Wk4 - Systemic Functional Linguistics and Language Teaching

In the reading by Butt, D., Fahey, R., Feez, S., Spinks., S., & Yallop., C. (2000), there is a focus towards noticing important features in the target language, and using exploring activities.  There are some insightful teaching samples too for which teachers can support or scaffold.  For students to become independent learners, Butt et al., 2000 stresses the importance of helping students learn how to explore the possible reasons why certain grammatical features used in different contexts.

In my opinion this can only be a good thing, as using complicated explanations for grammar context can be hard to grasp for L2 learners.  One particular experience springs to mind, while learing Japanese at university we were introduced to the “suffering passive” grammar form.  Only marginally different from a general media passive form, it is quite a difficult concept to grasp as I understand in all the languages of the world, this only exists in Japanese.  When we learned it, the grammar structure was drilled and the meaning explained “changing the verb form in this way shows the subject suffers or suffered in some way (even though you’re not actually saying it)”.  As Butt et al., 2000 stated, I was able to perfectly apply the grammar in carefully constructed sentences (which was required for the grammar exam), yet coming out the other end I am still not confident at a real world level how and when to use this form (and sadly, even an attitude may have developed of “oh well.. I’ll leave that to the native speakers..”).  So perhaps through some noticing / exploring activities it may have become clearer.

To tie in with this, Jones, R. H. & Lock, G. (2011) point out that the combination of context of culture and context of situation results in differences/similarities between languages.  As L1 speakers we usually recognise familiar situations in a culture context due to sharing the same cultural knowledge, whereas in an L2 situation, we often start out knowing the vocabulary, grammar rules etc but not so much appropriate context.  I agree that bridging this gap (or attempting to) should be a part of language teaching.

References

Butt, D., Fahey, R., Feez, S., Spinks., S., & Yallop., C. (2000). Using functional grammar: An explorer’s guide (2^nd ed). Sydney: NCELTR

  

Jones, R. H. & Lock, G. (2011). Functional grammar in the ESL classroom: noticing, exploring and practising. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillian.