Modelling of the Genre Short Story for Teaching Purposes: An Approach from a Systemic Functional Perspective

Abstract

This article is framed in a research project called “Literature from a linguistic perspective: modelling and teaching of literary narrative genres and response genres” carried out within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). One of the aims of this project is to create a model of the generic macro-structure of the literary macro-genre short story to be used for teaching purposes. This model is developed on the basis of the existent categories of personal narratives (Plum 2004; Martin and Rose 2008; Salmaso 2014, 2017, 2021) and fairy tales (Hasan 1997) in SFL. This article presents the results of a qualitative analysis of the generic macro-structure of six short stories. It provides a generic macro-structure potential for literary macro-genre short story, the elementary genres that are inserted in the constituents of this macro-genre and the reasons why such genres are inserted where they are. This article also presents a series of activities based on the generic macro-structure potential of short stories proposed, which provide a more objective tool for the analysis and comprehension of certain aspects of this macro-genre, like its organisation into different constituents, their purpose and their contribution to the overall purpose of the macro-genre, showing that systematic analysis of this genre can foster students' reading comprehension. This paper is expected to make, on the one hand, a theoretical contribution to SFL through an initial modelling of the macro-genre short story and, on the other hand, a practical contribution to the teaching of English through literature.

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