3.5 Conclusion

Designing and enacting the sort of curriculum and pedagogy outlined in this chapter requires that we think differently about what it means to be literate in the English language. Instead of seeing literacy as a set of generalized language skills, we need to adopt a more contextualized view of literacy, recognizing that language use varies across contexts and with purpose and that advanced literacy is best developed in contexts that are personally relevant and rich in content. From this perspective, learning language and literacy involves learning different genres and registers in content-rich contexts. As the knowledge that students have to engage with varies across academic disciplines, so do the language and texts that construct this knowledge. Current and past reform initiatives in English education have so far only paid lip service to this functional view of language, failing to enact curricula and pedagogies that foreground the role of language in construing disciplinary knowledge, values, and habits of mind.

The reality is that English graduates are often called upon to perform language-related work across a range of disciplines. This means they ought to be equipped with knowledge of the language and literacy practices within those disciplines. In an era of inter/trans-disciplinarity, institutions that take the functional view of language to heart will be in a better position to prepare English language workers who can more readily adapt to meet the evolving needs and challenges of the twenty-first century. In our efforts to build our students' linguistic capacities to work across disciplines, however, we should not lose sight of our identity as language educators, for language education is what we do best and also the primary reason for our very existence on campus. As 《高等学校英语专业英语教学大纲》 (高等学校外语专业教学指导委员会英语组，2000) rightly acknowledges, the core of developing language professionals with content expertise (复合型人才) in the Chinese context of foreign language education is the preparation of individuals with foreign language expertise. The rest of the book demonstrates how this mission can be accomplished through a functional linguistics approach.(https://www.daowen.com)