This volume will be welcomed by educators interested in how Michael A. K. Halliday’s social theory of language, systemic functional linguistics (SFL), has developed and been applied in educational contexts around the world. The book offers reflections from those involved in the development of SFL and SFL approaches to pedagogy and provides case-study reports of current implementations of such approaches in a variety of contexts. Defining literacy as social activity involving written language, the editors argue that teachers need to make new contexts of literacy available to students by helping them understand the role that language plays. Conscious understanding about the meaning-making potential of language can enable students to act in new ways using written language, and to make choices about whether and how they will participate in new contexts of academic literacy. The authors of the chapters provide examples of how literacy education can prepare teachers explicitly to support the development of the semiotic and linguistic resources students need for success in the literacy challenges of schooling.
The book is divided into three sections. The first offers historical perspectives on the development of SFL in educational contexts. Michael A. K. Halliday & Ruqaiya Hasan show how applications to education and literacy development were integral to the development of SFL theory from the beginning, and chapters by Frances Christie and Robert Veel offer descriptions of well-known programs that applied the theory, including Breakthrough to Literacy in the UK and the Write it Right project and other genre-based approaches in Australia. Through these chapters, the reader gets a good picture of the evolution of the theory and pedagogies based on it. At the same time, the notions of register and genre and definitions of literacy that include not only recognition but also reflection literacy are developed.
The second section describes a range of applications of the theory. Of particular interest are chapters by John Polias & Brian Dare, and by Bronwyn Custance. Polias & Dare show how teachers are using the Australian ESL Scope and Scales, standards informed by SFL, in work on functional grammar with mainstream and ESL students. Custance further exemplifies the application of these standards through her description of the development of school-wide “genre maps.” In another set of related chapters, James R. Martin provides a theoretical perspective on David Rose’s application of SFL theory in reading pedagogy, and Carol Thomson & Mike Hart illustrate the approach in action in South Africa. They argue that the explicit pedagogy SFL offers can help address the widening social inequality that characterizes the current South African context. In other chapters, Paddy Walsh and Carlos Gouveia reflect on educational applications of SFL in the UK and Portugal, respectively.
The third section illustrates how teachers can focus on subject-specific features of language in history (Caroline Coffin), language arts (Lorraine McDonald, Susan Marshall), and geography and the history of science (Ann Hewings & Sarah North).
Taken together, these chapters illustrate that it is possible to, in Martin’s words, transcend the “practical convenience of eclecticism” (p. 116) and draw on a theory of language that enables educators to have grounded ways of making engagement in social contexts of literacy available to a wider range of learners.
