1.5 The Imperative for Functional Grammar
A language-driven model of CBI necessitates a functional focus on grammar. After all, grammar is "the central processing unit of language, the powerhouse where meanings are created" (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014, p. 22). To make meaning in a foreign language, arguably the most important goal of any language learning, students must therefore learn its grammar. As Halliday (2004) observed, "Understanding, and knowing, are semiotic processes —processes of the development of meaning …; and the powerhouse for such processes is the grammar" (p. 11). One main source of students' difficulty in academic/disciplinary reading and writing is a lack of deep understanding of and sophisticated control over grammar (Fang & Schleppegrell, 2008). The sort of grammar that often comes to most people's mind is traditional grammar. This grammar, with its focus on prescriptive rules and conventions for language use regardless of context and purpose, has, as noted earlier, been found deleterious to language learning and largely ineffective in improving students' literacy achievement. For example, several meta-analysis studies (e.g., Andrews et al., 2006; Graham & Perin, 2007; Myhill & Watson, 2014) found that with the exception of sentence combining, explicit and systematic teaching of formal grammar (e.g., parts of speech, structure of sentences) has a small but statistically significant negative effect on students' literacy learning across the full range of abilities.
Yet, common sense suggests that grammar can be useful and may be worth instructional time. Every text realizes the interests, values, attitudes, perspectives, and positions of its author at the same time it conveys some kind of content; and these knowledge, beliefs and intentions are codified in the grammatical choices that the author deploys (Kress, 2003). It follows that an explicit knowledge of how grammar makes meaning should be helpful in developing students' critical reading ability to see not only what/how content/knowledge is constructed but also how texts are positioned by the author and at the same time position the reader. Similarly, writing involves making grammatical choices to design meaning in purposeful ways; this means that an explicit knowledge about grammar should enable writers to manipulate language in ways that suit their needs and purposes (Locke, 2010). By the same token, teachers who have a keen understanding of grammar should be better able to scaffold students in reading comprehension and written composition (Myhill, Jones & Watson, 2013; Schleppegrell, 2020), both constructive processes of making meaning through language.
To develop an explicit understanding of how language choices make meaning in a variety of contexts, we need a different kind of grammar, one that is oriented towards the study of meaning in context. This grammar is called functional grammar, the most elaborated, and perhaps also the most well known, description of which comes from systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and is presented in Michael Halliday's seminal work An Introduction to Functional Grammar, now in its fourth edition (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014). Briefly, SFL views language as interlocking systems of grammatical choices that enable its users to make meaning in different contexts and for different purposes. It offers a powerful metalanguage, that is, a language for talking about language, for analyzing grammatical choices in a text and discussing how these choices make meaning. Using this metalanguage, which will be more fully described in Chapter 2, teachers and students can explore the content, organization, and authorial perspective in the text, recognizing how a text means what it means and what makes a text more or less effective, powerful, or valued (Fang & Schleppegrell, 2008; Martin & Rose, 2003).
An increasing volume of research, albeit conducted primarily in K-12 classrooms (see Accurso & Gebhard, 2020 for a partial review), has demonstrated that a functional approach to grammar is effective in improving students' language learning, literacy development, and academic achievement. For example, Schleppegrell, Greer, and Taylor (2008) described a professional development project in California where middle school history teachers learned to use functional grammar in their teaching. They reported that students of teachers who had participated in the workshops made significantly greater gains on a standardized measure of historical literacy and wrote more effectively (i.e., developing a thesis and supporting it with evidence and analysis) than did students whose teachers had not participated in the training. They further noted that English language learners (i.e., students learning English as an additional language) benefited the most from the approach.(https://www.daowen.com)
Similar results were reported by Humphrey and Macnaught (2016), who found that middle school students who were explicitly taught functional grammar showed more than twice the average growth of students in other schools on a national assessment of writing and some or significant growth on a curriculum-based measure of persuasive writing. According to Rose and Martin (2012), in schools whose literacy programs systematically infused functional grammar instruction, the average literacy gains among students from all backgrounds and ability groups doubled the expected rate of literacy development for K-12 students in other schools. These SFL-informed literacy programs were found to be particularly beneficial for students with the weakest literacy skills (e.g., indigenous students and English language learners alike), who demonstrated almost four years' growth in reading and writing achievement in one year.
In higher education contexts, Dreyfus et al. (2016) described a project, called SLATE (Scaffolding Literacy in Academic and Tertiary Environments), that drew on functional grammar to provide online embedded language and literacy support to college students at the City University of Hong Kong, China. They reported that students tutored through the project were able to learn about the discipline-specific craft of writing and master the literacy requirements of academic tasks in their disciplines. 陈静 (2010) compared the effects of teaching functional grammar versus traditional grammar on the writing performance of students (second year non-English majors) at a Chinese university. She found that after one semester of instruction, students who were taught functional grammar scored significantly higher than did those who were taught traditional grammar on measures of writing quality, including thesis development, use of specialized and abstract language, use of formal and evaluative language, organization of ideas, links among paragraphs and among sentences within each paragraph, clarity of pronouns, and overall quality.
Other studies, albeit not explicitly framed within the SFL tradition, also found that teaching students grammar in functional and contextual ways produced strong and positive effects on students' writing. For example, Jones, Myhill and Bailey (2013) described a randomized control trial study in Britain that used a mixed-methods approach to investigate the effects of embedded grammar instruction on middle school students' writing performance. The researchers reported an overall positive effect, with more able writers benefiting more than did poor writers and students of more experienced teachers benefiting more than did those of less experienced teachers. Taken together, these studies suggest that a functional focus on grammar in literacy instruction promotes a deeper understanding of language and more powerful use of literacy.