, you have to be multimodal. You cannot understand mathematics without moving beyond language. It started there for me. Multimodal texts are texts that involve more than one semiotic resource. A multimodal text has something beyond language. I would not argue when someone says that a linguistic text is multimodal, because of the fact that you have colour and a certain font and font size, for example, in a written text. If it is spoken language, you have other systems (e.g. volume, intonation and pitch) coming into play. However, I would say that these linguistic texts still consist of one semiotic resource, namely, language, with different systems operating on the material plane (i.e. for spoken and written language). It is interesting that we have studied language in isolation all these centuries. However, we understand it even better when we consider language along with other semiotic resources. Then we understand what language can do, and how it works with other resources to make meaning. Language is a product of us as human beings, and how we perceive the world. The interesting thing is that we just take it for granted that language works as it does. That is, we construct reality as a series of happenings which are logically connected, and we take a stance towards those happenings. However, other semiotic resources work quite differently, for example, images where we perceive the parts in relation to the whole. It broadens our knowledge about language itself by looking at it multimodally because we can understand how it is organised to make certain kinds of meanings, but not others, given the functions of other semiotic resources. What is a mode to you? This is a never-ending debate. I do not spend too much time on a definition of mode because I tend to think in terms of semiotic resources. If you have a semiotic resource, for example, language, then it has spoken and written language forms which I would call modes. There are different types of images, for example, photographs, paintings, and drawings with common and unique systems of meaning. Maybe they are different modes, or at least they can be conceptualised that way. Music is another semiotic resource, and you can obviously classify music into different forms too. Different scholars use the term mode differently. I am more interested in how semiotic resources work than to debate how modes can be defined, although definitions are important, of course. I think what Halliday did, which is the hallmark of his work, is that he looked

84  Kay O’Halloran at language from two perspectives, the first being language in terms of system (the meaning potential) and language in terms of texts (the choices which have been made). In my work, I have always asked: what is the potential of the semiotic resources, how are the semiotic resources organised (i.e. in terms of the underlying systems) and what are the selections in the multimodal text, and how do they combine? Many analyses of multimodal texts have paid attention to systems and system choices individually, but these need to be studied in combination to explain the meanings which is made. That is, a semiotic system choice has meaning within the context of the other choices being made and in the context of the text itself. You cannot, for example, just look at camera angle and camera distance on their own. You have to look at these choices in combination with the other choices that are made, and this includes the type of film and other contextual factors (e.g. when the film was made, the director). One of the challenges of multimodal analysis is capturing the combination of choices and mapping how these combinations change over time according to context. I do not think you can do it through any other platform apart from a digital one because of the complexity. Does a mode realise all three metafunctions, the ideational, the interpersonal, and the textual? Modes (like written/spoken language and photography/drawings) realise all three metafunctions, but I think that there are different strengths in terms of metafunctional power. For example, if you look at mathematical discourse, the focus is experiential and logical meaning with a tendency to keep the interpersonal meaning firmly in check, but interpersonal meaning is still there. Mathematics is a semiotic tool designed to expand experiential and logical meaning and it was developed to derive logical results. Therefore, to be exact and precise is a prominent hallmark of mathematics, and this includes the intersemiotic relations between language, image, and symbolism. Mathematical discourse is very powerful at doing just that. Therefore, mathematics is metafunctional but with a focus on experiential and logical meaning, which is where the semantic expansions take place (O’Halloran 2005). What is your contribution to the theory of multimodality and to the methodology of multimodal analysis? In terms of the theory, I guess my contribution is building frameworks for mathematics. It is not only the fact that you have language, images, and symbolism, but the key point is how they work together. Halliday developed the notion of grammatical metaphor, but that is contained within language. When we move across semiotic resources, we get a shift in meaning, a metaphorical transfer of meaning by moving across semiotic resources and therefore a kind of semiotic metaphor. I think I contributed to understanding that. I see this as significant. We have multimodal choices in the combinations of meaning, but we can also

Kay O’Halloran  85 have movements between semiotic resources. Every time this takes place, there is an expansion of meaning which permits mathematics to expand the semantic realm beyond what is possible with other semiotic resources. The expansion takes place through the resemiotisation of semiotic choices and through accessing the meaning potential of the new semiotic resource itself, i.e. the resemiotised choice is recontextualised within new systems of meaning. These principles extend to other forms of multimodal discourse. Some of my latest work is on recontextualisation, tracing patterns through space and time and developing digital tools to map the patterns. When you develop digital approaches, methodology is not divorced from theory. It is an important issue when you start developing platforms and new methods of doing multimodal analysis. This development fits into the theory as well. What we develop through the software is not only platforms for coding, but also platforms for examining semiotic patterns. For example, we developed state transition diagrams to map combinations of semiotic choices in videos over time. Generally, what happens in systemic theory and in multimodal analysis is that frameworks are developed and demonstrated with examples. That is, however, as far as it goes. The frameworks never get fully tested, and that is what we are trying to do. The only way you can work out how good a framework is, is to apply it time and time again in order to see how robust it is under different conditions. We have done a lot of work in empirical approaches to test and push the boundaries of multimodal theory and analysis. You have used mixed methods in this work. Yes, we have developed mixed methods approaches, which I think is fundamental for moving multimodal analysis forward as a discipline. I wanted to operationalise the systemic theory through machine learning. That is, I wanted to get computers to learn and undertake multimodal computational analysis using our theory. However, we would need a lot of training data for that and we did not have the necessary resources. Therefore, we are working on an approach which combines existing computational techniques, natural language processing, image processing and video processing with multimodal theoretical frameworks. That is, instead of trying to do machine learning and data mining to operationalise the semiotic theory, we decided to take all the different computational tools and integrate them according to key principles in a multimodal social semiotic framework (e.g. ranks, metafunctions). Each computational tool fits into a particular dimension of the multimodal analysis framework. I hope that we can get better results by doing it this way. I am working with computer scientists Gautam Pal and Minhao Jin on this at the moment. As mentioned earlier on, we have been working on a project funded by the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld University on this approach, although the work has been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the interdisciplinary

86  Kay O’Halloran approach is essential, given that no single person has the necessary skills to complete this work, at least at this stage. This work started in Singapore. We developed software for close analysis and we also experimented with automated tools. We got an understanding of how we could code and analyse the results in detail using different methods. However, the automation really interested me. I have continued working with this at Curtin University and now here in Liverpool with the project at ZiF at Bielefeld University. In the project, we are looking at political rhetoric across different media platforms, mainstream news, social media, and so forth, and how news and information get resemiotised and picked up over space and time. We have been looking at news articles and social media about COVID-19, George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. Future work includes political branding. The problem of today is to understand communication across the media platforms, because this communication impacts on every institution in society: governments, industry, education, etc. Is mediatisation a relevant concept in this work? The process where the logics of the media are influencing all other kinds of institutions in the society. Well, in a sense, yes. The media are not only influencing the institutions but controlling them. Cambridge Analytica is a good example. The company was targeting messages at certain groups to make them think in certain ways. For the first time in human history, people are giving data away about themselves that are, in turn, being used to manipulate their thinking and behaviour. Some time ago we had a project on online terrorism. I was interested in how these messages were recontextualised and recirculated. We really need techniques to try to demonstrate what is going on. As I mentioned earlier, our recent work includes big data approaches to online news and social media in areas such as COVID-19, healthcare communications, black lives matter, and political branding. The term multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) has become quite frequent among social semioticians. Would you use this term for your analyses? Multimodal discourse analysis is what we do, and it is a good term (O’Halloran 2004). I tend to use multimodal analysis, just because people from other fields are more likely to recognise the term, even if they have a different understanding of what is involved. A fundamental and complex part of multimodal discourse analysis is how semiotic resources work together. However, you can propose something, and you can demonstrate it in one text, but my question is: does it always work like that? You can only understand how semiotic resources work together if you can apply it to lots of different cases. However, generally concepts are illustrated by a couple of examples. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen have emphasised that the aim of Reading Images was to present ideas about multimodality. Michael O’Toole did the same in his

Kay O’Halloran  87 book. These ideas, however, need to be theorised further and tested. Many have developed static tables of multimodal transcription to show the interactions between semiotic choices. However, the transcriptions are written and static, and you cannot capture time or how meanings unfold. That is why we work with digital tools to try to capture this complexity. Anthony Baldry and colleagues developed the Multimodal Authoring System (MCA), a multimodal concordancing and corpus construction system which was an early attempt to capture the dynamic unfolding of semiotic choices in videos and films on a digital platform (Baldry 2005). In cooperation with other scholars you have worked with many kinds of multimodal analysis. Can you mention some of your cooperative projects? Yes. I want to mention the performance studies I did with Maria Grazia Sindoni and Janina Wildfeuer (2019). One of my favourite papers appears in a volume they edited. Sabine Tan, Peter Wignell and I looked at the resemiotisation of a gothic horror story from a book into a theatre production and then into a movie (Tan et al., 2016). We studied how the suspense built up linguistically in the story, and how this changes in a stage play, where lighting, sound, movement, and props and much more realise different meanings. Other changes in meaning occur when the story is made into a film. The performance studies were interesting in terms of resemiotisation and media’s affordances in terms of what sort of meaning you can make. Social semiotics has not been so common in performance studies. Studies in performance and music have their own traditions to build on. I think, however, that social semiotics can be applied to any field, but it is up to us to demonstrate the usefulness of what we are doing. We should, however, never neglect what has been done with other frameworks. Film studies have, for example, a long research tradition, so when we do film analysis, we have to take into account film studies and look at what has been done in this field. If social semiotics aims to play a role in film studies, we will have to demonstrate the usefulness of what we are doing. I always take the view, that if we want to make an impact, we have to demonstrate that what we do is useful. Sabine Tan, Peter Wignell, and I also worked on the analysis of Trump’s presidential campaign at Curtin University (Wignell et al., 2019). We were studying the many ways that Trump makes meaning semiotically in terms of space and gestures. It was particularly interesting to study how Trump moves into other people’s space, handshakes, pulls people towards him, etc. We called him a ‘semiotic space invader’ because he systematically invades the space of other people in order to dominate. Linguistically, it was interesting to study the verbal strategies Trump uses, which are very simplistic. He hardly uses any abstract language. The Trump project has a link to the project in Germany we have talked about, as both projects are about multimodal political rhetoric.

88  Kay O’Halloran Trump was successful because his messages are simplistic, although COVID-19 and the last presidential election have changed that recently. It has been the same with Brexit. For example, Boris Johnson kept saying: “Let’s get Brexit done” and prior to that, the slogan was “Take back control”. These campaigns targeted certain groups. As already mentioned, there is much underlying analytics in digital media now where it is possible to carefully work out a user profile in order to send certain targeted messages. Companies like Cambridge Analytica develop different versions of campaign messages with different designs, and they study the effect of each version and pick the ones that work according to who they are targeting, based on user profiles. This is a new phenomenon. However, people are becoming more aware of how personal data are being used by the large tech companies to manipulate them. The next generation of researchers need to be trained for the digital world. Then we are back to the need for big data. As researchers today, we owe the next generation of researchers to develop and use methods which are capable of understanding how communication works today. We have to move beyond the idea that analysis of one text is sufficient. I will try to get a doctoral training programme here at the University of Liverpool where we will develop computational methods in close cooperation with scholars from other disciplines. Cooperation is necessary in order to be able to understand what is happening in society today. We need to build upon Halliday’s foundational insights. Our approach is multimodal, but the theoretical framework for meaning making is the same. How do we use this systemic functional theory to understand what is happening in the world today? It is a very different world now. Language was the dominant means of communication earlier on, given the technologies which were available (e.g. telephone, and written and printed texts), but now we must understand the digital, because that is where communication is today. Theory and analysis is never separate. Halliday studied language very closely to be able to get to the level of abstraction about how language works. We need to do the same, and test again and again, and improve our methods and theory. Another field of interest has been online extremist communications which started through collaboration with Michele Grossman from Melbourne. Colleagues working in counter-terrorism try different strategies, but often they can have the opposite effect of what is wanted. Michele and her research team wanted to know what multimodal strategies extremists employ, and their impact across different demographics. If you are trying to recruit different groups of people, what propaganda works? Based on this, we undertook a study of online multimodal extremist materials, in collaboration with Kevin Chai, Rebecca Lange, and colleagues in the Curtin Institute for Computation (see Wignell et al., 2018). The project was funded by the Defence, Science and Technology group in the Department of Defence in Australia. We collected materials

Kay O’Halloran  89 from magazines produced by ISIS (The Islamic State) and studied how images were recirculated across different media platforms. To do this, we extracted the images from the ISIS magazines, and then we tracked them across different media platforms using reverse image searches. We had a list of all the websites where the images appeared, and graphs of how often each image appeared on the different websites. We found that different types of images had different circulation patterns. For example, images of jubilant young military men from within ISIS were continually published on all sorts of websites, including Western media websites. However, interest in images of specific people involved in events (e.g. ISIS members who planned terror attacks) dropped off, unless an incident related to that event happened. We developed different apps to visualise and map these results. We also made an interactive visualisation to cluster the online articles with these images according to the results derived from automated analysis of text and images. Michael Wiebrands developed this visualisation. That was as far as we got with trying to use automated techniques at Curtin University. From there, I am continuing this work with Gautam Pal at the University of Liverpool. We have developed the Multimodal Analysis Platform (MAP) to analyse multimodal rhetoric in online news and social media. I consider multimodal analysis to be a fundamental science which can be applied to any domain. Another area I have been fortunate to take part in is health care. I was a member of a research team, led by Judith Finn at Curtin University, studying emergency ambulance phone calls. Marine Riou was the linguist who worked on the project. When someone calls an ambulance, the dispatcher has a protocol. He/she asks for your name, who you are, your address, etc., before he/she gets into what the actual emergency is. Based on what the person responds, the ambulance is assigned a priority. It is critical that the person, who is responding to the ambulance dispatcher’s questions, answers the questions correctly. People are of course really upset in such a situation, and the dispatcher’s questions influence how the person who calls responds. It could be a heart attack or other very critical situations. We analysed what the dispatchers were saying, how accurate the ambulance dispatch was, and the different sorts of responses that were made. We undertook spoken discourse analysis looking at how the questions were asked, the use of commands and interrogatives, where the stress was put, etc (see Riou et al., 2018). Marine Riou was the spoken discourse analyst and her insights into what happened during emergency phone calls were revealing. Also, I would like to mention the 360 degree video application developed by Michael Wiebrands in collaboration with Sabine Tan, Peter Wignell, and myself in a project funded by the Australian Technology Group at Curtin University. Michael developed innovative methods for showing how students engaged with 360 degree videos of teaching sessions using visualisations which included heatmaps and bounding

90  Kay O’Halloran boxes. Unfortunately, even though the results were impressive, we were not able to continue this work in virtual environments due to lack of resources.

Key Concepts Let us go to some key concepts in SFL and social semiotics. What is your concept of text? I will just go back to what Halliday says. Language is a system, and a text is an instance of the system. You can have a narrow notion of text, like an artefact, or a very wide: any instance of semiotic use. A text can be a semiotic instance of semiotic configurations. I do not spend time to ponder about the concept of text. However, I still like the complementarity approach which Halliday developed, i.e. ‘language as system’, and ‘language as text’. I just keep it at that. You can go through notions like text again and again. It is like trying to define ‘mode’. People find different definitions that work for them. I stick to the basic Hallidayan approach: semiotic resources as systems, semiotic choices as text, as an instance. How do you see the relations between text and context? The relation between text and context is essential. It is integral to the systemic functional model. Meaning is always realised in context. It has been claimed that SFL, or systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA) is not concerned with context, but this is not the case. Every act of semiosis has a context, and the meaning is dependent on that context. Halliday always said that. Therefore, if we are analysing recontextualisation patterns across media platforms, for example, we have to take the context into account. In digital media, this means analysing the multimodal text in relation to the digital platform (e.g. online news, social media), the time of posting, the author, and the related texts which came before. In fact, we have so much contextual information now in the form of metadata in digital communication; we can undertake large-scale contextual analysis in ways which were not previously possible. Do you analyse the context of situation in field, tenor and mode? I will follow Halliday here as well, and to how field, tenor, and mode are connected to the metafunctions at a higher level of abstraction: field connected to experiential meanings, tenor to the types of interpersonal meanings, and mode to textual meaning. I also think that the concept of register is very useful. There is no doubt about how registers and configurations change according to context. If you change one of the three variables, it changes everything. Do you use the concept of genre? I do, and Jim Martin’s version of genre is very useful. That is, a text unfolds in certain stages to serve particular social goals. With multimodal

Kay O’Halloran  91 analysis, you can actually map the different configurations of semiotic choices in phases and stages and locate when those configurations change. However, genres are not definite structures. Rather, the lines are blurry and hybrid genres develop all the time. I am aware that there are different views here. I use Halliday’s concept of register, but then there is a higher level on the top of that. Martin uses the concept of genre for that, which I think is useful. There are certain genres you recognise, for example, the interview genre we are doing now. We know what is going on: you ask me questions and I answer, you are nodding very patiently. So, there are social practices, and they unfold in certain ways, but there is a lot of room to move in within them. The better we capture them, I think, the better off we are in terms of understanding the world today. Halliday demonstrated that the system network was useful for language. I doubt that it is the way to model everything multimodally. We need to find new ways of modelling what the options are. I do not think we can ever systematise everything using system networks, however.

SFL and Learning Let us go to SFL and learning. You said you started out in education. After I did my degree in mathematics, I was bonded to become a teacher. As mentioned earlier, I completed my Diploma in Education in order to become a high school mathematics teacher. However, when I was in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Western Australia and tried to analyse what happened in the mathematics classroom for my PhD work, I could not find the frameworks and knowledge for doing the analyses I wanted. That was my reason for moving into communication and media with Michael O’Toole. I think SFL is critical for education and for bringing in what we understand about language and how language works. In the lab in Singapore, we worked with the Ministry of Education, Singapore. We aimed to develop multimodal literacy in schools and we worked closely with Victor Lim Fei, my former PhD student, who was working for the Ministry of Education at that time. The Singapore schools were very open to include multimodality in the way they understood literacy. They were far ahead of Australia at that time. I think multimodality is critical for education on all levels in school, and for educational research as well. Is there a cognitive component in your understanding of language development? There is cognitive element in language development, although I have never worked in this field. I have always concentrated on social semiotics because the use of sign systems can be captured and analysed. That is, social semiotics gives you something you can work with. But should social semioticians work more with cognition?

92  Kay O’Halloran Yes, cognitive approaches help to show how people react in certain ways. For example, eye tracking reveals how people engage with a multimodal text. It depends of course on what your research interests and your questions are and what you investigate. If we bring the social and the cognitive part together, we would have the whole picture of how we act physiologically, mentally and socially. I am certainly not against that. Is the cognitive element also necessary to understand learning? In learning both cognitive elements and social interaction is decisive. Halliday was interested in this. The thing about Michael is that he was interested in everything. He was never satisfied with how things are. He took on board everything and anything to learn about and to understand the world. I think this is an example of how we all should do it. In this way, Michael was an intellectual in the real sense of the word. He cooperated with people like the British educational sociologist Basil Bernstein, but in the end, he focused on what he really could contribute the most in terms of SFL. It is amazing achievement to develop a comprehensive model of language for studying language use. Bernstein and Halliday fit together perfectly, and I used them both for my PhD. I remember reading Bernstein’s book Class, Codes and Control (1971) for this first time and then I discovered social semiotics. It was a perfect match: Bernstein focused on sociological issues and Halliday developed ways to demonstrate how the codes and control operated on a day-to-day basis. In education, Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) has become important for many. Is this something you are interested in? I do not use LCT generally. Although the concepts are useful, I tend to use approaches which assist with multimodal analysis. I stick to Halliday here. The beauty of the Hallidayan theory is how language works on several levels and I really appreciate that. Karl Maton, who runs the LCT Centre at University of Sydney, comes from a sociological background. I think it is a good mix when sociologists like him work with linguists, like Bernstein and Halliday did. You mentioned your work with multimodal literacy in Singapore. What is literacy to you? Literacy is being able to use different semiotic resources in ways which are effective and appropriate for any context, and to understand what is going on around you. It ties in beautifully with the work we do. Knowing how language, images, and other resources work, how they are used, and what combinations occur in different circumstances is a part of literacy. It has to do with understanding texts and being able to use and create effective texts according to the context. The texts are multimodal, so multimodality is a part of literacy. This is something students should learn in school. Literacy also has a critical component. Sabine Tan, Marissa E and I wrote a paper on multimodal analysis for critical thinking (2017). The ability to understand and critique is fundamental today. You have to be

Kay O’Halloran  93 able to understand what you are reading, seeing, and hearing and how it is constructed in order to be able to answer to it. It is empowering when you can read something and understand how people are making the argument, because then you can support or counter it, depending on what is required. And it is very empowering when you can look at an image or a video and see what kind of meanings and choices are made, and why and how these semiotic artefacts are being recirculated and recontextualised. You need to be able to do this in order to survive today.

Achievements and the Future You have a long and varied academic career, and you have worked in several countries and continents. If you think back, which of your academic achievements makes you most proud? It is not one single instance making me proud, but a trajectory. For me personally it is how things have developed over the last 20–30 years that I am really pleased about. The work I did in the beginning opened up for me to understand more of what was happening in mathematics in different classrooms and educational contexts. Then I moved on to working with other colleagues and being research leader and research director. I am very proud of my research teams and postgraduate students, and of what we have done together. More recently, I am really proud of the cooperation with Sabine Tan, Peter Wignell and Michael Wiebrands, and Kevin Chai, Rebecca Lange, and other colleagues in the Curtin Institute of for Computation at Curtin University. Also, I enjoyed immensely working with Andrew Rohl, who was the Director of the Curtin Institute for Computation at that time. And now I am really pleased to be here at the University of Liverpool. In my position here, I can work with colleagues across different domains in a senior role. I  could not have been Head of Department before. However, after having been a research director and a research leader and seeing how much can be achieved through working with others, it is good to be in this position at this stage of my career. I aim to support colleagues and hopefully secure funding for a research institute to bring people together. So, it is this trajectory that I am happy about, the whole thing. Is there something you have not done yet, which you would really like to do? I would really like to establish the research institute I have talked about, and the doctorate training programme, although Brexit has complicated matters, particularly in terms of funding. However, I am still working towards building a research institute to bring colleagues together from across the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. I do not know if I will be successful, but I will try. We need to understand communication and show how communication is being used in different ways to manipulate, undermine, and support. To me, this is

94  Kay O’Halloran the problem of today. The material world was largely sorted out with science and mathematics. Now we are in the world of the human and of technology, and the world is dramatically changed. Look, what has happened with Brexit, Trump, and COVID-19. It is our time now. We need to step up and take on the challenge. I do not know how far we will get, but we can certainly try. What do you think will be the main challenges and opportunities for SFL and social semiotics in the future? SFL and social semiotics have to demonstrate their usefulness. We have to show that we can achieve things that are not possible without this approach. It is up to us to demonstrate this to others. If we get a research institute here at the University of Liverpool, we will work with colleagues from the arts and social sciences, computer science, and the sciences. It is up to us to demonstrate to them that our approach is useful for understanding the world today. That is our challenge.

References Baldry, A. (2005). A multimodal approach to text studies in English. The role of MCA in multimodal concordancing and multimodal corpus linguistics. Palladino. Bernstein, B. (1971). Class, Codes and Control. Theoretical Studies Towards a Sociology of Language. Routledge. Halliday, M.A.K. & Martin, J.R. (1993). Writing Science. Literacy and Discursive Power. The Falmer Press. Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Deakin Press. O’Halloran, K.L. (Ed.) (2004). Multimodal Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum. O’Halloran, K.L. (2005). Mathematical Discourse: Language, Symbolism and Visual Images. Continuum. O’Halloran, K.L., Tan, S. & E, M.K.L. (2017). Multimodal analysis for critical thinking. Learning, Media and Technology, 42(2), 147–170. doi:10.1080/ 17439884.2016.1101003. O’Halloran, K.L., Tan, S., Wignell, P., Bateman, J., Pham, D.-S., Grossman, M. & Vande Moere, A. (2016). Interpreting text and image relations in violent extremist discourse: a mixed methods approach for big data analytics. Terrorism and Political Violence, 454–474. doi:10.1080/09546553.2016. 1233871. O’Toole, M. (1994). The Language of Displayed Art. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Riou, M., Ball, S.J. & O’Halloran, K.L. (2018). Hijacking the dispatch protocol: when callers pre-empt their reason-for-the-call in emergency calls about cardiac arrest. Discourse Studies, 20(4), 666–687. doi:10.1177/1461445618754435. Sindoni, M.G., Wildfeuer, J. & O’Halloran, K.L. (eds.) (2019). Mapping Multimodal Performance Studies. Routledge.

Kay O’Halloran  95 Tan, S., Wignell, P. & O’Halloran, K.L. (2016). From book to stage to screen: semiotic transformations of gothic horror genre conventions. Social Semiotics Special Issue: The Languages of Performing Arts: Semiosis, Communication and Meaning-Making, 26(4), 404–423. Wignell, P., Chai, K., Tan, S., O’Halloran, K.L. & Lange, R. (2018). Natural language understanding and multimodal discourse analysis for interpreting extremist communication and the re-use of these materials online. Terrorism and Political Violence, 1–26. doi:10.1080/09546553.2018.1520703. Wignell, P., O’Halloran, K.L. & Tan, S. (2019). Semiotic space invasion: the case of Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign. Semiotica, 226, 185–208. doi:10.1515/sem-2017-0109. Central publications These are the publications that Kay O’Halloran herself considers to be her most important ones. Jewitt, C., Bezemer, J. & O’Halloran, K.L. (2016). Introducing Multimodality. Routledge. O’Halloran, K.L. (1998). Classroom discourse in mathematics: a multisemiotic analysis. Linguistics and Education, 10(3), 359–388. O’Halloran, K.L. (Ed.) (2004). Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Continuum. O’Halloran, K.L. (2005). Mathematical Discourse: Language, Symbolism and Visual Images. Continuum. O’Halloran, K.L. (2008). Systemic functional-multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA): constructing ideational meaning using language and visual imagery. Visual Communication, 7(4), 443–475. O’Halloran, K.L. (2011). Multimodal discourse analysis. In K. Hyland & B. Paltridge (Eds.), Companion to Discourse Analysis (pp. 120–137). Continuum. O’Halloran, K.L., Pal, G. & Jin, M.H. (2021). Multimodal approach to analysing big social and news media data. Discourse, Context and Media (Special Issue, edited by M.G. Sindoni & I. Moschini), 40(supplement 1), 1–16. doi:10.1016/j.dcm.2021.100467 O’Halloran, K.L., Tan, S. & E, M.K.L. (2017). Multimodal analysis for critical thinking. Learning, Media and Technology, 42(2), 147–170. doi:10.1080/ 17439884.2016.1101003. O’Halloran, K.L., Tan, S., Wignell, P., Bateman, J., Pham, D.-S., Grossman, M. & Vande Moere, A. (2016). Interpreting text and image relations in violent extremist discourse: a mixed methods approach for big data analytics. Terrorism and Political Violence. doi:10.1080/09546553.2016.1233871. Tan, S., Wignell, P. & O’Halloran, K.L. (2016). From book to stage to screen: semiotic transformations of gothic horror genre conventions. Social Semiotics Special Issue: The Languages of Performing Arts: Semiosis, Communication and Meaning-Making, 26(4), 404–423. doi: 10.1080/10350330.2016.119008

6

Clare Painter

Clare Painter is an Honorary Associate in Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Previously she worked at the University of Technology, Sydney, and in the School of English, University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research has focused on the areas of children’s early language development, as well as the semiotics of picture books. Her PhD was a case study of her son’s use of language from twoand-a-half to five years, following up her master’s thesis, which was a replica-study of Michael Halliday’s Learning How to Mean, which covered development in the period from nine months to two years. Painter argued in her doctorate that cognitive development is essentially a linguistic process. The case study examined the child’s changing language and showed how new linguistic possibilities constitute developments in cognitive resources and prepare the child for later learning in school. The interest in early language development was elaborated further in later work, focusing especially on the interactive nature of the process, as well as including illustrative texts to illuminate Halliday’s claim that when learning their first language, children simultaneously learn through language and learn about language.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429352270-6

Clare Painter  97 Together with Jim Martin and Len Unsworth, Clare Painter has developed the principles of systemic-functional theory to give an account of visual meaning in the reading of picture book narratives. On the theoretical level, this account extends previous social-semiotic accounts of the ‘grammar’ of the image, by focusing attention on discourse-level meanings, and also by working with sequences of images. In addition, the notion of ‘co-instantiation’ of different semiotic resources is deployed to describe image-verbiage relations in the picture books. The interview took place in Sydney in September 2019.

Academic Life Story Please tell us about your academic life story and how it all started. I grew up in England, and my first degree was in English literature, just because that was something I loved. After some years I emigrated to Sydney with my husband, and in 1973 I got a job teaching English to immigrants on government-sponsored courses. I really enjoyed this, but I thought I really ought to know a bit more about language and grammar if I was to do this job well. This was in 1976, which just happened to be the year that Michael Halliday was establishing the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Previously there had not been such a department in the university. I was lucky enough to get permission to do all the linguistics subjects that were on offer. In those days everything was a lot easier. As long as you were qualified, you could join any class without charge. It was a very tiny department at that time with very few students. And I really fell in love with the subject. Michael Halliday was such a charismatic teacher; it was impossible not to be totally involved. After I had completed what was on offer, I began tutoring in the department, teaching linguistics rather than English. And then I got pregnant. Michael Halliday’s book Learning How to Mean (Halliday 1975) had just come out a year or so before, and he was very excited about that topic. So, I thought this was what I would do for my master’s, a replica-study with my own son, which is what I did (Painter 1984/2014). I found the subject of language development absolutely fascinating, and so I really continued researching in that area most of my academic life. I completed my doctorate in 1994, using my second child as a case study of a slightly older age group, 2½–5 years, because there seemed to be a lack of data on that period (Painter 1999). I have worked at different universities in Sydney. In 1990, I was hired to teach functional grammar to master of TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) students at University of Technology, Sydney. And after that, from 1996, I taught a range of subjects, including functional grammar, children’s literature and visual communication at the University of New South Wales, which was my last official post. Since retiring in 2008, I have continued writing and most recently

98  Clare Painter participated in a research project on ‘paralanguage’ (Ngo et al. 2021) where my role was to consider the multimodal nature of infant communication. It was just very good fortune that I happened to want to study language at a time when Michael Halliday arrived in Sydney, and I was able to study under him. This interest in child language that seems to go all through your career, was it there even before you read his book? No, I was interested in everything I was learning, and I thought I would go on and do something in discourse analysis, but it just happened to coincide with the time of life when I started a family. And once I began collecting the data and observing my own child and reading up in this field, I just found it fascinating. And I still find it fascinating. The kind of study I did involved collecting material for about three years before even working it up into a thesis. It was a very long-term project, and I was only enrolled part time. But that kind of thing is much harder to do now when there is pressure on students and on staff to put people through a higher degree as quickly as possible. Things could be more leisurely in those days, and I appreciated having the time for longitudinal case studies. I also enjoyed reading up in the field, especially the work by psychologists like Colwyn Trevarthen (1999) and others on infant development, and I came to be interested in the whole child development area. But I did not enter into linguistics with an idea that this would be my path. It just happened to fit in with my life. I have never stopped finding it fascinating. What motivates your work? Simply curiosity, I think, and the pleasure of learning and the hope that it will be useful work generally for people who are working in areas which involve language development or child language. I have never been someone with a five-year plan or a long-term goal. I am not very driven to achieve particular things, I have just really enjoyed my intellectual life. I think I have been very blessed to be able to be taught by Michael Halliday and then by Jim Martin. And I have worked as a colleague also with Christian Matthiessen, tutoring on grammar when he was teaching it. So, I have been privileged to learn from some very great minds. Have there been other influences on your work, from within the SFL-community or outside, that have been important? After I completed my master’s research, which was the language development story up to about age two, so it was very much the entry into language, I was a tutor and doctoral candidate in the linguistics department at the time when Jim Martin and his then colleague Joan Rothery were beginning research into children’s writing in schools. And they were very interested in my research, because they saw it as offering some data to counter the idea that adults did not play any part in language development, that you just let children alone and they are creative, and it all happens. So, they encouraged me to focus in writing up my work on the role

Clare Painter  99 of the adult in facilitating and supporting the child’s language. And although it was not directly an influence on my own work, which is based in Halliday’s way of thinking about language development, I did at that point discover Vygotsky (1978) and was very taken with his ideas on distributed mind and scaffolding in learning generally. And that seemed to be very much supported by my data. So, I found that was something that I embraced. All the ideas were really already there within Halliday’s work. Those notions are implicit there anyway, so I would not say that it took me on a different trajectory, it was rather something that confirmed my own feelings about how language develops and encouraged my focus on the interpersonal aspects of language development. I guess you could say that Vygotsky represents the socio-cultural views on language and meaning. Did you ever consider any other theories of language? In the seventies it was pretty difficult to find anything that was useful in the way of language development. You know, the prevailing orthodoxy was Chomskyan – assertions about innate grammar and an acquisition device in your head that was not supported by brain science or data or anything else, really. And it was very difficult to get a hearing for any other kind of position. Interestingly, now we find people in the USA who are developing theories of language development that are usage-based and functional. I am thinking, for example, of Michael Tomasello, who puts forward the notion that language is as it is because of the job it has to do (Tomasello 2003). This is absolutely consonant with what Halliday was saying in the seventies, but it has taken that long, really, for it to become acceptable within some other frameworks. But at that time, I found the linguistic work on language acquisition really did not speak to me at all, because it was not based on that much data. And there was a sort of feeling that you did not need to do that kind of empirical work. Not just that we have not got it, but rather that you do not want to be bothered with it. What I felt more supported by and akin to was the work of psychologists like Katherine Nelson (1989/2006), who collected observational data on ‘crib talk’, or Catherine Snow, working on mother-child dyads, or all the ‘motherese’ work (Snow and Ferguson 1977) – there is a whole raft of scholars who have done work there. But of course, a lot of that work is done in a lab, an hour a week for data collection, which has its advantages but also disadvantages. You can obviously come to generalisations because you have more subjects, but then it is actually very limited in terms of the data you get because collection is only occasional and in one context, whereas if you do the kind of diary-study that Halliday and I did, where you notice every new development and you can make notes about it – or if you are very lucky even capture it on a recording – you get a much fuller picture. But that sort of work from psychologists was more useful to me than anything coming out of linguistics at the time.

100  Clare Painter You also refer to Shirley Brice Heath? Yes, indeed. I found her book, Ways with Words (Heath 1983), a fascinating study. And people like Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin, their more anthropological approach to ‘language socialization’ (1984) was also very worthwhile and interesting to me. Like Heath’s book they take the whole socio-cultural context and look at how a child’s language develops within it – it just gives you a much richer picture. And I think Heath did a great service in showing that English-speaking children who in the school-context might appear a bit tongue-tied or inadequate, actually have wonderful linguistic resources if they are in a context that enables them to display it.

Meaning We talk a lot about meaning. A philosophical question perhaps: What is meaning? And how is it related to knowledge? Having studied meaning-making from its inception, as it were, I very much saw that once the child develops linguistic symbols, the child is developing a resource for building everyday concepts; I would go along with Vygotsky in that. The first symbols, however, are what in SFL we call proto-language symbols. These are just the child’s own signs: it might be pointing at something and saying ‘dah’ or something like that, or reaching out to be picked up or a similar gestural sign, or saying ‘no’ and shaking the head when offered some food. Just those kinds of things: demanding or refusing, showing interest, wanting contact. The pre-verbal child starts to find little symbolic ways to do that. So rather than physically climbing up to you to be cuddled, it just stands over the armrest, reaches and looks at you. That is a symbolic way of acting on the world, by communicating with others. It constitutes a move into semiosis, into a symbolic system. The protolanguage is an effective resource for making meanings relevant to an infant’s life in the first year or so, but with the gradual move into words – into language itself – there is the possibility of categorising everything in the world and achieving more complex human interactions. Once you are at that point, you are really learning; you are building up knowledge. The mother tongue is the child’s key resource for understanding the world: what every object is called, how it fits in with other things, how we name our actions, what genres we follow in our interactions; this is all learning to mean in everyday contexts. I think knowledge, as we think of it in educational terms, is in relation to different disciplinary fields. So, we can think of the ‘field’ as the contextual level of a discipline of some kind, and it has its own classification schemes and its own ways of relating phenomena. But these are all realised in language, or perhaps formulas or other semiotic systems. So, meaning and knowledge are the same in the sense that when we talk

Clare Painter  101 about knowledge, we are talking about the meanings of particular disciplinary fields. What we do not usually think of as knowledge, is our understanding of everyday life and how to just go about living in the world, which is what the child is first learning, largely through language. Do you think this focus on meaning is perhaps one of the most important contributions from SFL? Absolutely! Certainly, at the time I began studying linguistics, meaning had been written out of at least American linguistics, that was very hegemonic at the time. Language was said to be innate – the so-called ‘universal grammar’ that was in your head. But it was seen in terms of sentence-structure, and meaning was not really part of the picture. And it only began to come in, by adding on insights from speech act theory or pragmatics. People found the need to build in other things in generative semantics and other branches of formalist linguistics. But Halliday started from the position that it is all about meaning, and so I think that was a terrific contribution. It allowed us to go ahead much earlier than some other theories were able to and to build a framework that could eventually be useful in the consideration of other semiotic systems like that of the image or three-dimensional space. Bringing in the concept of ‘communication’, what is the relation between communication and learning, do you think? I suppose ‘communication’ is just a broader term than language. In a developmental context, it allows you to think about what meanings the child is trying to make before having language. So, you can think of these baby-signs as communication. Even pre-dating that, we have the psychological work on gaze between mothers and babies, and the singing of nursery rhymes and the child learning to chime in with the same pitch at the end. All these kinds of attuning behaviours happen from birth, practically. ‘Communication’ is a kind of overall term that allows us to talk about that, to think about the exchange of the gaze as communicative, as some kind of intersubjectivity being established without the constraint of saying: oh, well, there is no language yet so let’s ignore it. So, I think communication is first of all a broader term. And useful in a developmental context because it allows us to see the intersubjective foundation of language. In the more formal learning context, we would again want to include all the multimodal resources: body-language, images, animations and everything else that is now being studied as communicative. We recognise now that it all contributes to learning. In the era when I was educated, language carried more of the burden, and basically you learnt through language and textbooks, and you did not have many other resources available. And if you did not succeed through those media, you probably failed in formal education. But now I think there are many more resources routinely brought in to assist learning.

102  Clare Painter

Social Semiotics Do you distinguish between the terms SFL and social semiotics? I always saw myself as a systemic linguist, so SFL was my intellectual domain, as it were. The term ‘Social Semiotics’ of course comes from Michael Halliday’s title Language as Social Semiotic (1978), in which he is emphasising that language is a social phenomenon, and that it is about semiosis, about meaning. SFL has always had that orientation, that it is very much a socially based linguistic theory, it is about how we use language in social contexts. But I think the reason that Social Semiotics has become a more prominent term is because of the multimodal turn. Because we are now thinking about language in the context of all the visual things that are happening on screens or in every publication. You know, newspapers are no longer pages of print, it is images as much as that. So, in order to capture the fact that there are other semiotic systems, other systems of meaning that operate alongside language, we use the term ‘Social Semiotics’. I have recently been working with a group here at Sydney University researching non-verbal language, such as gesture and tone, which of course is also part of how we communicate, along with verbal language. So ‘Social Semiotics’ I think is the broader term that encompasses any semiotic system, any system of meaning, any symbolic system that operates in our lives. Linguistics is the study of language, as perhaps the principal semiotic system, and the one that is probably most crucial in the context of learning and education. And in life, probably. I think Michael would say: yes, in life too.

Functions and Metafunctions How important are the metafunctions? I think they are extremely important. One of the things I think Learning How to Mean (Halliday 1975) set out to do, was to find out: how do the metafunctions arise? I was interested in addressing this question in my first research that was published as Into the Mother Tongue (1984/2014). In the developmental story, the child begins with these proto-linguistic signs that Halliday interpreted just in terms of functions, to be understood from the functional contexts in the child’s life. He referred to them as the instrumental function, the ‘I want’-function, the regulatory, bossing around the adult, the interpersonal function of just being together, the personal function, which really means exploring the world, taking an interest in what’s there. In this approach we interpret the baby signs in relation to the child’s purposes in the environment. We use the context to help interpret the functional meaning. But at a certain point, in what we refer to as the ‘transition’ phase, the original baby functions become generalised into two broader functions. With the growth of mother-tongue words, the child’s language itself

Clare Painter  103 builds in a distinction between what Halliday calls the pragmatic function, the wanting to achieve something in the world, and the mathetic function, which is about learning about the world. This occurred for all three children in the SFL case studies: Halliday’s Nigel, my son Hal, and Jane Torr’s daughter Anna (presented in Torr 1998). For each child, early words were used with one of two intonations or voice qualities. The use of one tone or quality with a word meant ‘I want’ (the pragmatic function) while the other tone or quality meant ‘that’s interesting’ (the mathetic function). In this way, the children built a functional distinction into their language: for example, ball on a rising tone for Nigel meant ‘I want the ball’ and on a falling tone meant ‘I see a ball’. As the language develops, this dichotomy, in turn, breaks down, and ‘I want’ also becomes a demand for information, so you get questions as well as commands. And ‘that’s interesting’ develops from ‘Ah, that’s interesting!’ into informative statements, telling you things you did not know. In this way you get different speech functions and the mood system developing to realise them. At the same time, there is a classification and recounting in language by the child, of everything observed and remembered in the world, using simple clause structures. So, the pragmatic/mathetic distinction kind of dissolves, and you get a metafunctional system arising where you have an interpersonal metafunction with a lot of speech function choices, and you have an ideational system with different transitivity choices, both realised simultaneously with every utterance. And once dialogue becomes more than just initiation–response, and once giving information is more than of just a single item, but has to be linked to other information in dialogues or little monologues, the child’s language has to include pronominal systems of reference, conjunctive links, thematic ordering, and so on, resources which herald the appearance of the textual metafunction. That very early work was above all interested in showing how language evolves because of the job it has to do. And that is the story of how the metafunctions evolve, from infant uses of symbols (interpreted from context) to an either/or pragmatic/mathetic functional choice to three co-existing sets of choices, which is how we understand the metafunctions. So, yes, I think the metafunctions are very important in the developmental story. And more broadly in linguistics they make the notion of ‘context’ so much more useful. If you see the context as semiotic in nature, then you can link the notion of ‘field’ with ideational meanings, ‘tenor’ with interpersonal meanings, and ‘mode’ with textual meanings. And this has been, I think, enormously valuable in SFL. The notion of metafunctions has also been so useful, I think, for transposing to other semiotic systems, like the visual, as Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) did. If you have the metafunctions, you can find a way of addressing and discriminating different things that are going on in images. And similarly, with body language or anything else. The metafunctions are very powerful, I think. And I would also say that they give

104  Clare Painter you entry points, depending on your research problem. If you are interested in the disciplinary knowledge of physics or history or something, you might go first to field and the ideational to see what is happening there. In another context, you might want to begin with the interpersonal to look at appraisal or look at speech function choices. Although everything is always relevant, it can help people navigate, to know where they are, and to know where they could be going with analysis. You do not have to do everything all the time, or all at once; you can find a principled way of deciding where to start, or what to focus on. Examining language or semiosis is such a big enterprise that it often needs to be delimited for practical reasons.

System and Text Let us move on to some more basic concepts, like the concept of ‘text’. How do you define a text in your work? Text is very important, but in a developmental context it is the opposition between system and text that is key. The whole mystery of language development is that the child’s task is to build the system, he or she has to build these layers of networks of oppositions: interpersonal, ideational, textual at the grammatical level, the discourse-semantic level, and so on. And yet, all that is available to the child are texts. So, text, in the way of thinking that has been useful to me, is the instantiation of systems. A text is an instance of the system. So, every utterance in language is an instance of the socio-cultural, the discourse-semantic, the grammatical, the phonological system. In a way it is the child’s window on everything. As Halliday pointed out, when a parent tells a child: ‘No you don’t whack the cat with a stick’, or: ‘You don’t bring muddy boots inside the house’, or whatever it is, the child is learning or consolidating language. The utterance is an instance of language, but that language is in a cultural context, so the child is also learning his/her culture, because he/she is learning about categories and boundaries and all that kind of thing. In a developmental context I think it is very easy to see how language is totally embedded in the social context, and learning one is learning the other. The system is the language system, but there is also the cultural context above that. And I guess you can construe that in terms of oppositions as well. All of this is made manifest in an instance. And one of the fascinating things in watching a child learn language is that these instances in a little toddler’s life, are always dialogic. So, there is always an adult involved there, which is why this notion of ‘joint construction’ is so important. And it is from these jointly constructed instances that the child is managing to expand the system. So, the scaffolding of the adult takes the child a little bit further than his or her own system can manage. And sometimes the child goes further just by parroting what

Clare Painter  105 the adult has said. So, the child is producing a bit of text that is beyond the capabilities of his or her actual system. And often the child also will memorise text, maybe text from books or little things that you say – every parent knows about that, that their children say their own sayings back to them. Or you jointly build a little story together, and the child replays it solo. So, as Halliday pointed out, there is a kind of leapfrogging between system and text. Sometimes the text is ahead of what the system can do, but at other times the text cannot quite manifest it correctly, but the system is making a space for some meaning that the child is trying to express. System and text is a very important opposition in developmental terms. And part of the interest in language development studies is seeing: what are the ways that a system can expand? Very often in language development it is connected to the interpersonal. For example, at first a child may only be able to make causal relations in relation to particular speech functions (a command, for example, but not a statement). Or, as another example, mental processes arise initially in terms of I and you or we – a third person does not emerge straight away. A lot of psychological studies confirm these observations from my case study. So, one way a system might expand is by something, initially restricted, being generalised across systems. It may just be a matter of increasing delicacy, as it were, so getting more sub-choices. Or it may be things that are initially restricted to one choice that become generalised, so you get two simultaneous systems where you used to just have one. So, there are different ways that a semiotic system expands as life goes on, and of course one way is that you enter new domains, new fields of knowledge or new work contexts or activities and you need new semiotic resources for those. That is a matter of building up system, but you are often doing it through encountering text and being supported at that level to enable the system to expand.

Context How about context; how can we analyze the context? I think in terms of field, tenor, and mode. There has been recent research in this area, for example, trying to put more flesh on the notion of ‘field’. I am thinking of the work by Jing Hao (2020) and Yaegan Doran (2019) during their time at the University of Sydney, young scholars who have gone past me in that particular area. They are looking at what systemic choices there might be at the field level, for example, that then get realised in discourse-semantics and lexicogrammar for particular disciplines. And I think of Cate Poynton’s (1989) early work analysing tenor in terms of contact, power and affect, and then seeing how they are realised in language. More recently, Hasan has also published contextual networks for field, tenor and mode (e.g. Hasan 2014/2016). So, I think

106  Clare Painter seeing the context semiotically is the key. And that is something that SFL has always insisted on. Would you say field, tenor and mode are concepts that are mostly relevant to how the context is realized in the text, or are they contextual factors, part of the situation? I think they are contextual factors, but semiotically construed. So, they are realised in the text, just as phenomena at a higher cultural level are realised, ultimately, in the text. It helps you in thinking about a particular text to think about what field is relevant, what are the tenor constraints, is it equal power or not, and so on. I see them as part of the semiosis, seeing the context as a semiotic construct. You have also contributed to expanding the notion of text in terms of multimodality, especially in your work with picture books. Did you consider text in that expanded sense all the way, or did that come along the way? In my earliest language development work, I thought of text as linguistic. But I am very happy with a broad notion of text. Certainly, I would see the picture book as a text, I would see images within it as texts. In language, the textual instance can be construed as an utterance; it could be a whole encounter. If you are doing multimodal studies, you might want to be thinking about spatial systems and how they finally manifest in buildings even. I would be quite comfortable with the notion of a multimodal text: anything that is a manifestation of something that operates in a context that has a generic form to which two or more semiotic systems contribute. If you are looking at film or something, then obviously there are multiple semiotic systems involved. So, I would feel quite comfortable with the term text being applied there. When you were describing the linguistic utterances in the dialogues between child and caregiver just now, you were also talking about gestures and gaze and that kind of resources? Oh, absolutely. At the time I did my research, we did not have smartphones or simple recording devices of that kind, so unfortunately, I don’t have audio-visual records, but there is now quite a lot of work that has been done. Not within linguistics, but within the community that is interested in body language, there is quite a lot of work on infant gestures and so on. And certainly, even in the notes we made to accompany our phonetic transcriptions or tape-recordings, we noted the gaze of the child; it might be an important aspect of a proto-language sign that the gaze shifted from the adult to the object that was wanted or to the object that was of interest. I would say now that a proto-language sign is really a multimodal complex. Even though we focused on the vocal, there is the sort of syllabic utterance, there is the tone, there is the gesture, which might be a pointing gesture or some other gesture, reaching arms, or grabbing-sort-of-motions. I remember my son at one time had a little stamp with his feet accompanying his vocalisation when he was

Clare Painter  107 impatient, when he wanted something. And, as you say, gaze as well. So certainly, right from the start multimodality is relevant, but I am not so expert in those aspects simply because we focused on the verbal. Now of course it is so much easier to get all that extra data. It would be great to have a fuller picture.

Genre Let us move on to the concept of genre, is that important in your work? It is relevant in understanding how children are learning every day: when they are learning spoken language, they are learning the everyday genres of mealtimes, book reading, and so on. In the psychological literature on child development, these are often referred to as ‘scripts’, and I think that is equivalent to what we think of as genres, but of course coming from a different perspective. Ninio and Bruner in 1978 published a very famous paper on mother-child interaction in what is often called “the naming game”, where the middle-class mother shares a book and says: ‘What’s that?’ And the child might just go ‘dah’ or just point to it, but the mum says: ‘Yes, that’s a rabbit’. And the child might then approximate what the mother says. And after some months as the child gets more accomplished, the mum will not accept just pointing but seeks the name. So that is a little genre of informal education in a middle-class family, certainly not culturally universal, but it is very visible. That has been important in my work, relating to the notion of scaffolding, interaction, and the adult’s role. And then as an academic, of course, I am helping students write their essays, and it is so useful to be able to talk about different kinds of assignments having different generic requirements, and how that affects the language choices. Your first degree was in literature before you moved into an interest in language, and you have worked with both picture books and fiction and non-fiction. How important is that distinction between fiction and non-fiction for you? It is not something I have reflected on hugely. I take Ruqaiya Hasan’s (1989) point here: when you are looking at a literary text, you are looking for the patterns of meaning that are manifest in the language – or image and language if you are looking at picture books – and you are noticing patterns. Then if it is a literary text, you are making an interpretation that there is some kind of significance to these patterns, the patterns themselves are carrying meaning. So, I suppose that is a level of interpretation you might give to a picture book story or a narrative. If you are looking at a children’s factual text or a more discipline-based factual text at university or in schooling, there you focus more on how the field is being realised, and you are not looking for those kinds of significances. And again, it is different if your interest is in grammar. I have

108  Clare Painter worked with Christian Matthiessen and Jim Martin on a work book for teaching or learning functional grammar, and we would just try to use little snippets of text that were accessible enough to be useful, and they might come from fiction or non-fiction, but we were focused on the grammar. So, because we were only looking at that level, of course the same grammar was relevant. But if you are looking at the complete text in context, then you would approach them slightly differently, depending on whether it is a literary text or an informative text.

Picture Books In your work with picture books, you include pathos, affect and ambience in the interpersonal metafunction. Is that particularly relevant in a literary text? In our project we used picture books as a data source (Painter et al. 2013). It was a project between myself, Len Unsworth, who initiated the project, and Jim Martin. For Len, the picture books were a very relevant educational source that he was interested in, and for Jim, they were a good source because the choices were often very deliberate and done with a lot of skill and expertise, so it could expand multimodal theory. And I was invited to be part of this project as someone who shared both concerns and was interested in language addressed to children and indeed in children’s literature. What we were trying to do was expand Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) work in a way that would be specifically relevant for picture books. The area we felt that most needed expanding was the interpersonal, and as well as affect, pathos, and ambience, we also brought in the notion of focalisation, which, of course, is very prominent in verbal literary analysis. Kress and van Leeuwen had already addressed this to some extent with their notion of contact versus demand, but we needed more than that for the picture book stories. We did not want to be treating the pictures as if they were language, but we wanted, where possible, to line up the meaning systems between images and language, so that we could then judge which resource was doing more work at a particular moment, or if they were both making the same meanings, or if the images and the language were sometimes contradicting or counterpointing each other. We thought Jim Martin and Peter White’s (2005) work on appraisal had not really been developed as a part of SFL theory at the time Kress and van Leeuwen were doing their work, so this was something we could expand. Affect obviously is something that is relevant for persons, so it could only be relevant for images of people. And the other systems, judgement and appreciation, could really only be evoked by images. We were thinking that these are systems of language, and it would be interesting to see if there was any relevance for images.

Clare Painter  109 Affect I guess you can analyse in any image that contains human beings or anthropomorphised animals. You can consider the affect that is represented in the face or the body language. We did not do anything very systemic; we just noted it and did off-the-cuff discussions. Ambience I think would be relevant for any visual medium because it is to do with the effect on the viewer of the colour-choices, so I think that would have a more general application. Pathos was to do with the drawing-style: Kress and van Leeuwen used the notion of modality as more or less realistic, but I had noticed when I was teaching students who were looking at picture books that they would invariably say: ‘Oh, well, it’s low modality because it’s drawn, it’s not photographs’. It did not seem to get us very far. So we adopted some of the work of one of Jim Martin’s students, Ariane Welch, who had done research on some picture books, and had suggested that they could be grouped into three main categories, depending on the drawing-style (Welch 2005). It could be very cartoony, just line-drawings: a face would have dots for eyes like a smiley. And that tended interestingly to be in the very early books, a sort of Dick Bruna kind of stylised drawing or the work of others for very young children. We called this the minimalist-style. It kept a bit of distance between the reader and what was depicted, often you were laughing at what was going on. And then there was what we called a more generic style, where the reader seemed to be more invited to identify with the child in the picture. This style has a little bit more depth to it, and that seemed to be very much in those books where you are teaching the child how to behave and that kind of thing. And then for older readers, there was a more naturalistic style where characters were depicted more realistically like individual people. And those stories tend to be more complex with a more complex kind of moral perspective in them. Whether that is generalisable, I am not sure. As I say, our only data was picture books, and that is the only data I have worked on in thinking about visual semiosis. We will see if it turns out to be useful in any other domain. I certainly think ambience is generalisable. And the others, we will have to see.

Cognition and Learning Does cognition play a role in your interest in language development? Absolutely. Halliday always avoided the word. But I have always been interested in the notion and interested in Piaget’s work and in Vygotsky’s. But I take a semiotic view of it. Obviously, babies from birth are doing things with their brains, they are learning, there is cognition. But, as I said earlier, once language comes into the picture, learning is accomplished through semiosis. So, language is a means of thinking.

110  Clare Painter In my study of my second child, I focused on things like cause and effect; that is a very big theme in Piaget’s work. But I was looking at it more from a semiotic point of view, looking at the language and observing that it is not just one thing. That, for example, it emerges within the interpersonal first, which is surprising given that we often think of causality as a key ideational meaning. But it comes up in things such as threats and warnings. For example: ‘If you do this, I’ll do that’-kind of thing. Or ‘I won’t touch this, because it might sting me’. These are early contexts for conditions and causes. So, I see in a way that a study of language development is actually a study of cognitive development. If you come from more of a psychology-orientation, you will theorise it and capture it in terms of cognition, which I think is valid, those are the kinds of tools of that discipline. But as linguists we can capture these things in semiotic terms, and say that if we are learning anything, if we are building knowledge, then we need to have the linguistic resources to construe it. And many forms of knowledge are quite abstract, as you go up the educational system, and therefore can only be construed in language or mathematical symbols or these kinds of systems. How do you think your work is relevant to education? Well, I am not an educationalist primarily. To the extent that my own work has been influential, it was in the genre-based writing work done in Sydney, which took up the notion of the adult’s guiding role in a child’s language development. I suppose I would use the Vygotskian term ‘scaffolding’ to describe how linguistic support is provided by the adult caregiver to enable the child to step up to a higher level. I was able to show this in relation to different aspects of language learning; for instance, developing a clause complex. The adult might say ‘Don’t touch that’ to which the child responds ‘Why?’ and is told “It’s very sticky”; later the child might reflect “I won’t touch that cause it’s all sticky”. Something that was built up dialogically, the child could later produce as a monologic clause complex. Also, I was focusing a little bit on narrative, little baby narratives. It is quite a hard thing for a very young child to select from memory things that you have done together to share with you in conversation. So, the caregiver offers a probe like “Where did we go?” or “What did the doctor give you?” and validates the child’s response and then follows up and asks another question, and so on until some incident is successfully recounted. And the child will sometimes even on the same occasion bring it all together in a connected utterance of their own; so, this idea of progressing from dialogue to monologue became a key. I think it was Joan Rothery’s insight that there should be ways of building this dialogic creation of text into classroom practice, so that we do not expect children to go from just having a written model of something to being able to write an example independently. We also need

Clare Painter  111 jointly produced models where what the child has to contribute unaided is constrained and limited and manageable. Vygotsky talks about this very nicely, I  think. There is less of a burden on the child, who can focus just on their bit, and experiencing this shared text creation leads to independent production eventually. Showing how this happens naturally – of course it is culturally really, but without consciousness on the part of the adult – I think was quite appealing to teachers who liked the idea that they were basing what they were doing on natural development. I probably would not have been able to think about how my findings could be implemented in the writing classroom, but Rothery (1989) and others came up with the idea of jointly composing a text as part of the ‘teaching-learning cycle’. In the ‘joint construction’, or ‘joint negotiation’ phase, the relevant language resources are made present in the classroom, for children to build up together and then use as a further model before they write independently. So rather than educational theory directly – because I suppose my extra-linguistic reading has been more in psychology than in education – I would say that my interest in education has been in how my work might inform pedagogy in this way. Perhaps it could be considered as basic research that would be useful for an educator? Yes, I hope so. Not that I did the research in order to be useful to educators. I was really just trying to address general questions. For example, Michael Halliday posited his notion of development in a little ‘Linguistics in Education’ group we started in 1986. Halliday gave the first informal presentation there, and he had a handout in which he mapped out all kinds of things relevant to the topic; it was stunning at the time. And then he spent the next 10 or 20 years writing it all up in various articles. But he had this notion of a trajectory from generalisation through abstraction and through metaphor as a different kind of phased development from Piaget’s with its stages and substages that you go through in a particular way. Halliday’s original account in Learning How to Mean (1975) had three phases of (1) the protolanguage, where the child is getting into language, (2) the transition, and then (3) the early metafunctional mother tongue. Generalisation was part of that because you generalise when you get common nouns. So early on, ‘Mummy’ is just one person, and, ‘cat’ might be your own cat, but as soon as it is generalised to be a common noun – a cat rather than my cat, that is a big step forward. And that is one aspect to generalisation. My own research shows that there is further generalisation when the child begins to use what Jim Martin (1992) calls generic reference. When you start talking about how ‘big boys don’t cry’ or ‘babies like milk’, the child is actually using those generic categories. That enables the child to move out of the here-and-now-context of situation, because you then do not have anything you can point to, like when you say: ‘That is my cup’. With ‘Babies like milk’ you cannot point to those things. So

112  Clare Painter that is part of the developmental process. And then abstraction builds on that because, once you have the ability to generalise, you can put things into abstract categories. And again, you do not have the support from the material context that you can always touch or point to. Grammatical metaphor, of course, has been a hugely productive idea in education. From my case studies of language development, I have detailed all the precursors to abstraction (Painter 1999) and all the metaphorical aspects of language up to age five (Painter 2003) but it is Beverly Derewianka’s (1995, 2003) case study of her son that takes the story right on to the development of grammatical metaphor. This is because she was looking at an older child and written texts too. Of course, that is all happening within the context of schooling as well, so you really have to take account of teaching as well as learning there.

Literacy Is literacy a concept that you can relate to? Certainly, I can relate to it since I was part of the community during the time that Halliday was developing his notions of grammatical metaphor. We were all reading a lot on the difference between spoken and written language and the idea that writing structures your thinking in a different way from spoken language. I have certainly always been interested in literacy in that respect. And of course, in my developmental work, seeing the development of generalisation and then abstraction as a necessary part of the trajectory towards literacy in terms of learning the writing-system. It is all very abstract for young children, learning letters, and the movement from top to bottom of the page. So, I would say that literacy has been part of the atmosphere I have breathed, rather than that I see myself as a literacy expert. I guess that is the principle interest of the linguist-educators among us. But you see literacy as first and foremost connected to written language? Yes, certainly as far as language is concerned. As I say, there are steps in spoken language that are moving you towards written language, and the development of metaphor in different forms is part of that. Now we also talk about visual literacy and musical literacy and mathematical literacy. I guess what is meant by that is understanding how the particular system works and being able to use it and perhaps talk about it. When I use the term ‘literacy’, I am thinking about written language forms, but the term is often expanded to include these other modes, which are also important. You know, the famous adage of Halliday’s on language development is that learning language, learning through language, and learning about language are part of the same trajectory. And I think literacy is part of learning language, learning through language, and learning about language. It is always useful to recognise those three facets of the process.

Clare Painter  113 Then it is used in a very different sense when people talk about ‘critical literacy’. Does that mean anything to you? Well again, I am not an expert there, but I would say that critical literacy, or ‘reflection literacy’ (Hasan 1996) is to be able to be conscious of and read the ideology that is implicit in any text, and to be able to question it or accept it, but not simply to be positioned by a text. And I think to have that critical or reflective stance, you do need to understand a bit about how language works and how texts operate, and to be able to stand back a little bit. Because we read for meaning, and we are not necessarily observing how that meaning is established. But I think the more tools you have for actually looking at the language, and the more useful metalanguage you have for discussing it and talking about it, the more you are able to take a critical stance.

Teaching Practice In your own teaching, how have you been working with SFL? Well, mostly I have been teaching linguistics, and my practice would depend on what the course was, and who the audience were. When I was teaching functional grammar, I would normally go through the metafunctions. When I was teaching TESOL teachers, I would try very hard always to use text examples that were of some relevance to their context. So, if they were analysing spoken discourse, I would try to use classroom discourse; if it was written text, I would use something that the students might have to address or indeed that we were actually addressing ourselves. I taught with Louise Ravelli in a course on visual communication, which initially was more or less teaching Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) study with a few additions; so, I would take a metafunctional approach. I like to always give a lot of exemplification and to foreground systemic oppositions. And I think in teaching analytical tools, it is really important for students to have a go. And so, I think the kinds of assignments are important and I would try and constrain those so that the student can focus on the particular things that have been taught and not get overwhelmed. I never minded working with edited text initially, even though the theory is very much built up on authentic text. But I think every piece of spoken dialogue or monologue is likely to have material in it that it is not necessary for the students to understand first up; they cannot get a grasp of the whole system at once. You have to go in at a particular stratum or a particular rank and get confidence going in that. You need to get the students to have a go, to try analysis for themselves, and for them to provide their reasons for different analyses they might come up with. Then you can see what they are understanding, what their reasoning is. When assignments are handed back, I think it is important to give model responses which also discuss the different possibilities. That way the students get the idea that there is not always just one right answer,

114  Clare Painter that in a particular text you might be more drawn to seeing something as a behavioural process than a mental one, for example. Or they see that some things fall between different criteria, and that is ok as long as you know what the criteria are, and you have some reason for what you are doing. Sometimes with novices, I would provide an analysis task where some of it was done for them, so that they did not need to worry about the really tricky things, just build up confidence in the more straightforward cases. Language is complex and it takes a lot of experience if you want to become an expert in analysis, which is what I have mostly been teaching. We have talked about how you have been motivated by things that happen in life, and also your emphasis on empirical studies. Could you reflect a bit upon the relationship between theory and practice? It is a maxim of SFL that theory has to be informed by practice and practice by theory; that it is a sort of virtuous loop. And I think similarly with data, that empirical research is necessary. Even if you think of it at the level of grammar, it is by addressing a whole lot of different registers that the grammar has been enriched, because there are certain kinds of clausetypes, relational processes for instance, that come up in particular registers or particular kinds of dialogic patterns that arise in certain genres. I think SFL has been so rich because it has always been taken into different domains, into the medical, into the legal, into the educational. And all those domains have fed back into the theory and encouraged rejigging and rethinking of the theory. I have not myself done forensic linguistics or medical linguistics, but I think it is always part of the SFL way of doing things to have empirical work and practical work reinforming theory, and then theory being enriched and expanded in order that the practical work or the field-specific work or the empirical work can be enriched, in turn.

Achievements and Future Looking back at your work: What would you say is your most important project? I would say probably my PhD research, which was published as Learning through Language in Early Childhood (1999). I think that provided data that really is not available elsewhere and which has proved useful in pedagogic contexts and helped inform Halliday’s ideas on a language-based theory of learning. And the unstructured, naturalistic method of data collection in that research has been very important in allowing me to return to the data and reexamine it from different angles over the years. This is also true of the earlier case study in fact. That one focused initially on the development of metafunctions, but I have been able to keep revisiting the data to explore different things, like appraisal or multimodality, often in fact looking at the two case studies together.

Clare Painter  115 A particular value of the second study at the time, I think, was the age range covered, as many language acquisition studies, often done by psychologists rather than linguists, focus on language up to about 2 or 2½ years. And of course, within those linguistic theories that are very sentence based, it is not until you have syntax that anything is considered to be happening, but then once you have got well-formed sentences, that is as far as it is taken. So, I think that by researching that pre-school period and taking the story up to the age of 5, it just showed that even though the child may have a metafunctionally based language at about 2½ years, there is still quite a lot that is going on and that is developing in those years before school. And, by implication, will still develop afterwards. So, this idea that language is all completed by age 4, I hope can be put to rest. Moving to the future: Is there anything that you would have liked to do that you have not yet done within this field? Well, it was always my intention to write a book on language development that was not a thesis, that would be more accessible to a broader audience. And I thought that would be my retirement project, but I have been sort of side-tracked both by other things and by life generally. Maybe I will manage it. It is a bit of a regret I have that I have never done this. So that, I would say, is on my unfinished list. How about the field as such: What do you think will be the main challenges and opportunities for SFL in the future? I am not one to predict the future, but I certainly think that a current challenge is trying to integrate our linguistic work with work on other modes: body language and gaze and all these kinds of things. And also, in the educational field bringing in all the different resources of screens and technology. Children are now operating tablets and playing games and learning through that mode, which was not addressed in any of our work, obviously because it did not exist. So, I think just building out the picture to encompass other modes and technology in the current era is a pretty big challenge.

References Derewianka, B. (1995). Language in the Transition from Childhood to Adolescence: The Role of Grammatical Metaphor. Unpublished PhD thesis. Macquarie University. Derewianka, B. (2003). Grammatical metaphor in the transition to adolescence. In A.-M. Simon-Vandenbergen, M. Taverniers & L. Ravelli (Eds.), Grammatical Metaphor: Views from Systemic-Functional Linguistics (pp. 185–219). John Benjamins. Doran, Y.J. (2019). The Discourse of Physics: Building Knowledge through Language, Mathematics and Image. Routledge Halliday, M.A.K. (1975). Learning How to Mean. Explorations in the Development of Language. Edward Arnold.

116  Clare Painter Halliday, M.A.K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. Edward Arnold. Hao, J. (2020). Analyzing Discourse from a Systemic Functional Linguistic Perspective: A Framework for Exploring Knowledge Building in Biology. Routledge. Hasan, R. (1989). Linguistics, Language and Verbal Art (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Hasan, R. (1996). Literacy, everyday talk and society. In R. Hasan & G. Williams (Eds.), Literacy in Society (pp. 377–424). Longman. Hasan, R. (2014/2016) Towards a paradigmatic description of context: systems, metafunctions and semantics. Functions of Language 1.9: 1–54. Republished in J.J. Webster (ed.) Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan, Volume 4. Equinox 2016 (495–499) Heath, S.B. (1983). Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge University Press. Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2nd ed.). Routledge. Martin, J.R. (1992). English Text: System and Structure. John Benjamins Martin, J.R. & White, P.R.R. (2005). The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Palgrave. Nelson, K. (1989/2006). Narratives from the Crib. Harvard University Press. Ngo, T., Hood, S., Martin, J.R., Painter, C., Smith, B. & Zappavigna, M. (2021). Modelling Paralanguage Using Systemic Functional Semiotics. Bloomsbury Academic. Ninio, A. & Bruner, J.S. (1978). The achievement and antecedents of labelling. Journal of Child Language, 5, 1–15. Ochs, E. & Schieffelin, B.B. (1984). Language acquisition and socialization: three developmental stories and their implications. In R.A. Shweder & R.A. LeVine (Eds), Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (pp. 276–320). Cambridge University Press. Painter, C. (1984/2014). Into the Mother Tongue. A Case Study in Early Language Development. Pinter, Bloomsbury. Painter, C. (1999). Learning through Language in Early Childhood. Continuum. Painter, C. (2003). The role of metaphor in early language learning. In A.-M. Simon-Vandenbergen, M. Taverniers and L. Ravelli (Eds.), Grammatical Metaphor: Views from Systemic-Functional Linguistics (pp. 151–167). John Benjamins. Painter, C., Martin, J.R. & Unsworth, L. (2013). Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children’s Picture Books. Equinox. Poynton, C. (1989). Language and Gender: Making the Difference (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Rothery, J. (1989). Learning about language. In R. Hasan & J.R. Martin (Eds.), Language Development: Learning Language, Learning Culture: Meaning and Choice in Language: Studies for Michael Halliday. Ablex. Snow, C. & Ferguson, C. (Eds.) (1977). Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition. Cambridge University Press. Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Harvard University Press.

Clare Painter  117 Torr, J. (1998). From Child Tongue to Mother Tongue: Language Development in the First Two and a Half Years. Nottingham University. Trevarthen, C. (1999). The concept and foundations of infant intersubjectivity. In S. Bråten (Ed.), Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 15–46). Cambridge University Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press Welch, A. (2005). The Illustration of Facial Affect in Children’s Literature. Unpublished BA Hons coursework paper. University of Sydney. Central publications These are the publications that Clare Painter herself considers to be her most important ones: Painter, C. (1984/2014). Into the Mother Tongue: A Case Study in Early Language Development. Pinter/Bloomsbury. Painter, C. (1996). Learning about learning: construing semiosis in the preschool years. Functions of Language, 3(1), 95–125. Painter, C. (1999). Learning through Language in Early Childhood. Continuum. Painter, C. (1999). Preparing for school: developing a semantic style for educational knowledge. In F. Christie (Ed.), Pedagogy and the Shaping of Consciousness (pp. 68–87). Cassell. Painter, C. (2003). Developing attitude: an ontogenetic perspective on appraisal. Text, 23(2). Special issue: M. Macken-Horarik & J.R. Martin (Eds.), Negotiating Heteroglossia: Social Perspectives on Evaluation (pp. 183–210). Painter, C. (2004). The development of language as a resource for learning. In C. Coffin, A. Hewings & K. O’Halloran (Eds.), Applying English Grammar: Functional and Corpus Approaches (pp. 155–171). Open University/ Arnold. Painter, C. (2004). The ‘interpersonal first’ principle in child language development. In G. Williams & A. Lukin (Eds.), Language Development: Functional Perspectives on Evolution and Ontogenesis (pp. 133–153). Continuum. Painter, C. with Martin, J.R. & Matthiessen, C. (2010). Deploying Functional Grammar. Commercial Press. Painter, C. with Martin, J.R. & Unsworth, L. (2013). Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis in Children’s Picture Books. Equinox.

7

Mary Schleppegrell

Mary Schleppegrell is Professor of Education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, USA. Prior to this, she had a position at the University of California at Davis. Mary Schleppegrell has conducted extensive research in applied linguistics with focus on language and learning. In her research and her teaching she has contributed strongly to implement systemic functional linguistics (SFL) in a US context. She has a special research interest in English as a second language, and in how English language learners can increase their linguistic competence for learning across the curriculum. Her research projects have been conducted in Washington, California and Michigan, in close cooperation with teachers. The focus has been on how meaning is realised in the texts students work with in the classroom, and on how linguistic tools can give meaningful support for teachers in their daily work in the classroom and for students when they read texts in different school subjects and write in different genres. In her research Schleppegrell has paid special attention to texts in the subjects history, social sciences and science. Mary Schleppegrell has published extensively, and her publications are read by students and researchers all over the world. In 2015, she was invited DOI: 10.4324/9780429352270-7

Mary Schleppegrell  119 to the Council of Europe’s Language Policy Unit in Strasbourg to give a keynote speech when they launched their policy initiative on Teaching the Languages of Schooling. The interview took place at the 45th International Systemic Functional Congress in Boston, USA, July 2018.

Academic Life Story Could you please tell us about your education, your academic interests, and how you got into your field? I grew up in a small town in Northern Minnesota where my father was a teacher in German. I went to University of Minnesota and studied German and took my first linguistics courses there, as I was very interested in languages. After I finished my degree, I spent a couple of years in Germany in the early 1970s, just hanging out with students and having casual jobs and learning more about the world. When I went back to the USA, I returned to the university to earn a teaching credential and became an elementary school teacher in California. At that time, many immigrant children were coming into the schools, out of South-East Asia after the Vietnam War, and from Mexico of course. In those years, those children were just sitting in the back of the room with something to do until they had learned English. There were few resources for teachers to meet their needs in the classroom. That got me interested in English as a second language. After I had been teaching for a couple of years, I had the opportunity to go to Egypt with a fellowship at the American University in Cairo in 1980, where I earned a master’s degree in teaching English as a foreign language. For my thesis, I worked with agricultural economists who participated in research projects with American universities and needed to develop English proficiency. At that time, the research of Stephen Krashen on second language development was very influential (Krashen 1987, 1988). His theory of comprehensible input argued that instead of teaching about grammar and focusing on speaking correctly, as was common in language teaching, we instead needed to provide students with opportunities to listen to and read the new language in the early stages of learning. Comprehension became interesting to me, so I used these theories of comprehensible input and comprehension-based instruction to work with these professional economists. This work brought me into the area of English for specific purposes, which was my first academic interest. When I returned to the States, I started working for the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington D.C., where I helped develop programmes for specific purposes and different contexts. In doing that, I started thinking about how the syllabus for language teaching is structured. In those years, the ‘functional’ or ‘situational’ notion of the syllabus was very prominent. When it came

120  Mary Schleppegrell to grammar, however, I could neither see a theoretical aspect of why the syllabus was structured the way it was, nor a rationale for the structure of grammar instruction. That got me interested in going back to study again. I enrolled at Georgetown University in Washington, for a PhD in linguistics in the sociolinguistics strand, where I studied with Deborah Schiffrin, who was interested in the analysis of discourse. At the same time at the Center for Applied Linguistics where I was still working, I got involved in a research project in schools in the Washington area where there were many children speaking languages other than English. We interviewed children about what they thought makes a student a good communicator in the classroom. I used that corpus of data for my dissertation, where I focused specifically on the use of because-clauses, which related to my interest in grammatical development by children who were and who were not English native speakers. I  asked the questions: ‘How do we describe what is better or what is more ­developed in their language?’ ‘What theories do we have to help us?’ I was not satisfied with the ways because was described in the research, only as a complex and high-level move that constructs causality. The ways the children I interviewed were using because-clauses was not really like that. They might say: “She’s a good communicator because I always see her answer the questions”. I was interested in describing this and other uses of because. How did you learn about systemic functional linguistics? One day in 1986 or 1987, I was in the library at the Center for Applied Linguistics, and there I discovered Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. This book really changed my trajectory and my academic life from then on. In my PhD studies, we had not read Halliday’s work, and the professors were not familiar with the systemic functional ­theory. I used it in what I now see as a superficial way in my dissertation research, but it gave me a way of thinking about the use the students were making of because, not as subordination or even hypotaxis, but as a paratactic use, in Halliday’s terms. Now I would be able to talk about this in terms of the interpersonal and textual meanings of clauses introduced by because. After that, my first academic job was at the University of California at Davis. I was hired in the linguistics department in 1992, the same year Cecilia Colombi was hired in the Spanish department. We realised that both of us had been independently reading Halliday on our own without much support. We formed a group and started reading more systematically together. In 1998, we went to the ISFC (International Systemic Functional Congress) in Cardiff, where we heard Michael Halliday and Christian Matthiessen give their course on An Introduction to Functional Grammar and met many people doing systemic functional linguistics. There were many South-Americans there that year, maybe for one of the first times, and we started making connections with other

Mary Schleppegrell  121 people on the American continent. After that, SFL became a powerful influence in my research. As my research was continuing to be situated in educational contexts, in 2005 I moved from California to the University of Michigan to take up a position in the School of Education, where I would have the opportunity to work more closely with scholars interested in language and education. At Michigan I have been able to develop collaborations with teachers to do school-based research.

SFL in the USA How has it been to work with systemics in the US, as many US scholars have a cognitive approach to linguistics? Well, that is a great question. I was fortunate in that the department of linguistics at Davis was very eclectic. There were no dogmatic linguists there promoting a particular theory, and many people there were not in the Chomskyan tradition. Berkeley is, however, right down the road from Davis, and well-known scholars like Robin and George Lakoff and other people were definitely under the Chomsky umbrella. Everybody at Davis was fine with me doing systemic functional linguistics. I was hired there to direct the ESL (English as a Second Language) writing programme, and I was in charge of the master’s programme for ESL teachers. In that context, I started using Graham Lock’s book on functional grammar for second language learning and Susan Feez’ book on Text-Based Syllabus Design. Cecilia Colombi was also directing a programme in Spanish for heritage speakers, so we continued to collaborate and introduced our students to SFL; they found the functional approach useful right away. In 2000, we held a conference and invited Jim Martin, Frances Christie, Jay Lemke, and other people who were working in US literacy contexts to address the question: how do students advance in first and second language development? This question continued that interest I always have had in how we describe developmental pathways, and how we see growth in language. How can we structure a syllabus that supports a view on development that is grounded theoretically? We were able to bring this question to the context of first and second language literacy development, and to heritage language development. This is also an issue for African American speakers in our context, for example, who also have to learn new registers. At that time, it was thought that writing with fewer errors was evidence of improvement and “advancedness”. Everybody knew, however, that writing in error-free ways was not a good measure of growth, as it leads students to write the simplest sentences they can to be “correct”, without thinking about texture or the representation of their ideas. We were interested in thinking about development in new ways, and the conference promoted that interest. Cecilia Colombi and I edited in 2002 a book together out of that conference, The Development of Advanced Literacy in First and Second Languages.

122  Mary Schleppegrell How is the status of functional linguistics in USA today? The 45th International Systemic Functional Congress, which was held in Boston in 2018, is a proof that SFL now has a strong position in US educational research. This conference was an opportunity for many SFL interested people in the USA to come together, meet colleagues from all over the world, and develop connections and networks. Cecilia Colombi and I have had students interested in SFL all these years, and they have had their students, so new generations interested in SFL are coming up. It has, however, not always been like this; SFL used to be much less known in the US. My book The Language of Schooling was published in 2004, and it has had an impact. I spent five years writing that book, and it was rejected by several publishers before one accepted it. Each time it was rejected it helped me to improve it and to think about the audience for it and my message. My goal in that book was to take SFL-theory and connect it to what I knew were the problems in literacy that researchers in the USA were struggling over and the kinds of debates they were having. I wanted to offer some new ways of thinking about those problems, drawing on Michael Halliday’s work and the SFL-grammar. Many people have said that they got interested in SFL through that book. Meg Gebhard, professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst, in her presentation at the Boston conference, reported on the great increase in publications in the USA by people who are using SFL in their work.

The Field Let us go to the classroom and to teaching. You are well known for your content-based approach to language teaching and learning. Can you tell us about this approach? Content-based teaching was a big movement in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) back in the 1980s. The idea behind the content-based approach was to make language teaching more relevant by addressing language goals in the context of engaging with meaningful content. In other words, as a language teacher, you choose a good topic and have some good texts that are interesting to students. I think that idea, even if it is good, is not enough when it comes to children with English as a second language, which is what I was especially interested in. In classroom teaching, it is very important to support children to achieve subject area goals. At that time, it was typical to have separate language classes for children learning English, where the ESL teacher would take the children out of the mainstream classroom and use any interesting topic to teach English. This was not successful in preparing students to work in the subject areas at their grade level and level of cognitive development. As content-based teaching became prominent, it focused the ESL teacher on thinking about what the children actually needed to learn in

Mary Schleppegrell  123 the subjects so they would teach language that relates to that content. But initially the approach was not theoretically developed in terms of what it means to teach content. That is where SFL was very useful, and collaboration with the history project at the University of California gave me a context to explore the ways content and language teaching could be theorised in a different way. I began to work with the history project, which was providing professional development for history teachers, right after a California ballot proposition in 1998 that had eliminated bilingual education across the state. Many students learning English were in transitional bilingual education programmes at that time, and the proponents of the proposition convinced voters that children should not be in classrooms where other languages were spoken, so that they would supposedly learn English more quickly through immersion. The result was that all teachers, also history teachers, had many English learners coming to their classrooms for the first time. Those teachers wanted not only to learn more about teaching history in the project’s workshops, but also to learn about how they could work with children who were learning English. The project organisers wanted to connect second language teaching to the subject history and asked me to get involved. I had just read Jim Martin’s work on history (Martin and Wodak 2003), and Caroline Coffin’s work on historical discourse (Coffin 2009), so I knew a lot about what we might do! We got a small grant from the university and started doing workshops for history teachers where we taught them some ways of deconstructing texts using the functional grammar. We taught them about metalanguage and genre, and the teachers studied different genres in history and used these genres as a learning tool. My idea was that we should reconceptualise content-based language teaching as language-based content teaching. At first, when the history teachers came to a workshop where they had to focus on language and learn SFL metalanguage to analyse texts, they resisted this linguistic focus, claiming that they were not language teachers. Over time, though, as we got them looking more closely at the texts they were teaching, and learned how content and language were related, they became interested in this approach. What is the power of SFL in situations like this? The power is in the meaning-focus of the grammatical metalanguage; the focus on meaning and the use of the functional grammar was really the key (see de Oliveira and Schleppegrell 2015). Nowadays, I know that many people are coming to SFL from genre-based approaches and the teaching-learning cycle. These are important contributions. I still think, however, that it is the notion of register and the grammar, the ability to see the three lenses of meaning that is crucial: to be able to say ideationally, interpersonally, and textually what is going on in a text and how that relates to field, tenor, and mode. That is the true power of the theory and the tools. If you never get to that point, if you are just at the level of genre, you are not using the full power of the theory.

124  Mary Schleppegrell To what extent do you use metalanguage in classroom? My thinking on this has evolved and I am still struggling about it. From the beginning, I thought the metalanguage is the power, so we started off with a lot of metalanguage with the teachers in the history project. The ideational tools process/participant/circumstance and the different process types are really useful for analysing complex texts and thinking about what is going on in the texts. The metalanguage is, however, hard for teachers, and in the history project, we had to simplify it to some extent. When I moved to Michigan and started working with teachers there, we also used the metalanguage with them, and they found it really useful too. We had time to work intensively with them and consider what kind of metalanguage we could use. We tried to connect the SFL metalanguage with the kind of literacy metalanguage the teachers already were using. The teachers were for example talking about ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ when they worked with narrative texts with their students. We could see that the showing is typically done in the doing and sensing processes. If the story says, ‘she huddled under the bed’, then you could say ‘What feeling is in that?’ and ‘How is the author showing that?’ Well, she is afraid, and the author is showing it through a doing process of hiding under the bed. In this way, the literacy metalanguage they already knew could be connected with the SFL metalanguage, giving students a concrete way to explore the literacy concepts and recognise how they are accomplished by an author. This was really powerful.

Classroom Practice Can you give us some examples from your work with students and teachers in the classroom? I will give you an example from my current work, where we are using the SFL theory but as much of the explicit metalanguage. In a middle school history class, the 13-year-old students were reading sources to think about the experiences of women in colonial America; enslaved women, indigenous women, women of the high classes and servants. They read, for example, letters that those women wrote or laws that affected them. The language was challenging, and as the project’s overall goal was to engage the students in inquiry with sources, we had less time to work with teachers to introduce the SFL metalanguage. Instead, I thought about what the theory had to offer, and how we could support teachers and students as they read each source to ask questions that could support their understanding. These questions, I saw, could be focused on different meanings that are realised in different genres. So, for example, in reading a law or proclamation, the class asks: who are the people and institutions in this text? What are their relationships to the speaker or author? From an SFL perspective, students are identifying

Mary Schleppegrell  125 the social actors and their relationships with each other, with a focus on participants. If the text is a report on people’s views at that time, students can ask “What do the people in this text think, feel or want?” From an SFL perspective, that focuses them on mental processes to help them recognise the perspectives in the text. A task to understand more argumentative texts or legal documents was to focus on sentence beginnings and what follows to discover what the author is highlighting in creating the text. Without using SFL metalanguage, this focuses readers on marked themes, helping them recognise when an author is shifting the focus of a text. The questions come from SFL-theory and help the students have a way into a challenging text without using the technical metalanguage. It is always important for us to start with what the teachers already do and build on that. However, many teachers do not have a strategy for working with a text. In our projects, we give them tools to work systematically with students as they read texts. This work unfolds over several days. In a social studies investigation such as the one about colonial America, the students are reading sources in order to respond to an overarching question, where the sources they read offer different possibilities for developing an argument with evidence. In this case, on the first day, the students learned background about the topic and shared what they already knew. Then they start to work with the sources. We have developed a set of literacy tools; one is what we call the “bookmark”. The bookmark lists the questions students should ask as they read each source; the questions I talked about above that are shaped by SFL theory and that help them unpack meaning in the text. How they use the bookmark is of course different at the beginning of the year and at the end. Let us take an example from the beginning of the year, when a teacher is just starting with this approach. The investigation may have three sources. In introducing the first source, the teacher models for the students how to read it; engaging students first in reading information about where the source came from, who the author is, and other questions, while thinking aloud about the ways they will approach a new source and showing students how to make notes about it they can come back to later after reading the other sources. The ‘bookmark’ questions then guide the students’ reading in pairs, as they read aloud, sentence by sentence, asking the questions about social actors or sensing processes or marked themes, depending on the genre, and writing notes about what they understand. This is an interactive process of reading together for the students. As the school year goes on, these practices become familiar to the students and there is less teacher modelling, but the close reading continues as an interactive activity that helps students understand the sources they are reading. The children become familiar with the bookmark reading process and doing the annotations and that helps them build the field of knowledge they will use when they write.

126  Mary Schleppegrell Then after a few class sessions of reading, teachers lead an activity we call ‘weigh the evidence’. The students know these texts now, so the teacher reminds them about the main question guiding the investigation; in the case of the colonial women, it was: Were women’s experiences similar or different in colonial America? The students look back at the texts and their notes and find evidence they can use to respond to the question with an argument. There is a lot of interaction as students identify evidence that could be used to support different claims, and reason about how that evidence supports the claim. The teacher develops a chart with a record of this interaction. At that point, the students have constructed their arguments in oral language and with each other, before they write, and they have a model of how those arguments can be constructed in writing in the chart. The next day they analyse a mentor text that models the structure of the genre for them and they identify stages of an argument, asking: ‘Where is the claim in this text?’ ‘What is the evidence,’ and ‘How did the author introduce the evidence?’ Here a focus on language comes in again because the students have to start thinking about how the author moves from the claim to the evidence, the language that is used when a quote is brought in (for example ‘in this source’ or ‘according to this author’), and other linguistic features of the mentor text. This is again very interactive and supported by a lot of talk and discussion. So, the learning unfolds over several days of focused instruction, with close reading, lots of talk, and supports for writing. In the writing process the students have a support that helps them consider what their own claim will be, based on the discussion the whole group had together when weighing the evidence. Then, after all this work, the students write on their own. This is a heavily scaffolded pedagogy. In our project, the teachers organise four of these kinds of units of instruction, and we can see the progress students make across the year. Is your approach to language learning as useful for students with English as their first language as it is for students with English as their second language? In all the contexts where I have been doing research, the students are mixed; some with English as L1, and others at different stages of development of proficiency in English. Teachers find that all students benefit from the close reading, talk, and writing supports. What we heard from the history teachers, for example, was that their English-speaking students who were good readers liked doing language analysis activities because it slowed them down and gave them the chance to look more closely into the text and start thinking about the language choices an author made. It became intellectually interesting to those students, and teachers reported comments like “Oh, look at how he is positioning this actor” and “Look at what words are being used to describe the actors!” The teachers never reported to us that the students found it boring.

Mary Schleppegrell  127 Is there one of your projects that you find especially successful? The Language and Meaning project I engaged in with my colleague, Annemarie Palincsar, was a five-year project in which we helped primary school teachers use SFL metalanguage to support reading and writing. We built the work within the curriculum the teachers were using. For example, after the students had read and worked with a story, teachers used functional grammar metalanguage to support students in digging deeper into the text by looking at the language and talking about how the author used it to make meaning. I gave an example of it above when I talked about using the SFL metalanguage to connect to literacy metalanguage in helping students see what an author has shown and what an author has told. We spent extensive time with the same teachers over three years, helping them adjust their classroom literacy instruction and using functional grammar in ways that have been very productive for them. The project has resulted in many publications and I am proud of the work we did.

Literacy Let us go to the concept of literacy. What is literacy to you? For me, literacy is participation in discourses in different subject areas that enables students to be part of a community of people who think, talk, read, and write within these discourses. Moving to the University of Michigan and its School of Education was a shift towards research in classroom literacy development for me because my colleagues were literacy scholars, and my students were no longer coming for linguistics, but for education. I have learned a lot from collaborating with Annemarie Palincsar and other literacy researchers who are interested in classroom talk and the relationship between talk and reading and writing. On the other hand, Ruqaiya Hasan and Michael Halliday have been critical of new ways of thinking about literacy as encompassing broader social practices, asking what we shall call reading and writing if literacy is everything? Some part of me says that there is some truth in that. My work has focused especially on reading and writing, and I have worked with teachers who were limited in their pedagogical approaches to reading and writing. Above I have talked about the need for close reading, supported by metalanguage that puts a focus on the meanings in a text (see Fang and Schleppegrell 2008). In teaching writing, the process-oriented approach has been very prominent in the USA. Teachers encourage students to brainstorm, draft, maybe they provide some kind of scaffold for drafting, writing, and revising, but there is seldom explicit teaching of writing as meaning-making and the language choices available for writing different genres. We drew on the genre-based SFL work and helped teachers introduce the stages of a genre and focus students on the language resources they could draw

128  Mary Schleppegrell on in each stage to accomplish the purposes and goals of the genre. Here the SFL metalanguage came into the picture again. For example, after a while, the teachers could say: “We are going to start with circumstances of time and place to help us know where the character is at this point”. So, teachers have key needs for support in literacy instruction that explicitly teaches students to get meaning from what they read and write in ways that make the meanings they intend. But I also recognise the very important role of spoken language in accomplishing those goals. As I described above, in my current project with social studies in the middle school, the curriculum that my colleague Chauncey Monte-Sano and I have developed involves reading, talk, and writing over several days, and through that work I have seen the value of thinking about literacy from a wider perspective. To develop disciplinary literacy across school subjects, students need to spend time working with new ideas, making personal connections to a topic, and reading and talking. So, literacy also includes oral language, where meanings can be co-constructed in talk in ways that contribute to students’ engagement with text and that prepare them to write. What about multimodal literacy? The students have to consider the visual elements in the texts, and some of our sources are graphs, paintings or other non-verbal texts. When I was first working with children’s literature, I talked to Professor Geoff Williams at Sydney University, and he gave me many ideas for ways of thinking about the visuals; for example, thinking in terms of process types to consider how a character is positioned in a visual and relating the visual presentation to the language of the author. I would recommend the work of Len Unsworth to anyone who wants to see SFL approaches to multimodal literacy in action in education (Unsworth 2001). At present, the need for critical literacy in school is much discussed. Is critical literacy important in your work? Most definitely. You can imagine how important critical thinking is at the moment in the USA (2018). In social studies and history education, the students work with social issues and read varied sources. They need to reflect on where the sources come from and how reliable they are. In the pedagogy that my colleague Professor Chauncey Monte-Sano and I have developed, the students have to think about where the source comes from, answer questions about the author, when the text was written, the context in which it was written, the genre, and why it was written. They need to think about the opportunities the author had to know what he or she wrote about, and they discuss how trustworthy and reliable the text is. After they have read the text, there is a moment in the lesson where they think about the following question: how reliable is this text for answering the question that we are going to answer? The other part of critical literacy is to think about the perspectives of the authors, and how the students are going to align themselves or not

Mary Schleppegrell  129 with the points of view that are presented in the texts. One of the units we did in our current project was on the power of the presidency. It started off by talking about the idea of executive action; how the presi­ dent has the power to make some things happen without the Congress. We used the example of DACA, The Deferred Action for Childhood Ar­ rivals, concerning children who are in our country without legal status. Now many of these children have grown up. They are American chil­ dren, but without the DACA programme they were going to be deported to a country they never lived in. Their DACA status was given them by an executive action by President Obama. President Trump, however, used a new executive action to remove that status. Our students were asked to think about what the founders of the Constitution intended with their introduction of the executive action. They studied President Obama’s action and President Trump’s. Of course, the students were aligning themselves with one or the other of those points of view right from the beginning, but they were also studying the debates that went on in writing the Constitution. One of the sources was a debate where some of the founders were arguing about the following questions: ‘Do we want a strong president?’ ‘Is there a problem with a strong president?’ ‘Why might we need the president to be able to take some actions on his own?’ By thinking about what was said when the Constitution was written, students were able to consider the question and offer support for the position they took; the sources they read had evidence to support different interpretations. Reading historical sources, recognising the perspectives they present, and relating what they learn to issues today is a way of building critical literacy. Another thing I want to mention is that President Trump’s discourse makes people use words in public that they would never do before. Even middle school teachers are struggling with students who are saying nasty things to immigrant children. When the teachers are commenting on that, the students are pushing back at the teachers by saying that the President said this, so why cannot I say it. It is important to learn to be critical to that kind of discourse too.

Genre Let us move to genre. What is your understanding of genre? I use the Sydney-school’s definition of genre as fulfilling a ‘social pur­ pose’, but I think of the Sydney-school descriptions as a point of de­ parture that can be adapted to fit what teachers in our context want children to do and write. We help teachers develop a genre description for tasks they want the children to do, using the book School Discourse. Learning to Write across the Years of Schooling from 2008 by Frances Christie and Beverly Derewianka. Their book gives us a good starting point, but sometimes we add stages or develop the description of a stage

130  Mary Schleppegrell to fit our context. We also focus on the language used to accomplish each stage. Genre descriptions offer a way of thinking about a text’s unfolding in a macro-sense, but we need understanding of register and the relationship of language and context to consider how a genre is realised in different ways as field, tenor, and mode shift in response to the context of situation. For learners, recognising choices they can make as they write a genre, or the choices an author has made in writing it, call for a focus on register at the level of the clause.

Learning How does SFL contribute to learning? SFL theory and tools support deeper engagement with a text, in both reading and writing. SFL helps to raise students’ consciousness and focus them on language and wording in detail, and to think about relations between words and between clauses. In the past, text work was done far more superficially. If the teacher just gives the children a text and says ‘read it, talk to your neighbor about it, and then we will talk about it together’ very few students get something from such an activity. SFL, and pedagogy developed with SFL, support students with tools they can use to approach a text in ways that better prepare them to participate in talk about it or write with knowledge developed through reading. We see students who are English learners participating just as much in the talk in the classroom as students who are typically quick to respond, as the work with language and meaning prepares everybody better for participating in conversation about the text. Have other theories of education been important to you in connection with SFL? Vygotsky’s theory is very prominent in our work, and his ideas of co-construction, scaffolding, and support are important ideas. I also find Bernstein’s theory about the recontextualisation of knowledge and the different coding-orientations that children bring into school, important (Bernstein, 2000). I also want to mention Ruqaiya Hasan. She emphasised that we need to listen more carefully to what students say and understand that we might hear unexpected things that we need to ponder over before we quickly respond. It is likely that not everyone in the class experiences what we work with in the classroom in the same way, based on their background. Once we did a unit on the experience of the Cherokee people in the USA. The Cherokees are indigenous people who were moved from Georgia to Oklahoma and forced out of their land when gold was discovered on it. The teacher asked the middle school students: ‘Have you ever had to move when you did not want to?’ Some students actually had the experience of being evicted from their homes, which of course is a really terrible situation. Such an experience did not only give a better

Mary Schleppegrell  131 understanding of the Cherokee’s and the topic the students worked with, but it also gave the teacher insight in the lives of the students in her class. If teachers recognise that some children may have experiences that are quite different from many others’, they can be open to understanding what children say and respecting it. Even if students bring values into the discussion that the teacher may not agree with, Hasan asks us to think about what brings them to say that. However, things like these make teaching complicated.

Text and Context How important is the relationship between text and context to you? It is essential to think about the shifting in text and context that has to occur from the beginning of a work unit with students to the end. The students start out with a certain way of talking about a new topic, and then we build their knowledge over time. By the end of the unit, they are talking in a different and more specialised way about the topic and have created a different context for that talk. The text they create at the end shows that they have learned and understood something. The idea is that the context is continually recreated and reformulated through the talk that goes on in the learning process, and through the work with the texts that are introduced. The talk and the reading of texts are shaping the next moment. Do you work with the register variables field, tenor, and mode in school? The notion of ‘register’ has always been central to my work and understanding, and shapes the way I start working with any text. I often start from the metafunctional perspective, but always thinking about field-tenor-mode-relationships. With my graduate students, we work with field, tenor, and mode explicitly. With the teachers, we talk more about the ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings, and try to recognise how texts are always simultaneously presenting those different meanings. We explore what is going on in the text, what perspectives are presented, and how the text is structured. That is more the central point of departure that I take with teachers. We talk about register shifting by promoting talk about text in the classroom. Students need opportunities to take ideas presented in a text and explore them in talk; then also represent them in their own writing. Register is a concept that is foundational to my work with teachers. You mentioned that the students are bringing their own context into the classroom in reading and writing situations. What kind of tools do you need to analyze that kind of context? Could you approach that from a textual point of view? The idea of culturally responsive pedagogy is really important in the USA now; that teachers should meet students where they are and let

132  Mary Schleppegrell them bring their experiences into the classroom. How that is or should be realised still needs more research. In our projects, we try to connect to the students’ experiences at the beginning of the learning process, e.g. with the topic about the Cherokees and moving I already mentioned. The teacher always has to ask, however, what is the goal of bringing in students’ experiences, and how should these experiences be used. The experiences students share then also need to shape the instruction throughout a unit of study. Some experiences may also be sensitive. This is something my colleagues and I are talking about a lot, because we do not feel we are managing this in powerful ways right now. It can be very superficial when teachers connect with students’ experiences. How do we bring in conversations about the students’ experiences in ways that engage and are useful for further learning? I do not think we are there yet. In our current project, we are videotaping the classrooms and plan to analyse the sharing of experiences discussion that takes place at the beginning of an investigation, in order to understand better how the students’ experiences can be shared and used to support learning. In our master’s programme, we have many international students and face the question of bringing in their experiences in another way. They go to courses about education, but they are not familiar with the US education with much jargon and language about principles. The last couple of years, we have worked hard to initiate international talk about education and make space for students to talk about how education works in their home countries. In the schools, it is actually the same. If a student has just come from Mexico in the seventh grade, he or she knows Mexican history. This student does not know US history. When we take up topics from the US history in school, we cannot assume the same background knowledge on the part of this student but can recognise that students have other knowledge that can be recognised. This is another element we have to consider when we consider how to introduce a new topic and draw on students’ own experiences. When immigrants with another mother tongue arrive, their challenges are too often talked about as a vocabulary issue. It is, however, not just lack of words that might be a problem. Nor is it just background and knowledge issues in the same way we might think about this with L1 students. There are values and attitudes and other aspects of students’ thinking that are involved. This is a complicated issue in school. You have mentioned Ruqaiya Hasan and her work several times. What have you learned from her, and what do you think is her special contribution to the field? She has two big contributions for me. One is the concept of ‘semantic variation’ that comes out of her work on her project with mothers and children. She emphasised the notion of ‘coding orientation’ and how language varies by social positioning. I think these ideas are not well understood. Nor are notions of dialect and register well understood, even now.

Mary Schleppegrell  133 In the US context, individualism is strong and the same is the idea that there are not any social classes. Nobody wants to say: ‘That social group thinks in a different way’. People want to say: ‘Everybody is the same, and we should not assume that people think in different ways’. Therefore, the notion of ‘coding orientation’ gets rejected constantly. You might be perceived as racist by saying that some people think differently. It is easier to ignore differences and say that we all think the same. This is really a complicated issue. I think that experiences in life, experiences of talk and texts, shape the way we recognise what is going on and how we respond to what is going on. All this varies by our social positioning and the socialisation context that we have experienced. Hasan’s idea of semantic variation is a very profound thought that should be promoted (Hasan 2009). It is a huge contribution, and it is going to keep me thinking for a long time about it. Her second big contribution is her notion and understanding of ‘reflection literacy’, which I think is very accessible, and something that teachers easily can get a hold of (Hasan 2011). She writes about how literacy is conceptualised in three ways: as coding sound-letter correspondence, as action with a focus on meaning-making, and as reflection with the goal of producing new knowledge. She sees decoding as a very limited conceptualisation of literacy that supports students only in conforming to norms rather than challenging them. She also sees action-focused approaches to literacy, such as asking students to write canonical genres that reproduce valued discursive practices, as not enough. Her notion of reflection literacy, on the other hand, requires conceptualising language as meaning potential and recognising how knowledge is constructed in different disciplines so that they can question knowledge and contribute to producing new knowledge. We all want our students to know, not only reproduce, and we want them to contribute and participate in society and to shape the world in new ways with their own new knowledge.

The Future What about you yourself, is there something you really want to do, which you have not done yet? I want to write another book about disciplinary literacy and the subject area-language connection. That is still in my future. I want to build on what I have been doing in so many projects over the years. I am learning much myself in the current project in social studies. The subject itself raises many questions to how we can work with texts with relevant topics. Working with people from other fields has really been good for me. Which of your academic achievements are you most proud of? I am proud of my book The Language of Schooling, because I have heard from many people that it has helped them. I would say that is my proudest achievement. I am also really proud of the work with teachers

134  Mary Schleppegrell and students. This work demonstrates that teachers and students can use SFL theory and metalanguage and find it helpful to them and support their learning. What do you think will be the main challenges and opportunities for SFL and social semiotics in the future? I think the opportunities are many in both schools and universities, and there is potential for great expansion of SFL and social semiotics. The challenge is to implement a true social semiotics, and not only small parts of it that just get incorporated as another thing you do without going deeply into the theory. We need to read Hasan in more detail. The potential of her thinking has not been realised as much as it should be. She can be hard to read, and yet there are some really deep ideas there that we would benefit from engaging with.

References Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity. Theory, ­Research, Critique. Vol. V. Rowman and Littlefield. Christie, F. & Derewianka, B. (2008). School Discourse. Learning to Write across the Years of Schooling. Continuum. Coffin, C. (2009). Historical Discourse. The Language of Time, Cause and Evaluation. Continuum. de Oliveira, L.C. & Schleppegrell, M.J. (2015). Focus on Grammar and Meaning. Oxford University Press. Fang, Z. & Schleppegrell, M.J. (2008). Reading in Secondary Content Areas: A Language-Based Pedagogy. University of Michigan Press. Feez, S. (1998). Text-Based Syllabus Design. Macquarie University. Halliday, M.A.K. (1985). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Edward Arnold. Hasan, R. (2009). In J.J. Webster (Ed.), Semantic Variation: Meaning in Society and in Sociolinguistics. The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan. Vol. 2: Language and Education : Learning and Teaching in Society (pp. 41–72). Equinox. Hasan, R. (2011). Literacy, everyday talk and society. In J.J. Webster (Ed.), The Collected Works of Ruquiya Hasan. Vol. 3: Language and Education : Learning and Teaching in Society (pp. 169–206). Equinox. Krashen, S. (1987). Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Prentice-Hall International. Krashen, S. (1988). Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Prentice-Hall International. Lock, G. (1995). Functional English Grammar. An introduction for second ­language teachers. Cambridge University Press. Martin, J.R. & Wodak, R. (Eds.) (2003). Re/reading the Past. Critical and Functional Perspectives on Time and Value. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Schleppegrell, M.J. (2004). The Language of Schooling: A Functional Linguistics Perspective. Erlbaum. Schleppegrell, M.J. & Colombi, C. (Eds.) (2002). Developing Advanced Lite­ racy in First and Second Languages. Meaning with Power. Routledge. Unsworth, L. (2001). Teaching Multiliteracies across the Curriculum. Open University Press.

Mary Schleppegrell  135 Central publications These are the publications that Mary Schleppegrell herself considers to be her most important ones. Fang, Z. & Schleppegrell, M.J. (2010). Disciplinary literacies across content areas: supporting secondary reading through functional language analysis. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 53(7), 587–597. Moore, J., Schleppegrell, M.J. & Palincsar, A.S. (2018). Discovering disciplinary linguistic knowledge with English learners and their teachers: applying SFL concepts through design-based research. TESOL Quarterly, 52(4), 1022–1049. Schleppegrell, M.J. (2001). Linguistic features of the language of schooling. Linguistics and Education, 12(4), 431–459. Schleppegrell, M.J. (2004). The Language of Schooling: A Functional Linguistics Perspective. Erlbaum. Schleppegrell, M.J. (2008). Grammar, the sentence, and traditions of linguistic analysis. In C. Bazerman (Ed.), Handbook of Writing Research (pp. 549–564). Erlbaum. Schleppegrell, M.J. (2010). Language in mathematics teaching and learning: a research review. In J.N. Moschkovich (Ed.), Language and Mathematics Education: Multiple Perspectives and Directions for Research (pp. 73–112). Information Age Publishing. Schleppegrell, M.J. (2011). Supporting disciplinary learning through language analysis: developing historical literacy. In F. Christie and K. Maton (Eds.), Disciplinarity: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives (pp. 197– 216). Continuum. Schleppegrell, M.J. (2012). Systemic functional linguistics: exploring meaning in language. In J.P. Gee and M. Handford (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis (pp. 21–34). Routledge. Schleppegrell, M.J. (2013). The role of metalanguage in supporting academic language development. Language Learning, 63(Suppl. 1), 153–170. Schleppegrell, M. & Christie, F. (2018). Linguistic features of writing development: a functional perspective. In C. Bazerman, A. Applebee, V. Berninger, D. Brandt, S. Graham, J. Jeffrey, P.K. Matsuda, S. Murphy, D. Rowe, M. Schleppegrell & K. Wilcox (Eds.), The Lifespan Development of Writing (pp. 111–150). NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English).

8

Diana Slade

Diana Slade is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra and Director of the ANU Institute for Communication in Health Care (ICH). She has played a leading role in research on healthcare communication in Australia and internationally. She was originally an academic researcher and teacher in applied linguistics and linguistics (in particular the description of spoken English), and she has worked with a range of organisations, collecting and describing spoken communication in workplaces, and translating the evidence based research into training to improve workplace communication practices. Over the last 13 years the focus of her research has been on the critical role of communication in the provision of safe and effective healthcare. She has collaborated with Suzanne Eggins on healthcare communication DOI: 10.4324/9780429352270-8

Diana Slade  137 research projects in hospital contexts, ranging from communication in clinical handover, communication at discharge from hospital to the community, to End of Life Communication in Intensive Care Units and currently on improving consent and shared decision making for dialysis patients. Since 2007, Diana Slade has led many research projects and received several competitive grants in the area of healthcare communication. Her projects include collaboration with doctors, nurses, and staff in hospitals in both Australia and Hong Kong where she had a position at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) from 2010 to 2015. In Hong Kong, she collaborated closely with Professor Christian Matthiessen and founded with him the International Research Centre for Communication in Healthcare (IRCCH) at PolyU. The interview was conducted at the Australian National University in Canberra in September 2019.

Academic Life Story Please tell us about your education, special interests, and how you ended up in your field? I grew up in Adelaide in South Australia. My undergraduate degree had nothing to do with linguistics. So how did I get into linguistics? My sister, Christina Slade, knew the now quite famous applied linguist Scott Thornbury who at the time was living in Cairo teaching English as a second language. He was employed by the International House in London, which was one of the most highly regarded international schools for training people to be teachers of English as a second language. She suggested I should go there. So, in 1978, there I was. I had just come out of university, and I went to London and did a one-month course. The course changed my life completely. I thought I was doing it just to have a wonderful time and be overseas for a year, but I became fascinated with the whole endeavour of learning and teaching languages. The course was one of the most stimulating and exciting courses I have ever done. It was rather basic linguistics, but the teachers were exemplary in terms of language teaching pedagogy. They taught contextualised language, frequently used role play, and stressed the role of spontaneous, natural speech as models for teaching. After the year in London, I had planned to go to Egypt, because Scott Thornbury at that stage was high up in the International House School in Cairo. I had just read the wonderful tetralogy The Alexandra Quartet by Lawrence Durrell with great enthusiasm, and I would have loved to go to Cairo. However, my mother got very sick, so I had to come back to Adelaide. There I got a job teaching English as a second language while completing my degree. I then did a graduate diploma in education with the intention of becoming a full-time English as a Second Language teacher to adult migrants in Australia. In Adelaide, I worked for a short time with David Newman, who together

138  Diana Slade with Scott became one of the most influential authors of English as a second language research books and textbooks. Then I moved to Sydney and got a full-time job as a teacher with Adult Migrant Education Service in New South Wales, and continued teaching English as a second language. In 1981, I did a master’s in applied Linguistics at the Institute of Education at London University (now part of University College London). It was during this course that I first heard of Michael Halliday in one of Professor Henry Widdowson’s amazing lectures. He said: Michael Halliday, all of you will have heard of him, he is one of the most brilliant linguists. He has developed a grammar called Systemic Functional Linguistics. He has a manuscript, and is teaching from it, and we are desperate to get hold of it. He has just started as the Pofessor of Linguistics at Sydney University. Diana, you are from Sydney, can you try to get a copy of this manuscript? I imagine Michael Halliday at that time taught from the manuscript and handed out bits of it as he went on. Everybody knows how thorough and meticulous Michael was. It was said that he had filing cabinets full of different unpublished manuscripts which often were there for many years before he did something with them. Of course, not knowing Michael, I was far too embarrassed to approach him and ask for his manuscript. This must have been the very first version of Introduction to systemic functional grammar, which was published in 1985? Right. I assume it was. I returned to Sydney after my master’s and went back to teaching English as a Second Language to adult migrants living in Australia. I realised that what most of us were teaching was not necessarily what was relevant and critical and that the invented dialogues in the textbooks did not resemble at all the language that was used in real contexts socially or professionally. So in about 1983 I developed and administered a survey to 200 adult English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. The survey asked the learners to rank what they found most difficult to learn in English and what they felt they most needed more instruction in. Over 90% of those surveyed said that what they found most difficult to learn in English was casual conversation: how to chat during coffee breaks at work, over dinner, at the pub, during doctor’s appointments, etc. Yet paradoxically although English teaching was already established as a billion-dollar industry around the world there were no effective books or materials for teaching conversation. All the language teaching books embodied partial theories of language and most only contained decontextualised, invented examples which bore very little relationship to any of the real interactions they would have heard in the community, at work, etc. The reason why is simply because casual conversation is far complex in many ways and there were no adequate descriptions of it.

Diana Slade  139 So, I decided to undertake the task of writing materials for teaching casual conversation. In order to know how and what to teach in terms of conversational English, I realised I needed to know in detail about the structure and function of English casual conversation. Lloyd Norris and I applied for a small grant and for many months we taped people talking and interacting in a wide variety of contexts. We went into workplaces and taped hours and hours of lunchbreak conversations and morning tea conversations. We collected 27 hours of authentic casual conversation in a wide variety of contexts. We audio recorded groups of male supervisors in a factory, while they were sitting eating their pies and mushy pees, several of them with non-English-speaking backgrounds. They all spoke in English. That was a time in Australia when, at workplaces, people were not allowed to speak their first language, and they were disciplined if they did. We also recorded a group of men and women who were clerical staff at a hospital, and a group of women who were kitchen staff also in a hospital. I was interested in not only how you describe the way they talk, but the gender differences as well. Making sense of this data was utterly daunting. The great paradox of casual conversation is that while it seems so intuitive and natural to native speakers, it is very difficult to analyse and describe. So, after many months of transcribing, I turned up at Michael Halliday’s office with 100s of pages of the transcripts. I had not met him, and I had not managed to get the manuscript Henry Widdowson had told me about. I will never forget Michael’s reaction. He looked so excited, as only a linguist would, and said that I had wonderful data. I told him that I would like to do a PhD. He was very supportive and encouraged me to do so. That was my first definitive moment in the process of going from being a language teacher to becoming a linguistic researcher. I enrolled as a PhD student at Sydney University, and was supervised by Jim Martin and in the last year and a half by Christian Matthiessen. I feel very privileged that I had extraordinary input from both of them. They have very similar orientations in many ways, but also quite different ones, which was very stimulating for me. Jim influenced me particularly on stratification and genre. Christian taught me a lot about instantiation and metafunctions, and we had many hours of discussions locating conversation on the climb of instantiation, relating the instances to the system. You were at the University of Sydney at a time when a lot of activities were going on in Halliday’s department. Yes. As I was in Michael Halliday’s department, I also was privileged to have many informal conversations with him in relation to my PhD research. Soon after I had started my PhD, a job as lecturer came up in the department, and Michael encouraged me to apply, and I got the job. This was in 1985 and I was 29 years old and so humbled and excited to work at the University of Sydney in one of the most extraordinary linguistics

140  Diana Slade departments and led by such an extraordinary scholar. M ichael wanted a department with academics from a range of different linguistic schools. There was also a very strong group of PhD students working in SFL such as Clare Painter, Chris Nesbitt, Graham Lock, Suzanne Eggins, Guenther Plum, and Frances Christie. Here I met Suzanne Eggins for the first time. Like me, she was doing a PhD on casual conversation. We collaborated very closely in this period, as we have done more recently on healthcare communication research. Suzanne was analysing dinner table conversations among close friends, and I was analysing coffee break conversations among acquaintances at work. I was five years in Halliday’s department. By the time I left and went to University of Technology in Sydney (UTS), Michael had retired. Christian Matthiessen went to Macquarie University soon after I left. Jim Martin continued at the University of Sydney. I took up a position as Associate Dean at UTS for six years. At the end of my time as Associate Dean, I needed to make a decision whether I should continue to do administrative jobs or go back to research. I decided to go back to research. You have also worked in Hong Kong. Can you tell us about your time there? In 2008, Christian Matthiessen went to Hong Kong and was appointed Chair Professor and Head of the Department of English at Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). In 2009, I got a phone call from him where he said that he was going to advertise for a professorial position at PolyU, and he asked me if I would apply. He wanted to gather SFL-people from around the world in his department. It was similar to Michael Halliday’s dream of getting a community of people from around the world to develop SFL and related disciplines. I had children in school at that time, but both my mother and my husband urged me to apply, which I did. I got the job and stayed five years in Hong Kong without my family. However, I had a wonderful linguistic family there including Kazuhiro Teruya, Jack Pun, Francisco Veloso, Elaine Espandola, Marvin Lam, Xu Xunfeng, Kaela Zhang, Eric Cheung, and many others, and I had the most extraordinary time. Christian achieved his dream of building up a department of scholars from across the world and under his leadership it was a truly exciting time. I had been doing work in healthcare communication at University of Technology in Sydney before I went to Hong Kong. Christian and I were very keen to establish a cross-disciplinary, international centre in HK that focused on communication in healthcare and bringing linguists together with healthcare professionals from around the world. We established the International Research Centre for Communication in Healthcare (IRCCH) in 2011, in collaboration with Dr. Elizabeth Rider and Jack Pun. Beth is a paediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital, and an academic at Harvard Medical School. Beth, apart from being

Diana Slade  141 a brilliant clinician, has a significant reputation nationally and internationally in person-centred, compassionate care. Jack was my research assistant for the whole time I was in Hong Kong and I could not have achieved what we did without him. He is a brilliant researcher and went on to do a PhD at Oxford University. Beth, Christian, Jack and I have worked very closely since 2010 when we first met. IRCCH grew quite quickly to over 100 interdisciplinary members from across the world. In 2011 we held our first international symposium for communication in healthcare which has been held approximately every 18 months since. The first three of them were held at Hong Kong PolyU, a couple in Lugano, Switzerland, and one at ANU, and despite a delay due to the pandemic it is still running with the next one being organised by Dr. Olya Zats at Hong Kong University in February 2021. Despite loving the job, due to personal reasons I decided to return to Australia in 2015, and soon after, I got the job I have now at Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. Both Suzanne Eggins and I were employed on strategic positions, starting in February 2017. We have had extraordinary support from the ANU leadership, particularly the acting Dean of the College of Arts and Social Sciences, Professor Paul Pickering and the current Dean, Rae Francis, and our linguistics department colleagues Jane Simpson, Susy Macqueen, Catherine Travis, Carmel O’Shannessy, and others. We have also had amazing collaborative support from the Director and Deputy Director of ANU Medical School, Professors Imogen Mitchell and Zsuzsoka Kecskes. I could not think of a better university to be at for what I assume will be my last academic posting. Due to this support our healthcare communication research has really flourished. Since we started at ANU we have built up a wonderful team, including Liza Goncharov, who started working with me as a research assistant and is now Manager of ICH. Largely thanks to Liza, who has insisted we build a scalable operating model for our hospital projects, we are about to start a new project in collaboration with St Vincent’s Hospital Group called ACCELERATE to be piloted across three hospitals in New South Wales and Victoria. If successful, the aim is for it to be rolled out across Hospitals in New South Wales.

Casual Conversation You have mentioned that casual conversation has been an important part of your scholarship. Could you elaborate on how your interest in this field developed? As I have mentioned my interest in casual conversation started when I was teaching English as a second language. In 1986 Lloyd Norris and I published our book Teaching Casual Conversation: topics, strategies

142  Diana Slade and interactional skills. This book was a basis for a lot of the work I did after that. What we did first, was to incorporate authentic examples of the coffee break conversation in our teaching. We divided the data into topics like storytelling, gossiping, and conversational strategies without really having a theoretical base at all. We only used a tiny proportion of the data we had collected. The book for ESL teachers was well received across Australia. It was real people talking in real situations in different workplaces. This is actually not too different to what Suzanne Eggins and I tried to do later in our book Analysing Casual Conversation in a much more theoretical and systematic way. After I returned from London in the early 1980s, I returned to looking at the 27 hours of the conversational data again. I knew I had an extraordinary resource and decided to transcribe as much of the 27 hours as possible. After many months I had this amazing data but really no idea what to do with it. I transcribed it myself as well as working full time as a teacher. I invented my own way of transcription as it was only years later when I first met Michael Halliday that I learned about his transcription conventions. The great paradox of casual conversation is that while it seems so simple, intuitive, and natural to native speakers, it is very difficult to analyse and describe. It is because of its complexity that linguists have tended to avoid it and indeed many feel that it cannot be described adequately at all. The other paradox with casual conversation is that it is the type of talk in which we feel most relaxed, most spontaneous, and most ourselves, and yet it is the most critical site for the construction of our identities. The relaxed nature of casual conversation leads to a very common perception by those who participate in such talk that it is trivial and nothing happens. Conversation is anything but trivial; it does enormous work in constructing and maintaining culture and it reflects and constitutes our social world. The fascination for me became how English conversation is structured to enable it to do the social work it does. How has SFL influenced the way you work with casual conversation? SFL is fundamental for my analysis of casual conversation. SFL has taught me that the most important question is how English conversation is structured to enable it to do the social work it does (Halliday 1967, 1970). In this regard SFL can contribute better than any other approach. One quote of Michael Halliday (1984, p. 32) has always been especially inspiring to me, showing his extraordinarily beautiful style of writing: The magical power of talk derives from the fact that it is, in every instance, the manifestation of a systematic resource, a resource which has been built up through acts of conversation in the first place, and which goes on being modified in each of us as we talk our way through life.

Diana Slade  143 What kind of understanding of casual conversation did the research for your PhD bring? The aim of my PhD thesis was to shed light on the nature and function of casual conversation in English. I wanted to develop an integrated framework for the analysis of the macro- and micro-organisation of casual conversation. The approach was a social semiotic one, drawing primarily on SFL but also influenced by some work in Conversation Analysis (CA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It is a social semiotic approach in that it is concerned with the dialectic of language, text, and social life. To study language within a social and cultural context, in which the culture itself, as Halliday said, is interpreted in semiotic terms as an information system, appealed to me. Such an approach, as embodied in SFL, stresses the centrality of the study of conversation. My initial task was how to start making sense of the huge quantity of data I had. I initially divided the talk (across the three groups) into two types of talk: chunks and chats. For the chunks, I used the notion of genre inspired by Jim Martin’s work as well as some of the wonderful research on genre from other SFL scholars such as Guenther Plum, Frances Christie, and Joan Rothery. The most commonly occurring genres in our casual conversation data were found to be storytelling texts like narratives, anecdotes, exempla, and recounts, and observation/comment, opinion texts, gossip, and joke-telling. However, there were large sections of data that could not be characterised in terms of generic structure. These sections I labelled chat. Genre is in some ways quite an easy concept to pick up, but an important question was also how the conversation could keep going on seemingly forever and still making sense. How do you describe the structure of that? Similarly, the conversations at work places went on and on, although they were constrained by the coffee time finishing. Chat is the dynamic unfolding of talk, and in fact, the chat is critical for opening up the next chunk. People chat until someone comes in and tells, for example, a story. Then there might be a little bit more chat, and then someone comes in and gossips. A dynamic approach to conversational analysis is crucial for the chat sections, an approach which focuses on the processes by which moves succeed other moves. Using the linguistic categories of Mood, move complexes, speech functions, and exchange structure as well as rhythm and intonation analysis, the texts can be analysed to capture the dynamic unfolding of the talk. The aim is to capture the semantic coherence of extended stretches of talk by describing the relationship that exists between consecutive and adjacent moves. In my thesis, I described in depth the relationship that exists between adjacent moves. I discussed the relationship between moves of different speakers, but also of the same speaker. Speech function and exchange structure describe the interactivity between different speakers across speaker turns. The concept of move complex was developed to account for the sequence of related moves produced by the same speaker.

144  Diana Slade ­

Yes. As already mentioned, Suzanne Eggins and I published our book Analysing Casual Conversation with Cassell in London in 1997 (it is now published by Equinox) building on both our PhDs. The aim was to come up with a description that was accessible and amenable not only to linguists, but also to applied linguists, sociologists, etc. We wanted to unravel the complexity of casual conversation and to develop a set of analytical techniques that could help shed light on the structure and function of casual conversation in English. We emphasised two organisational principles for the book. First, as the primary motivation of conversation is to establish and maintain relations with others, we decided to focus on the interpersonal metafunction (although, of course, we recognise that all three metafunctions are interrelated). The second organising principle was that of stratification – building up layers of analyses from grammar, to discourse structure to genre. Starting with grammar, we built up the analyses from the micro to the macro level, incorporating authentic examples from our two data bases. How does the SFL approach differ from the CA approach? In our article from 2011 ‘Analysing conversation’ in The Sage Handbook of Sociolinguistics, Christian Matthiessen and I state that there are several approaches to the understanding of conversation. The approach may be: 1 2 3

On individuals and their intention (Speech Act Theory) On exchange of meaning (SFL, The Birmingham School, CDA) Social groups and interpersonal behaviour (CA, interactive sociolinguists)

Diana Slade  145 The focus in SFL-studies of conversation is on the way that language is organised to enable conversation to do the work it does and have the power it has. In this article, we say that SFL stresses the centrality of the study of conversation to the study of language, both because conversation is the most important vehicle by means of which social reality is represented and enacted in language, and because conversation is, as it were, the frontier in the evolution of language. A stratally comprehensive analysis of conversation with an SFL approach involves contextual, semantic, lexicogrammatical, and phonological analyses. In CA, by contrast, the focus is on social life, and conversation is seen as a key to that. It is a completely different emphasis. This has implications for the theories of conversation that come out of it, and for the methodology. The two approaches have, however, also similarities, in that they are both concerned with describing the relationship between language and social context, and the ways conversation socialises individuals and regulates the social order. They share the belief that conversation builds social context at the same time as it shapes the context. I think that this overlap is quite critical. I also recognise in our approach, as do the CA analysts, the fact that each speaker in the conversation creates a context for the next speaker. The commitment to studying authentic data that is collected in real contexts is also fundamental in both approaches. It is important to understand and at times incorporate insights from different but complementary perspectives. You have already mentioned genre above, but can you elaborate on how you use this concept? As mentioned, I was influenced by Jim Martin’s way of describing genre. In my work with casual conversation, I looked at, for example, storytelling, which occurred much more with the women than with the men. I also looked at gossip and there were interesting gender differences in the particular cultural contexts I was recording in. Gossip is a form of talk usually associated with women, and the term ‘gossip’ is often used by men to denigrate women’s talk. However, despite some peoples’ denials (especially men’s), gossip is a form of talk that most of us, perhaps all of us, engage in to differing degrees and in differing contexts. It plays a significant role in the construction and maintenance of our social identities and friendships: it is not something to be denigrated, but rather is one of the most important social phenomena to analyse. A genre always has a certain social function. In my work, I always ask about the social function. What is the social function of, for example, a story or some gossip in the conversation? The functions are quite different. The social function of gossip is expressing judgement of an absent other. The way gossip is structured, all of the stages of it, are there to fulfil that social purpose. These stages are very different compared to the complication-resolution of a narrative. In gossip, there is, however, a stage that I call substantiated behaviour. It is like a little story. It is,

146  Diana Slade however, not a story; it only resembles a story. When a person says: “You won’t believe what Julie did yesterday. She went…” In a way, you tell a little story. It might even have a similar structure as a story. However, because the social purpose is different, I would not call it an embedded mini story. It just has similarities, because it is building up suspense. The speaker tries to make it funny, but the function is different. Stories and gossip are different genres because they have different social functions. You started out as a language teacher. Is your work on conversation useful for teachers? Teaching was the point of departure for my research. The teaching of English as a second language was my inspiration. Here I want to mention the book I did with Scott Thornbury in 2006, Conversation: From Description to Pedagogy published at Cambridge Language Teaching Library. The aim of the book was English language teaching. As the title says, we wanted to give a comprehensible description of conversation and its function, and then go from this description to pedagogy. Half of it really is on pedagogy. Scott Thornbury was a wonderful teacher trainer and academic, and also editor for the Cambridge Handbook for Language Teachers (Thornbury 1988). His experience was crucial in writing this book in a relevant way for teachers. He has published so prolifically in the field that what is now Waterstone’s bookshop in Bloomsbury had a whole area dedicated to Scott’s books!

Language at Workplaces Your early research shows an interest in language use at workplaces. How has your work in this field developed? As functional linguists, we are able to shed light on how workplaces function through looking at the communicative practices of that workplace. If we believe in the Whorfian view that language constructs and enacts social identity, then it is self-evident that if you want to see how workplaces are functioning or not functioning, you examine their communication practices. I undertook translational research (research followed by evidence-based training) on communication at workplaces for many years, starting in the early 1990s when I was at University of Technology in Sydney. We managed to get several grants for this research. For example, we went into the food industry and looked at communication in teamwork, communication between supervisors and employees and communication in training. As an example of best practice, in one workplace (a major food factory) we followed the supervisors who were deemed to be professional, popular, and effective team leaders, recording all their interactions through the course of the day. What is it about the way they communicate that actually makes them successful supervisors? We identified those interactional features that resulted in effective team meetings where people felt validated and

Diana Slade  147 included. We then incorporated de-identified authentic transcripts into our training of effective teamwork, effective leadership, etc. In another project we did at the Australian tax office we looked at where and why communication was failing. In another workplace, we realised that in each working group, there was a node who was the most influential in terms of either effective or disruptive decision making. By recording the nodes’ interactions and by interviewing the team members, we learnt much about the social cohesion of the group and the potential risk points in the communication practices. We also followed the supervisors who were successful and got people to work together collaboratively and looked at everywhere they spoke to people. We did a lot of training in workplaces based on our research. There is no point in just going into workplaces and researching them. As a researcher you have to ask the “So what”-question. How can you make your research accessible to the people in that workplace? How can your results make an impact? How can you help them change their practices? There might be valid reasons for doing research in workplaces that just extends the boundaries of your theory, for example, bringing new knowledge about different contexts and different registers. I wanted, however, to make a difference with my research. One way of doing that is translating the evidenced-based findings into training and helping to improve the communication practices of that workplace. What I learnt from this early research in workplaces was that to change the culture of a workplace you need to change the way people talk to each other in the professional contexts that they work in. That is, improving communication practices across a workplace changes the culture of that workplace. But research alone does not make a difference. You need to involve the people you are working with in the change process. I realised early in my workplace research that recording their actual interactions then using the de-identified transcripts in training was a very powerful tool for reflection and for changing communication behaviours. The early research projects that I led at the University of Technology Sydney on communication in workplaces was with a team of dedicated academics and researchers: Hermine Scheeres, Helen Joyce, Nicky Solomon, and Chris Nesbitt.

Health Communication This leads us to health communication, another important field of yours. The workplace that could be one of the most interesting and critical for looking at the role of communication is health. Research around the world as well as the media have written about communication breakdowns in hospitals. Questions as why it is that communication matters in healthcare contexts, whether it be hospitals or community settings, have been raised.

148  Diana Slade It is estimated that approximately 500,000 people a year in Australia are harmed by the hospitals they go to for healthcare. That is an extraordinary number. They suffer from an avoidable or preventable critical incident caused by something that happened in the hospital. This is the same situation in hospitals around the world. It is estimated that over 90% of these incidents have a communication failure component. It can be, for example, a misunderstanding between a patient and a clinician where the patient does not understand the diagnosis, does not feel listened to, and so does not comply with the recommended treatment. It can be due to ineligible patient records, or it could be omissions or failures to clarify ambiguity in the handover. Most of our experiences of healthcare are through language and therefore a lot of what goes wrong is with the communication process. In 2009 I applied for and received an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant which is a highly competitive national research grant, funded by both the Australian Government and industry partners. We partnered with the New South Wales (NSW) ACT Departments of Health and five hospitals. The grant – the first of mine focusing on communication in healthcare – was to investigate communication in hospital Emergency Departments. The Chief investigators on the team included linguists, Christian Matthiessen and Hermine Scheeres, and clinicians, Jane Stein Parbury and Roger Dunstan. A result of this three-year-long research was the book Communicating in Hospital Emergency Departments (Springer 2015). As part of this research, we followed patients on their journey through the emergency departments, consented them at triage. We tried to record everything that was said to the patients by different clinicians. My colleague Marie Manidis diagrammatically showed the number of different interactions each patient had with different clinicians in the Emergency Department, whether that be ambulance officers, nurses, doctors, allied health professionals, etc. For example, one patient we called Denton was an 80-year-old man who presented to the emergency department with shortness of breath and a fever. He spent five and a half hours in the emergency department from triage to admission. Over the course of his care, Denton interacted directly with 17 different people (two ambulance officers, ten nurses, two doctors, one radiographer, one orderly, one communication clerk), and during this time he had 243 communicative encounters with clinicians. The diagrams Marie drew highlighting each of these interactions clearly demonstrate the communicative complexity for both patients and clinicians in emergency departments, as in each of these encounters there is a possibility of a communication misunderstanding or breakdown. One small misunderstanding does not necessarily mean that there is going to be a critical incident. It becomes critical when there are layers of misunderstandings, when misunderstanding builds on misunderstanding. Following the patients’ journey gave us insight into what we called potential risk points in these interactions.

Diana Slade  149 This project, in addition to over 150 interviews, we audio-recorded patient – clinician interactions over the course of 82 patients’ trajectories from triage to disposition. We have approximately 1,700,000 words of authentic Emergency Department interactions, which as far as we know constitutes the largest database of authentic clinician-patient interactions in Emergency Departments. The material was de-identified, transcribed, and coded, so that it is now also amenable to corpus linguistics approach. We qualitatively analysed it, but qualitatively, you can only describe a small proportion of the data. So, in conversation with a wonderful colleague, Professor Elena Semino, who heads the department of linguistics at Lancaster University in Britain, and is an internationally highly regarded corpus linguist, we decided to bring our teams together to analyse the data quantitatively using corpus linguistic techniques in conjunction with the qualitative analyses of smaller segments. We are trying now to bring together the qualitative and the quantitative perspectives of this rich data set, which is really exciting. We have just completed a project with Imogen Mitchell, Dean of the ANU Medical School, on End of Life Communication in Intensive Care Units. Imogen approached us and said that they were really concerned that so many people who come into intensive care were obviously at the last stage of their life, but no doctor had had an End of Life conversation with them. Many doctors avoid these conversations, but the consequence is that the patients often have unnecessary interventions in the Intensive Care Units, increasing their discomfort and stress. We recorded consultations in family meetings in relation to End of Life. This has been a very moving and extraordinary project. There are many excellent books written on how doctors avoid End of Life conversations, but how it can really impact on the patients’ quality of life if these conversations take place. In his book Being Mortal from 2014, Atul Gawande says among other things that if patients do not know early enough and clearly and honestly enough about their condition this causes themselves and their carers much greater suffering. Our final report detailed suggested communication protocols for conducting End of Life conversations. Another area of your work in health communication is clinical handovers. What we realised in our first hospital research in the Emergency Departments was that what is called clinical handover was a critical source of potential misunderstandings. Clinical handovers are handovers of the responsibility and care about a patient, for example, the nurses’ shift-to-shift handover from the outgoing to the incoming nurses, or when the doctor does a ward round, etc. It is estimated that there are approximately 52,000,000 shift-to-shift handovers, including medical, nursing, allied health, in Australian hospitals every year. Australia has got a relatively small population. Imagine how many there are worldwide. At every one of these handovers, there is a chance of miscommunication. And

150  Diana Slade this is just the formal handovers. Then there are all the informal handovers, in the hallway, coffee room, etc. The World Health Organisation has identified handover as one of their top five patient safety solutions and risk points. We applied for and received a national grant across four states of Australia from the Australian Research Council on Effective Communication in Clinical Handover. The book that came out of this research has the same title, but with the subtitle From Research to Practice. It was published by De Gruyter in 2016 with Suzanne Eggins, Fiona Geddes, and me as editors. In this research, we looked at different kinds of handover, all kinds of nursing and medical handovers, in addition inter-professional handovers and handovers in mental health, in rural and metropolitan hospitals in several Australian states. Once again, we got an amazing database, most of it videoed as well. I led the project across Australia, but there were very competent teams in four different states. In particular I worked closely with Suzanne Eggins, Jeannette McGregor, and Marian Lee (an Emergency Department specialist) in this project. In New South Wales Jeannette and Marian focused on medical ward rounds while Suzanne and I focused on nursing handovers. There had been an enquiry in Australia on the acute care services in New South Wales that mandated that handovers should be done at the bedside and involving the patient because of safety and patients’ agency. Nursing handovers were, however, mostly done away from the bedside. The nurses have not been trained to involve the patients, and so this is a whole new way of conducting handovers. Can you elaborate on your methodology in this research? In each of our research projects, we apply our predominantly qualitative translational methodology we have refined over the years. It combines ethnographic and discourse analytic approaches to analyse handovers and other ward handover practices within the local ward context. By combining extensive interviews and detailed observations where we immerse ourselves in the context, we audio and, if possible, video the actual handover events. By combining these different but complementary approaches, we can overcome the discrepancy between what people say they do (interviews and focus groups) and what they actually do (observations, interactions, and documentation). The process of being immersed in the department or the ward is important, because it means that people do not feel threatened or judged by the researchers. You need to brief the doctors, nurses, and allied health so that they know that they will not be identified or get any kind of trouble through the presence of the researchers. When they feel comfortable then and only then do you ask if you can audio- or video-record the actual interactions. Then we transcribe the material, using the transcription conventions described in Eggins and Slade, based very much on Halliday’s transcription conventions for analysing spoken English. It is not like a CA-transcript; it is much simpler. Then we do the analysis,

Diana Slade  151 looking at a range of features such as shared decision making, and to what extent the doctor expands on what the patient has said. And we identify potential risk points in the interactions. Most health departments around the world have now adopted a particular model of patient care and communication, known as patient-centred care. However, very little research has been done on how patient-centred care is enacted in particular communicative practices. It is only patient-centred if you communicate in patient-sensitive ways. Communicating care is just as important as delivering care. The de-identified transcripts are then used as the basis of training. We have amazing videos, which are reenactments of verbatim what happened in the real contexts and these are very powerful tools to use in training. We also have developed communication protocols and frameworks for different contexts, for example of the interactive component of handover (CARE) or for a protocol to help structure an End of Life conversation. We have now learnt, however, that training alone does not result in sustainable change, but must be accompanied by ward and system level changes. Improving communication practices across a ward changes the culture of that ward and only then does the training impacts on long-term sustainability and inclusiveness. So after we have collected and analysed the interview data we make detailed recommendations on system- and ward-level changes to improve handover practices. The other key factors that are critical key drivers for effective and sustainable change, is supportive leadership and that co-opting and engaging the clinicians at all levels has to be part of the change process. The combination of these principles and methods is now proving to have significant impact. Was the handover research also conducted in Hong Kong? Yes. We were very privileged to work with two major hospitals in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Sanatorium and Hospital, one of the most important private hospitals in Asia, and Tuen Mun-a, a large public hospital. I worked with a bilingual team at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the research was done in Cantonese and English. The process was similar to what I have described: we go into the hospital, first of all we brief all the staff, we immerse ourselves in the context and do the observing, interviews, recordings, transcriptions, and do detailed discourse analyses. Then we come up with recommendations for ward level changes. After these changes have been implemented, we do the training. To do that, we need the support from all levels of the hospital. Some people would argue that the Chinese cultural context makes it even harder to do that kind of work, but I think it is quite similar to Australia. Do you see some clear results of your recommendations for organisational change and training? Yes, we expanded the research in Australia with follow-up studies. We got a grant from the Handbury Foundation to go into a public

152  Diana Slade hospital in Sydney where we did the translational research and training until Christmas 2018. After our research, implementation of ward level changes and training showed a correlation with a 52% reduction in inpatient falls and a 21% reduction in the number of medication errors. There was an increase in patient satisfaction and the patients were involved in the handovers, so the nurses are now going to the bedside. This is very exciting and partly as a result of this impact we have been funded by philanthropy to roll out our translational research across three hospitals. I would like to emphasise that all this work stems from the orientation of SFL. The motivation is what Michael Halliday has emphasised, that linguistics should be socially responsible. This view is so different to Chomsky. Chomsky has, I think, insightful political views, but he says that linguistics has nothing to do with social life. I had the extraordinary privilege of working in Michael’s department before he retired, and his view on language has influenced and motivated me. You and your colleagues have established several international contacts in health communication. Yes. With the support of my dean and the head of the research team here at ANU, in February 2018 we established the cross-disciplinary Institute for Communication in Health Care (ICH) with over 100 members from around the world. More recently we established the International Consortium for Communication in Health Care (IC4CH) with the partner universities Nanyang Technological University (Director: Professor K.K. Luke), University of Hong Kong (Director: Olya Zats), University College London (Director: Zsofia Demjen), Lancaster University (Director: Professor Elena Semino), and Queensland University of Technology (Director: Stuart Ekberg). The Directors of each of the Consortium partners and their teams carry out cutting-edge research in different aspects of healthcare communication. The collaboration is very exciting, and we believe that working together across borders and disciplines will give us the unity and strength to realise our collective vision of creating a future in which healthcare is safe, compassionate, sensitive, and supportive for patients, carers and clinicians.

Key Concepts How important are the metafunctions in your work? The systemic functional linguistic model of language as a semiotic system that is organised to enable us to exchange both interpersonal meanings – meanings about the interaction and our relationships with those we are interacting with – and ideational meanings – content meanings – is fundamental in my work. In applying systemic linguistics in institutional contexts; however, Suzanne Eggins and I have found it useful to re-gloss

Diana Slade  153 these types of meaning with the more transparent forms of interaction and information. Interactional and informational meaning is more accessible to clinicians. Some purists would not like it; they might say that a shift of notions is a shift of meaning. This is understandable. It is, however, crucial to use terminology that people can understand. When you work with conversation, the interaction is prominent. How do people interact through language? The metafunctions as a conceptual framework have enabled us to do systematic analyses of what is going on in the interactions. Without an analytical framework, our data are just that, data. In the analyses of handover interactions, we look systematically into the interdependence of interactional and informational dimensions. Is the concept multimodality useful in your work? When you study conversation, many forms of meaning making are represented in each communication event. Conversation has evolved as face-to-face-interaction, and conversational language must therefore have evolved together with paralanguage, gestures, and other forms of body language. The use of intonation is also making meaning in all kinds of communication. Conversation is the most critical site for the construction of our identities, and as Firth said: ‘the study of conversation (…) the key to a better understanding of what language really is and how it works’ (Firth 1935, p. 71). I have not done systematic multimodal analyses in my work, but that is not to say it is not a critical component. I have, however, seen how powerful multimodal texts as films can be in training. In the training material we have developed, for example, in relation to the handover research, the films show, for example, bedside handover situations. We get actors to do a reenactment, not role play, and these reenactments have been filmed by the filmmaker Daz Chandler who is a creative genius. One of the reasons why this training is so much appreciated, I think, is because of Daz’s videos. They are verbatim using the conversation transcripts from our research. The videos are powerful tools in the training.

Academic Achievements and SFL and Social Semiotics in the Future Which of your academic achievements are you most proud of? My major joy and I hope achievement is mentoring brilliant junior researchers that I have been privileged to work with. To name just a few: Eloise Chandler, Jack Pun, and Liza Goncharov, each of whom I have no doubt will continue to do incredible work. Research, in particular involving communication and social interaction, is and should be a collective endeavour and so I am immeasurably grateful to the research teams I have worked with over the last 30 years.

154  Diana Slade The publications I am most proud of are the book with Suzanne Eggins on Analysing Casual Conversation and the two books I have done with the team of cross-disciplinary authors on different aspects of Communication in Health Care: Effective Communication in Clinical Handover – from Research to Practice and Communicating in Hospital Emergency Departments. What do you think will be the main challenges and opportunities for SFL and social semiotics in the future? To be accessible to both a broader linguistic and an applied linguistic audience as well as translatable to a general audience such as people in healthcare contexts, education, and other organisations. SFL is unique in its potential to significantly impact on education and organisational communication practices so we need to work together collaboratively to try to make a difference to the lives and experiences of people and the organisational contexts they are part of.

References Durrell, L. (1957–1960). The Alexandra Quartet. Faber & Faber. Eggins, S. & Slade, D. (1997). Analysing Casual Conversation. Cassell (now Equinox). Eggins, S., Slade, D. & Geddes, F. (Eds.) (2016). Effective Communication in Clinical Handover – From Research to Practice. De Gruyter Mouton (PASA, Patient Safety 16). Firth, J.R. (1935). The technique of semantics. Transactions of the Philological Society, 34(1), 36–73. doi:10.1111/j.1467-968X.1935.tb01254.x. Gawande, A. (2014). Being Mortal. Medicine and What Matters in the End. Metropolitan Books. Halliday, M.A.K. (1967). Intonation and Grammar in British English. Mouton. Halliday, M.A.K. (1970). A Course in Spoken English: Intonation. Oxford University Press. Halliday, M.A.K. (1984) A systemic-functional interpretation of the nature and ontogenesis of dialogue. In J. Webster (Ed.), The Language of Early Childhood. Continuum (227–381). Halliday, M.A.K. (1985). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Edward Arnold. Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. & Slade, D. (2010). Analysing conversation. In R. Wodak, B. Johnstone, and P. E. Kerswill (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics (pp. 375–395). SAGE Publications. Norris, L. & Slade, D. (1986). Teaching Casual Conversation: Topics, Strategies and Interactional Skills. National Curriculum Resource Centre. Slade, D., Manidis, M., McGregor, J., Scheeres, H., Chandler, E., SteinParbury, J., Dunston, R. & Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. (2015). Communicating in Hospital Emergency Departments. Springer. Thornbury, S. (from 1988) (Ed.). Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers. Cambridge University Press. Thornbury, S. & Slade, D. (2006). Conversation: from Description to Pedagogy. Cambridge Teaching Library.

Diana Slade  155 Central publications These are the publications that Diane Slade herself considers to be her most important ones. Eggins, S. & Slade, D. (1997/2006). Analysing Casual Conversation. Equinox. Eggins, S. & Slade, D. (2016). Contrasting verbal styles and barriers to patient participation in bedside nursing handovers. Communication and Medicine, 13(1) (special volume on Team Talk), 71–83. Eggins, S., Slade, D. & Geddes, F. (Eds.) (2016). Effective Communication in Clinical Handover – From Research to Practice. De Gruyter Mouton (PASA, Patient Safety 16). Kazuhiro T., Canzhong W. & Slade, D. (Eds.) (2020). Collected Works of Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Part 1, Volume 1. Equinox. Pun, J., Chan, E.A., Man, M., Eggins, S. & Slade, D. (2019). Pre- and postevaluations of the effects of the connect, ask, respond and empathise (CARE) protocol on nursing handover: a case study of a bilingual hospital in Hong Kong. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 1–11. doi:10.1111/jocn.1487. Rider, E.A., Kurtz, S., Slade, D., Esterbrook Longmaid III, H.E., Ho, M.-J., Hung, J.P.K., Eggins, S. & Branch, W.T. (2014). The international charter for human values in healthcare: an interprofessional global collaboration to enhance values and communication in healthcare. Patient Education and Counselling, 273–80. doi:10.1016/ j.pec.2014.06.017. Slade, D., Manidis, M., McGregor, J., Scheeres, H., Chandler, E., Stein-Parbury, J., Dunston, R. & Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. (2015). Communicating in Hospital Emergency Departments. Springer. Slade, D., Matthiessen, C.M.I.M., Lock, G., Pun, J. & Lam, M. (2016). Patterns of interaction in doctor-patient communication and their impact on health outcomes. In L. Ortega, A. Tyler, H.I. Park & M. Uno (Eds.), The Usage-Based Study of Language Learning and Multilingualism. Georgetown University Press. Slade, D., Pun, J., Murray, K.A. & Eggins, S. (2018). Benefits of health care communication training for nurses conducting bedside handovers: an Australian hospital case study. The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 49(7), 329–336. doi:10.3928/00220124-20180613-09. Thornbury, S. & Slade, D. (2006). Conversation: from Description to Pedagogy. Cambridge University Press.

9

Terry Threadgold

Terry Threadgold had a long career in Australia and the UK working at Sydney (1966–1993), Monash (1993–1999), and Cardiff universities (1999–2014) in roles spanning all levels from teaching fellow to Dean and Pro Vice Chancellor. She was Dean of Australia’s largest Faculty of Arts at Monash 1997–1999, and Pro Vice Chancellor for Equality and Diversity at Cardiff 2007–2012. Terry Threadgold took her work in social semiotics from Australia to her position as Professor at Cardiff University in Wales from 1999 until her retirement in 2012. Her research interests have included critical discourse analysis, feminist and critical theory, journalism and the media, gender, race, and diversity. Among her many projects are one on women and ageing in multicultural Australia (1996–1999), and one on representation of asylum seekers and refugees in the UK (2000–2008). From very early in her career she worked across disciplines, collaborating with scholars in fields such as linguistics, law, education, theatre, literary studies, nursing, and public health.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429352270-9

Terry Threadgold  157 Her distinguished academic work was always concerned with impact and practical policy and practice outcomes. Terry Threadgold has contributed to research centres, charities, and trusts as an advisor, consultant, trustee, and chair. For example, she was advisor to the Leadership Foundation in Higher Education programme ‘Leading Culturally Diverse Communities’, and consultant to the Information Centre about Refugees and Asylum Seekers (ICAR), King’s College London (2005–2011). In this interview we use the name she is known by academically. Her full name is now Terry Threadgold-Taylor. The interview was conducted in her home in Cardiff in January 2020.

Academic Life Story Please tell us about your education, and how you got into the field. I am Australian originally, so it started in Sydney in Australia. I  went to a private Church of England girls’ school and then to Sydney University, where I did an arts degree in German, French, and English. When I started as an undergraduate at Sydney University, you could study language and literature together but at the end of my third year we had a new head of English Literature who told the top thirdyear students that our literary training was not adequate for us to do well in honours in Literature under him. That meant that I became overnight a medievalist and did my fourth-year honours in medieval English language and literature, including old Norse, old Irish, and Anglo- Saxon language. I think it shaped the rest of my career that my training was not specifically linguistic at all, but literary and foreign language driven. At that time in Australia if you wanted to do a PhD in the humanities you normally did it overseas, mostly in the UK. I decided to get married and stay. So, I did what was then known as a master’s honours degree, a three-year full-time thesis only degree, comparing the linguistic structure of 18th-century and Anglo-Saxon poetry. I was awarded the university medal for the thesis (1970) and appointed to my first lectureship in 1972. By the time I finished my master’s degree I was married and had my first child. When my husband took his first full-year sabbatical from Sydney University at the University of Madison (1970), Wisconsin, I went too. Madison happened to be where Professor Frederic Cassidy, one of my thesis examiners, was. So, I spent a lovely year with him as a post-doc, without a doc! I learnt a lot there about all kinds of linguistics and approaches that I would not ever have learnt about in the Australian context. In the USA at that time Chomskyan transformational grammar was dominant, and also a lot of very historically based philology work. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

158  Terry Threadgold In 1971 I was back to teaching medieval language and literature in the English Department at Sydney University. It was in the ten years after I was appointed to a lectureship in 1972 that I first started engaging with English grammar as such. I started reading the British linguist Roger Fowler’s work on stylistics and some of Michael Halliday’s own early work on textual analysis. So, when Halliday arrived in Sydney, I already knew his work. Together with other colleagues I wrote two little handbooks on English grammar in the early 1980s. We were trying to find a way of teaching grammar to our students, since they did not have it at school at the time. That was one reason why Halliday arriving in the country in 1976 to set up the Department of Linguistics at Sydney University was such a major event, and in time changed the subject and the education of teachers. By 1984, I was a member of the Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture, set up to foster multi-disciplinarity and work that did not fit within the disciplines. In 1984 I was the Co-ordinator of its Working Committee and organised through the Association two conferences which were fundamental to the directions my work took. One was Language, Semiotics, Ideology (published in 1986) organised with Elizabeth Grosz, Gunther Kress, and Michael Halliday. The other was a Conference called Future-Fall: Excursions into Post-modernity (published in 1987) with Jean Baudrillard and Gayatri Spivak as its guest speakers. These two conferences were meant originally to be one, but the linguists and the critical theorists could not agree on the title. ‘Ideology’ in particular was anathema to the critical theorists and postmodernists. So, we ran two very different, very interesting events and I realised for the first time what I would actually be involved in trying to bring these two areas together. During my time at Sydney University, I worked with wonderful colleagues across the faculty to support interdisciplinarity. For example, I co-ordinated the establishment of a master’s degree in Language and Education, taught across English, Linguistics, and Education. With support from a range of disciplines we set up the interdisciplinary Centres for Women’s Studies and Performance Studies. Within the English Department I also established with Professor Elizabeth Grosz an interdisciplinary degree programme in Semiotics (1988–1992). I had an amazing time teaching and researching with staff from performance studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I was Acting Head of the Department of Early English Literature and Language within the English Department in 1991–1992. I got my first chair at Monash University in Melbourne in 1992. I was appointed Professor and Head of the Department of English. It was a professorship in English literature, cultural and media studies, and drama; all my interests combined in one chair. I had nine years in a wonderful department at Monash. I loved being head of the English department; I loved having all those things under my roof that I could play with and that I could support people to do.

Terry Threadgold  159 In 1999, when I left Monash to come to Cardiff, I had a six-month fellowship with the Humanities Research Centre at the University of California at Irvine working with an interdisciplinary team on multiculturalism in the Pacific region. There I also spent time listening to Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler lecture. Those engagements taught me a lot about writing, identity, and the performing body. I also finally had my PhD at the age of 55, before I got as far as Cardiff. I could not do a PhD, once I had started supervising PhDs, because that would have been a conflict of interest. And I had been supervising PhDs for years successfully, so that was out of the question. But when I was about to leave Monash to come to Cardiff, I decided that I would do a PhD by publication. What took you halfway around the world to Cardiff? In the 1990s John Howard had become Prime Minister in Australia and was busy downsizing the universities and getting rid of staff. I had become Deputy Dean of graduate studies at Monash in 1997. The Faculty of Arts was required to get rid of over 100 staff. The then Dean resigned, and the Vice Chancellor asked me if I would become Acting Dean and take this on. I negotiated with the unions, with the faculty, I endlessly talked to people and worked with my staff. I had two years of this awful negotiation, sacking staff, doing things to disciplines that I did not believe in but that had to be done to preserve what could be supported and maintained. Professor John Tulloch, an Australian professor of cultural studies with whom I had co-edited a book series in Cultural Studies, had just taken a position in Cardiff, and he encouraged me to apply for a research chair here. The Vice Chancellor at Cardiff was investing in active research staff to boost the university’s standing in the 2001 UK Research Assessment Exercise. Theo van Leeuwen was also appointed to Cardiff at around the same time for the same reasons. My first husband had died about ten years before, and I was on my own. So, I took the job in Cardiff. I met my current husband within about three months of getting here and married him a year later. The move to Cardiff was a great move, but it did change the way I worked. I was a Research Professor in the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. I discovered very quickly that if I was going to speak to journalists and the media industry, I had to do it in a less theoretical, a more sociological mode. The School of Journalism was an exciting place to be because it was a school that taught media and cultural studies academically, but also trained journalists in broadcast media and magazines and newspapers. You could watch what they were doing and learn how they operated and make your theories work in different ways. I learned from them in the same way as I had from working in performance and theatre studies, and the law, at Sydney University. After three years as a Research Professor (1999–2001) I was appointed Head of the School. I loved being Head of the School (2002–2007), but at a certain point I was asked if I would consider being Pro Vice Chancellor. People

160  Terry Threadgold come along and offer you these opportunities, you know. They particularly wanted someone to take on the Equality and Diversity portfolio and work with that. I saw it as a real and rewarding challenge to try to use my research background to work across the practices and policies of a whole university. I held that position from 2008 to 2012. I think one of the last times I saw Michael Halliday was here in Cardiff at a systemic functional linguistics conference in 2006. He asked how I was managing this job. I said what I found most valuable was that I could do more to change things in this role, than I ever could by only analysing texts. But I could not have done it if I had not done all the work with text, because that was what taught me what I needed to be doing and how to talk to people and get things done across disciplines and across institutions. It was the tail end of my career, and it would not have been right for me earlier on, but it was right then. And then I retired officially in 2012. After my retirement I was appointed a visiting scholar and honorary professor at Wollongong University for eight years. In Cardiff, after my retirement, I was immediately re-employed to work part time (2012– 2015) to support the university’s submission to the 2014 UK Research Excellence Framework and complete the work I had been doing as Pro Vice Chancellor on academic workload. There were a lot of interesting discussions on equality and diversity going on around access to research in this country around the 2014 framework. I was on the national UK panel as well as leading the work at Cardiff. After that, for about three years from 2015, I moved around the country as a consultant helping universities to get transparent workload management processes in place. And then finally, in 2018, I said: I think it is time to stop. Now I am working with the Learned Society of Wales as a member of their council and their Fellowship and Finance Committees, and I do a lot of voluntary work here in Cardiff.

Feminism My interest in feminism was inspired by working with a whole range of wonderful women in the faculty of Arts at Sydney. I attended lectures given by Professor Elizabeth Grosz in Philosophy and later taught and worked with her. The work on language and poststructuralism was about the questioning of representation, the understanding that all social realities were constructed and could therefore be made differently. It focused on the question of the speaking subject and the ways in which the contextualised use of language produces masculine and feminine identities, social and cultural difference and gendered realities (Caine et al. 1998). Throughout my career I have had some experiences that I think are interesting in terms of the feminist I became. One was when I had a

Terry Threadgold  161 teaching fellowship and was doing my master’s at Sydney University. When I got pregnant with my first child, I was so excited. I remember rushing into my supervisor’s office and saying: “I am pregnant”. He looked absolutely horrified, and said: “Oh my goodness, we’ll be so sorry to lose you”. I was so stunned by this that it took me a week to tell him I was not going anywhere. He eventually accepted this and when I had my second baby, he actually got in touch with me while I was on leave and said: ‘Look, there’s a lectureship coming up in the department and you would be well positioned to apply for it, you should do so’. That was my first lectureship in 1972. I also learned from experience about the power and exclusiveness of discipline, how disciplines responded to change and difference. This affected my female colleagues in Philosophy, one of whom was consistently refused promotion because of the ‘dangerous’ new knowledges she was teaching and introducing. It took a member of the promotions committee to break confidence and seek the support of the faculty to get her that promotion. When I started applying for chairs, I had some most unpleasant, very gendered experiences. I had gone from lecturer (1972) to senior lecturer (1980) to associate professor (1988) at Sydney University, and supportive colleagues, both women and men, encouraged me to apply for a full chair somewhere. When I applied for a chair at the University of Adelaide in the English department, I was rejected because the department would not accept the appointment of somebody who was a linguist, a poststructuralist, and a feminist. Another chair became available in the Humanities Research Centre in Canberra. I was invited to interview and presented a paper on postmodernism and the humanities. I did not get the chair, but the issue here was the appallingly sexist and bullying way I was treated at the interview. A year or so later senior colleagues like Professor Elizabeth Webby and Professor George Russell encouraged me to apply for the chair at Monash University to which I was appointed in 1993. By this time, my expectations were quite low, but I was offered the job, and that was how I got to Monash. This was an entirely positive experience. Were these experiences specific for Australia, do you think? I am sure it was not specific to Australia, but Sydney University was a closed and very male dominated, if often benevolent, system in those days. The academy was very new in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. I was the first person in my family to go to university. It was an interesting period, and things were changing very fast in ways which many people found unsettling. But the kind of experiences I had early on in Australia were still affecting people, both men and women, at Cardiff when I arrived in 1999 and during the years I was Pro Vice Chancellor. The difference was that by then I was able either to deal with them or to stop them happening.

162  Terry Threadgold When I left Australia to come to Cardiff in 1999, several Australian Cultural Studies scholars left at about the same time largely because of the de-valuing and de-funding of the Humanities that was then going on. John Tulloch, John Frow, Theo van Leeuwen, Gunther Kress and Meaghan Morris, Sneja Gunew, and Penny Pether were among those who accepted chairs overseas. Elizabeth Grosz and Carole Pateman had long since left and were well established in the USA.

Across Disciplines Tell us about your interdisciplinary work. I had to learn to do interdisciplinarity. It didn’t just happen. By the time of those conferences in 1984 when I first encountered the differences between systemic linguistics and poststructuralism, I had already attended my first International Summer School for Semiotic and Structuralist Studies in Bloomington Indiana. The English Department supported me to go again in 1985 (in Toronto, Canada) and in 1987 in Bloomington. The summer school always had a distinguished teaching faculty; Michael Halliday was visiting scholar at the institute in 1985. You had a month or more of courses and lectures where you could just sit and listen and be filled up. It was like being an empty pot, the most wonderful experience. The Bloomington Indiana Institute was initiated by the semiotician Thomas Sebeok. It brought together the people who were working in these fields at the time from all over Europe and the USA: Umberto Eco in semiotics, Erika Fischer-Lichte in performance studies, and so on. The Toronto Institute was co-ordinated by Professor Paul Bouissac and it was there that I first learned about the semiotics of the circus and listened to Derrida and Iragaray. The institutes went right back to early structuralism, the Prague School, and then forward to Foucault and poststructuralism and a range of traditions in semiotics. That was probably when I started rethinking the systemic functional perspective. Not that I ever stopped believing in it, because there is so much in it of value. But I wanted to expand it and to take it further and to do different things with it. I suppose what I had really learned by then about interdisciplinarity was that you can always see more or differently if you start from somewhere else, if you refuse to be limited by looking at things from just one disciplinary perspective. Jim Martin, bless him, once said to me that I was totally undisciplined because I did not stick to the rules – but being ‘undisciplined’ was absolutely intentional at the time. All of my teaching in this period was strongly influenced by what I learned in Bloomington and Toronto. It involved introducing critical and cultural theory and feminist theory into the faculty and the department, learning how to integrate what could be done with that kind of theory and what could be done with Hallidayan social semiotics.

Terry Threadgold  163 Courses included the development of interdisciplinary approaches to text and context, genre, writing, and performance studies, for example. Most of my time by then I was actually working outside the English department. I was seconded to the Centre for Women’s Studies and the Centre for Performance Studies and teaching semiotics in the English department. The first time I taught Semiotics in English was for students in literature. The fourth-year honours students came to me and asked specifically for such a course. The work I did in the Centre for Performance Studies was incredibly influential, I think, for my later work. I had just returned from a course with Erika Fischer-Lichte in Bloomington and I told some of the people who taught drama in English about it. They had just got funding to do a production of Strindberg’s Miss Julie with their students. They asked me to come and see what they were doing and how they worked. I sat in rehearsal rooms watching them producing this play, and the thing that struck me was that all the stuff that poststructuralism and structuralism talked about, was happening in front of me. They were remaking bodies. They were teaching people to perform themselves differently. They were constructing new genders. I saw it as a wonderful tool for teaching poststructuralism and critical theory, and grammar, in fact. I got involved at Sydney University with the law and with legal feminism too, and that developed when I got to Monash, where I did a lot of work for the Law Faculty as a feminist scholar. In my time in Sydney, I  was invited to a conference (1993), which was about deconstructing the law and its practices. I gave a paper called ‘Rewriting Law as Postmodern Fiction’, which was very badly received by many of the legal practitioners present. This was the beginning of a long involvement with a group of scholars who were intent on changing legal narratives to explore, for example, what was happening to women in court processes, how women were treated in cases of spousal murder. I was using what I had learnt from theatre about performing yourself differently and the work of, for example, Barbara Kamler and Rod McLean (1996) in Education on the making of legal bodies in the moot court and the making of the gendered bodies of little girls and boys in primary school classrooms. There was a lot of Bourdieu and systemic linguistics in that work.

Cooperation and Inspiration Through the years I built a network with the feminists, the poststructuralists, and the systemic functional people in the faculties at Sydney. They were in education, literature, modern languages, linguistics, anthropology. There were systemic functionalists by then working across the faculty under Michael Halliday’s influence. Those networks extended beyond Sydney University to national and international groups as well. One important example is the group involved in producing the report

164  Terry Threadgold for the federal government on Teaching Critical Social Literacy (Christie et al. 1991) chaired by Frances Christie. She had included people who understood the value of systemics and social semiotics but also those like myself who came from other disciplines and backgrounds. It was an often challenging team to be part of, we were constantly negotiating differences, but it was always exciting and inspirational. What inspired you to explore systemic functional grammar even before Halliday came to Sydney? I think it was finding some of the work about textual analysis, because that was what I was trying to teach my students. Both Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan had published small pieces about literary analysis, and I remember finding those interesting and very useful. Michael O’Toole was in Perth at that stage and he and David Birch edited a book called The Functions of Style (1988) which brought the research together in one place. Learning about his work and meeting and working with Michael Halliday made a huge difference to everything I did thereafter. He was such a humble man, a lovely man, and I adored him personally. It was so easy to sit on a grassy bank in Bloomington, Indiana, and chat to Michael about the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev or Habermas or something and learn from him and think about ways of doing things. He was always totally open to any of the mad new things I came up with. I miss Michael. What did the Newtown Semiotic Circle mean to you? It was such an important connection. It was Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen and me, Cate Poynton, Anne Cranny-Francis and Jim Martin. Jay Lemke was there sometimes; Frances Christie came and went. So did Paul Thibault. We used to just go to Gunther’s house in Newtown, or somewhere else, and we would have wine and discuss interesting things. Theo and I once did a project on graffiti in loos, and I nearly got arrested by the university security people. I was given the job of going into the women’s loos in Sydney University and photographing the graffiti. Theo photographed the graffiti along railway lines. There I was with a camera at 5 o’clock on a Friday evening photographing loos, and somebody sent the security men. They released me when a professor of English confirmed that he knew me. The Newtown conversations were so valuable, with very intelligent people questioning you and querying what you are doing and feeding back. It was an exciting group. On a more serious note, the group also achieved international recognition. In 1987 and 1988 I co-ordinated and chaired an Australian Symposium on Social semiotics with members of the group at the International Summer Institutes for Structuralism and Semiotic Studies in Toronto and at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

Terry Threadgold  165 Who did you work closely with? Elizabeth Grosz, Gunther Kress, Cate Poynton, Alison Lee, Anne Cranny-Francis, and Theo van Leeuwen were among my closest and best friends and colleagues. In Melbourne there was Barbara Kamler. We established journals along the way: The Journal of Social Semiotics: A Transdisciplinary Journal in Functional Linguistics, Semiotics and Critical Theory was one that Theo and I established with Anne Cranny-Francis and Christian Matthiessen in Sydney in 1990. The work with journals was a way in which I kept a finger in all that was going on, whatever else I was doing and I always enjoyed the editorial work and saw it as very important: The Australian Journal of Feminist Studies; Law, Text, Culture and The Australian Feminist Law Journal were all journals I had a big part in.

Meaning Could you please sum up what inspired you in social semiotics, and how that developed through all your cross-disciplinary activities? I remember that what fascinated me in Michael Halliday’s work initially was that it was about meaning. It showed the paradigmatic options that allow you to choose to make different meanings, but it constantly related that back to the social. At the 1984 conference I presented one of my first pieces of systemic linguistic analysis on a John Donne poem where love was referred to as dying; this was about orgasm and death and love. And how on earth do you turn that into the kinds of process types that were in Halliday’s grammar? Or trying to look at a Milton-text with that enormous Renaissance complexity and think about it in terms of process types and interpersonal meanings – it was fascinating, and I really got hooked. These are complex texts. When I wrote Feminist Poetics (1997a), I was still really tackling the same issues and trying to make systemic theory and social semiotics work on complex literary and cultural texts. And although the categories in Halliday’s grammar were incredibly valuable in getting me to think about things, I always tended to make them more complex to deal with these kinds of literary and wider cultural issues. The idea of embedded genres and narratives really required a theory of intertextuality, for example – hence the influence of Bakhtin – and so on. Can you tell us now what meaning is? No. The interest is not so much about what is the final meaning, but how are meanings constituted. What is the range that you have for challenging those meanings, changing those meanings? How do those meanings position you as a writer or a reader? And what freedom do you have to do something with them? Can you change, for instance, entrenched, patriarchal stories? Can you make them include the feminine? Initially I used to teach people that if you can change the story,

166  Terry Threadgold you can change the world. Well, actually you cannot because that alone is not enough. But it is certainly a good way to start. You cannot change the story, or change the world? Well, you can change the story, but it does not necessarily change the world. The problem is that until you can change the embodiment of the story so that it is lived and performed differently, until you can change the emotional attachment to the story, which is in the body, you do not change very much. People can hear new stories, and they just say: I still believe the old one. It was only as I began to understand and work with theories of embodiment that I began to be able to think differently about changing meanings. ‘Meaning’ for me has always been very complex, and it changes all the time. If you put old texts in new contexts, they will mean differently. And you are not always in control of what is going on. In Feminist Poetics I tried to articulate that instability of meaning in the work that I did on Thomas Keneally’s novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Keneally was writing against Australian racism, he was trying to change the world. In my analysis I show how complex that is, and that it takes more than just linking the three metafunctions of language to field, tenor, and mode, and a register. There are embedded narratives, things that come into the text that nobody thinks to argue with. There is stuff embedded in there that still carries the racist discourse, even as he is challenging it. It was only the nitty-gritty linguistic and intertextual analysis that could show why different readers took different messages from Keneally’s text and why they were not always the ones that Keneally meant. The text was heteroglossic in Bakhtin’s sense of that term. No reader could engage with the text without also engaging with the echoes of the places where the word, the text, the reading and writing bodies had been before. It was this complexity that I tried to teach in my poststructuralist feminist approaches to systemic functional linguistics and textual analysis. In all this work, the body and embodiment mattered. My understandings of these questions had a long intellectual history, too long to rehearse here, but fully articulated in my book Feminist Poetics (1997a). Bodies leave traces in texts and texts leave traces on the body of writers and readers – those are the reasons why bodies matter in my work. There is no way that meanings can be made in isolation from this complexity. And it was in the rehearsal process that I first found practical examples of the way this worked and was able to teach it using performance studies. How, then do you connect meaning to knowing? It seems to me that you must rely on a certain amount of meaning being stable enough to know it. You can go on deconstructing forever, but you cannot do much with that unless you occasionally say that we also need to establish what we know, what we can rely on as a starting point. You have to be very pragmatic about it. I have read so much stuff in order to know. And if I had not been prepared to accept that knowing at

Terry Threadgold  167 face value, I would not have been able to use it as a basis for challenging something else. And I think that the knowing is very closely connected to the meaning. Both are necessarily social and corporeal constructions but at some point, you have to stop the chain of semiosis and work with what you have in order to take things further.

Social Semiotics Would you distinguish between the terms ‘social semiotics’ and ‘systemic functional linguistics’? I think I would. Social semiotics for me is always connected to Halliday’s thoughts in the book Language as Social Semiotic (1978). What I always found fascinating about Michael Halliday’s work was the intertextuality of all the places he had been before he wrote that book: the linguistics of his supervisor Firth, the inspiration from Hjelmslev, the way in which Whorf’s work on cryptogram is built into what he is doing. Another point is the notion of the series of realisations from one level to another, the very complex arguments and issues, which very few people have subsequently taken up and worked with. Once you do that, it is a fascinating theory. It is not the same as actual practice which most systemic functional linguists want to get to work with as knowledge. That is why the linguistics has been so valuable, because it has offered a tool for practice. And as soon as you start doing the practice, you have to forget for a while all that extraordinary history and all the places that Michael has been struggling with and tackling and trying to think about before he got to write the theory as it was. So, it becomes much simpler and more straightforward when you apply it as linguistics than it is as a theory. I would say that systemic functional linguistics also is about social meaning-making practices, but I think there is a distinction in the levels of theoretical difficulty between the two kinds of activity. Some of the work on genre is interesting there. If you think about the way in which Jim Martin and Frances Christie apply the term – I have had long arguments with both about this. They were concerned with how you facilitate people’s learning and knowing in a classroom: what do they need to know to make these texts in a way that will be recognisable, acceptable, that would get good marks? And they tended to focus very much on the structural side: what comes first, what comes second, what comes next? How do you put that together? Rarely they would focus on how the speaking subject or the writing subject was constructed, how the interpersonal got woven into that, how the wave-like structures of the textual function might work through the genre. These things are much harder to teach because they are much harder to analyse. In dealing with register, they tended to go straight from the three metafunctions of language to field, tenor, mode and a register that belonged in

168  Terry Threadgold an institution. To me that meant ignoring the complexities of the body that was working through the text. That was always my issue with this, that it was too easy to just teach people how to form a structure without thinking about what they were filling the structure with or how that structure might be leaving traces on their bodies, forming a gendered or patriarchal habitus which would perpetuate structures that might need to be changed rather than being a transformative pedagogy. Alison Lee’s work in the geography classroom (Lee 1996) and Barbara Kamler’s (1994) with primary school children on writing pedagogy showed what the alternatives could look like. Sarah Mills and Norman Fairclough’s work are also examples of the way linguistics can work with the social semiotics. The work I would call social semiotics is actually a very rich poststructuralist and feminist, sometimes postcolonial development and use of Halliday’s theory. You have told us about your encounters with postmodernism and the radical division in the 1980s. How have you bridged the gap between poststructuralism and functional linguistics? I always tried to, but I do not know whether I succeeded in all contexts. There are a couple of pieces I wrote about Michael Halliday’s work for those international structuralist and semiotic schools in Bloomington and Toronto. The first one was about ‘The Semiotics of Vološinov, Halliday and Eco’ (1986a). That, for me, is about social semiotics. It was a paper in which I tried to trace some of the multiple dimensions and complexity of Halliday’s social semiotics by going back to the work of Vološinov and forward to the work of Eco, and reading them with and against one another. Vološinov’s work on Marxism and the Philosophy of Language was published in 1930. It was a key text to emerge from the Bakhtin Circle which worked in Russia from about 1918–1929. In later years, the Vološinov text was sometimes argued to have actually been written by Bakhtin himself. And Michael loved that paper, he once said: ‘I am very proud to be put together with Vološinov’. The other paper I wrote was about several of Michael’s own early papers where he was going through his relationship to Firth and to Whorf. I was trying to put these together and see where the later ideas came from. It was a quite long and dense paper, called ‘Paradigms of Culture and Semiosis: Grammatics for Cryptogrammars or Metalanguages for the Ineffable’ (1989). Social semiotics had this extraordinarily flexible notion of multiple levels of realisation, of instantiation, how things are an instance of a system, as well as being a realisation of some of it. You also had the register theory, which I have relied on enormously, although I have never used it in quite the way that systemic linguists do. Everything I have done in that area has been informed by it as a framing theory. The question of metalanguage was central at the time in poststructuralism. It was no longer ‘proper’ to use metalanguages, and so detailed linguistic analysis had been deconstructed in favour of discursive

Terry Threadgold  169 formations, embodied practice, and so on. Intertextuality, myth, metaphor, discourse, genre were concepts that were used all over the place, with no definitions and no real understanding of what they were about. So, this was a two-way process for me. My way of doing it was to do the detailed linguistic analysis, to refuse the rejection of metalanguages that was going on in poststructuralism. Instead, I insisted that we are using metalanguages all the time. Every time we are using a theory to analyse something, we use metalanguage. But I also added that some of the concepts in the systemic functional toolkit can easily be developed to do other things. Register was one of the concepts that I have found most valuable. If you wanted to know where the chunks of text were coming from, from which institution, which embodied set of beliefs, which discursive formation, then intertextuality gave you the tool to analyse it. You just needed to think a bit differently about what you were looking for in the thing we call context.

Text and Context That takes us to text and context. How do you see the concept of text? The first thing I should say is that I have for a long time accepted the deconstruction of the verbal/non-verbal binary and my understanding of this is very much influenced by, for example, Foucault’s notion of discursive formation or a Peircean concept of infinite semiosis. A discursive formation may have verbal elements, but it may include visual, architectural, spatial, or corporeal elements. The interpretant of a verbal sign may be a visual sign and so on. Everything is potentially a text: the chair I am sitting on, the person I am talking to, the room I am in. All these things are constructions of various kinds, and none of them is impervious to being constructed differently or to being made to mean differently. So, I think everything is textual potentially. And what makes the potential turn out to be a text, then? It is the fact that it has some sort of a shape or a form for someone, and that people think that they can make sense of it. That needs to be added: it is a potential for meaning-making, but until it is actually used to make meaning, it is probably not yet a text. Then your concept of text is inherently multimodal? Yes. Interestingly, I have never used the term ‘multimodal’, but I do accept the idea and I find the concept useful. I think it was because when Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen were working on multimodality, I was too busy struggling with the poststructuralist reading of Foucault and with other traditions of semiosis. In your work with journalism and media coverage you probably could not avoid looking into the visual? I always had to look at the visual. I probably used ‘multimodal’ occasionally in that writing, but I did not use their work on Reading Images

170  Terry Threadgold (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996) specifically. I know it well, and it certainly influenced the way I think about things. Every text has got all the same potential as a verbal text, basically, so you can make the grammar and the intertextuality and register work on all those texts, and it is critical to do it. I was also influenced by work in architecture and photography around that time, and I was probably using slightly different language to those working with multimodality. But there was also something else. The media analyses that I did around immigration, asylum and refugees was designed to influence and change media representations of these things. This meant that I needed to talk to (and teach) journalists and that I had to understand the media as complex institutions. To talk to that institution and the bodies that it produces I had to develop some different communication tools. I turned to sociology, to content analysis and focus groups and interviews to get my evidence. I never stopped theorising what I was finding, but I learned to talk about it differently in order to engage with the institutional practices and beliefs of a different industry. My handling of the visual in that process was shaped and formed by those contextual constraints. How basic are the metafunctions in all this? I think they are fundamental. One of the cleverest things that Halliday ever did was to think about the metafunctions. If you did not have those, you really would not have any tools to start with. You have got to have the idea of the ideational metafunction or representational or logical – whatever you want to call it. The interpersonal dimension is equally crucial, and then the textual metafunction. I think without an understanding of the metafunctions I would not have known where to start from. Even when I struggled with John Donne’s poetry, asking what sort of a process type ‘die’ is. You would not ask those questions without the metafunctions. So, I think it is providing you with the questions to ask. And it is an invaluable tool when you are teaching people how to begin thinking about these issues. Are you more critical to the use of field, tenor and mode? Not entirely critical. I find them useful; I just do not find them sufficient. You can do a straightforward analysis of the field that the ideational function relates to. And it can be a quite narrow analysis, it might just be the geography classroom. And the tenor may be just teachers and students. And then the textual function may position one student as the writer, and another as the reader. That is helpful, but I do not think it is enough. I think field and tenor are always more than that. Because all those little children whose bodies are being interpersonally inserted in these texts or affected by these texts have got different backgrounds, they come from different places, there is more stuff in there than that simple one-to-one balance will let you get at. And similarly, with the textual function, it links you to the geography classroom. But where does the geography classroom go? Is it part of a much wider scientific system?

Terry Threadgold  171 Is there a patriarchal structure built into it? What is its history? Let us expand the concepts and see what else they can tell us. So, this is not a criticism as such, it is a need to do more. The analysis of what surrounds and give rise to textual practices has got to be very thorough. It needs to include ethnography and history and sociology, for example. Then you can begin to look again at the texts themselves and you will see a whole lot more than field, tenor, and mode will let you see on their own. And maybe that takes us to context? How can we analyse that? I have talked about this already in relation to embodiment, intertextuality, and register and just now the much wider questions of ethnography and so on. Context is kind of endless. So, you must be pragmatic. You have indicative markers of context I, think, in the texts you are working with, that allow you to either ask questions about why they are there or to see where the complexities might lie, and where you might want to go further. You always have to be aware that the context is as hugely stable and as potentially unstable as anything else is. And the role of the reader/ analyst is always a factor in the way in which contexts are constructed and made sense of. If you are trying to limit what you are talking about with context, you need to be clear about what might be relevant to what you are trying to do. But in relation to Hallidayan linguistics I rewrote the textual function in Halliday and Hasan to foreground it as the place where the corporeality of reading and writing might be located in a functionalist linguistics. This is the function of language which allows for exchanges with the semiotic networks of other texts and contexts. But these exchanges must move through the bodies of those who read and write. It is the space of intertextuality, subjectivity and the habituated body and it relocates the interpersonal as the driving rhetorical function of language. When you are working with context, does that require interdisciplinary cooperation with other perspectives than your own? Absolutely! Every time you move into a different context, and for me this was usually a different discipline or institution, you have to get to know it. In theatre studies, for example, I had to get to know how that worked. I had to understand what their discourses were, what they thought they were doing when they were behaving in certain ways. The same in the law-context. I had to do quite a lot of work in the legal context before I could be useful in that place. Senior judges that I worked with used to send me their judgements so I could analyse them and explore with them how their masculine legal habitus was contributing to the making of meanings and the disciplining of the subjects who come before the law in ways that they often did not intend. In the process of doing that, I had to know about the writing of judgements, about how in that institution and in that context, this was considered to work. So, I had to do a lot of reading before I could have any credibility in talking to them about how they might write something differently.

172  Terry Threadgold You are talking about the need to get to the context from the inside so to speak. Do you also need a perspective from the outside, based on a more theoretical view of society? Absolutely. It is bringing those two things together. You must have a perception, a way of theorising and framing it, but you also need a perception of how it is lived, how it is performed. And those two things then have to come together. This is why I said earlier that history, ethnography, sociology, literary studies, for example, are important ways of knowing in relation to these things. They give you the capacity to look at the issues from somewhere else, to see more and differently, and then to come back and try to make sense of what you are in the middle of.

Discourse Analysis Let us move on to discourse analysis, which is also a major part of your work. What would you say is your contribution to discourse analysis? It is hard to know where poststructuralist feminist linguistics and critical discourse analysis begin and end, but I certainly worked in CDA. I have talked a lot about my work in Feminist Poetics and I think it introduced discourse analysis to a very wide audience. That was where I set out what I thought a critical discourse analysis required. For me it was the same thing as what I called a feminist poetics and it involved always the ‘poiesis, performance and histories’ of rewriting. The contribution made by that book answers the question about the contribution made to discourse analysis, I think. Roger Fowler before he died said that in it I had ‘redefined the field’. The densely theoretical contents of the book were also rewritten to address the need for teaching texts and again were widely influential. My version of CDA could be placed very much in the centre of Australian Cultural Studies. When I left the country for Cardiff in 1999, Professor Kay Schaffer, then president of the Australian Cultural Studies Association, delivered a plenary paper in which she identified me as one of the two main founders of Australian Cultural Studies. The work I did in discourse analysis was much broader even than this. The same research I did on the discursive formation of which Keneally’s novel was merely a part, was also published in an early version as part of a collection of essays in critical legal studies called Thinking through the Body of the Law (1996). What that work did was explore the complexities of what Foucault had called a discursive formation, collecting texts, verbal, visual and corporeal, from the media, the law, literature and family histories and narratives and showing how meanings were made as these bodies and texts folded into one another and as Foucault argued ‘produced the things of which they spoke’. In this case that was patriarchy, racism, gendered difference, and both resistance and continuity. This was important in a critical legal context because it was

Terry Threadgold  173 able to demonstrate that the law was not immune to those histories and narratives, that legal bodies also performed gender, race and patriarchy. That was why I enjoyed working with Penny Pether because she had been a practising solicitor as well as a lecturer in English Literature. The work we did on judgements in equity in Australia depended on bringing our knowledges together and looking at things from several places at once. We used intertextuality and theories of the body to show how patriarchal and influenced by stereotypes and popular culture judgements in equity could be, with anything but equitable outcomes for those who came before the law (Pether and Threadgold 2000). My work with educators in Australia was also very important. I spoke to conferences of secondary school teachers about the importance of poststructuralism and discourse analysis in the English curriculum. I was influential in the changes that rewrote the English inherited from the British colonial past as an Australian Cultural Studies curriculum for young Australians and advised government in New South Wales and Victoria on these issues. And I became part of an important international group working on critical social literacies in the Australian context. It was in these contexts that much of the systemic functional work on genre was explored and critiqued (Kamler 2001; Threadgold 1997b are examples). I also worked with researchers in Melbourne on the discursive construction of injecting drug use, and ways in which that discourse and its policy implications might be changed. I worked with nurses in Cardiff on developing age-appropriate health information for children and young people. But I think the real contribution has been to the teaching, I would have to say. So much of what I have done has been built into the classroom and what is going on there. That is where you test whether it can work or not, whether it has the effects that you think it might have. I think the people who have most benefitted from the work I did, have been all the undergraduates, the PhD students and MA students whose theses I have supervised and examined. I have supervised 60 PhDs in my time. I must have supervised more than that in terms of masters’ theses. And I have examined 75 PhDs – I counted them the other day for the record. And all those people have been influenced by or disciplined into the way I thought about discourse analysis and encouraged to challenge it and frame it in their own contexts. They come from performance studies, English, law, education, journalism. And many of those people are now in senior positions, where they, in turn, are having an influence. So, the biggest single contribution that I feel I have made was in facilitating and nurturing, and then setting them loose and watching what happens. It is such a pleasure when you get the books back that they have written. I think that is a major contribution to the next generation. It sounds like there has been a very close connection between your teaching and your research?

174  Terry Threadgold Yes, they have always been very closely connected. It has been a constant process of change and adaptation. And I have learned so much myself from all those students because of all the different places they were working in. I have got prizes for supervision and prizes for teaching. When I was head of the English department at Monash, it was named in a national publication that ranks everybody every year as the best place in the country to study English. When I was here at Cardiff, the school of journalism got the same ranking here. So, it has not always been just about my own teaching. I have always felt it was important to make it possible for everybody else in there to contribute in that way, and to really make a difference to the students we were looking after. At Monash, they used to give awards for postgraduate supervision, one was student nominated and the other one was nominated by staff. I won both of those at Monash. In your work with discourse analysis, it has been interesting to see how you have been able to include perspectives from cultural studies like gender, origin of birth, and power, of course. Would it be fair to say that you have contributed with new perspectives? In fact, I think I also contributed those things to Australian Cultural Studies. They came, as I have been saying, from my work in feminism and poststructuralism, where the issues of authorship, sexing the subject of semiosis and performing gender as well as Bourdieu’s habitus had forced me to think through the question of differently formed and located bodies and their interactions with texts. It was a very important move in the development of Australian Cultural Studies because it, as an interdisciplinary endeavour, was seeking to displace the centrality of an inherited, exclusionary and powerful masculinist tradition or canon of English Language and Literature and to develop understandings of the relationships between high and popular culture. Those relationships could not be thought without reference to issues of power, gender, and race, especially in Australia at that time.

Genre and Narrative Is genre an important concept within the fields where you have been working? I think it is a really important concept. I wrote a paper that was full of the histories of genre, and the other places genre was talked about, arguing that what was being done in systemic functional linguistics was not taking into account enough of those histories and enough of the complexities that people had already identified in other disciplines in relation to genre. What the systemic functionalists took up in Australia was a very straightforward view of genre. But there are so many complex things that you can take from the history of genres into the way we might think about how genre works now. In Feminist Poetics

Terry Threadgold  175 I looked at the development of the scientific genre in Newton’s work and the way the person and the body were gradually written out of it. It is only when you look at that history that you can ask why that happened and whether it is still appropriate and those complexities I think have to be taught and understood. You also introduced narrative analysis. What can that do? Narrative is really interesting. Again, there is a whole history of narrative study, a massive amount of work done already in a whole range of contexts: the narrative analysis of Vladimir Propp (1928), or Labov and Waletzky (1997). We know that narrative is a very complex phenomenon, and we know that it exists everywhere. I used to have it plastered all over my wall, which Michael Halliday used to laugh about: ‘narrative’, ‘myth’, ‘metaphor’, ‘discourse’. I was interested in trying to unpack how text and narrative and genre and discourse might fit together. But narrative had a structure, and you could begin to see how narratives were weaving through the texts and the discourses you were analysing. One of Michael’s very helpful remarks was about the way in which hypotaxis and parataxis work, and the fact that if you have got embedded clauses in an ordinary syntactic structure, that is the bit that is not arguable in terms of the textual metafunction. So, the fact that you had bits of narrative embedded in whole text structures, made them also not arguable. Often, they were not even visible, as bits that needed to be argued with. All of that I found extremely useful and interesting to work with. So, I started looking for narratives in texts, and looking for the ways in which people narrativised what they were doing when they were writing texts (Threadgold 2005). I was using every bit of narrative theory I could find to think about how to make sense of what was going on. Is narrative something else than genre? I think narrative is a genre. One of the genres that we use is narrative, but narrative also intertwines with and folds into other genres. Many genres try to exclude narrative, scientific genres, legal genres, for example. Historically genres in science and law have developed from narrative into more complex structures where the narrative is embedded but now actually denied. Telling stories is not scientific or is seen as too subjective. But of course, they are always there and need to be argued with.

Literacy What is literacy for you? And in what contexts have you applied it? I think critical social literacy is ultimately about having access to the meaning-making resources of a culture and then knowing how to use those resources effectively. It is about understanding how language and texts realised in many media, operate within the frameworks shaped by a context and being able to have a voice in that place.

176  Terry Threadgold It is always connected to the context because you cannot just be literate in isolation. Literacy takes many different forms. Learning how to read and write in primary school is the basic first one. That is a really important one, critical in terms of the construction of subjects. But it gets more and more complex, the more complex the contexts become. It includes many of the things we have talked about: empowering people to know how to work with genre, working with narratives and understanding that they are there, the power of intertextuality. And also, to use the tools of discourse analysis, to support critical thinking. In my work with my students everywhere I have taught in universities, it has always been important to help them understand what it meant to be literate in the area they were working in, what it required to be in a position of power in relation to that literacy, rather than just being spoken by it, and how to be brave enough to take chances and change things and do things differently with the literacy that they are working with. I would say that what I was doing in rehearsal rooms was learning about the way actors become physically, bodily literate. In the work I did with the law in the Australian context, it was important to see the power of those kinds of literacies to position people, to damage people, to produce injustice rather than justice. And to make sure that the people using those literacies understood the power they were wielding. Literacy is not only about the written word, it is always about the body and the wider semiotic or discursive context and how the written word fits into that. I do not believe you can be literate without all those things.

Achievements and the Future Summing up, which of your academic achievements makes you most proud? I think I have talked about most of these things as this interview has developed. Redefining fields and helping to construct new ones which were more inclusive and tolerant of diversity. This involved teaching, research and developing the infrastructures to support interdisciplinary and critical activity, for example, my contribution to establishing and editing journals and running conferences. I am proud and feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to work with so many excellent postgraduate students, and with my students generally. I am proud of the teaching and supervision awards, that said we were doing it well. That really mattered to me. But if I go beyond the academic work, I am also very proud of the work I have managed to do as an equality, diversity, and inclusion person in the broader university context in this country. I think I have made quite an impact there in terms of changing the ways people think and how they manage their organisations. I am very proud of the changes made, because they were hard ones to make, and they

Terry Threadgold 177 were on a national level. However, you cannot ever stop doing that work; it is an ongoing exercise – always two steps forward and one step back. Is there anything that you would have liked to have done that you have not yet done? Gunther Kress and I were going to write a book, we even had a contract. It was going to be about genre. The idea came out of our work with the Newtown Semiotic Circle. We did a lot of thinking about it and wrote a paper together. But we were both too frenetically busy with other things at the time to concentrate on it. I could have written a book about genre with Gunther, which would have been really interesting. But it just did not happen. The other book that did not get written was a book with Barbara Kamler and Susan Feldman based on the research we did in our project on stories of women and ageing, which we completed just before I left Australia. We published articles but the tyranny of distance was too great and that did not get written either. What do you think will be the main challenges and opportunities for social semiotics in the future? I am not sure I am fit to answer that question these days, since I have been out of touch with it for a period. But the interesting stuff I have seen has been going in very nice directions. My one anxiety would be that it becomes too formalistic, too structured, and that people forget all that early interesting thinking that Michael Halliday did about how systems work and why they do not do the things you might expect. I hope it does not become too predictable or too straightforward. We need an open-minded social semiotic framework to think with – one that is inclusive and interdisciplinary and allows you to look at things from several places at once.

References Birch, D. & O’Toole, M. (Eds.) (1988) The Functions of Style. Pinter Publishers. Caine, B., Gatens, M., Grahame, E., Larbalestier, J., Watson, S. & Webby, E. (Eds.) (1998). Australian Feminism: A Companion. Oxford University Press Australia. Christie, F., Devlin, B., Walton, C., Freebody, P., Luke, A., Cook, J., Martin, J.R. & Threadgold, T. (1991). Teaching English Literacy: A Project of National Significance on the Preservice Preparation of Teachers for Teaching English Literacy (Vol. 1–3). Centre for Studies of Language in Education. Halliday, M.A.K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. Edward Arnold. Kamler, B. (2001). Relocating the Personal: A Critical Writing Pedagogy. State University of New York Press. Kamler B. & McLean, R. (1996). You can’t just go to court and move your body: first year students learn how to read and write the law. Law, Text, Culture, 3, 176–209. Kamler, B., McClean, R., Reid, J.-A. & Simpson, A. (1994). Shaping Up Nicely: The Formation of Schoolgirls and Schoolboys in the First Month of School.

178  Terry Threadgold A report to the gender equity and curriculum reform project, Department of Employment, Education, and Training. Australian Government Publishing Service. Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading Images. The Grammar of Visual Design. Routledge. Labov, W. & Waletzsky, J. (1997). Narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience. In J. Helm (Ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts: Proceedings of the 1996 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society (pp. 12–44). University of Washington Press. Lee, A. (1996). Gender, Literacy and Curriculum: Rewriting School Geography. Taylor and Francis. Pether, P. & Threadgold, T. (2000). Feminist methodologies in discourse analysis: sex, property, equity? In C. Poynton & A. Lee (Eds.), Culture and Text. Allen & Unwin. Propp, V. (1958) [1928]. Morphology of the Folk Tale. Indiana University Research Centre in Anthropology, Folklore and Linguistics. Publication 10, 1958. Threadgold, T. (1986a). The semiotics of Vološinov, Halliday and Eco. A merican Journal of Semiotics, 4(3–4), 107–142. Threadgold, T. (Ed.) (1986b). Language, Semiotics, Ideology. Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture. Threadgold, T. (1989). Paradigms of culture and semiosis: grammatics for cryptogrammars or metalanguages for the ineffable. In W.A. Koch (Ed.), Evolution of Culture. (pp. 157–224). Proceedings of the International and Interdisciplinary Symposium, Sept. 19–23, 1988. Universitätsverlag S. Norbert Brockmeyer. Threadgold, T. (1997a). Feminist Poetics: Poeisis, Performance, Histories. Routledge. Threadgold, T. (1997b). Critical literacies and the teaching of English. In S. Muspratt, A. Luke & P. Freebody (Eds.), Constructing Critical Literacies: Teaching and Learning Textual Practice (pp. 353–386). Hampton Press, Inc. Threadgold, T. (2005). Performing theories of narrative: theories of narrative performance. In J. Thornborrow & J. Coates (Eds.), The Sociolinguistics of Narrative: Identity, Performance, Culture (pp. 261–278). John Benjamins. Vološinov, V.N. (1973) [1930]. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. by L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik, 1973. Seminar Press. Central publications These are some of the publications Terry Threadgold herself considers to be her most important ones. Threadgold, T. (1986a). The semiotics of Vološinov, Halliday and Eco. A merican Journal of Semiotics, 4(3–4), 107–142. Threadgold, T. (1989). Talking about genre: ideologies and incompatible discourses. Cultural Studies, 3(1), 107–127. Threadgold, T. (1994). Re-writing law as postmodern fiction. In J.N. Turner & P. Williams (Eds.), The Happy Couple: Law and Literature (pp. 322–341). The Federation Press. Threadgold, T. (1997a). Feminist Poetics: Poeisis, Performance, Histories. Routledge.

Terry Threadgold  179 Threadgold, T. (2000). Introduction to poststructuralism and language. In C. Poynton & A. Lee (Eds.), Culture and Text (pp. 40–58). Allen & Unwin. Threadgold, T. (2001). Making theories for different worlds: making critical differences. In P. Freebody, S. Muspratt & B. Dyer (Eds.), Difference, Silence and Textual Practice (pp. 209–242). Hampton Press. Threadgold, T. (2005). Performing theories of narrative: theories of narrative performance. In J. Thornborrow & J. Coates (Eds.), The Sociolinguistics of Narrative: Identity, Performance, Culture (pp. 261–278). John Benjamins. Threadgold, T. (2009). The Media and Migration in the United Kingdom, 1999 to 2009. Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/ TCM-UKMedia.pdf. Lewis, J., Brookes, R., Mosdell, N. & Threadgold, T. (2006). Shoot First and Ask Questions Later: Media Coverage of the Iraq War 2003. Peter Lang.

10 Eija Ventola

Eija Ventola is now retired from her last position as Professor of International Business Communication, Aalto University, Finland. She is a central figure in the academic world of social semiotics and SFL, and she has contributed to it both by developing the theory and applying social semiotics and SFL in various fields. She holds an MA in linguistics from Macquarie University and a PhD in linguistics from the University of Sydney, where she wrote her thesis on service encounter interaction for J.R. Martin and M.A.K. Halliday. In addition, Eija Ventola also has an MA in English, German, Literature and Pedagogy from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She has had various docentships and honorary posts at Finnish universities and is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. Her previous positions include full professorships at the University of Helsinki, Finland, the University of Salzburg, Austria, and Martin-Luther Universität in Halle, Germany, and several visiting lecturer positions and guest professorships, at universities in Europe, the USA, Latin America, and Asia. She has initiated series of conferences, DOI: 10.4324/9780429352270-10

Eija Ventola  181 e.g. International Conference of Multimodality (ICOM) and Multisemiotic Talks (MUST), and given plenary and conference presentations all over the world. Eija Ventola has an impressive career, with regard to both the breadth of research fields and worldwide research contacts. The interview took place in November 2018 in Helsinki, Finland.

Academic Life Story Please tell us about your education, special interests, and your academic career. My academic life is a bit of an accident, but in a good way. I did my high school certificate in Finland, but before completing it, I had been on exchange in the USA. That year in the States made me see foreign language learning and teaching in a new light. In Scandinavia in the 1960s, language teaching was very traditional, focusing on structuralist grammar. My interest in foreign languages came through having to use the English language in context, in that American context. That meant daily learning of the foreign language and using it in various social interactions. This became an important impetus when I decided to study languages instead of studying history and archaeology, and thus I went to Jyväskylä University to study English and Latin, and later German (Latin was connected to my interest in history). In the early 1970s, transformational grammar theory was prominent in the study programmes for foreign languages. I did not really feel that that theory was useful to what I had experienced in using language in social contexts. I was a bit disappointed. I think the real motivation for my future career as a linguist came from a lecturer who was not in the English department but taught a combination course of sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. He talked about Bronislaw Malinowski and phatic communion and I thought: ah, that is what I am interested in. I started reading Malinowski (1923/1946), about his context of culture, context of situation, and phatic communion (keeping the channels open). I became theoretically interested in social interactions and was trying to think about ways of integrating these views into my Finnish MA thesis. I wanted to study casual conversations: how do we initiate and manage casual conversations? How do we learn to keep the channels open, the phatic communion that Malinowski talked about? But I lacked authentic casual conversational data in Finland (all the recorded conversations I could get hold of were more or less scripted and acted). I then managed to get a European-Australian-award to collect data for the thesis in Australia in 1976. Not really knowing Australian universities, I chose Macquarie University as it had an interesting department which combined linguistics and media studies, and it was located in this fabulous, big city called Sydney, unknown to me. I told Prof. Delbridge, the head of the department, that I wanted to do something

182  Eija Ventola useful during my time in Sydney, and he suggested an MA in linguistics. One of my lecturers at Macquarie was Ruquaiya Hasan, who had just arrived in Sydney with her husband Michael Halliday, who had accepted a professorship in linguistics at Sydney University. I actually ended up collecting data for two theses, had numerous interesting, long, at times strenuous, discussions with Ruqaiya about the data and theoretical approaches, finished my Macquarie MA, and came back to Finland and finished my MA in English for Jyväskylä University. What next? I wanted to continue doing research, and I managed to get back to Australia with a one-year Rotary Foundation funding. I started a PhD with Ruquaiya Hasan at Macquarie University, but after receiving a full-time PhD scholarship from Sydney University, I transferred to Michael Halliday’s lively department and became Jim Martin’s first PhD student. In 1985, I finished my PhD which was in 1987 published with a title The Structure of Social Interaction: A Systemic Approach to Semiotics of Service Encounters. After the PhD, I first had a job at Jyväskylä University as an assistant and then got appointed to a lectureship in linguistics at Oulu University, but almost immediately got the British Council Award and spent a year in Britain (with Robin Fawcett and Margaret Berry). Then followed a post as Director of the Language Centre at Helsinki University. That was a very administrative job, which was difficult for me, because I was still so enthusiastic about doing research, so I moved to the English department. In 1992, I received a Humboldt Research Award and went to Germany for two years to do research with Prof. Konrad Ehlich in Munich. Our common interests circulated around pragmatics and social interactions, but I was also doing research on academic discourse writing and conference presentations, specifically non-native difficulties in Finnish and German contexts. While in Germany, I applied for an English linguistics professorship in Halle, Sachsen-Anhalt, at Martin-Luther-Universität. There in my teaching, I tried my best to do linguistics ‘applicable’, selecting topics in such areas as local tourism and business. From the city of salt and Händel, Halle, I moved on to the city of salt and Mozart, Salzburg. At the University of Salzburg, I continued to work with the students on research themes in tourism involving Mozart. In my youth I had worked in a summer job as a tourist guide, and now I had an excellent opportunity to combine my first-hand guiding experiences with language and multimodal issues with tourism and museums, in fact, cities as semiotic concepts, working with the students on themes concerning their own social spaces, hoping that they could combine their learning with their own planned careers. From Salzburg I returned back to Finland, to Helsinki University English Department, to teach linguistics and multimodality, but also literature, which was part of my professorship. I specialised in Australian literature, of course. Then an opportunity for a professorship at

Eija Ventola  183 Aalto University arose. This university was created by joining the School of Design, the Technical University, and the Business School together to create Aalto University. With such field combinations it seemed an optimal place for trying out various multimodal analyses with a linguistic perspective with students of business communication.

The Field How were you first introduced to SFL/social semiotics? Conversation was my major interest during my early studies. It had not been discussed a lot, or only in very regulated contexts, like the classroom, where one person has the power and the others are powerless, so to speak. Whereas the social interactions in casual conversations and in service encounters can go both ways. They can be successful, sometimes they fail, and you have to be flexible in order to see how you can take it on. And it is the dynamics of the conversations which particularly interested me. My Australian MA thesis was on casual conversations and conversation management. I was combining my linguistic interest in conversation with what I had previously learnt about social interaction through social psychology and anthropology by reading mainly Michael Argyle, Erving Goffman, and Adam Kendon and through ethnography of speaking (Dell Hymes and John Gumperz). Ruquaiya Hasan, then, became interested in what I was interested in my MA thesis. She lectured on language and context and register. Little by little she was getting students interested in systemic functional linguistics (SFL), without really emphasising the approach, as at that stage at Macquarie University the SFL approach was not well known. The two of us had long discussions about language, Malinowski, etc. What Ruquaiya Hasan was saying to me about context of culture and context of situation in Hallidayan terms was helping me to sort out my focus in the thesis. My perspective was in studying how friends use language for social interaction when they meet casually, in contrast to when strangers meet and get to know each other. I enjoyed researching how the structure is built up in a casual conversation from different kinds of phases in conversations between friends and strangers, and how the strangers have to keep the level of knowledge and understanding of each other on equal terms in order to keep the conversation pleasantly phatic (see Ventola 1979). After returning to Australia for my PhD, I continued with my conversational interests and chose service encounters as the topic for my PhD research. After casual conversation, I felt that I would like to do something that was applicable in the business sense, in carrying out successful service encounters. We all have to deal with service encounters in foreign cultures. The dialogues that you saw in any teaching programmes/textbooks at that time were written out as mere question/answer sequences;

184  Eija Ventola that structure made service interactions sound like unfriendly, impolite interrogations, e.g. TRAVEL AGENT: ‘Where do you want to CUSTOMER: ‘I want to go to England’. TRAVEL AGENT: ‘Where in England?’ CUSTOMER: ‘London’.

go?’

Such pairs as in the example, were called ‘adjacency pairs’ within American Conversation Analysis (CA) framework. In textbooks, teaching adjacency pairs appeared as rigid, without any notion of dynamics in negotiating the dialogue, except for ‘repair specification’, as shown in the example. Very often the textbooks, for example, travel agency dialogues about booking a ticket or something, did not even have a proper conversational starting, the transitions from one phase to another either did not exist or were abrupt, and they did not end. Model dialogues just started in the middle of some conversation that was supposed to illustrate a grammatical point. The learners had no sense of how to start the conversation appropriately, the various possibilities of realising the conversation, or getting it on track, when it seemed to go off track, and how to bring it to a satisfactory end for all participants (for my criticism, see Ventola 1987b, 1990). I collected two kinds of data for my PhD. I wanted to study how the native Australian English speakers conducted and managed their service encounters. And since I had foreign language teaching and learning also in mind, I further collected data with Finnish migrants, who lived in Australia or had just come to Australia, recording their interactions in service encounters. The first set of data turned out to give me so much material for the PhD, that the second set, the Finnish migrants’ skills of managing service encounters, I only worked later on in Finland, comparing the learners’ English skills in service encounters, to the ways the service encounters in Australia and Finland typically unfold. Being aware of cultural and language-based differences helps even a learner with minimal foreign language skills to complete the service interaction satisfactorily, as I have pointed out in some of my publications (e.g. Ventola 1990). Studying the service conversations made me realise to what degree successful communication also depends on non-verbal factors in the encounter, and thus I saw the necessity of studying service encounters, not only linguistically but multisemiotically. Once at Sydney University, I became a member of a very interesting group called The Genre Group (led by James Martin, and with, e.g. Guenther Plum, Suzanne Eggins, Cate Poynton, Anne Thwaite, Chris Nesbitt – some of whom continued in a later interest group called the Newtown Semiotic Circle), and we had very lively discussions arguing about various sorts of linguistic questions. One of the issues that I was concerned with was that I had different kinds of interesting data, but the

Eija Ventola  185 use of Hallidayan context of situation variables – field, tenor, and mode – was not sufficient to show the similarities and differences in my data. The service encounters differed in terms of field (post office, souvenir shop, and travel agency data), but were similar in tenor (customer-server) and partly in mode (face-to-face, but at times, e.g. non-verbal). The data was much richer than the service encounter examples discussed previously in the research literature (many of the examples scripted). When service encounter interactants knew each other, other tenor choices seemed to apply, and at times service conversations seemed to shift to casual conversations. Even in terms of mode, communication channels, there seemed to be differences in stages, like booking confirmations by the travel agents, that at times were done by phone, and so on. I needed something that could join together the different kinds of data across various fields, but which could give us a much more dynamic representation of what was going on in service encounters. Service encounters had typical overall global structures, similarly to the casual conversations. Each phase of the global structure seemed to be dynamically unfolding in the communicative situation, following the interactive needs of the interactants, and thus at each stage the combinational values of field, tenor, and mode seemed to be renegotiated. This is where the notion of genre and socially recognisable generic structures gave me a helping hand. I needed something that would show these recognisable global structures that we are socialised into and how they are realised by our linguistic and non-verbal behaviour. Yet, I also needed to explain the flexibility of shaping the unfolding service structure as we negotiated it with our interactive partners. It was these global structures and their realisations that we were also arguing about in the genre group: ‘What is genre? What are its manifestations – socially recognizable “understandings” of how interactions unfold? And how can we deal with the varying register variation shown in the different phases of the service encounter data? Do we just focus on linguistic realizations, or do we also need to focus on other semiotic systems to study the encounters? How about the multiple, different realizations of the actual unfolding of service encounters? How do you activate different potential of language (and other semiotic systems) as you go through the development of the social interaction? How do you vary the social interaction linguistically and non-verbally? How to capture that potential of dynamism of unfolding?’ (I ended up representing it with a flowchart). All these issues were vital for the topic of my PhD (Ventola 1987a) and our dialogues and argumentation in the genre group ultimately led to the model of language/other semiotic systems – register – genre, so well-known within the SFL literature. You really have been building bridges between the Australian tradition and the European? Yes. I came back with the theories I learned in Australia and the ideas that I had, but I think it was too early for the Finnish linguistic landscape

186  Eija Ventola in a way. In the mid-1980s I lectured on conversation management at Tampere University as an hourly paid teacher, and also at Jyväskylä University. But at that time many linguists at Finnish universities were still only just recovering from the Chomskyan revolution and thanks to Professor Nils-Erik Enkvist who was promoting text linguistics, also others started to study spoken discourse-related phenomena (e.g. the use of particles in conversations), but unfortunately, many turned to CA, which in my view is not semiotically as rich as the Hallidayan approach. But one area of contribution of SFL in Finland that I managed to open up was the study of academic discourse, specifically academic writing, that is, what we need to do in terms of helping the non-native writers to write academic texts in English, and how to help the native speakers help the non-natives in text production, beyond correcting the obvious grammatical/lexical mistakes. As the director of the Language Centre at Helsinki University, I was also in charge of the language revision section for academic writing, i.e. the university researchers could send their papers to be ‘checked for English’ before they were sent to the publishers. I looked at some of the work that the language revisers did, and I was not very happy with the kind of comments they gave to writers. Many language revisers did not have a way of looking at a text textually. They worked very much with the unit of a clause, without looking at the whole of the argumentation structure that was going through the scientific articles that they were revising. Thus, the revised texts might have had more ‘correct’ English, but textually they were not improved. Together with Anna Mauranen, at that time teacher at the Language Centre, we started organising training courses, for both the writers and the revisers from the textual point of view, applying SFL notions widely (see e.g. Ventola and Mauranen 1991). And I think that we helped a lot of the writers to get published in English, a whole generation of writers in Finland really, because we offered these courses at various Finnish universities. I believe we helped the writers to see what their difficulties on various linguistic levels were when writing in English. This work helped me see the function of the register and genre working in the context, in different kinds of texts. Later, of course, I realised that focusing just on text was not even enough in academic papers, but that we also needed to think of other semiotics – tables, graphs, layouts, and their communicative purposes. And, of course, when one moves away from academic texts, e.g. advertising texts in tourism or business, the communicative purposes of images and their meaning-making need a richer semiotic approach – the multimodal and multisemiotic approach – from which I later benefitted and which I hope I also helped to develop in a minute way in my teaching and publications. You have also contributed to the development of the theory of exchange structures. Where does this notion originally come from? Language philosophers, J.L. Austin and John J. Searle, wrote about their views on direct and indirect speech acts and their functions in the

Eija Ventola  187 1960s. Their views were further developed by several linguists into theories in pragmatics. Speech acts also interested scholars closer to sociology, social anthropology, ethnography and they developed their approach into ethnomethodology, and further into Conversational Analysis (CA), e.g. Schegloff, Jefferson, Sachs (1974). CA focused on audio-recorded, transcribed conversations data of various kinds. CA researchers also differed from language philosophers and early pragmatists in that they, not only looked at individual speech acts and their functions, but were also interested in sequencing in talk, sequencing of turns, and sequencing of ‘adjacency pairs’ – their seminal units for analyses. Further, they were also interested in repairing of adjacency pairs in turns. That is, if you do not do the first move right, you can do a repair, and it is a negotiation process between the interactants. That was very interesting for me from the beginning, and later helped me in my work on the dynamic development of conversations. The notions of turn-taking and adjacency pair already indicated towards developing the theoretical notion of exchange structures in SFL, e.g. John Sinclair and Malcom Coulthard’s work in classroom discourse indicated that teacher-pupil talk did not take place in two-part exchanges in turns, but in three-part exchanges: the teacher initiating and the pupil responding and then the teacher giving feedback to the pupil. Within SFL, Margaret Berry (1981) and James Martin (1981) were also at that time interested in speech acts and the mechanics of sequencing them. What proved very useful for my analyses of service encounter data were Berry’s views on exchanges being directed either on information or on action, and that the structure of the unfolding exchange depended on who the primary or the secondary knower or actor was in the exchange. For example, in classroom discourse the teacher is the primary knower of the information, but can delay displaying the knowledge, when checking out whether the pupil knows the information, e.g. ‘What is the capital of Finland? – Stockholm? – Finland’. In contrast, for example, in doctor-patient discourse, during the examination, the patient is the primary knower of his/her pains – e.g. ‘Does your throat hurt? – Yes. It is sore’. So, Berry brings out the importance of considering the social roles, when the nature of exchanges is analysed. All this previous work on speech acts and their functions, turn-taking, adjacency pairs and exchanges proved very useful for me in the analysis of service encounter interaction. I developed exchange structure further to show how the different kinds of exchanges unfolded in service encounters, depending on its various phases, and how the primary knower/ actor roles could change during the negotiation processes for goods and services. The exchange structure analysis can help us to see what is going on in the negotiating process from the beginning to an end in conversation. It shows the moves in exchanges needed to initiate the encounter, and how the moves in exchanges differ when we move on to the next phase, or how the exchanges are construed when the service encounter is brought to a satisfactory completion. It also helps you to see what can

188  Eija Ventola go wrong, off-track, in exchanges and how to repair the discourse and bring it back on-track. By analysing the exchanges, you can see the work the interactants achieve through talk and action, and you can see where the boundaries of various discourse phases are and how the boundaries are indicated, thus guaranteeing smooth transitions in talk. All this was very useful for me for understanding the nature of service encounters. The work I did in my PhD was picked up by some surprising fields, e.g. computing (Anslee and Clarke n.d.) where the notion of genre and flowcharting was used to study the library context and how you go through the process of borrowing books and returning them, the purpose being the technological automation of library services. It is interesting to see that you can have and enhance other people’s ideas and help their work. So, the expansion to other modes has come along the way? Yes, the technological change from audio-recording to video recording demanded us to develop tools for analysing not just talk, but other semiotic modes operating in social interactions. You could study conversation, like I did first, on the basis of audio recordings. But when you are working with a transcript of the recording, social interaction is changed to a static text that you study. You have perhaps noted a few things down, as an ethnographic observer in the situation, concerning what went on non-verbally. But you cannot study the ‘other semiotics’ to its fullest without the video recording. I remember when Michael Halliday talked about computing, he said that he was very disappointed in the 1960s when computers could not do what he had envisaged. I think that he was very happy later on, when he had the chance of seeing the developments of technology. I feel the same in terms of understanding what social interaction is about. We now have really fantastic analytical tools (those developed, e.g. by Kay O’Halloran) to study video recordings. You can build up different layers of social semiotic analysis in the video, focusing on different modes, which was not possible before.

Social Semiotics Would you say that social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics are equally important in your career? Or how do you see the difference between them? I do not see the need to differentiate those two at all in my career. Language is one way of realising social semiotics, one part of it. Michael Halliday wrote Language as Social Semiotic (1978), where he says very clearly that language is part of social semiotics. If students want to have an understanding of language as social semiotics, I advise them to go back to Michael’s book and start reading that. And I think he had a way of explaining things so that you could relate it to the social structure, the structure of the society that people live in. What characterises SFL compared to other theories of language?

Eija Ventola  189 Halliday argued very early on that what we see superficially as one linear structure, e.g. a clause, in fact is three functional structures, i.e. a clause can tell us about our experiences in the world (ideational function), about our relations with our discursive partners (interpersonal function) and about the channels we use for our communication (textual/ compositional). These functional realisations are motivated by the variables of contexts of situation – field, tenor, and mode – so that particular linguistic choices are motivated by the particular values of field, tenor, and mode, relevant in that communicative situation. This is what Halliday called ‘the metafunctional hook-up’, and he has, of course, explained this most important notion of SFL much better and more extensively than what I can in this context. This view is advantageous because it immediately gives you multifunctional view to linguistic structures and relates them to the social context of communication. What have you especially appreciated with SFL in your work? The metafunctional hook-up and the notion of genre and register. I am sure that I would not be a linguist had I not read about SFL and met SFL-linguists to talk to. SFL opens your eyes to see how language works. I especially appreciate that it gave me a way of understanding social interaction in different contexts. Through the ways that SFL has developed, it allows me to explain social behaviour. But in application it is also very difficult, because you are at the same time explaining how the world functions. You have to be very specific in your research, limiting your ways and trying to define clearly what you want to study. Otherwise, you might get lost. This of course applies to all research work. SFL is perhaps first elaborate to learn, due to this multifunctional view, so you really need to take patient steps in explaining it to students and go through the concepts, looking at texts that interests them and motivating them to see how the metafunctional hook-up works. And once you get through that barrier you can see their eyes opening: ‘Ok, I see now how language works in this context and why it works this way’.

Text and Context We would like to hear your way of explaining some of the central concepts here, such as text, context, meaning. I would also like to add ‘genre’ to the key concepts. I think I already indicated the links between context and meaning, when explaining the metafunctional hook-up, how we manage to use our language contextually in a meaningful way. But ‘text’ I think is a difficult concept. Earlier the distinction was made between text linguistics – the study of written text – and discourse analysis – the study of spoken texts (see e.g. Edmondson 1981; little consideration was, however, given to the fact that spoken interaction was made into a written text, when it was made an object of study). The distinction – text vs. discourse – was initially

190  Eija Ventola ­

‘Text’ and ‘context’ is a pair of concepts that we use. And you wanted to add ‘genre’, too? Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan wanted to keep ‘text’ as a realisation of linguistic organisation (phonology/graphology – lexicogrammar – semantics) and ‘context’ as a non-linguistic organisation that through the meta-functional hook-up motivates the choices on the linguistic levels, according to the situational variables of field, tenor, and mode. This model did not fully work for me, when I did my service encounter studies. I needed something ‘higher-up’, enabling me to see the service encounters as similar, whether they were similar or different in terms of the variations of field, tenor, and mode combinations at various phases, and whether they were looked at from the point of view of completed ‘texts/products’ or as unfolding ‘processes’ where the process was being negotiated using various semiotic modes, sometimes leading to goals being achieved, and sometimes not. And even if not, the interactions still showed similarities that would mark them as being of the same kind, belonging to the same genre. With the notion of genre, I could explain how we are socialised into the society, how we have notions of what to do and what not to do and how to go through social events. Genre enables to explain what socialisation is about; how we learn to go through various social processes and socially accepted ways of behaving. But social processes might differ in other societies and thus following our own socialisation in social interactions might mismatch the others’ expectations and lead to communication break-ups. Thus, genre is a useful concept for training in cultural differences. It is also useful in explaining ‘genre switching’, e.g. when casual conversational phases appear in the middle of service encounters, or when genres are taking features from various genres, and become hybrids, ultimately leading to new or changed ways of social practices (see Ventola 1999). So, you would place genre within the context of culture?

Eija Ventola  191 Yes. I am so influenced by Malinowski and still impressed by his work. He worked during a time when people were talking about language as reflection of thought. His description of using language as action, using language functionally to go through the various phases of a culturally recognisable social processes (in my words), was based on his observations on how the fishermen in the Trobriand Islands in the South Pacific varied their language use according to what stage of the fishing process they were in – at times language played a major role, at times other semiotics, e.g. non-verbal actions. But this ‘genre’ of fishing will most likely be realised differently in generic stages, linguistically and non-verbally, e.g. in the Northern hemisphere waters, due to the differences of contexts of culture and how members are socialised into that culture. I found his views on the difficulties of translating between cultures fascinating. You cannot fully understand the social process unfolding in a particular context of situation without also understanding the context of culture. Cultures are manifested in ways of doing things, in the genres that we have been socialised into ever since our childhood. Genres are the social practices in a society – the routinisation of certain ways of behaving into which we get socialised. Kids get socialised into having to do housework, for example. I, for example, was not born with the knowledge of washing the dishes (before the times of the dishwasher), I had to learn how to do it. First, my mother was teaching me how to do the dishes properly, and her socialisation work was complemented by the home economics teacher at school. Genre knowledge is about learning the processes in society that are functional and into which we are socialised. Knowing what works, what does not work, and partly also what is acceptable because societies rule certain behaviours out. For some behaviours, they punish us, too. This is all learnt in the context of culture. Jim Martin says that genre realises ideology. How can we analyse ideology within the tradition we are talking about here? Ideology becomes important when you try to work with for what purposes texts and conversations are used. Certain genres are available in certain cultural and situational contexts and others are less available. If you had not, for example, gone to the university, but you were all of a sudden expected to give or write an academic paper, you most likely would fail. And that is where ideology steps in: it is inclusion and exclusion through access to appropriate genres and their linguistic and non-linguistic realisations. Recognising ideologies is now more important than ever in the modern media-dominated world. We have to train students to be aware of harmful ideologies, realised both linguistically as well as using other semiotic means, particularly now, with the internet discourses. The more you understand how language works for various ideological purposes, the safer you can feel, because you understand what you are reading and looking at and you are aware of the ideological purposes behind the message. But it is not only the linguists’ task to

192  Eija Ventola unravel ideologies; rather we need representatives of various disciplines to work together to display ideologies. Does this also become apparent when you move to different fields of society? – You have been into business communication, the press, museums, social encounters, academic life. It is a matter of opening people’s minds. I have been lucky in life, in the sense that it has offered me various linguistically challenging opportunities along my way. When I moved to Halle, to take on the professorship in English linguistics, I found myself in a city which was in the former GDR, and it was striving to build up its tourism. The city, being the birthplace of Georg Frederic Händel, had a Händel museum. I organised a seminar that concentrated on the language of museums; we analysed the audio texts that guided the tourists through the museum, focusing their attention to the museum displays. Kay O’Halloran, who briefly joined the department, also taught students about visual meanings and their analyses. When one of the students wrote in his feedback: ‘I finally understand what linguistics is good for’, that was the delight of my life, I think. Excellent opportunities opened up to me also in Salzburg, where the students enjoyed studying in seminars on Mozart representations and the Mozart-museums, and in fact the whole ‘Mozart tourism semiotics’ of the city. The analytical tools also enhanced as the multimodal theories and technological tools were developed. Salzburg was just a fabulous place to do interdisciplinary work: tourism and language and semiotics together. As I have taken on a new job, I have also taken on new challenges. At Aalto University, Business School, I worked with the students on the kind of documents that they were expected to deal with in their future jobs as communication experts for firms, etc. I had students, for example, analysing how men and women are portrayed in businesses, and how female directors’ images are presented in company brochures, and whether or not the representations differed from those of male directors. We also analysed the linguistic and multimodal realisations of scandals. For example, one scandal concerned a well-known Marimekko designer, whose fabric design was discovered to be almost one-to-one representation of a painting by a Ukrainian painter. We not only analysed the similarities in designs, but also all the media documents concerning the scandal and how the company communication representatives quickly had to learn to react to what was going on and to respond to the scandal by publishing press releases, giving interviews, etc. You have also mentioned ‘register’. How important is that in your work? Michael Halliday’s early use of register was in general very influential. It gave ESP (English for Special Purposes) teachers their first tools to teach language related to specific fields. Thus, technical English or medical English were considered ‘different registers’ of language, contextually

Eija Ventola  193 motivated language learning. This, rather simply defined understanding of register, was at one stage very useful for language training. My use of register is linked with field, tenor, and mode and the unfolding of a genre as the social process. As we move from one phase to the other when realising the social process, we can vary the combinations of field, tenor, and mode for our communicative purposes. For example, in service encounters when the customer is in the service-stage, different linguistic realisations for the field ‘items for sale’ appear; once the decision to buy has been made, the language activated is from the field of ‘money’ when the pay-stage is taking place. Or the mode choices for good-handover-stage may be totally realised non-verbally, not using language at all. So, register is a useful concept, but not just like it is used in many contexts: the selection of field, tenor or mode are not just done at one go for the whole process; rather, as the social process unfolds, different combinations of these variables are negotiated and needed, and it is for this flexibility that we need the notion of register.

Multimodality You organised the first International Conference on Multimodality (ICOM), which has led to a series of conferences later. That was in 2002. I think that is probably my best achievement, because the conference will continue happening, I hope. I had been teaching multimodality in Halle and in Salzburg. Students found the approach really interesting. Because Italy was so close to Salzburg, and I had had previous contact with Anthony Baldry, Paul Thibault, and Chris Taylor, I decided that I would invite them to give talks. Then the question arose: why not also invite Theo van Leeuwen and Gunther Kress? They were both in London at that time, not too far away. So, then we ended up organising a conference, having about 50–60 people in Salzburg. I think it was a very comfortable and good conference with an exchange of inspiring ideas. We decided that we would do it every other year. So the subsequent conferences were organised in Norway 2004, Italy 2006, Singapore 2008, Australia 2010, the UK 2012, China 2014, South Africa 2016, Denmark 2018. A conference forum like that gives young people a chance to talk to people who have been working on various multimodal topics for a long time and helps them to establish international contacts. It is very important in today’s academic world. What would you say is the power of the multimodal approach? Once you start talking about multimodality and teaching it, you cannot see the world in any other way than multimodally (see Jones and Ventola 2008; Ventola and Moya Guijarro, 2009). We communicate multimodally everything, and it is just the complexity of multimodal semiotics that is challenging for us. We have needed new analytical ways of capturing different meanings and how they combine. For instance, people were

194  Eija Ventola interested in gaze and the meaning of gaze very early on, and Kendon analysed hand gestures. All this could have been combined with linguistics earlier. Taking into consideration these semiotic modes together with language has taken a long time, but it has been necessary. It could have happened earlier, but in the early 1900s various disciplines had to fight for their independence. Linguistics, for example, had to establish itself as a subject, and many other disciplines in the same way. It would have been better had we just had an overarching discipline where all kinds of different multisemiotic interests could have flourished together. We would have reached multimodality much quicker. But we also needed new technology to enhance the development of multimodal analysis. Who has inspired you the most working with multimodality? Probably I would not have started thinking about it, had I not early on read various publications by Argyle, Kendon and Goffman, although they have never been considered ‘multimodalists’. Their work made me aware that even as linguists we cannot just look at language. And then of course Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen and their image analysis. In the early 1990s they published the early version of their Reading Images in the Deakin series (see the interview with Frances Christie in this volume). That version actually, in a way, is a better version of it because it has clearer links with the systemic functional analysis than Reading Images (1996/2006), published by Routledge. Theo van Leeuwen and Gunther Kress have inspired me the most in doing multimodal analysis. Paul Thibault also, who is a great thinker and has done great interesting work on multimodality. Kay O’Halloran, too; I had the pleasure of working with Kay for a while in Halle until she went to Singapore. In her PhD (supervised by Michael O’Toole) she had worked with mathematical texts and images and was already then expanding her multimodal interests and ways of analysing multimodal texts. Once in Singapore, with good financial resources, she was really progressing very fast in developing her tools for multimodal analyses. Other examples are John Bateman and his film analysis, and Michael O’Toole and his work with art analyses. The DVD that he produced as an appendix in his book, Language of Displayed Art (1994/2010) is a good tool for introducing multimodality for students because in it he explains how to look at paintings, and other images, from the threefunctional perspective. Louise Ravelli and Maree Stenglin and many others have been doing interesting work on space analysis (see, e.g. Ravelli and Stenglin 2008). And today, of course, there are many others who are further developing the multimodal analyses in various contexts. How do you see the development of the multimodal approach from the early start until today? Where is it now? Very early on I argued that we have to look at other modes than language as well. I still remember when Jim Martin said to me: ‘We are linguists, let us just concentrate on language’. But when you are analysing social interaction, you have to understand that other modes are important

Eija Ventola  195 as well for realising the interactive process. I cannot put the finger on when exactly my multimodal interests started. I think that multimodal interests have always been within the functional approach, in the way that Michael Halliday thought about it, but in a bit ‘dormant’ way, because there was so much work to do with linguistic representation and analyses, so early on, we just did not get around to discussing it. As the possibilities of capturing visualisation through videos became more prominent, we also started developing tools to look at social interaction multimodally. And where is it at the moment? Our world representations are definitely more visual today. Thus, the need for being able to analyse communication processes multisemiotically is there. Some already consider SFL-based language analyses as being too complicated, and when multimodal analytical demands are added on the top of that, we have a multi-faceted approach that students may find confusing, too frightening to embark on. So, the question arises, how can you teach it? Or which particular aspects to teach? As a supervisor or a tutor, you have to try to see what students want to do with the analysis, what the purpose of the analysis is and perhaps then find the appropriate tools to answer the questions concerning the data. You have analysed verbal language and the images in museums. What is your take on analysing the interplay between the modes? I will take an example of a paper that I did with my one of my students (see Hofinger and Ventola 2004), on the analysis of Mozart’s image in the museum and the audio guide that should lead the tourist to the picture, give advice on what to see in the picture and then guide the tourist away to look at the other things in the museum. In this kind of a context, you need to analyse what goes on audio-wise, what goes on in terms of the spatial movement, guiding you where to look at, then explaining the picture that you look at and possible interpretations the picture gives you. We found, for example, that the language coding in the audio guide, forgot to guide the tourist to the picture. Somewhat confusing were also the explanations of what the picture was about, what you were looking at and how you were supposed to interpret it, what role music played in the audio guide, and how you moved your focus away from the picture to the other displayed objects. By analysing the spatial, textual/ audio and musical/audio modes and their meanings, we were able to suggest to the museum a new version of the audio guide which was tuned to a more effective co-operation between the semiotic modes. Our study showed that multimodal analyses are ‘very applicable’ and profitable in the context of museums (and no doubt in other contexts). What has working on space in museums and cities, semiotic landscapes meant to your understanding of multimodality? I got interested in space very early on in terms of the orientation to the discourses. When we enter different social encounters, we have our places in a way. Interviewer and interviewee are usually on opposite sides of the table. Sitting corner to corner usually means cooperation.

196  Eija Ventola These practices were already established in Michael Argyle’s early studies in social psychology, following his special interest in interpersonal relations. If we understand the semiotic space and how it combines with the other modes, it helps us to predict the requirements of the social situation and behave appropriately perhaps. It is obviously a mode that is structured in a very different way than linguistic processes. We have to talk to architects and engineers about space; they might give us some further tools to work with. We might consider what makes these specialists to consider various semiotic organisations of space. I was interested in looking at classroom spaces and architecture and the possibilities of different kinds of discourses that different spaces allowed (I never published a paper on this, although I gave some conference presentations on the topic). Very early on in Finland there was a very interesting group of architects that were designing school spaces for teaching. They had the concept of moving around, for example, from the classroom to the group conversation room, where the furniture was differently organised. The differentiation of space organisation would obviously influence what kind of communication would take place in each space (e.g. teacher monologuing to students in the classroom, whereas in group work rooms the pupils would interact among themselves). These architectural new designs were not accepted in the educational context of that time, and those kinds of schools did not become the prominent trend – not until now in Finland, when we have long since moved away from ‘the desk and the table’ kind of thinking. We have very interesting experiments in Finland with various schools. At Helsinki University in the Department of Education, they have experimented with spaces and learning, how kids move around in teaching spaces that may not have any furniture, or just bean bags, and how young kids have different tasks in different places, and how different semiotic modes can be used for learning. The previously mentioned architects had envisaged the impact that spatial organisation would make on the use of semiotic modes (language, action, etc.) in learning. Now their visions are being realised at least partly.

SFL and Writing In your work with students, how did you apply SFL? I had so many different kinds of students from various fields. You cannot just focus on one academic context. To the students of the BAand MA-level you want to give tools for writing good texts, so that they get through their studies and complete their theses. When you have specialists in academic/scientific writing courses or conference presentation courses (see Ventola et al. 2002), you need to study the kinds of discourses that are prominent in their social contexts and in which journals/book series they want to publish or which conferences they are to give their papers. In the business-student context, you have to learn

Eija Ventola  197 to understand what kinds of texts the students will encounter and will have to produce once they leave their universities. I think, SFL has given me ways of showing the writers how to organise the text in terms of the global, overall organisation, in terms of the section-ordering if we are talking about scientific articles, what linguistically makes effective introductions, good argumentation, good conclusions, for example, and similar aspects apply to conference presentations. And learning some of the SFL principles usually helps the writers/presenters to become critical editors of their own discourses. SFL opens your eyes to see how communication works and if you are explicit in your argumentation other people understand it and are also convinced by it. You said earlier that it is difficult for students to understand this other way of looking at language. How do you overcome this difficulty? For example, all writers are interested in improving their own texts. When working in groups you can get them to read each other’s texts and then working on improvement. When teaching them, I did not talk so much about the SFL theory as ‘theory’ or use the same terminology as when teaching students linguistic analysis. Of course, some concepts are useful, some things you have to teach, for example, global structure, textuality, and the influence of Theme-/Rheme-structure onto information flow, what kind of patterns you can develop, what works in one part, but not in another. You also have to talk about interpersonal realisations, e.g. the scale of probability (Ventola 1997). If you write everything in a factual way when you are interpreting the results, you are responsible for the facts, but there may be a possibility of hesitating a little bit, to reflect on what might be open to interpretation in the research. Non-linguists often do not explicitly think of the various linguistic possibilities of expressing probabilities in their writing, thus, it is useful to teach them those tools.

The Future Which of your academic achievements makes you most proud? I have already mentioned the multimodal conference series, ICOM. I am glad that I established that conference series because that gives the younger people the chance of giving their papers, networking, etc. It has also made me proud when students have said: ‘Finally I understand what linguistics is good for’. Or: ‘I will never look at things the way I used to. I see so much more in everything that I see’. These kinds of ‘eye-opening’ evaluations have occurred so often after analyses of various kinds of texts, for example, analyses of what goes on in advertisements in terms of the use of women in ads. Still, women are used in certain kinds of advertisements and other texts as sexual objects, etc. This process of ‘opening eyes’ for understanding meaning-making is the achievement that we all have to strive for when we work with language: we have to learn to understand what language does.

198  Eija Ventola I am glad that I have had the career that I have had, because I have learnt a lot about human communication, how we interact with each other, etc. I think I can explain a lot of things about social interaction in conversation and understand how to help other people, since I can see where the interaction perhaps starts to go off-track. And what would you have liked to do that you have not yet done? I am still fascinated by Händel and Mozart and the tourismconnection. I find commercialisation and commodification of Mozart and Händel particularly fascinating, also comparing how these processes emerged in their lifetimes (Händel being earlier than Mozart) and developed in the later centuries. I have so many half-written papers about Händel and Mozart and the semiotics of going around in spaces connected with them. Further, comparing the commercialisation and commodification of the previous two composers to the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius, would be interesting, because he does not get as extensively commodified as Händel and Mozart. Yes, if you go to the Sibelius-museum, you may find some Sibelius memorabilia, but not so much Sibelius stuff in the shops around in Helsinki. Are we being more protective in commodifying Sibelius, or merely modest, I do not know. I still ought to write a book about these issues. But I have been involved with so many other practical sides of life at the moment that I have not found the time. Perhaps someone else will do it. But as I love travelling, I am glad that I have been trained to keep my ‘semiotic eyes’ open during my explorations. What do you think will be the main challenges to social semiotics and SFL in the future? SFL’s future, and multimodality: it has become so multi-faceted. Keeping up dialogue and developing theoretical aspects jointly with others and with ‘an open mind’ is important. Important is also marketing ourselves – making our views more widely known – we have never been very good at that. I once gave a paper in Beijing (Ventola 2014), complaining that if you compare us, SFL as a group, to pragmatics or the Chomskyan revolution, for example, SFL never did market itself efficiently, and sometimes we could have done more in terms of influence, having a stronger role to play in academic contexts, because it is a good theory – it explains how societies work semiotically! It is important to make it possible for the younger scholars to understand what is going on in the theory, but also to make the approach more cohesive. I do not know how to achieve that: through conferences, through networks, through research groups. Making sure that there are enough channels for cooperation and possible development, not just within the systemic group, but also in other interdisciplinary work. That is important. We achieve more when we work together. I hope that SFL goes on developing and progressing and producing ‘good stuff’.

Eija Ventola  199

References Anslee, R.J. & Clarke, R.J. (n.d.). Computational Modelling of Workpractice Genres Using the Protocol Method (PA). www.researchgate.net. Berry, M. (1981). Systemic linguistics and discourse analysis: a multilayered approach to exchange structure. In M. Coulthard & M. Montgomery (Eds.), Studies in Discourse Analysis (pp. 120–145). Routledge and Kegan Paul. Edmondson, W. (1981). Spoken Discourse: A Model for Analysis. Longman. Malinowski, B. (1946). The problem of meaning in primitive languages. In C.K. Ogden & I.A. Richards (Eds.), The Meaning of meaning. A Study of the Influence of Language Upon Thought and of Science of Symbolism. With Supplementary Essays by B. Malinowski & F. G. Crookshank (pp. 296– 336). (Original work published 1923). K. Paul, Trend, Trubner. Martin, J.R. (1981). How many speech acts? University of East Anglia Papers in Linguistics, 14–16, 53–77. Halliday, M.A.K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic. Arnold. Hofinger, A. & Ventola, E. (2004). Multimodality in operation: language and picture in a museum. In E. Ventola, C. Charles & M. Kaltenbacher (Eds.), Perspectives in Multimodality (pp. 193–209). John Benjamins. Jones, C. & Ventola, E. (Eds.). (2008). From Language to Multimodality: New Developments in the Study of Ideational Meaning. Equinox. Kress, G. & Leeuwen, T.V. (1990). Reading Images. Deakin University Press. Kress, G. & Leeuwen, T.V. (2006). Reading Images. Routledge. (Original work published 1996). O’Toole, M. (2010). The Language of Displayed Art (2nd ed.). Routledge. Ravelli, L. & Stenglin, M. (2008). Feeling space: interpersonal communication and spatial semiotic. In G. Antos & E. Ventola (Eds.), Handbook of Interpersonal Communication (Handbook of Applied Linguistics 2, pp. 355–396). de Gruyter. Sachs, H., Schegloff, E.A. & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simple systematic for the organization of turn-taking in conversation. Language, 50(4), 696–735. Ventola, E. (1979). The structure of casual conversations in English. Journal of Pragmatics, 3, 267–298. Ventola, E. (1987a). The Structure of Social Interaction: A Systemic Approach to Semiotics of Service Encounters. Pinter. Ventola, E. (1987b). Textbook dialogues and discourse realities. In W. Lörscher  & R. Schulze (Eds.), Perspectives on Language in Performance. Studies in Linguistics, Literary Criticism, and Foreign Language Teaching Methodology (Vol. 1, pp. 399–411). Guenter Narr. Ventola, E. (1990). Linguistic difficulties in institutional discourse. In M.A.K. Halliday, J. Gibbons & H. Nicholson (Eds.), Learning, Keeping and Using Language (Vol. 1, pp. 493–508). John Benjamins. Ventola, E. (1997). Modalization: probability – an exploration into its role in academic writing. In A. Duszak (Ed.), Culture and Styles of Academic Writing (pp. 157–179). de Gruyter. Ventola, E. (1999). Semiotic spanning at conferences: cohesion and coherence in and across conference papers and their discussions. In W. Bublitz, U. Lenk & E. Ventola (Eds.), Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse. How to Create It and How to Describe It (pp. 101–125). John Benjamins.

200  Eija Ventola Ventola, E. (2014). Systemic functional linguistics and cyberspace. In F. Yan & J. Webster (Eds.), Developing Systemic Functional Linguistics: Theory and Application (pp. 370–381). Equinox. Ventola, E. & Mauranen, A. (1991). Non-native writing and native revising of scientific articles. In E. Ventola (Ed.), Functional and Systemic Linguistics. Approaches and Uses (pp. 457–492). Mouton de Gruyter. Ventola, E. & Moya Guijarro, A.J. (2009). The World Told and the World Shown. Palgrave Macmillan. Ventola, E., Shalom, C. & Thompson, S. (Eds.). (2002). The Language of Conferencing. Peter Lang. Central publications These are the publications that Eija Ventola herself together with the works mentioned in the article considers to be her most important ones. Ventola, E. (1988). Text analysis in operation: a multilevel approach. In R.P. Fawcett & D. J. Young (Eds), Theory and Application. New Developments in Systemic Linguistics (Vol. 2, pp. 52–77). Pinter Publishers. Ventola, E. (1994). Finnish writers’ academic English. Problems with reference and theme. Functions of Language, 1, 2, 1–33. Ventola, E. (1995). Generic and Register Qualities of Texts and Their Realisation. In P. Fries & M. Gregory (Eds.), Meaning and Choice in Language: Studies for Michael Halliday. Discourse in Society: Systemic FunctionalPerspectives (Volume III, pp. 3–28). Ablex. Ventola, E. (1995). Thematic Development and Translation. In M. Ghadess (Ed.), Thematic Development in English Texts (pp. 85–104). Pinter Publishers. Ventola, E. (1998). Interpersonal choices in academic work. In A. Sánchez-Macarro & R. Carter (Eds), Linguistic Choice Across Genres: Variation in Spoken and Written English (pp. 117–136). John Benjamins. Ventola, E. (1999). Constructing and maintaining sexist ideologies: horses sweat, men perspire, women glow. In J. Fisiak (Ed.), Festschrift for Prof. Kari Sajavaara. Special issue of Studia Anglica Posnaniensia XXXIII, 463–474. Ventola, E. (2005). Revisiting Service Encounter Genre – Some Reflections. Folia Linguistica XXXIX/1-2, 1–259. Ventola, E. (2008). Lexical density and grammatical intricacy in conferencing. In R. Geluykens & B. Kraft (Eds.), Institutional Discourse in Cross-Cultural C ontexts (pp. 271–286). LINCOM Studies in Pragmatics. Ventola, E. (2009). Selling Mozart in Salzburg – Multisystemiotic approach. In T. Vestergaard, I. Lassen & J. Strunck (Eds), Constructing History, Society and Politics in Discourse: Multimodal Approaches (pp. 149–168). Aarhus University Press. Ventola, E. (2011). Semiotization Processes of Space. In K. O’Halloran & A. Smith (Eds.), Multimodal Studies (pp. 220–238). Routledge.

11 Discussion

In this final chapter our aim is to draw some long lines across the nine interviews presented in this volume. What all the nine scholars we have interviewed have in common is the influences from the Department of Linguistics established by Michael Halliday at Sydney University in 1976. Most of them have attended his classes and have been supervised by Halliday or one of his close associates in the department, such as Jim Martin and Frances Christie, or his wife Ruqaiya Hasan at Macquarie University. So, we are looking into a generation of scholars who have a starting point in functional perspectives on language and communication developed as social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The significance of this research environment is beautifully expressed in Frances Christie’s memory from one of her last meetings with Michael Halliday1: He said to me, ‘You know, looking back, I think the decision Ruqaiya and I made to come to Australia was one of the best decisions we ever made.’ He went on to say that he was ‘quite proud’ that he had created the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. I was quite moved by this, and I responded by saying that their decision to come to Australia had had a major impact in my life, as well as the lives of many other people. We are asking where they came from, and where they have taken these ideas through long lives of scholarship; how they have developed new concepts and insights, and applied this in new domains of research, such as education, health communication, media, and cultural studies. We will take care not to exaggerate their similarities; they are all independent thinkers who have taken their linguistic insights in different directions, in response to the domains and contexts they have worked in across four continents. We find it interesting to establish both common interests and differences in opinion. Across the interviews we have asked some of the same questions about academic life, central concepts, and visions for the future. We like to envision this as a conversation between our nine interviewees, which we will attempt to stage in this final discussion. DOI: 10.4324/9780429352270-11

202 Discussion Another common trait is that all our interviewees are women. This invites reflections on how life conditions for female scholars may have influenced the opportunities and challenges they have met through their academic lives, and even more interesting: how this may have influenced their research interests and construal of their discipline.

Making a Difference The subtitle of this volume comes from the interviewees themselves. Several times through our conversations we have heard that the major motivation for their research work is that they want to make a difference in the world; they want their work to mean something for other people, to ‘do good in the world’ as Kay O’Halloran put it. We read this as a genuine form of idealism and believe this attitude may have been strengthened by the close contacts established with the fields of practice where the scholars have been executing their work. As Mary Macken-Horarik reported from her experience in classroom research, the teachers would say: ‘Become useful to us or we cannot work with you’. All of these scholars seem to be engaged in society, and the interviews show how that has inspired, motivated, and driven their research. This may not be exclusive to scholars in social semiotics, but we still think it is crucial that their perspective on language, text, and context is inherently social, which makes it hard to overlook social problems, and it invites the question whether any of these problems could be amended through the activity of research and teaching. Examples of this engagement can be found in all the fields covered by our interviewees: We see it in education with a special focus on groups that struggle for some reason or other; Aboriginal children and second language learners or the ‘boundary students’ that Mary Macken-Horarik says she has always seen as problematic. The challenge is, she says, how we can look at their work to be able to see their resourcefulness. In the USA, some of the driving forces behind Mary Schleppegrell’s work were her concern with immigrant children, and her experiences as a teacher in deprived areas. We see the same kind of engagement in health communication, where Diana Slade explains how communication failure may play an important part in critical incidents for patients. And we see it in Terry Threadgold’s research on discourses in the legal domain, studying how vulnerable women are positioned in court, or in her studies of how asylum seekers are portrayed in the media.

Entering and Contributing to the Field It is interesting to note that many of these scholars were not initially trained as linguists, but they have turned to SFL after certain kinds of experiences that led them to search for a functional approach to language

Discussion  203 and meaning. Eight of them started out as English teachers after studies in education, literature, or modern languages. Kay O’Halloran stands out in this company, with her background in mathematics and mathematics teaching. She describes her academic trajectory as a move ‘from the hardcore sciences into education and then into humanities’, adding that she feels very fortunate to be able to bring together insights from various fields. For all of the scholars these early experiences started them out searching for insights in language and texts that would be useful in their profession, and this was how they were drawn towards functional and context-sensitive approaches to language and meaning. Frances Christie states that after some years of teaching English she found that the traditional school grammar was not necessarily relevant when she was teaching children, and particularly not for kids in rural high schools. Likewise, Mary Schleppegrell found school grammar and how it was taught in the USA unsatisfactory and searched for better foundations for work with grammar in school. Clare Painter, from her experiences of teaching English as a foreign language, found that she needed to know more about language and grammar. So did Diana Slade, who realised that traditional language teaching did not at all resemble the language that was used in real social contexts. Eija Ventola took the same kind of experience from being a second language learner as an exchange student to the USA during her teens, and she found that the transformational grammar she encountered in her university studies was not useful for language learning. She realised that she was particularly interested in social interaction, which eventually took her halfway around the world to Sydney. Beverly Derewianka points out that ‘SFL gave us a way of talking about meaning in context rather than simply syntactic structure or lists of functions and notions’. Terry Threadgold reminds us that grammar had been missing in Australian education, and this was a gap that was filled when Michael Halliday arrived in the country in 1976 to set up the Department of Linguistics at Sydney University. She claims that this in time changed the subject and the education of teachers. From this point of departure, the scholars have taken SFL and social semiotics into a wide range of fields of practice, and also in dialogues with adjacent fields of study, such as conversation analysis, cultural studies and – more surprising, perhaps – postmodern theories. In the following we will look into their contributions in education, health communication and business communication, journalism and media studies. The tradition of applying SFL in education seems to be the strongest strand, anchored in Halliday’s view that what may seem like educational failure often is actually linguistic failure (Maagerø 1995). As we have pointed out above, a strong motivation for scholars like Christie, Derewianka, Macken-Horarik, and Painter, was to find ways of describing and analysing language that would be helpful in their classroom

204 Discussion practices and to their students. These scholars have all spent the major part of their academic lives in Australia, and they have had a basic influence in Australian teacher education and language learning in schools, spreading from there to the rest of the world. As founding President of the Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association (ASFLA) from 1995, Frances Christie stayed in touch with basic research in the field, at the same time breaking new ground in classroom research and influencing curriculum development. Her work together with Beverly Derewianka on School Discourse, exploring writing practices in classrooms across disciplines, resonated far beyond the borders of Australia. Christie has taken the lead in discussing Halliday’s linguistic contributions to school and education both in general and in very practical ways. In publications and conference contributions she has highlighted how useful Halliday’s view of language and his functional linguistics are for teaching and learning in school. Beverly Derewianka has taken the insights from SFL in two major directions: into the classrooms and into educational politics and curriculum work. In her close work with schools, she has introduced SFL into the field of practice with deep respect for the teachers and students she has worked with. In the interview she describes her role modestly as ‘to make it accessible to teachers and in the process to improve students’ literacy outcomes’. Her workshops on genre pedagogy are famous worldwide and have made a strong contribution to the development of genre pedagogy and the teaching and learning cycle, which we will discuss in more depth below. Mary Macken-Horarik did her PhD under Frances Christie, and her work on the domains of literacy has left its marks internationally. Like Beverly Derewianka she is very attentive to what is useful to the teachers, at the same time allowing herself to question established theoretical truths and pointing out the need for further theoretical development. She positions her professional life as ‘moving between theory and practice, theory and curriculum, knowledge about language and linguistic know how’. These three scholars define themselves as ‘educational linguists’ and emphasise that the educational perspective makes that into a different field than the discipline of linguistics. Hence, their occupation with the educational context bears consequences for how they see themselves as scholars. Clare Painter’s position seems to have been slightly different, since her main field of teaching has been linguistic analysis, though she has also been involved in teacher education. In her research her focus has basically been on how children learn and develop language outside the educational system. Nevertheless, her work on the role of the adult in facilitating and supporting the child’s language, has laid foundations for the understanding of joint construction of language, which became integral in the teaching and learning cycle. Her interest in child language has

Discussion  205 led to extensive reading, e.g. in the field of developmental psychology, taking functional linguistics into dialogue with the otherwise neglected field of cognitive psychology. Mary Schleppegrell has pursued research interests that in many ways follow the lines of the Australian educational linguists. Still, this must have been a very different experience in the American context where other perspectives on language and literacy have dominated. Schleppegrell has taken the lead in bringing SFL into teacher education and schools in the USA and she has taught generations of teachers how SFL can contribute to language development and language growth, not least among students with a mother tongue other than English. She has also contributed to an understanding that all subjects are language subjects in the sense that they have their own genres and their own registers that must be learned. In her work, she has created connections between Australia and the USA, but also between social semioticians within the American continent. Diana Slade and Eija Ventola both came into the field sparked by an interest in how important context sensitive communication is for English language learning. This led them both to an interest in casual conversation, which they have later taken in different directions. Eija Ventola points out that one of the strengths of SFL was that it allowed her to study language as social interaction. This brought her work in dialogue with social anthropology and conversation analysis. She has taken that interest into different domains of society new to the SFL community: service encounters and tourism, but also self-reflective perspectives on academic writing and the language of conferencing. Looking back on her academic life, she states that she has taken the opportunities that appeared relevant in the context she was in. We can see this as yet another example of the dialectics between context and meaning. Diana Slade took her research interest into studying language in the workplace, and further into health communication in close cooperation with Suzanne Eggins. Slade’s research includes perspectives from doctors and nurses as well as patients and their families. Both Slade and Ventola have also been part of spreading the field internationally, Slade through her work in Hong Kong and Ventola mainly in Europe. Another of Eija Ventola’s important achievements, was to organise the first international conference on multimodality. This field has been taken further by Kay O’Halloran, and contributions have also come from Clare Painter’s work on picture books expanding in particular the understanding of how the interpersonal metafunction works in visual communication. Multimodality also becomes relevant to her interests in gaze, gesture, intonation, etc., in children’s early language development. Kay O’Halloran shares the concerns for education with her Australian colleagues, although her educational experiences came from teaching mathematics. She had taught in low-performing schools in deprived

206 Discussion areas and found that social semiotics provided the theory that she needed to analyse what was happening in different mathematics classrooms based on socio-economic status and gender. Her interests in mathematics discourse led her to work more closely with language, images, and symbolism, which in the next instance sparked her interest in multimodality. Kay O’Halloran has, perhaps more than any of the others, been a founder, establishing groundbreaking research environments both in Singapore and in Liverpool. Coming from the natural sciences, and with a looser connection to the Sydney group, since she was educated with Michael O’Toole in Perth, she has gone her own ways. Her research has extended across several domains of public communication; however, her most innovative contribution may be to the field of multimodal social semiotics. In addition to studying multimodal discourse in the media, fashion, and politics, to name but a few examples, she has delivered vital contributions to developing methods and tools for multimodal analysis, including software for systematising the analytical work. This kind of work requires extensive collaboration across disciplines, which shows her strong networking abilities. The same could be said about Terry Threadgold, and her unique endeavours to unite the social semiotic perspectives with postmodern critical thinking. On the one hand, this has led her to constantly question established truths and provided an urge for further theoretical development. On the other hand, it has led to applied research in domains where questions of power, identity, embodiment, and affect are at stake, ranging from the courtroom to performances on stage. Needless to say, this kind of work connects theories and perspectives that do not often meet in the fragmented disciplinarity of modern academics. Summing up: the nine female scholars interviewed in this book represent an important generation in the disciplinary history of SFL and social semiotics. They have contributed to exploring, testing and expanding the theoretical perspectives, to apply them in new domains of society, and to build bridges to other theories and perspectives. And they have spread their ideas and work to new continents as well as communicating them to new communities of practice.

Theory and Practice As can be seen from our discussion of contributions to the field above, social semiotics has always been developed in close connection with fields of practice. We find this reflected in Clare Painter’s words: I think SFL has been so rich because it has always been taken into different domains, into the medical, into the legal, into the educational. And all those domains have fed back into the theory and encouraged rejigging and rethinking of the theory.

Discussion  207 This is in line with what Frances Christie states: ‘Good theory is, I  believe, informed by practice. Good practice is only ever informed by theory. There is a dialectic, an intimate relationship between them’. This dialogical attitude comes to the fore in Mary Macken-Horarik’s dream of bringing together teachers’ practical understanding of context with Halliday’s theoretical insights. Still, she admits that embracing both theory and practice comes with a cost: ‘It means you have friends nowhere, or you are a stranger to every field, in a way’, she says, and adds: ‘It is very difficult, – and very beautiful’. As university teachers the scholars encounter practice in their research, but also in their work with students, particularly in professional educations such as teaching or journalism. Terry Threadgold talks enthusiastically about why she found the school of journalism such an exciting place to be when she moved to Cardiff. It was a school that taught media and cultural studies academically, but also trained journalists to work in broadcast and print media. ‘You could watch what they were doing and learn how they operated and make your theories work in different ways’, she says. This may be one reason why so many of the interviewees talk enthusiastically about their work with students: they form a challenging, but very useful link to the fields of practice they are being educated for. Eija Ventola points to another practical dimension that may influence scholarly exploration and thinking. She finds that the technological change into the visual, to the use of video, provided tools for understanding social semiotics in detail. Clare Painter touches on the same point when she says that if she had the technical opportunities we have today when she did her observation of language development in early childhood, she could have analysed the proto-language sign as a multimodal complex, including gaze, tone, gesture, etc. Kay O’Halloran may be the one in our panel of scholars who has taken the opportunities offered by digital technology the furthest, developing software for close analysis and experimenting with automated tools. These are tools that can serve the purpose for ideas about multimodality to be theorised further and tested. She claims that we need new methods to understand new phenomena, such as communication across media platforms, which impacts on every institution in society. Close cooperation with practitioners in fields such as computer science and social sciences is essential in developing these approaches.

Central Concepts, Themes, and Perspectives When we ask which concepts from SFL/social semiotics they consider most important, the two that are unanimously highlighted across our panel are meaning and the metafunctions. Mary Schleppegrell connects the two, characterising the metafunctions as ‘the three lenses of meaning’. Hence, she claims that the power of SFL is in the meaning-focus

208 Discussion of the grammatical metalanguage. Frances Christie states that for education the most important statement from Halliday, was that learning language is learning how to mean (Halliday 1975). This focus on meaning shifts the way you see language, human identity, and eventually, learning. Mary Macken-Horarik agrees that putting meaning making at the centre in language studies makes SFL particularly productive for educational purposes. She also points out how important the metafunctions were in her own development of a theory of literacy domains, since they made her able to connect contextual variables to meaning choices. Similarly, Clare Painter found the metafunctions very important in the developmental story when she explored how toddlers moved from proto-language with separate meaning functions to a fully developed language with three co-existing meaning choices in the metafunctions. She also finds them useful for transposing social semiotic theory to other semiotic systems, like the visual, which she did in her work (with Unsworth and Martin) on picture books. At a more general level, she says the metafunctions give you entry points, depending on your research problem. This is also why Terry Threadgold finds the metafunctions to be fundamental, since they provide the scholar with the questions to ask, and with tools for teaching people how to begin thinking about issues of meaning. From her interest in interaction in conversation Diana Slade similarly points out that the metafunctions as a conceptual framework enable systematic analyses of what is going on in the interactions. ‘Without an analytical framework, our data are just that, data’, she states. For the sake of making the concepts accessible to clinicians, however, she prefers to talk about interactional and informational meaning. Interestingly, the interpersonal metafunction seems to be a dimension that has brought about productive theoretical reflections among our group of female scholars. Clare Painter points to the interpersonal as driving force in children’s language development, with support in Vygotsky’s ideas on distributed mind and scaffolding in learning. This is most clearly stated in her article ‘The “interpersonal first” principle in child language development’ (2004). In her work with visual communication in picture books, she also considers that her most important contribution is expanding the understanding of the interpersonal in terms of pathos, affect, ambience, and also focalisation. Diana Slade, in the book on casual conversation that she co-authored with Suzanne Eggins, also decided to focus on the interpersonal metafunction. This was related to their object of study since the primary motivation of conversation is to establish and maintain relations with others. Terry Threadgold claims that the interpersonal is the driving rhetorical function of language and connects it to communication as an embodied process that includes space for intertextuality, subjectivity, and the habituated body.

Discussion  209 Genre and Register A concept that is pointed out as both important and contested within the field, is ‘genre’. On the one hand it has constituted a widespread approach to the teaching of writing, which may be one of SFL’s most important legacies to educational linguistics, particularly in Australia. On the other hand, the concept rests in the middle of the theoretical discussion of how to see the relations between text and context, and how to theorise the organisation of strata in language. Eija Ventola considers the concept of genre to be crucial to her work on casual conversation. With the notion of genre, I could explain how we are socialised into the society, how we have notions of what to do and what not to do and how to go through social events. Genre enables us to explain what socialisation is about; how we learn to go through various social processes and socially accepted ways of behaving. She adds that genre is a useful concept for training in cultural differences. Diana Slade also found the concept useful for identifying genres and families of genres in casual conversations in the workplace. In her analysis she added the category of ‘chat’, which covered the parts of talk that could not be characterised by its generic structure but served a connecting function to keep the conversation flowing. Kay O’Halloran is one of several interviewees who refer to Jim Martin’s understanding of genre, which she explains as ‘how a text unfolds in certain stages to serve particular social goals’. She finds this useful in multimodal analysis, where you can map different configurations of semiotic choices in phases and stages. From the same starting point Clare Painter finds the concept of genre relevant to understand how language develops. She points out that children learning to speak a language, are learning the everyday genres, for instance of mealtimes or book reading. This example also testifies to the insight that access to genres is socially distributed, which has been crucial as motivation for developing genre pedagogy in education. For practical purposes, this understanding of genre has been central in developing genre pedagogy in the teaching of writing, and this influence has been particularly strong in Australian schools. The motivation has been to empower writers to master the genres that are valued and necessary to succeed in society. Beverly Derewianka, who has been influential through her countless workshops with teachers and schools, points out how her work with genres in classrooms is anchored in the everyday work on the curriculum. Her advice is to start from context, by analysing the literacy demands of the curriculum and identify relevant genres for the writing task required. She is very sceptical to seeing genres as

210 Discussion rule-based ‘recipes’ – a critique that is shared by the other interviewees. Though genres are useful tools for teaching because they are predictable, she states that this predictability varies a lot between genres, which makes it important to point out choice and flexibility in genre structures. She describes the uptake of genre pedagogy in Australia as one of rise and fall: in a first phase, genre pedagogy gave teachers the tools to differentiate writing tasks, followed by a phase where a certain set of genres were taken for granted, and taught as an end in themselves – a development to which she is very critical. In her recent work, however, she has seen teachers rediscovering genres, ‘and in a much more flexible way and embedded in actual curriculum tasks in the various learning areas’, she states. Australian genre pedagogy is theoretically inspired by Jim Martin’s work on genre, which can be seen in Derewianka’s adaptation of his functional model in Figure 3.4 (p. 10). Slade, Painter, and O’Halloran also point to his understanding of genre as their main inspiration. In contrast, Frances Christie states that she originally took her genre theory from Ruqaiya Hasan (1984). Then, when doing her PhD with Jim Martin, she found his model useful for educational linguistics. She points out that the difference between the two models is in how they place the concepts of genre and register within their understanding of context. While Hasan (and Halliday) use genre and register interchangeably, Martin’s model proposes that register and genre operate on different strata: genre relates to context of culture, while register relates to context of situation. Christie concludes that she finds values in both: ‘I was not ever interested to pursue the often fierce arguments about the differences in the discussions over register and genre. They are important theoretical issues, but from the position of an educational linguist they are not central’. This pragmatic stance may be typical of the experiences and thinking within educational linguistics. Derewianka argues that she prefers Jim Martin’s model because she finds it resonates with the teachers she is working with. Kay O’Halloran is well aware of the different views, and says she uses Halliday’s concept of register, but finds Martin’s concept of genre useful for ‘a higher level on the top of that’. However, she emphasises that genres are not definite structures, and that they develop all the time. Mary Macken-Horarik is perhaps the one most critical to the ‘formulaic’ understanding of genre that may have evolved within genre pedagogy. She says that the notion of genre as ‘poly-functional, as involving structure, addressivity and construal of experience’ is increasingly important to her. Looking back, she now considers her paper ‘Something to Shoot for’ (2001), to be a ‘reductive account of English and science’. Nevertheless, she admits that it has been helpful to teachers. A majority of Australian teachers in a recent survey claimed that genre was helpful in teaching students how to structure a text (Macken-Horarik et al. 2018). ‘It gave them something, but it does not go far enough’, she says.

Discussion  211 In the LERN project she saw how genre was a powerful way of thinking about choices and meaning in text. This experience changed when it was taken into secondary school, where the symmetry between purpose and text structure broke down. Working with narrative, poetry and drama, she saw the need for a more relational account. ‘We need a linguistics that is attentive to the “not-said”, or to the “said very subtly”, as well as the “said more directly”’, she claims. First and foremost, her critique is directed towards classroom practices that are based on a reductive version of genre, working with a very formulaic pattern of stages. This is very much in line with Terry Threadgold’s critique, based in poststructuralism. She agrees that genre is an important and interesting concept but calls for more awareness of the history of genres, and how that has shaped the ways genres work now. She characterises the view of genre taken up by systemic functionalists in Australia as ‘very straightforward’ and suggests that they may learn from the complexities identified in other disciplines working with genre. She is critical to a genre pedagogy that focuses too much on the structural side: ‘In dealing with register, they tended to go straight from the three metafunctions of language to field, tenor, mode and a register that belonged in an institution’. This must be seen as a critique of an analytical practice, rather than the theory as such. Threadgold states in the interview that register is one of the concepts that she has found most valuable: If you wanted to know where the chunks of text were coming from, from which institution, which embodied set of beliefs, which discursive formation, then intertextuality gave you the tool to analyse it. You just needed to think a bit differently about what you were looking for in the thing we call context. From her educational point of view, Mary Schleppegrell also points to a more detailed analysis of the context variables as the most powerful contribution: To be able to say ideationally, interpersonally, and textually what is going on in a text and how that relates to field, tenor, and mode. That is the true power of the theory and the tools. If you never get to that point, if you are just at the level of genre, you are not using the full power of the theory. As the other educational linguists, she is occupied with what is useful to learners. She claims that they need to focus on register at the level of the clause, in order to recognise the choices they can make as they write a genre, or the choices an author has made in writing it. Summing up the discussion on genre and register, these concepts seem to be at the centre of attention for at least two reasons. One is that they

212 Discussion are useful as theoretical concepts that enable work with text as purposeful in a social world. That is relevant in education as well as in other fields. This practical applicability seems to lead to a pragmatic stance to the theoretical debates about how to understand the relations between genre and register, text and context. Yet, this points to the other reason for attention: these concepts are central to how we theoretically construe texts in context, which is at the core of the social semiotic approach to language, text, and meaning. The work of our panel of scholars has contributed by expanding and nuancing the notion of genre through applying it in a range of contexts, and also by criticising mechanic and formulaic ways of using it. Context A fundamental assumption in social semiotics is that meaning, and hence language, is socially shaped. This inseparable connection evokes the much-debated question of how context can be analysed from a social semiotic point of view. The answers have ranged from pointing to supplementary theories in social sciences, to developing models of stratification that include both textual and contextual variables. Mary Macken-Horarik sums up two main positions: ‘Jim Martin identifies field, tenor, and mode as register variables, whereas Michael Halliday insisted that register is semantic, and context is social’. Her own view leans to Halliday’s position, since she wants to distinguish between situation and meaning. This stands in contrast to Martin’s model, where register is included in the context: ‘genre relates to context of culture, while register relates to context of situation’, Frances Christie comments. Clare Painter agrees with Martin in seeing the variables field, tenor, and mode as register variables, but she clarifies that they are ‘semiotically construed’. In general, she claims that seeing the context semiotically is the key to understanding these relations. The reluctance to draw sharp boundaries between textual and contextual dimensions may be understood in terms of the reciprocal relationship highlighted in several interviews. Beverly Derewianka explains it this way: The relationship between text and context is not one-way, it is not a deterministic one of the context determining the choices we make, but a reciprocal one where the language choices that we make both create the context and reflect the context. Mary Macken-Horarik talks about the same kind of reciprocity as an enduring question for her. In her own work in the Disadvantaged School Project (DSP), she says these perspectives helped her theorise the literacy domains and thus make contextualisation more principled. Terry

Discussion  213 Threadgold points to the same kind of reciprocity from a different angel: ‘the role of the reader/analyst is always a factor in the way in which contexts are constructed and made sense of’. In their applied research, the scholars we have interviewed demonstrate the key functions of the concept of context. Clare Painter points this out for the developmental context she has been working with: ‘I think it is very easy to see how language is totally embedded in the social context, and learning one is learning the other’. Mary Schleppegrell has experienced how important it is to be attentive to the contexts students bring with them into reading and writing situations in the classroom: The idea of culturally responsive pedagogy is really important in the US now; that teachers should meet students where they are and let them bring their experiences into the classroom. How that is or should be realized still needs more research. Kay O’Halloran in her work with digital media sees how the questions of context multiply: if we are analysing recontextualisation patterns across media platforms for example, we have to take the context into account. In digital media, this means analysing the multimodal text in relation to the digital platform (e.g., online news, social media, etc.), the time of posting, the author, and the related texts which came before. In fact, we have so much contextual information now in the form of metadata in digital communication, we can undertake large-scale contextual analysis in ways which were not previously possible. Terry Threadgold admits that ‘context is kind of endless’. This is why the analyst must be pragmatic and follow indicative markers in the text to find out where the complexities might lie, and where you might want to go further. In her own work, she has been interested in exchanges with the semiotic networks of other texts and contexts. This meant rewriting the textual function to the place where the corporeality of reading and writing might be located. In the next instance this relates to the interpersonal, since these exchanges must move through the bodies of those who read and write. Literacy Mary Macken-Horarik gives a clear definition when we ask what literacy is to her: ‘Literacy is a social practice and a technology by which we work with meaning and text’. Kay O’Halloran integrates the multimodal perspective when speaking of being able to use different semiotic resources in ways which are effective and appropriate for any context.

214 Discussion The connection to context is also mentioned by Terry Threadgold, ‘because you cannot just be literate in isolation’. And she elaborates: I think critical social literacy is ultimately about having access to the meaning-making resources of a culture and then knowing how to use those resources effectively. It is about understanding how language and texts realised in many media, operate within the frameworks shaped by a context and being able to have a voice in that place. Hence, these scholars see literacy as enabling for the individual, and dynamic in the sense that it relates to the resources and media made available in contemporary culture. And their view on texts and the literacy they require, is inherently multimodal. In practice, if not in principle, the scholars involved in the teaching of reading and writing tend to restrict the concept of literacy to written and spoken language. Frances Christie says she prefers to retain literacy for the written language. She adds, however, that ‘history might overtake people like me and decide that the term can be used more flexibly and metaphorically’. She comments that the noun ‘literacy’ is very recent. Even though she herself has been Chair in Language and Literacy Education, she admits being a little uncomfortable about using the term ‘language and literacy’, stating that ‘clearly literacy is simply a dimension of language’. She elaborates that the benefit of the term is that it unites the activities of reading and writing, and it draws attention to the differences between written and spoken language. Mary Schleppegrell, who has cooperated closely with literacy researchers, connects literacy to disciplinary resources: ‘For me, literacy is participation in discourses in different subject areas that enables students to be part of a community of people who think, talk, read, and write within these discourses’. In her recent work within the subject of social studies, she has seen the value of thinking about literacy from a wider perspective, including spoken language as well as visual elements. In her work with school discourse, Beverly Derewianka has also engaged in the literacy of the different disciplines: ‘Each content area has its own way of exploring the world, its own specialized knowledge, its ways of using language, and its typical genres’. In her experience it is hard to convince discipline teachers, in science for instance, that they should be literacy teachers. But they are more motivated when they understand that it is about the students learning how scientists use language to inquire, explain, investigate, hypothesise, describe, and so on. She is clear that disciplinary literacy may involve other modes than writing, such as diagrams, maps, charts, tables, graphs, and symbols, or sophisticated illustrations in picture books, she states, pointing to the work on multimodality done by other scholars. Likewise, Clare Painter sees other modes as important, though she herself uses the term literacy primarily

Discussion  215 about written language forms. When asked about the concept of critical literacy, she refers to Ruqaiya Hasan’s term ‘reflection literacy’, which she explains as being able to be ‘conscious of and read the ideology that is implicit in any text, and to be able to question it or accept it, but not simply to be positioned by a text’. This takes her back to learning about language and about how text operates, and developing metalanguage as tools for discussing and talking about language. The nuances in how the scholars we have interviewed see literacy, are not about absolute contradictions, but rather about what is the most fruitful way of conceptualising literacy. None of them would contest the existence and relevance of multimodality, but those who have mostly worked with classroom discourses, see the value of a more restricted and concise concept of literacy. On the other hand, the scholars who have actively worked with modes other than verbal language, see multimodality as inevitable. Eija Ventola states that ‘Once you start teaching or talking about multimodality, you cannot see the world other than multimodally’. Mary Macken-Horarik consents: ‘Once you see a text as multimodal, there is no going back’. Kay O’Halloran, the scholar who has worked her way into multimodality from her outset as a teacher in mathematics, simply states: ‘texts are multimodal, so multimodality is a part of literacy’. Cognition For a theory that has played such an important part in education, it may seem odd that the concept of cognition is hardly ever touched upon in social semiotics. Mary Macken-Horarik admits that cognition has largely been left out of the picture and explains it historically as a result of the contradiction between Halliday’s and Chomsky’s approach to language, where Halliday’s contribution was to emphasise language as a social process. However, she sees hints to the cognitive in Halliday’s metaphor of ‘construal’ as well as in Gunther Kress’ focus on the interest of the learner. Her own view is that ‘meaning making is a cognitive process, occurring interiorly but shaped by social processes’. She calls for conversations between SFL and cognitive linguistics, stating that ‘We can think about the semiotic and the cognitive as different perspectives on one process’. Kay O’Halloran says something along the same lines: ‘If we bring the social and the cognitive part together, we would have the whole picture of how we act physiologically, mentally and socially’. Frances Christie is also open to talk about cognition, and she connects it to meaning-making and learning. She points to Halliday’s work on a language-based approach to cognition, co-authored with Christian Mathiessen (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999), commenting that ‘this book argues that language is our principal meaning-making resource, and in that sense, it can be thought of as a “cognitive resource”’. She

216 Discussion concludes by referring to the work of Halliday (1975) that first sparked her interest in SFL: ‘It is a very fundamental learning theory, learning how to mean’. Based on her work on language development in early childhood, Clare Painter finds it obvious that from birth babies are ‘doing things with their brains, they are learning, there is cognition’. She has always been interested in the notion, and read the work of Piaget, Vygotsky, and other cognitive psychologists. Summing up her position, she says: I see in a way that a study of language development is actually a study of cognitive development. But as linguists we can capture these things in semiotic terms, and say that if we are learning anything, if we are building knowledge, then we need to have the linguistic resources to construe it.

Politics There has always been a social drive among social semioticians, connecting the social view on meaning making to social and political responsibilities. The female scholars we have interviewed are no exception. Those working in the field of education have had considerable influence on curriculum development, first and foremost in Australia. Frances Christie worked at the national Curriculum Development Centre in Canberra early in her career. Mary Macken-Horarik had a similar kind of career start, working at the School’s Directorate of New South Wales, and later she was an adviser and then a writer of the national curriculum (2009–2010). Beverly Derewianka is perhaps the one who has worked most closely with politicians, balancing the practically feasible with the theoretically grounded. She has been on the writing team for the English syllabus in primary schools, and involved with the National English Curriculum, where she had major responsibility for the Language strand from Kindergarten to Year 10. Recently she has been working with the national Language Learning Progressions for English language learners. Through this work they have all exercised extensive influence that spans from translating the theory into language that teachers and politicians can relate to, to writing the material for curriculum support. The literacy movement has been influential in curriculum development all over the Western world, to a great extent inspired from Australia. An example can be found in the work Beverly Derewianka has done as an informal consultant for the work with English Language Development (ELD) standards in California. Terry Threadgold has taken a different perspective, but just as political, taking part in the rewriting of the English curriculum from the British colonial past to one based in Australian Culture, acting as advisor for the government in New South Wales and Victoria. Threadgold’s

Discussion  217 most significant political influence, however, is in the field of University politics, working with equality, diversity, and inclusion. Her efforts as a university leader to facilitate equal and fair access to research opportunities point in the same direction. A third area that carries political implication is the strategic work of building viable research environments in the universities where the scholars have been working. Kay O’Halloran established Laboratory for Research in Semiotics (LRS) in Singapore. Currently she is building a cross-disciplinary research group from across the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. She emphasises that ‘cooperation is necessary in order to be able to understand what is happening in society today’. Her aim as Head of Department in Liverpool is to support colleagues and secure funding for a research institute to bring people together. Even in the content of her research, she is boldly facing the political challenges of contemporary society, for example, in her recent work with news articles and social media about COVID-19, George Floyd, and Black Lives Matter. She states that ‘the problem of today is to understand communication across the media platforms, because this communication impacts on every institution in society: governments, industry, education etc.’. Diana Slade has also established important research environments in health care communication, first in Hong Kong with Christian Mathiessen, and then in 2018 in Canberra. Recently she has also established an International Consortium for Communication in Health Care, involving institutions in China, England, the USA, and Australia. Her philosophy is that ‘working together across borders and disciplines will give us the unity and strength to realise our collective vision of creating a future in which healthcare is safe, compassionate, sensitive, and supportive for patients, carers and clinicians’. The same kind of belief in dialogue and collaboration has been the driving force in Terry Threadgold’s interdisciplinary work, setting up research centres working with gender and performance studies.

Female Perspectives In the interviews we have first and foremost been interested in the academic work of the interviewees. We did not ask specifically how they have seen their role as female scholars, nor about their views on feminism. Still, several of them touch on questions of gender, whether as topic for their research or as realities in academic life. In this section we reflect on the fact that they are all individuals who have lived and experienced life as women in a certain historical and social context. We are interested in how that embodied experience (as Terry Threadgold might have put it) may have influenced the opportunities they were given and the challenges they met, the questions they asked, and their ways of working and positioning themselves in the academic world.

218 Discussion Most of our interviewees stood on the threshold of working life half a century ago, in a social context where women’s roles in family and work life were rapidly changing in the Western world. While men would rarely be asked to choose between family and work, this was frequently an issue for women. Terry Threadgold’s anecdote about her supervisor’s reaction when she told him she was pregnant, and he took it for granted that that meant ‘losing her’, may sound funny today, but it reflects a reality of that period in history. Mary Macken-Horarik talks about how she struggled to complete her PhD with two babies and needed extra time. The other side of the coin was that she was awarded a scholarship supporting women returning to study after having children, which shows that these were times of transition. In her young days Diana Slade decided to return to Australia from an exciting engagement in Cairo when her mother fell ill. In contrast, she later took a position in Hong Kong, leaving her family in Australia, a decision that did not come easy. For Clare Painter starting a family and an academic career in parallel had different consequences, as it determined the path her research was going to take, when she decided to observe her first child for her master’s work and her second child for her PhD research on child language. This was not her plan, ‘it just happened to coincide with the time of life when I started a family’, she states. But it ended up as a lifelong fascination. The most severe examples of gendered experiences concerning power and positions in academia are reported by Terry Threadgold. Typically, these experiences were most severe when she was ready to apply for a top position as a chair, and ‘hit the glass ceiling’, as the saying goes. Her experiences include being bullied in an interview situation, being rejected on the grounds of her scholarly perspectives on postmodernism, and a prospected job offer that was withdrawn with no good reason. These were experiences she shared with female colleagues, and they inspired her later engagement in equality, diversity and inclusion when she herself became a leader in Cardiff. Though things are changing through history, she describes this is an ongoing exercise – always two steps forward and one step back. Whether gender influences the choice of research topics, is a question that can probably not be given a simple answer, but it is certainly worth reflecting on. We have pointed out how the scholars we have interviewed seem to be driven by an idealistic engagement; they want their work to be useful and make a difference in the world. We cannot claim that this is not the case with male scholars, but the emphasis on purposeful projects is certainly a characteristic trait that unites the whole group of female scholars. It may also bear consequences for the ambitions to pursue academic power for its own sake. In some cases, the priority of applied research seems to lead to a pragmatic attitude to theoretical concepts. As we have seen in our discussion of central concepts, many of our interviewees are satisfied to settle for theoretical concepts that work for their purposes. Kay O’Halloran states

Discussion  219 that she does not spend time pondering over concepts like ‘text’ as long as she is happy with what she calls ‘the basic Hallidayan approach’. Instead, she devotes her energy to new areas and methods of research. Terry Threadgold reflects on the relations between theoretical insights and applications in practice, saying that you cannot do both at the same time. She claims that Halliday’s linguistics has been so valuable because it has offered a tool for practice and adds that as soon as you start doing the practice, you have to forget for a while all that extraordinary history and all the places that Michael has been struggling with and tackling and trying to think about before he got to write the theory as it was. It seems to us that the dividing line between a pragmatic and a critical stance to theory depends on the context in which the scholars are doing their research, which connects to the purpose, and whether the work is directed towards theory development or empirical findings. Another question is whether gender influences the ways of doing research. An observation that we have found interesting, is that our interviewees seem to be team workers, more interested in achieving results for the group than in building empires for themselves. An example may be the development of the teaching and learning cycle, which has become so central to genre pedagogy. In our interview with Beverly Derewianka, some of this teamwork is demonstrated in Figures 3.1–3.3: Figure 3.1 (p. 37) shows how Derewianka as early as 1990 described a teaching unit in terms of a cyclic movement from ‘action’ to ‘reflection’. Four years later the term ‘teaching and learning cycle’ was coined in Joan Rothery’s (1994) model following a similar cyclic pattern (Figure 3.2, p. 38), and this has later been adapted to the version Derewianka presents today (Figure 3.3, p. 38). Along the way the model has been supported and developed by basic research, among others by Clare Painter who contributed empirical evidence for the role of the adult in facilitating and supporting the child’s language in joint construction of meaning. Mary Macken-Horarik sums it up: The teaching-learning cycle emerged through a confluence of studies focusing on learning ‘how to mean’ (Halliday 1975, 1993; Painter 1986, 1999), research by Brian Gray into conditions of successful literacy learning by Aboriginal children (Gray 1986, 1990) and genre-based literacy projects focused on factual writing led by Jim Martin (1985, 1993) and Joan Rothery (1989). This led to a flowering of new understandings about the intimate connection between language and learning. This notion of being part of a movement can also be seen in the answers to what makes these scholars most proud. Beverly Derewianka puts it

220 Discussion very clearly: ‘I see myself as part of a collegial movement, and I just feel privileged to be part of that’. Even the scholars who have held the most prestigious academic positions, claim that their reasons for doing so are to be able to build good teams. In Diana Slade’s words: ‘Research, in particular involving communication and social interaction, is and should be a collective endeavour and so I am immeasurably grateful to the research teams I have worked with over the last 30 years’. This attitude is also reflected in that they all highlight the work with students as something they are proud of. This applies to all levels: Derewianka talks about teachers and students, and states that her role in the field has been ‘to make it accessible to teachers and in the process to improve students’ literacy outcomes’, while Slade mentions mentoring young researchers as her major joy. Ventola says it makes her proud when students have said: ‘“Finally I understand what linguistics is good for”. Or: “I will never look at things the way I used to. I see so much more in everything that I see”’. Terry Threadgold expands this to her responsibility as an academic leader: ‘it has not always been just about my own teaching. I have always felt it was important to make it possible for everybody else in there to contribute in that way, and to really make a difference to the students we were looking after’. Along with the other educational linguists Mary Schleppegrell emphasises the work with teachers and students. ‘This work demonstrates that teachers and students can use SFL theory and metalanguage and find it helpful to them and support their learning’, she says. Mary Macken-Horarik states: ‘I am so happy to have been part of the educational work that began with genre and went on from there’, mentioning the grammatics project and the work on disciplinarity in subject English (with Christie) as her contribution to take the field further. Christie agrees, and adds other topics of expansion such as descriptions of pedagogic discourse and disciplinary discourses, as well as writing development. Hence, they are all aware of how their work has been closely intertwined in a collaborative effort for making their knowledge useful, and expanding it to meet the needs in the field they were working in.

The Future of SFL/Social Semiotics: Challenges and Opportunities When asked about how they see the future of the field of SFL and social semiotics, the answers reflect both continuity and innovation. Beverly Derewianka points to the importance of keeping true to the core values of SFL, which includes the concern for issues of equity and accountability. She makes the point that providing learners with the resources they need to succeed in schooling is an ongoing challenge. This is supported by Frances Christie, who says that issues of social class remain important, and by Mary Macken-Horarik who states that we need to know

Discussion  221 more about student semiosis, especially to understand the students who struggle in school. Frances Christie adds that much more work needs to be done on what constitutes the disciplinary bases of the school subjects. Mary Schleppegrell states that the challenge is ‘to implement a true social semiotics, and not only small parts of it that just get incorporated as another thing you do without going deeply into the theory’. Simplification is also a concern for Terry Threadgold when commenting on the challenges ahead. She warns about becoming too predictable and straight forward, concluding that ‘we need an open-minded social semiotic framework to think with – one that is inclusive and interdisciplinary and allows you to look at things from several places at once’. Several of the scholars also point to cultural changes that need to be addressed. Frances Christie and Clare Painter both mention the challenges from an increasingly multimodal and digitalised world. Painter points out how children today are operating tablets in learning and games, and along with Macken-Horarik she calls for more research in the area of multimodality. Ventola consents, underlining how multifaceted communication has become. Finally, these scholars emphasise the need for cooperation in the future. Frances Christie states that ‘SFL theory has always worked well in collaboration with other traditions of scholarship in sociology, education and other branches of the social sciences’. Eija Ventola thinks along the same lines, saying that ‘keeping up dialogue and developing theoretical aspects jointly with others and with “an open mind” is important’. Being accessible is also imperative to Diana Slade, who points out that this holds for both a broader linguistic and applied linguistic audience. She is enthusiastic about the potential of SFL ‘to significantly impact on education and organisational communication practices, so we need to work together collaboratively to try to make a difference to the lives and experiences of people and the organisational contexts they are part of’. Kay O’Halloran shares her enthusiasm and says that SFL and social semiotics must demonstrate their usefulness: We need to understand communication and show how communication is being used in different ways to manipulate, undermine, and support. To me, this is the problem of today. The material world was largely sorted out with science and mathematics. Now we are in the world of the human and of technology, and the world is dramatically changed. Look, what has happened with Brexit, Trump and COVID-19. It is our time now. We need to step up and take on the challenge. I do not know how far we will get, but we can certainly try. Eija Ventola probably speaks on behalf of all the nine scholars in saying: ‘We achieve more when we work together’. Which, indeed, they have also done by contributing to this volume.

222 Discussion

Note 1 Unless otherwise stated all quotes in this chapter are from the interviews in this volume.

References Gray, B. (1986). Aboriginal education: some implications of genre for literacy development. In C. Painter & J.R. Martin (Eds.), Writing to Mean: Teaching Genres across the Curriculum (Occasional Papers 9). Applied Linguistics Association of Australia. Gray, B. (1990). How natural is ‘natural’ language teaching: employing wholistic methodology in the classroom. Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 12(4), 3–19. Halliday, M.A.K. (1975). Learning How to Mean. Hodder Arnold. Halliday, M.A.K. (1993). Towards a language-based theory of learning. Linguistics and education, 5, 93–116. Halliday, M.A.K. & Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. (1999). Construing Experience through Meaning: A Language-Based Approach to Cognition (Open Linguistics Series). Continuum. Hasan, R. (1984). The nursery rhyme as a genre. Nottingham Linguistics Circular, 13, 71–102. Painter, C. (1986). The role of interaction in learning to speak and learning to write. In C. Painter & J.R. Martin (Eds.), Writing to Mean: Teaching Genres across the Curriculum (Occasional Papers 9). Applied Linguistics Association of Australia. Painter, C. (1999). Learning through Language in Early Childhood. Cassell. Painter, C. (2004). The ‘interpersonal first’ principle in child language development. In G. Williams & A. Lukin (Eds.), Language Development: Functional Perspectives on Evolution and Ontogenesis (pp. 133–153). Continuum. Maagerø, E. (1995). Verden kan forstås gjennom grammatikken. Et møte med lingvisten Michael Halliday. Norsklæreren nr. 1/1995. [Interview with Michael Halliday]. Macken-Horarik, M. (2001). “Something to shoot for”: a systemic functional approach to teaching genre in secondary school science. In A. M. Johns (Ed.), Genre in the Classroom: Multiple Perspectives (pp. 17–43). Erlbaum. Macken-Horarik, M., Love, K. & Horarik, S. (2018). Rethinking grammar in language arts: insights from an Australian survey of teachers’ subject knowledge. Research in the Teaching of English, 52(3), 288–316. Martin, J.R. (1985). Factual Writing: Exploring and Challenging Social Reality (republished by Oxford University Press, 1989). Deakin University Press. Martin, J.R. (1993). Life as a noun. In M.A.K. Halliday & J.R. Martin (Eds.), Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power (Critical Perspectives on Literacy and Education, pp. 221–267). Falmer. Rothery, J. (1989). Learning about Language. In R. Hasan & J.R. Martin (Eds.), Language Development: Learning Language, Learning Culture (pp. 199–256). Ablex. Rothery, J. (1994). Exploring literacy in school English. (Write it right resources for literacy and learning). Metropolitan East Disadvantaged Schools Program.

Index of Names

Adoniou, Mistry; Associate Professor, Education Institute; University of Canberra 56 Argyle, Michael; Lecturer in Social Psychology; University of Oxford UK 183, 194, 196 Austin, J. L.; Professor of Philosophy; University of Oxford UK 186 Bakhtin, Mikhail; Russian philosopher, literary critic and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language; Moscow, Russia 61 Baldry, Anthony; Professor of Linguistics; University of Messina, Italy 87, 193 Barthes, Roland; Literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician; France 69 Bateman, John; Professor of Applied Linguistics; University of Bremen, Germany 63, 72, 80 Baudrillard, Jean; Professor, Institut de Recherche Socio-Economique; Paris Dauphine University, France 158 Bernstein, Basil; Professor of Educational Sociology; University of London, UK 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 50, 56, 61, 92, 130 Berry, Margaret; Reader in the English Department; University of Nottingham, UK 182, 187 Birch, David; Professor, School of Humanities; Murdoch University, Australia 164 Bouissac, Paul; Professor, French Department; Victoria College, University of Toronto, Canada 162

Bourdieu, Pierre; French cultural sociologist; Mostly associated with the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and the College de France 163 Butler, Judith; Professor, Comparative Literature; University of California, Berkeley, California 159 Butt, David; Professor of Linguistics; Macquarie University, Australia 13, 55 Callow, Jon; Senior Lecturer in English Education; University of Sydney, Australia 51 Cassidy, Frederic G.; Professor of English; University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA 157 Chai, Kevin; Senior Data Scientist; Curtin University, Perth, Australia 79, 88, 93 Chandler, Daz; Interdisciplinary Storyteller and Senior Producer; Australia 153 Chandler, Eloise; Researcher; University of New England, Sydney, Australia 153 Cheung, Eric Lok-ming; Lecturer; Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong 140 Chomsky, Noam; Professor of Linguistics, American linguist, philosopher and cognitive scientist; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA 36, 61, 121, 152, 157 Christie, Frances; Professor of Language and Literacy Education; University of Melbourne, Australia

224  Index of Names 35, 44, 51, 55, 56, 57, 59, 64, 70, 121, 129, 140, 143, 164, 167, 194 Coffin, Caroline; Professor in English Language and Applied Linguistics; The Open University, UK 123 Colombi, Cecilia; Professor of Spanish; University of California, Davis, USA 120, 121, 122 Cope, Bill; Professor of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership; University of Illinois, USA 3 Coulthard, Malcom; Professor of Forensic Linguistics; Aston University, Birmingham, UK 187 Cowey, Wendy; Academic developer of the Accelerated Literacy Program (ALPAA); Australia 56 Cranny-Francis, Anne; Professor of Cultural Studies; University of Technology Sydney, Australia 3, 164, 165 Dare, Brian; Consultant in Language and Literacy; Australia 52 de Lauretis, Teresa; Professor of the History of Consciousness; University of California, Santa Cruz, USA 123 Delbridge, Arthur; Professor of Linguistics; Macquarie University, Australia 181 Demjen, Zsofia; Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics; University of London, London, UK 152 Derewianka, Beverly; Professor of Education; University of Wollongong, Australia 21, 23, 28, 66, 112, 129 Derrida, Jacques; Professor of Philosophy; The Sorbonne, Ecole des Hautes Etudes et Sciences Sociales, Paris, France 159, 162 Doran, Yaegan; Lecturer; University of Sydney, Australia 51, 105 Douglas, Mary; Professor of Social Anthropology; University College, London, UK 26 Dunston, Roger; Associate Professor; University of Technology Sydney, Australia 148

E, Marissa K. L.; Lecturer in English Language; National University of Singapore, Singapore 79, 92 Eco, Umberto; Professor of Semiotics; University of Bologna, Italy 162, 168 Eggins, Suzanne; Honary Fellow; Australian National University, Canberra, Australia 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 150, 152, 154, 205, 208 Ehlich, Konrad; Professor of German as a Foreign Language; LudwigMaximilian-University, Munich, Germany 18 Ekberg, Stuart; Senior Lecturer; Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia 152 Elf, Nicolai Frydensbjerg; Professor of Education; Institut for Kulturvidenskaber, University of Southern Denmark 72 Ellis, Jeffrey; Professor of Linguistics; University of Edinburgh, UK 11 Enkvist, Nils-Erik; Professor; Åbo Akademi University, Finland 186 Espandola, Elaine; Lecturer; Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong 140 Fairclough, Norman; Professor of Linguistics, Department of Linguistics and English Language; Lancaster University, UK 168 Fang, Zhihui; Professor of Education; University of Florida, USA 127 Fasciani, Stefano; Associate Professor in Music Technologies; University of Oslo, Norway 79 Fawcett, Robin; Professor; University of Cardiff, UK 182 Feez, Susan; Associate Professor in TESOL/English, Literacies and Language Education; University of New England, Australia 57, 59, 121 Finn, Judith; Professor of Health Sciences; Curtin University, Perth, Australia 89 Firth, John Rupert; Professor of Linguistics; University of London, UK 153, 167, 168 Fischer-Lichte, Erika; Professor, TheatreStudies, International Research Centre for Advanced Studies on ‘Interweaving

Index of Names  225 Performance Cultures’; FreieUniversitat Berlin, Germany 162, 163 Fish, Stanley; Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences; University of Illinois at Chicago, USA 69 Foucault, Michel; Professor of Philosophy; Collège de France, Paris, France 162, 169, 172 Fowler, Roger; Professor of English and Linguistics; University of East Anglia, UK 172 Frances, Raelene; Dean; Australian National University, College of the Arts and Social Sciences, Canberra, Australia 141 Frow, John; Professorial Fellow in English; University of Sydney, Australia 162 Gawande, Atul; Surgeon and Professor of Medicine; Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, USA 149 Gebhard, Meg; Professor of Applied Linguistics; University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA 122 Geddes, Fiona; Research Associate; Curtin University, School of Nursing, Midwifery and Paramedicine, Bentley, Australia 150 Gee, James; Professor of Literacy Studies; Arizona State University, USA 58 Goffman, Irving; Professor of Sociology and Anthropology; University of Pennsylvania, USA 183, 194 Goncharov, Liza; Manager at The Australian National University Institute for Communication in Healthcare; Canberra, Australia 141, 153 Gray, Brian; Professor of Education; Charles Darwin University, Australia 56, 60, 65, 219 Grossman, Michele; Professor of Diversity and Communication; Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia 88 Grosz, Elizabeth A.; Professor of Women’s Studies; Duke University, USA 158, 160, 162, 165

Gumperz, John J.; Professor of Linguistics; University of California, Berkeley, USA 183 Habermas, Jürgen; Professor of Philosophy and Sociology; Frankfurt University, Germany 164 Halliday, Michael A. K.; Professor of Linguistics; University of Sydney, Australia 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 35, 41, 42, 51, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 66, 68, 71, 77, 81, 83, 84, 88, 90, 92, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 111, 112, 120, 122, 127, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 150, 152, 158, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 175, 177, 180, 182, 188, 189, 190, 192, 195, 201, 203, 204, 207, 208, 210, 212, 215, 216, 219 Hasan, Ruqaiya; Professor of Linguistics; Macquarie University, Australia 3, 4, 6, 7, 13, 26, 27, 31, 42, 46, 55, 58, 62, 81, 105, 107, 113, 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 164, 171, 182, 183, 190, 201, 210, 215 Hjelmslev, Louis; Professor of Linguistics; University of Copenhagen, Denmark 164, 167 Hodge, Robert; Professor, School of Humanities; Murdoch University, Australia 3 Hofinger, Andrea; EijaVentola’s MA student; The University of Salzburg, Germany 195 Hood, Sue; Associate Professor; University of Sydney, Australia 62 Humphrey, Sally; Senior Lecturer; Australian Catholic University, Australia 57, 59 Iragaray, Luce; Director of Research in Philosophy; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France 162 Jin, Minhao; Computer Scientist; University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK 80, 85 Jones, Pauline; Associate Professor; Faculty of the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, School

226  Index of Names of Education, University of New England, Australia 44, 51 Joyce, Helen; Researcher; University of Technology, Sydney, Australia 147 Judd, Kevin; Professor of Mathematics; University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia 77, 79 Kalantzis, Mary; Professor of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership; University of Illinois, USA 3 Kamler, Barbara; Professor; Deakin University, Australia 163, 165, 173, 177 Kecskes, Zsuzsoka; Director, Medical School; Australian National University, Canberra, Australia 141 Kendon, Adam; Visiting Professor; University of Cambridge and Oxford, UK 183, 194 Keneally, Thomas; Australian novelist 166 Krashen, Stephen D.; Professor of Linguistics; University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA 119 Kress, Gunther; Professor of Semiotics and Education; University College, London University, UK 3, 13, 55, 59, 61, 63, 72, 81, 86, 103, 108, 109, 113, 158, 162, 164, 165, 169, 177, 193, 194, 215 Labov, William; Professor ofLinguistics; University of Pennsylvania, USA 175 Lakoff, George; Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics; University of California Berkeley, USA 121 Lakoff, Robin; Professor of Linguistics; University of California, Berkeley, USA 121 Lam, Marvin; Lecturer; Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Department of English, Hong Kong 140 Lange, Rebecca; Data Scientist; Curtin University, Perth, Australia 79, 88, 93 Lee, Marian; Emergency Physician, Senior Staff Specialist; Prince of Wales Hospital, Sydney, Australia 165, 168 Lemke, Jay; Professor of Semiotics and Education; City University of

New York, USA 3, 13, 16, 77, 80, 121, 164 Lim, Victor Fei; Assistant Professor of Multimodality and Education; National Institute of Education, Singapore 91 Lock, Graham; The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 121, 140 Luke, Kang Kwong; Professor of Linguistics; Nanyang University of Technology, Singapore 152 Lukin, Annabelle; Associate Professor of Linguistics; Macquarie University, Australia 61 Macken-Horarik, Mary; Senior Research Fellow; Australian Catholic University, Australia 12, 23, 28, 29 Macnaught, Lucy; Learning Adviser; Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand 59 Macqueen, Susy; Senior Lecturer; Australian National University, School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, Canberra, Australia 141 Malinowski, Bronislaw; Professor of Anthropology; London School of Economics, UK 6, 181, 183, 191 Manidis, Marie; Postdoctoral Research Fellow; University of Technology Sydney, Australia 148 Martin, Jim R.; Professor of Linguistics; University of Sydney, Australia 3, 10, 11, 13, 14, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 35, 36, 39, 40, 43, 55, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 72, 79, 80, 90, 97, 98, 108, 109, 111, 121, 123, 139, 140, 143, 144, 145, 162, 164, 167, 180, 184, 187, 191, 194, 201, 208, 209, 210, 212, 219 Maton, Karl; Professor of Sociology; University of Sydney, Australia 21, 23, 56, 57, 62, 70, 92 Matthiessen, Christian M. I. M.; Professor of Linguistics; Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong 7, 19, 25, 61, 98, 108, 120, 130, 139, 140, 141, 144, 148, 165, 215 Mauranen, Anna; Professor of English; University of Helsinki, Finland 186

Index of Names  227 McEwan, Ian; English novelist and screenwriter; UK 30 McGregor, Jeannette; Researcher; University of Technology Sydney, Australia 150 Mills, Sarah; Professor in Linguistics; Sheffield Hallam University, UK 168 Mitchell, Imogen; Professor, Senior Staff Specialist at the Intensive Care Unit Canberra; The Canberra Hospital and Australian National University, Canberra, Australia 141, 149 Monte-Sano, Chauncey; Professor of Education; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA 128 Moore, Rob; Professor of Sociology; University of Cambridge, USA 30, 62 Morgan, Wendy; Senior Lecturer; Queensland University of Technology, Australia 56, 69 Morris, Meaghan; Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies; University of Sydney, Australia 162 Muller, Johan; Professor; University of Cape Town, South Africa 62, 70 Nesbitt, Chris; Lecturer in Language Studies; University of Technology Sydney, Australia 140, 147, 184 O’Halloran, Kay; Professor of Communication and Media; University of Liverpool, UK 188, 192, 194 O’Shannessy, Carmel; Senior Lecturer; Australian National University, School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, Canberra, Australia 141 O’Toole, Michael; Professor of Communication Studies; Murdoch University, Australia 63, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 86, 91, 164, 194, 206 Painter, Clare; Honorary Associate in Linguistics; University of Sydney, Australia 13, 60, 63, 72, 140 Pal, Gautam; Research Fellow; University of Liverpool, UK 80, 85, 89 Palincsar, Annemarie; Professor of Reading and Literacy; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA 127

Pateman, Carole; Professor, Department of Political Sciences, Honorary Professor Cardiff University School of European Studies; University of California, Los Angeles, USA 162 Pether, Penny; Professor of Law; Southern Illinois School of Law, USA 162, 173 Piaget, Jean; Swiss developmental psychologist; University of Neuchatel, Switzerland 25, 216 Pickering, Paul; Director; Australian National University, Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Canberra, Australia 141 Plum, Guenther; Editor and Professor; University of Sydney, Australia 140, 143, 184 Podlasov, Alexey; Computer Scientist, Chief Technology Officer; Singapore 79 Polias, John; Consultant in Language and Literacy; Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong 52 Poynton, Cate; Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication and Media; Western Sydney University, Australia 13, 164, 165, 184 Pun, Jack; Assistant Professor; City University of Hong Kong, Department of English, Hong Kong 140, 141, 153 Ravelli, Louise; Professor in the School of the Arts and Media; University of New South-Wales, Australia 113, 194 Rider, Elizabeth; Professor; Harvard Medical School, USA 140 Riou, Marine; Assistant Professor of Linguistics; Lumière University Lyon 2, Lyon, France 89 Rohl, Andrew; Professor of Computational Science; Curtin University, Perth, Australia 79, 93 Rose, David; Director of the Reading to Learn Literacy Program; University of Sydney, Australia 37, 43, 51, 52, 65 Rothery, Joan; Educational Researcher; University of Sydney,

228  Index of Names Australia 3, 13, 35, 37, 38, 55, 57, 60, 64, 98, 111, 143, 219 Russell, George Harrison; Chairs of English; University of Sydney, Australian National University, Canberra Melbourne University, Australia 161 Sandiford, Carmel; Senior Lecturer; University of Melbourne 57 Saussure, Ferdinand de; Professor; Université de Genève, Switzerland 4 Schaffer, Kay; Professor of Gender, Work and Social Inquiry; University of Adelaide, Australia 172 Scheeres, Hermine; Adjunct Fellow; University of Technology Sydney, Australia 147, 148 Schieffelin, Bambi; Professor of Anthropology; New York University, USA 100 Searle, John R.; Professor of philosophy; University of California, Berkeley, USA 186 Sebeok, Thomas Albert; Proessor, Chair Research Centre for Language and Semiotic Studies; Indiana University Bloomington, USA 162 Semino, Elena; Professor of Linguistics; Lancaster University, UK 149, 152 Shiffrin, Deborah; Professor of Linguistics; Georgetown University, USA 120 Simpson, Jane; Professor of Linguistics; Australian National University, Canberra, Australia 141 Sinclair, John McHardy; Professor of Modern English Language; Birmingham University, UK 27, 187 Sindoni, Maria Grazia; Associate Professor of English; University of Messina, Italy 87 Smith, Bradley; Honorary Associate; University of Sydney, Australia 79 Snow, Catherine; Professor of Education; Harvard Graduate School of Education, USA 99 Solomon, Nicky; Professor of Education; University of Technology Sydney, Australia 147

Soosai, Anne; English Second Language Teacher; RMIT University Melbourne, Australia 19, 28 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty; Professor, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society; Columbia University, USA 158 Stein-Parbury, Jane; Professor of Nursing; University of Technology Sydney, Australia 148 Stenglin, Maree; Lecturer of Literacy and Learning; University of Technology Sydney, Australia 194 Tan, Sabine; Senior Research Fellow; Curtin University, Perth, Australia 79, 87, 89, 92, 93 Taylor, Chris; Professor of English Language and Translation; University of Trieste, Italy 193 Teruya, Kazuhiro; Associate Professor of Linguistics; Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong 140 Thibault, Paul; Professor of Linguistics and Communication Studies; University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway 3, 164, 193, 194 Thornbury, Scott; Teacher and Teacher Educator; International Teacher Development Institute, New York, USA 137, 138, 146 Thwaite, Anne; Lecturer for the School of Education; Edith Cowan University, Australia 184 Tomasello, Michael; Professor in Psychology; Duke University, USA 99 Torr, Jane; Honorary Associate in Education; Institute of Early Childhood, Macquarie University, Australia 103 Travis, Catherine; Professor of Modern European Languages; Australian National University, School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, Canberra, Australia 141 Trevarthen, Colwyn; Professor of Child Psychology and Psychobiology; University of Edinburgh, UK 98

Index of Names  229 Tulloch, John; Professor of Cultural Studies; Charles Sturt University and Cardiff University, UK 159, 162 Unsworth, Len; Professor in English and Literacies Education; Australian Catholic University, Sydney, Australia 51, 56, 57, 63, 67, 68, 72, 97, 108, 128, 208 Ure, Jean; Linguist; University of Edinburgh, UK 11 van Leeuwen, Theo; Professor of Linguistics and Communication, Professor of Multimodal Communication; University of Technology Sydney, Australia, University of Southern Denmark 3, 13, 59, 63, 70, 80, 86, 103, 108, 109, 159, 162, 164, 165, 169, 193, 194 Veloso, Francisco; Associate Professor of English; Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong 140 Ventola, Eija; Professor of International Business Communication; Aalto University, Finland 78 Vygotsky, Lev Semyonovich; Russian cultural psychologist; Institute of Psychology, Moscow, Russia 25, 26, 61, 99, 100, 111, 130, 216 Wang, Zhenhua (Eddie); Professor of Linguistics; Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China 80

Webby, Elizabeth Anne; Professor of Australian Literature; University of Sydney, Australia 161 Welch, Ariane; Speech-Language Pathologist, Memory and Aging Center; University of California, San Francisco, USA 109 Whorf, Benjamin Lee; American linguist 146, 168 Widdowson, Henry; Professor of Applied Linguistics; University of London, UK 138, 139 Wiebrands, Michael; IT specialist and software developer; Curtin University, Perth, Australia 79, 89, 93 Wignell, Peter; Research Fellow; Curtin University, Perth, Australia 79, 87, 88, 89, 93 Wildfeuer, Janina; Assistant Professor in Language and Social Interaction; University of Groningen, Netherlands 87 Williams, Geoff; Professor of Language and Literacy Education; University of British Columbia, Canada 27, 61, 128 Xunfeng, Xu; Associate Professor; Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong 140 Zhang, Kaela; Researcher; Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong 140