2.2 Key Principles

2.2 Key Principles

Ten key, and interrelated, principles of functional grammar inform its application in literacy teaching and learning. These principles, culled from Eggins (2004, p. 3) and Achugar, Schleppegrell, and Oteiza (2007, pp. 12-13), are presented below.

·　Principle 1: Language is a creative resource for making meaning. Language is not a set of rules or conventions but a system of interrelated grammatical choices that enables its users to make meaning for personal or social reasons across a range of contexts.

·　Principle 2: Language use is functional. People use language to get things done, such as describing an object, giving instructions, recounting and reflecting on a past experience, explaining a phenomenon, making an argument, or performing a ceremony. The process of using language is a semiotic one, that of making meaning by choosing from the various options that the lexis and the grammar in a language make available.

·　Principle 3: Language use varies across contexts. People use language in different ways for different purposes. The language used in academic and disciplinary contexts is different from the language used in other social settings. Moreover, the language used in one discipline or genre differs from that used in another discipline or genre. Developing academic or disciplinary literacies thus entails a firm control over these linguistic varieties and an awareness of their differences.

·　Principle 4: People use language by making choices, consciously or unconsciously, from their existing linguistic repertoires according to the situations they participate in. They vary their language use based on who they are interacting with, the subject matter involved in the interaction, and the communicative demands of the situational context.

·　Principle 5: Any learning, including literacy learning, is a semiotically mediated activity. It is primarily a linguistic process in which language plays a dominant role. Language mediates the production, distribution, evaluation, acquisition, and renovation of knowledge. From this perspective, all teachers, including literacy teachers, are in some sense language teachers.

·　Principle 6: Language and content are inseparable. Content is made prototypically of language; it is constructed and transmitted in a multimedia environment typically dominated by language. In other words, discussion of content without language is rarely possible. Conversely, language does not exist in a vacuum; it becomes meaningful only when used with content. That is, discussion of language in the absence of content is a theoretical exercise that has little bearing on teaching and learning. Any description of language without attention to content cannot reveal how language actually works.(https://www.daowen.com)

·　Principle 7: Learning a second or foreign language is a process of expanding linguistic resources for making meaning. Everyone grows up with a mother tongue, which enables them to socialize with family and community members dear and near to them. As their social networks expand, they need to develop new language resources so that they can be effective participants in these new worlds.

·　Principle 8: Acquisition of a metalanguage — a language for talking about language — facilitates language learning and literacy development. Having a metalanguage promotes text exploration, makes language learners become more reflective of their own and others' language use, and enables them to be critical about the meanings made and the interests of those who make these meanings.

·　Principle 9: Detailed analysis of texts promotes awareness of the meaning and power of language choices. Close attention to how language is used in the texts valued by specific discourse communities facilitates access to knowledge, world views, practices, and habits of mind privileged by those communities.

·　Principle 10: Learning is a socially distributed practice and occurs in communities of practice. To learn means to expand one's meaning-making potential through active engagement in the social practices characteristic of the discourse community into which learners are being apprenticed or socialized.

These principles can be used as guidelines to inform the conception, design and implementation of a language-based literacy pedagogy in English education, which is the central preoccupation of this book. The rest of this chapter unpacks some of the key (and interrelated) concepts that are most relevant to the educational uses of functional grammar: text, clause, sentence, context, cohesion, coherence, genre, register, metafunction, system (e.g., transitivity, clause complexing, Mood, appraisal, Theme/Rheme), and choice. Familiarity with these basic concepts is essential to effective use of functional grammar in literacy teaching and learning.