Applying Systemic Functional Linguistics to Build Educators’ Knowledge of Academic English for the Teaching of Writing

Abstract

The studies presented in this chapter highlight promising ways to foster inservice teachers and teacher candidates’ knowledge of the complexities of academic English using systemic functional linguistics (SFL). This linguistic understanding is required in order to successfully teach writing in multilingual classrooms that include native speakers of English, where English is the medium of instruction. Findings indicate inservice teachers’ newfound linguistic knowledge enacted changes to writing pedagogy. Specifically, teachers’ writing instruction with elementary students emphasized genre, language, and tenor. Moreover, the teachers used a greater repertoire of teaching strategies to teach content, such as deconstruction and joint construction of text. Similarly, changes to teacher candidates’ proposed writing instruction resulted in an increased focus on genre and language. The building of the inservice teachers and teacher candidates’ comprehension of academic English emerged through ongoing professional development and coursework. This learning was facilitated using SFL. This theory of language provided the theoretical lens to examine texts and the metalanguage to discuss genre and language. Developing inservice teachers and teacher candidates’ linguistic knowledge required a significant amount of time and commitment. Educators’ developed comprehension of language appears to promote robust classroom instruction that more effectively develops pupils into proficient and purposeful writers.