7.4.2 Field:Ideational Instantiation of Clauses an...
Field is one of the contextual variables by which a register is realised.The way that it is construed in the text represents what happens in a contextual situation.It is reflected in the patterned language activity of meaningful organisation (Halliday, 1961) around the focused discourse topics.In this study, the classroom discourse analysis at the clause level into the ideational meanings presents the ways in which the Chinese students’ disciplinary identities are instantiated in the development of lexicogrammatical resources and the reconstruction of specialised disciplinary knowledge.
As mentioned in Section 7.3, spoken language is grammatically intricate, so one orientation to interpret field is to look at the complexity of grammatical structure which exhibits ideational meaning through the text.Meanwhile, in a tertiary education context, field also involves specialised knowledge of the things and events in which experience is construed as abstract entities in the form of nominal groups or incongruent metaphors.The current analysis of field therefore calculates and summarises the intricate clauses, clause complexes and words, and the technicalities and abstractions used in the four texts and by the individual Chinese students.This quantitative comparison between the classrooms and the individual Chinese students provides a comprehensive understanding of how far the changes of field are represented in interaction with regard to the enhancement of grammatical selections and the re-instantiated experience of knowledge world in the classroom interaction at both classroom and individual analytical levels.
7.4.2.1 Grammatical Units
7.4.2.1.1 Clauses and Words
Clause and word are two fundamental lexicogrammatical units in organising a text.Table 7.10 gives a quantitative evidence of the number of the units of clauses and words selected by the teachers and students.In the four texts, the teachers dominate the teacher-student interaction, with the range from the highest 912 (out of total 1,035) clauses and 7,882 (out of 8,411) words to that of the least 290 (out of 412) clauses and 2,296 (out of 3,188) words.
The summary of the total number of Chinese students’ verbal clauses in the four texts shows that the highest number is generated in Year 1, followed by Year 2, Year 4 and Year 3.The numbers are 124, 123, 122, and 42 respectively.In terms of the Chinese students’ words in the four texts, the highest total number is produced in Year 4, with 892 words, which is followed by Year 1, Year 2 and Year 3, with the number of 561, 529 and 282 words.However, if we consider the average numbers of clauses and words at individual student level, the senior year Chinese students use more clauses and words than the Year 1s.From the highest to the lowest, the descending order of the mean of individual Chinese individual words is listed as followed:Year 4-148.67, Year 3-70.5, Year 2-58.78, Year 1-43.15; whereas for the mean of Chinese students clauses, the order is:Year 4-20.33, Year 2-13.67, Year 3-10.5, Year 1-9.54.Although the different degrees of clauses and words use at both classroom and individual levels are found in the four texts, more specific analysis is needed to examine how the texts are similarly and differently organised in the representation of the types and density of these grammatical units.
Table 7.10 Overview of the numbers and means of Chinese students’ verbal clauses and words in the four classroom discourse texts
Notes:P =all participants in the classroom; SS = the number of Chinese students who produce classroom discourse; SP=Student Participant; CS=Chinese Student; FS=Foreign Student; T=teachers.
7.4.2.1.2 Process Types
Process types are initially identified not only to divide clauses and clause complexes in the four classroom discourse texts, but also to manifest what process types are instantiated to construe the meaning probabilities in texts.Table 7.11 summarises the total number and percentage of Process types in the Chinese students’ verbal clauses.
Table 7.11 Number and percentage of Process types in Chinese students’ verbal clauses
The relational clause is the most highly used in all four texts.The percentages of the total clauses used in the four texts are as followed in a descending order:Year 1-43.42%, Year 4-38.53%, Year 2-37.1%, Year 3-31.26%.The relational clause is divided into attributive and identifying categories.Year 1 uses the highest number of attributive clauses, with 28 (36.84%) clauses of its total clauses.With regard to identifying clauses, Year 4 produces the highest of 15 (13.76%), whereas Year 1 generates the least of 5 (6.58%).In the other two texts, Year 2 produces 7 (11.29%) clauses and Year 3 produces 3 (9.38%) clauses.
Mental clauses and material clauses, followed by relational clauses, are also favoured in the four texts.The descending order of Chinese students’ mental clauses in the four texts is Year 3-37.50%, Year 2-32.26%, Year 4-27.52%, Year 1-15.79%, and of material clauses is Year 1-25.00%, Year 4-23.85%, Year 3-18.75%, Year 2-16.13%.The other three Process types of behavioural, verbal and existential are used less in the four texts, all with lower than 10% of the total clauses.Among them, the existential clause is the least used, with only 4 clauses in the Year 4 text and 1 clause in the other three texts respectively.
Results from the analysis above reveal that relational, material and mental clauses dominate in the Chinese students’ classroom discourse texts, whereas behavioural, verbal and existential are less favoured.This finding supports what Halliday and Matthiessen (2014) point out that material, mental and relational clauses are the main and the most frequent types of process in the English transitivity system (p.215).Experience is reflected in texts as flow of events, which is organised by a linguistic order of the process types.Similar linguistic ordering of process types in certain texts partially enables to identify the register that they belong to.In this sense, the relational, material and mental processes partially determine the registerial type of the four texts.
First, from the systemic viewpoint, the relational clause construes the meaning of ‘being’, which includes the subcategories of attributive and identifying processes.In the four texts, the relational clause is the most frequently used.This uncovers the phenomenon that their main classroom events are concerned with classifying taxonomic relationships of class members (attributive) and identifying symbolised values of participants (identifying) in clauses.Furthermore, the results show that Chinese students in Year 1 use more attributive processes to differ the types and subtypes of participants than other years; on the contrary, Year 4 students use more identifying processes to express their symbolised understanding of participants.This to a certain extent implies that Year 4 Chinese students tend to be more competent on identifying the values of knowledge than the novice ones.
Second, mental process and material process construe the inner and outer experience of ‘sensing’, and ‘happening’ or ‘doing’.These two grammatical categories represent what we experience inside that of perception, emotion and imagination, and what we experience that of actions and events.Halliday and Matthiessen (2014) explain that inner experience is ‘partly a kind of replay of the outer, recording it, reacting to it, reflecting on it’ (p.214).Therefore, outer experience will be transformed into the inner world of consciousness.Overall, Chinese students in the four years use certain high number of mental process.Year 1 Chinese students use almost half of those in the rest three classrooms, which to some extent exposes that Year 1 Chinese students have less engagement in the disciplinary learning experience than the other three years.
This low engagement is further demonstrated in Year 1 Chinese students’ higher percentage of using material process than the other three years.Material process represents what are happening and people doing in the world around us.As introduced in Section 7.4.1, the students in the Year 1 seminar are required to watch videos and then to review and discuss the relevant concepts and theories related to the contents in these videos.Rather than focusing too much on what events and actions happen in the outer world, the students are supposed to critically interpret how these events and actions meaningfully happen.This involves their personal understanding of the disciplinary knowledge which is most likely to be obtained through long-term participation in disciplinary learning.
7.4.2.2 Grammatical Intricacy
7.4.2.2.1 Density of Clause Complexes, Clauses and Words
Despite that there are different contributions of verbal clauses and words, and Process types in the four texts, it is still not valid enough to trace the text unfolding processes in logogenesis in reference to the complexity of grammatical features in the synoptic dimension.Halliday (1994) states that ‘spoken language becomes complex by being grammatically intricate:it builds up elaborate clause complexes out of parataxis and hypotaxis’ (p.352).I thus further identify the verbal clause complexes and the density of these basic grammatical features in the four texts.
Table 7.12 shows that Year 4 produces more clause complexes than the other three years, with the highest number of 33 units.Year 2 contributes with 16 complexes, while Year 1 and Year 3 generate the least, with 14 and 10 units respectively.
Table 7.12 Density of verbal clause complexes, clauses and words in Chinese students’ classroom discourse
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Taking a look at the density of the grammatical features from words to clauses and clause complexes, Year 4 produces by far the highest mean of 25.49 words per minute and 7.3 words per clause.Year 1 follows with 17 words per minute, but with the least 4.71 words per clause.Year 2 and Year 3 produce pretty similar density of words per minute, with the means of 8.67 and 7.83 respectively.However, Year 3 generates more words per clause than Year 2, with 6.7 versus 4.3.With regard to the verbal clauses per complex, the ascending order from the least to the highest is Year 4, Year 3, Year 2, Year 1, with the means of 3.7, 4.2, 7.7, and 8.86.
Clause complexes organise a text as a semantic unit by integrating the structures and meanings of clauses through logico-semantic relations.They contribute to the semantic development of the text, which construes more extensive meanings than lexicogrammatical units.In the current analysis, the quantitative comparison between the four texts above indicates that senior year students are more competent than the junior years in constructing classroom discourse in terms of meaning enhancement through logogenetic development.In order to gain a more comprehensive picture of how they do so, the individual Chinese students’ uses of grammatical categories of clause complexes in the four texts are presented in the next subsection.
7.4.2.2.2 Clause Complexes in Individual Chinese Students’ Discourse
Overall, the clause relations of projection and expansion are both found in the four texts, but with different amounts and variety of the subtypes.Table 7.13 provides a synoptic picture of what types and subtypes of clauses relations are selected by the individual Chinese students to unfold the meanings of clause complexes in texts.
Hypotaxis projection accounts for almost half of the total clause complexes used in Year 1, Year 2 and Year 3.The numbers are 8 (out of 16), 10 (out of 23) and 7 (out of 15) respectively.It is also highly used in Year 4 with the number of 19 (out of 51).Expansion is more frequently used in Year 4, with the total number of 32 clause complexes as opposed to 8, 12, and 8 clause complexes in Year 1, Year 2 and Year 3.
Table 7.13 Number of grammatical categories of clause complexes in individual Chinese students’ classroom discourse
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Note:loc.= locution; elab.= elaboration; ext.= extension; enh.= enhancement.
As to individual Chinese students, Year 4 Chinese students tend to produce more intricate clause complexes in their speech turns.Three (CS1, CS2, CS4) out of five students in Year 4 generate the highest numbers of clause complexes in the four texts, with 15, 13 and 12 clause complexes respectively.Although there is only one speech turn produced by CS6 in Year 4, Extract 7.4 demonstrates that the turn consists of 20 clauses, with three hypotactic projections, one hypotactic enhancement, and five paratactic enhancement clause complexes.In contrast, most individual Chinese students in the other three texts construct clause complexes in each of their speech turns with 2 or 4 clauses.
Extract 7.4 The speech turn with clause complexes from CS6 in Year 4
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What the results reveal is that Year 4 students offer more linguistic selections in dialogue exchanges to unfold disciplinary knowledge by means of elaborating (i.e., restating, clarifying, commenting on the previous clause), extending (i.e., adding new clause(s) to the previous clause), and enhancing (i.e., qualifying the previous clause).As mentioned earlier, these relations grammatically construct and develop the sequences of events in texts.The interactants do so by moving between different experiences of knowledge.In this sense, individual Year 4 Chinese students tend to more successfully mobilise their linguistic choices and experience of knowledge in different areas than those who are in Year 1, Year 2 and Year 3.This finding supports one of the current hypotheses that senior year Chinese students gain more advanced academic language and a larger reservoir of specialised knowledge over time.
7.4.2.3 Experience of Disciplinary Knowledge in Thing Types
The presentation of results focuses on the evidence of the Chinese students’ use of technicality, categories of abstraction, and nominal groups with defining and classifying elements in relational processes.As mentioned earlier, the way of using these grammatical features represents the constructed process of their disciplinary identities in terms of how they access and share semiotic experiences of disciplinary knowledge and then how they transfer the understandings of commonsense things to uncommonsense ones.To do so, the current analysis on these elements aims to provide a synoptic overview of how far these students differently construct their understandings of the focused themes in the classroom.
To recapitulate from Section 7.4.1, the focused themes in the four seminars are relisted below.The students in the four seminars were expected to critically review these discipline-related theories and concepts, and interpret them by using the examples associated with their own experience.This process unavoidably involves the defining and classifying of technical terms and abstract things.
Year 1 sex, gender and media, including feminism, masculinity, gender hegemony
Year 2 feminism, gender stereotyping, racism, and media, including stereotyping of women, marginal position, cultural production
Year 3 ethics, propaganda, PR
Year 4 new media technologies in the politics of the Western world, including Californian Ideology, Barack Obama’s election, Multitude
Table 7.14 presents the flow of the lexicogrammatical choices of these nominal things in the individual Chinese students’ verbal clauses, which facilitates to visualise taxonomic organisation between the things.Technical terms are underlined and in bold, abstract and metaphoric things are in bold, and the nominal groups with defining and classifying elements in relational processes are italic and in bold.The rest of the lexicogrammatical elements are the indefinite pronouns and concrete types of abstract things in clauses.
Table 7.14 Flow of the technical terms, abstractions, and nominal defining and classifying groups in individual Chinese students’ clauses
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At the same time, to compare the different uses of these elements between individual Chinese students and between the four texts, the quantitative calculation of their total numbers and percentages in the flow is summarised in Table 7.15.From the grammatical perspective, the change of wording imposes a change of meaning.Each use of these items has its own function.
Table 7.15 Numbers and percentages of technicality, concrete things, abstract & metaphoric things, and nominal groups with defining and classifying elements
Technicality and Taxonomy
It is mentioned in Section 7.3.1.2.1, the use of technicality in the classroom is realised in the processes of naming, ordering and classifying discipline-related theories and concepts.It enables students to explore the experiential world of disciplinary knowledge development.Technical terms are usually related together and organised as a taxonomic relation.However, it is found in the four texts that technicality and taxonomy do not play a major role.That is, the technical vocabulary of sub-classes, definitions and phenomena related to the focused themes suggested by the teachers are rarely mentioned in the four texts.
For example, in the Year 1, Year 2, and Year 3 texts, the total numbers of technical terms used in the flow of nominal elements are 1, 1 and 2 respectively.Although technicality in Year 4 occurs with a relatively higher frequency than the other three texts with the number of 13, the occurrence only accounts for 7.83% of the total.With reference to the individual use of technicality, there is only one student who makes a contribution in each of the other three texts, with the numbers of 1, 1, and 2 respectively.However, there is an increased occurrence of using technical terms in Year 4.That is, five out of six Year 4 Chinese students produce technical terms.Although each of the three students (CS2, CS3, CS6) only mentions 1 technical term, the result still indicates that Year 4 students tend to utilise more technical terms than their junior peers.This is most likely due to their growing consciousness and repeated experience of disciplinary practices.For example, CS1 in Year 4 produces the highest number of technical terms, ‘libertarianism’, ‘new media ideology’, ‘new media’ and ‘new mediated publicity’.The student mentioned these four terms 7 times to express the personal understanding of the focused theme ‘Californian Ideology’.
The overall results on the use of technicality in both classroom and individual dimensions show that in these humanities-directed texts, the interpretation of the disciplinary knowledge involves less use of technicality with taxonomic relations.Martin (1993a, 1993b) suggests that language development in humanities is instantiated in abstraction, but not in technicality.As such, the use of abstraction categories on different scales in the four texts will be further examined.
Categories of Abstraction
Abstraction offers a linguistic resource by which the students mobilise ideational meanings to engage in the re-instantiation of disciplinary knowledge in discourse.In the categories of abstraction as shown in Table 7.16 below, the indefinite pronoun and concrete Thing types dominate in the four texts, accounting for the highest percentages in each text with 69.23% (Year 1), 55.56% (Year 2), 53.70% (Year 3), and 34.34% (Year 4) respectively.But there is a decreased low frequency of the use of concrete Things from the junior year texts to the senior year texts.The most striking result is that Year 1 produces concrete Things two times more frequently than Year 4.
Table 7.16 Total percentage of concrete Things and indefinite pronouns in the four texts
The increased occurrences of abstract and metaphoric Things, and nominal groups with defining and classifying elements in the four texts verify Martin’s suggestion above.The results also reinforce what has been discussed in Chapters 3 and 7, that is, through the repeated engagement in experience of disciplinary knowledge, the students transfer commonsense to specialised knowledge.In Table 7.17, the ascending order of the percentage of abstract and metaphoric Things in the four texts is:6.73% (Year 1), 14.81% (Year 2), 18.52% (Year 3), 24.10% (Year 3).Similar to the results of the concrete Things and indefinite pronouns, the average number in Year 4 is considerably higher than the one in Year 1.This is also reflected in the results of the individual students’ use, with the number of 5 (CS1), 19 (CS2), 10 (CS4), 3 (CS5) and 3 (CS6) in Year 4 as opposed to 3 (CS3), 1 (CS8), 2 (CS13) and 1 (CS14) in Year 1.For the other two texts, pretty close quantitative results are found, with the number of 12 in Year 2 and 10 in Year 3 respectively.
Table 7.17 Total percentage of abstract and metaphoric Things in the four texts
The use of nominal groups with defining and classifying elements increases slightly.The average number of the nominal groups in the four texts in an ascending order is:23.08%, 28.40%, 24.07% and 33.73%.However, the most striking difference between the texts lies in the increased complexity of the nominal groups from Year 1 to Year 4.That is, there is a high occurrence of both the length and the structural variation of complex Things in Year 3 and Year 4 than the other two texts.Table 7.18 below presents the nominal groups consisting of more than four words in the four texts.More explanation on the structural organisation of nominal groups can be found in Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar (2014), Chapter 6 (nominal groups) and Chapter 8 (group and phrase complexes).
Table 7.18 Nominal groups with defining and classifying elements containing more than four words in the four texts
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