10.4 Supporting Teacher Learning About Functional ...
There has been a steady surge of interest in SFL within China over the past few decades (see, for example, Webster & Peng, 2017). Despite this surge, classroom applications of SFL remain surprisingly limited in English education. The situation is beginning to change in recent years. An increasing cadre of scholars and teachers are now showing an interest in using SFL for instructional purposes (e.g., 陈静，2016; 何中清，2019; 孙迎晖，2017), and some have reported promising results from their applications. Sun and Zhang (2018), for example, implemented functional grammar analysis in a freshman English reading course at Beijing Normal University (北京师范大学), and reported that functional grammar analysis improved students' reading comprehension as well as their confidence and interest in English reading. Comparable results for writing were reported by 陈静 (2016) from Sun Yat-sen University (中山大学), who found that Chinese college students (first year non-English majors) who received writing instruction using the Sydney School Genre-Based Pedagogy made significantly greater improvement in their exposition and discussion writing than did their peers who received writing instruction using the traditional EAP (English for Academic Purposes) pedagogy. This enthusiasm must be harnessed for the benefits of English teaching and learning.
A major issue that needs to be addressed in this connection is the perception that functional grammar is too theoretical or technical to be useful for teachers. With little or no training in SFL and its classroom uses, teachers are justifiably apprehensive about functional grammar because it is a complex theory linking language and meaning. For example, Patrick (2009) engaged a small group of U.S. high school science teachers in learning to implement functional grammar analysis to help their students unpack technical and dense science texts. She reported that while the teachers were excited about the approach and found it "eminently useable", their lack of basic knowledge about — and comfort with — English grammar severely undermined their efforts to learn and implement the approach in ways that promote content learning and literacy development at the same time. The finding means that teachers need support in developing expertise and confidence in making functional grammar relevant to their practices. Such support can be — and has been successfully — provided through preservice coursework and inservice professional development programs. The rest of the section describes these two bodies of work in detail.
10.4.1 University Preservice Coursework
Research conducted primarily in K-12 contexts in Australia and the U.S. has shown that teachers can learn to embrace and enact an SFL-informed literacy pedagogy at the same time they are developing an explicit knowledge about functional grammar. For example, Gebhard et al. (2013) from the University of Massachusetts (USA) reported that the teacher candidates in their TESOL master's degree program were able to attain a "good enough grammatics" (i.e., a useable metalanguage) for the purposes of designing curriculum and instruction for diverse learners in the context of a 14-week course focused on applying functional grammar in second/foreign language teaching and learning through tasks such as reading and discussing SFL-related materials, analyzing and evaluating sample student writing, planning and implementing units and lessons that infused grammar instruction, and reflecting on the course experiences.
Two other studies provide details about the content and structure of the training course in ways that can inform the development of courses to prepare teachers to use functional grammar in literacy instruction. Love (2010) described a short but intense training course (18 hours in six weeks) titled "Language and Teaching" in a two-year Master of Teaching program at the University of Melbourne (Australia) aimed at preparing middle and high school teachers with no prior linguistic subject knowledge to be "master teachers" capable of supporting academic learning through literacy. The course addressed the following components of linguistic subject knowledge that she deemed important to these teacher candidates:
· knowledge about how spoken and written language are structured for learning,
· understanding that disciplines differ in their language use and hence literacy practices,
· capacity to plan lessons and units of work that account for discipline-specific literacies and language practices, and
· control of a metalanguage that fosters conscious awareness and critical reflection on language use in the classroom.
The course is structured into eight units, as follows:
· Unit 1: Introduction to Language and Literacy, which examines the range of first and second language learners in Australian schools and the range of language and literacy practices and modes.
· Unit 2: Scaffolding Literacy, which introduces the notion of scaffolding as a highly planned and explicitly structured support for learning through and about literacy. Scaffolding is provided through a five-stage learning/teaching cycle that includes engagement, building knowledge, transformation, presentation, and reflection. During the engagement phase, the teacher identifies a gap in students' understandings, plans strategies to bridge the gap, and engages with students' prior understanding. During the building knowledge phase, the teacher (a) previews the target genre, (b) explicitly teaches students how to skim the headings, illustrations, and first and last sentences of each paragraph in order to establish what the text is about, (c) explicitly deconstructs linguistically dense and highly nominalized constructions, and (d) organizes students in groups to take on one of the four reader roles identified by Luke and Freebody (1999) —text decoder (deciphering and breaking the codes of written and visual language in text), text participant (making meaning from text), text user (reading text for social purposes), and text analyst (detecting underlying ideology in text). This phase provides students with new information, helping them build common knowledge and shared understanding of the purpose of the set tasks. During the transformation phase, students write in the target genre with the teacher's help (if needed) by transforming their newly acquired information into structured knowledge. During the presentation phase, students submit their completed work (in writing or through oral presentation) for evaluation and feedback. During the reflection phase, the teacher and students reflect on information, insights, and understandings, and in the process identify a new "gap" to be bridged.
· Unit 3: Oral Language, which examines the structures of oral language that can be used for effective learning in a range of classroom contexts.
· Unit 4: Standard Written Genres, which introduces the structures and linguistic features of key school-based genres (e.g., procedure, report, explanation, argument) that students are required to read and write across academic disciplines.
· Unit 5: Multi-Genre Texts, which examines the more varied structures that underpin the print and multimodal texts that students are required to comprehend and produce.
· Unit 6: Supporting Reading, which addresses the reading demands of the more complex texts that students need to understand to be successful in disciplinary learning.(https://www.daowen.com)
· Unit 7: Supporting Writing, which addresses the writing demands of the more complex texts that students need to produce to be successful in disciplinary learning.
· Unit 8: Planning for Literacy Learning, which suggests a framework that teachers can use to forge cross-disciplinary collaboration to support students in the complex literacy demands of the tasks they set and to assess students' progress.
These units offer a rich array of virtual clinics, electronic and face-to-face tutorials, workshops, and reflective tasks. They were packaged into an interactive, video-based multimedia resource (DVD). Besides the DVD, teacher candidates were placed in a school two days each week and attended school-based seminars designed by clinical specialists in conjunction with teaching fellows. Throughout the course, they were expected to relate what they learned from the DVD to their ongoing teaching practice in school, drawing on systematically collected evidence from their own classrooms.
A cohort of over 300 teacher candidates enrolled in the course. They came from disciplines ranging from the humanities (e.g., English, history, psychology) and visual and performing arts (e.g., music, art, media studies, drama) to mathematics, sciences, physical education, business studies, and information technology. They succeeded in developing a capacity to plan content area instruction with an informed understanding of the role language and literacy play in disciplinary learning. Specifically, they were able to identify the literacy demands inherent in a unit of work they had planned and to outline strategies for supporting learning through literacy. The finding, according to Love (2010), illustrates how even a little linguistic subject knowledge can "provide a strong foundation for subject specialists to further scaffold their diverse learners into the advanced literacies required of their specializations" (p. 346).
Fang et al. (2014) engaged elementary and secondary teachers across multiple school subjects (reading, language arts, science, mathematics, social studies) in learning to use functional grammar analysis for content area reading instruction in a graduate level course at the University of Florida (USA). These teachers perceived functional grammar analysis to be interesting and "eye opening" because it offers a viable alternative to the prevailing paradigm of reading instruction that focuses on cognitive strategies (e.g., inferring, predicting, summarizing) or basic language skills (e.g., decoding, vocabulary, fluency). They found functional grammar analysis both useful and useable in reading instruction, particularly with learners who face challenges in reading academic and disciplinary texts. Although at times they felt intimidated or even overwhelmed by functional grammar because of its somewhat technical metalanguage and their own lack of linguistic subject knowledge, they expressed a willingness to give it a whirl in their classrooms and a need for sustained support in their efforts.
Building on this work, Fang (2015) subsequently developed a graduate-level course focused on familiarizing students (i.e., prospective and inservice language/literacy teachers) with a functional linguistics approach to literacy teaching. The focus of the course was on developing an in-depth understanding of how the lexical and grammatical resources of language are used to construct text in context, present knowledge, infuse ideology, structure discourse, and develop argument. Students learned tools for analyzing different types of pedagogical texts (e.g., literature, textbooks, student writing, government documents, newspaper articles, test items, online blogs) across academic disciplines for the purpose of language/literacy instruction through constructs such as clause, genre, register, transitivity, Mood, modality, appraisal, cohesion, Theme/Rheme, and other lexicogrammatical features of language. During the 15-week course, students read two textbooks — An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics (Eggins, 2004) and Reading in Secondary Content Areas: A Language-Based Pedagogy (Fang & Schleppegrell, 2008), as well as a variety of published articles and book chapters that describe how SFL is used across different disciplines, grade levels, and contexts. Each week, students read, responded to, and discussed assigned materials to ensure understanding of key SFL concepts/principles and their applications in language/literacy teaching. They also analyzed a sample pedagogical text using one of the functional grammar analysis tools (e.g., genre analysis, register analysis, cohesion analysis, noun analysis, appraisal analysis, analysis of grammatical units, transitivity analysis, analysis of clause-combining strategies, Theme-Rheme analysis, multimodal analysis), and wrote a short paper reporting what valuable or interesting meanings about the text are revealed through the analysis as well as their thoughts and reactions in doing the analysis. They discussed the relevance of these analysis to reading/writing instruction. Toward the end of the semester, students designed a unit of instruction that includes (a) language/literacy goals and content objectives to be accomplished in the unit, as well as ways these goals and objectives are to be assessed, (b) an annotated text set around a topic of interest that is worthy of exploration in light of the unit goals and objectives, (c) an essay identifying the comprehension challenges of a chosen text from the text set and discussing ways to address these challenges, and (d) a sample lesson that includes activities and strategies for promoting language/literacy learning and knowledge building through a functional focus on grammar. The course was well received by graduate students in education who were interested in using functional grammar to enhance language/literacy teaching and learning in their disciplines. They reported being enlightened by the course and expressed confidence in and commitment to implementing functional grammar in their future classrooms.
10.4.2 Inservice Professional Development Work
Professional development (PD) work with inservice teachers has likewise produced positive results. Aguirre-Munoz et al. (2008), for example, found evidence of effectiveness of a weeklong PD program in California on increasing the expertise of 21 mainstream classroom teachers from three urban middle schools in applying a functional metalanguage to evaluate student writing. Four training modules were developed to familiarize teachers with the genre-based FLA approach to teaching response-to-literature writing. Module 1 introduces three register dimensions of field, tenor, and mode; explains analytical concepts and units such as participant, process, and Theme/Rheme; and presents Theme analysis as an approach to analyzing written discourse. Module 2 reviews the linguistic and cognitive demands of writing response to literature and presents features of well-written character studies and features of general academic language. These include choice of processes for retelling, interpreting, and evaluating the story; use of clause-linking strategies and transitional expressions for connecting clauses and paragraphs; choice of words that convey evaluative, affective, and speculative meaning for authorial point of view; analysis of patterns in the development of argument flow through Thematic progression analysis; and various types of grammatical metaphor such as nominalization. Module 3 presents strategies for teachers to incorporate SFL in their writing instruction, including analyzing language choices student writers or disciplinary experts use to realize meaning, developing lessons to teach revision and literary analysis, and modeling readers'/writers' workshops that infuse functional grammar. Module 4 involves presentation of prevailing linguistic features of the responses to literature written by English language learners (i.e., students for whom English is not the first language) and identification of specific issues that need instructional support (e.g., minimal reference to characters other than the main character, lack of a vocabulary repertoire for implicit expression of personal opinions and stance, lack of cohesion, overuse of easy connectors such as and and so, lack of nominalization and expanded noun phrases, and low lexical density). Each module addresses the linguistic resources critical for making ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings in the literary response genre. Each workshop session began with a discussion of assigned readings related to the training content, followed by presentation of each contextual feature (field, tenor, mode). Teachers then practiced the application of the concepts and strategies learned through analysis of texts generated by English language learners. They also role-played target minilessons in writing. After the fourth module, teachers were engaged in joint lesson planning based on the work of pilot teachers. Workshop facilitators provided feedback on language use and shared a set of model lessons.
Longitudinal work with larger groups of practicing teachers also yielded promising results. For example, Schleppegrell, Greer and Taylor (2008) described a sustained professional development program in California (i.e., Building Academic Literacy Through History) aimed at helping teachers improve students' reading comprehension and academic writing in history. The project has served nearly 300 teachers in summer institutes, academic year programs, and an online course since 2003. The focus of the project was to engage teachers in learning to use functional grammar analysis strategies for unpacking dense text and for talking about how language works to construct knowledge and value in history. Project content was typically presented in a five-day summer institute, where university faculty and teacher-coaches who had used functional grammar analysis strategies in their own classrooms through prior participation in the summer institute presented the curriculum and guided teacher-participants in working through demonstration lessons as students would. The teacher-coaches also presented the theoretical framework and linguistic rationale for the functional grammar focus and addressed the benefits and pitfalls of the approach from their own classroom experience. Through the summer institute, the teachers were introduced to a new metalanguage based in functional grammar (e.g., participant, process, reference), as well as a framework for unit planning that involves developing guiding questions, selecting challenging texts for analysis, conducting intensive work with vocabulary, and using functional grammar analysis strategies to deconstruct text and discuss its content, organization and voice. As the teachers learned new strategies for approaching reading and writing, they also discussed the classroom implications and possible adaptations for their own contexts. With the assistance of teacher coaches, they then drew on the strategies they had just learned to develop new lessons for use in their own classrooms. In this way, the summer institute provided participant teachers with example lessons, as well as curriculum materials they had designed themselves.
It was reported that the teachers bought into functional grammar analysis because they experienced firsthand how the approach helped them achieve their curricular goals by addressing students' literacy needs and engendering more complex and in-depth class discussion of the historical content. They felt well equipped to help students work through challenging texts. Most impressively, students of the teachers who had participated in the training, particularly the English language learners, made greater gains on a standardized measure of historical literacy (California History-Social Science Test) and wrote more effectively than students whose teachers had not participated in the project. The researchers suggested that it is the close reading and analysis of texts enabled by a functional metalanguage that made these learning outcomes possible.
Gebhard et al. (2011) reported similar success in their work with elementary and middle school teachers in Massachusetts. In a federally funded project called the ACCELA (Access to Critical Content and English Language Acquisition) Alliance, Gebhard and her university-based colleagues provided sustained professional development to teachers and students in two economically struggling school districts near Boston by developing an inquiry-based Master's degree program tailored to their needs. Through this degree program, university faculty and school teachers engaged in collaborative research on effective and equitable pedagogical practices that support the academic literacy development of English language learners. A key feature of this collaboration was the use of SFL tools to design curricular interventions aligned with state standards and student investments and to promote academic language development. Case studies from the project suggest that participant teachers developed a deeper understanding of both disciplinary content knowledge and associated language practices and greater expertise in scaffolding their students' academic literacy development. They also indicate that SFL-based pedagogies supported English language learners in producing more coherent and well-formed pieces of academic writing that met the school's expectations.
Humphrey (2017) described a 4 x 4 framework that she and her colleagues developed and implemented in several professional development projects, where they worked with more than 100 middle school teachers in five Australian schools over a period of three years to improve disciplinary literacy instruction. The framework, presented in Table 10-1, is divided, horizontally, into four levels of text (whole text, paragraph, sentence, and word) and vertically, into four meaning systems (experiential meaning, logical meaning, interpersonal meaning, and textual meaning). The language resources for instantiating the four strands of meaning at each text level vary by genre and context. The framework, designed to "assist teachers to better access and frame the content of curriculum documents and to relate patterns of language to their functions and contexts of use" (Humphrey, 2017, p. x), encourages teachers to "look 'up, down and all around' when considering the language resources in texts" (Humphrey, 2017, p. 242). It can be used to support a wide range of teaching and learning experiences, from planning language and literacy goals in a unit of study to developing assessment criteria on language use. Using this framework, teachers and students develop a deeper understanding of language as organized systems of resources and more concrete knowledge about the lexical and grammatical features that characterize specific genres and contexts. It was reported that teachers who applied the 4 x 4 framework for instruction and assessment saw "substantial literacy growth for their students" (Humphrey, 2017, p. ix).
Table 10-1 4 x 4 Framework for Literacy Instruction (after Humphrey, 2017, p. 26)
In designing professional learning that contributes to successful implementation of the 4 x 4 framework, SFL experts (university faculty) engaged teachers in analyzing curriculum goals and closely examining the genres students were expected to learn and the challenges they faced in learning these genres. They then drew on SFL to identify genres that teachers recognized as central to disciplinary learning, designed instructional and assessment tasks that promoted the learning of these genres, and articulated concrete criteria for successful completion of those tasks. Three elements— limiting the scope of genres, focusing on fewer mentor texts for close examination, and using a common metalanguage that relates linguistic patterns to curriculum goals — were found to be especially effective in encouraging teacher participation and buy-in and in developing a deeper understanding of how disciplinary knowledge is built cumulatively across the years of schooling. Specifically, SFL experts worked with teachers in planning sessions to identify a disciplinary literacy goal and a target genre for assessment, to prepare and analyze mentor texts in the target genre, and to prepare activities for classroom modeling and guided practice. A functional metalanguage, informed by SFL, was used as teachers, together or individually, planned and delivered instruction that engaged students in identifying and comparing linguistic patterns across texts; connecting linguistic patterns to disciplinary knowledge, practices, audiences, and goals; and evaluating, critiquing, and transforming meanings in texts. These pedagogical practices were found to support students in developing disciplinary literacy and critical literacy.