Systemic Functional Linguistics in Teaching English Beyond School

Abstract

The seeds of SFL as a theory of language have gone hand in hand with applications to teaching from its inception, and SFL-based educationalists have promoted a pedagogy which is strongly rooted in descriptions of language as it is used in specific contexts and situations. However, it is a call for applications of SFL beyond these contexts of schooling that the articles in this special issue address. Given the focus in SFL on increasing repertoires of language resources, or the gains people make in having available to them a range of choices in linguistic elements to construct ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings, the linguistic theory with its lexicogrammatical descriptions and its accompanying pedagogies can obviously be applied to any language development situation across the lifespan. The genres of schooling are sites of recontextualized knowledge-making and reproduction (Christie & Martin, 2007), whose curricular role may provide a stability which leads more readily to genre description and characterization, which can then be made explicit to students in order to enhance their chances of success in school (Schleppegrell, 2004). Moving beyond the genres of schooling into other contexts of language use thus brings other challenges for educators, as the genres encountered may be less homogenous and wide-spread, meaning that learners’ understandings of language need to flexible enough to be applied to an ever-increasing range of situations.

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