Realization(s): Systemic-Functional Linguistics and the Language Classroom
INSIGHTS AND QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR OWN PRACTICES
As researchers, we were struck first by the enormity of the assumptions we had made about the uptake by the teachers of the SFL grammar component of the course. As these were enthusiastic teachers and two of the top students in the class who had shown in-depth understanding in their class assignments, we had assumed that they would ‘naturally’ take up the pedagogical implications with no difficulty. What our research initially highlighted was a continued reliance on traditional approaches. During the research we also realized that their increasing focus on SFL was certainly influenced by our observations and discussions - the Hawthorne effect in fact. At first, we were very concerned about this and felt it would unduly bias the findings. However, the stimulated recall approach we adopted with the teachers clearly enabled them and us to interrogate what we were all doing at a deeper level.
Furthermore, the research opened our eyes to the very real challenges for our students of translating our course content into their classrooms. We wondered whether the teachers, our ex-students, would have eventually integrated SFL principles into their teaching of grammar had they not participated in our research. This insight led us to think much more systematically about how we could introduce the content in future. A number of questions related to our practice as teacher educators became pressing:
● How do our students learn SFL? What are the processes involved? Which aspects of the theory are the easiest for them to apply to classroom practice?
● Given the newness and theoretical complexity of SFL for our students, how could we best assist them to apply the pedagogical principles in practice? What kind of tasks and reflective activities could we use to enable this to happen?
● What forms of course assessment would best enable students to demonstrate their ability to apply the principles of the course?
● Apart from more practical materials, what other support could be provided for language teachers struggling to implement SFL in their classrooms?
As a result of identifying these questions, we have further developed our current course content and tasks, employing a problem-based approach where the application of SFL based pedagogy in teachers’ specific contexts is explicitly explored. One major issue has been to balance the teaching of the theory of SFL, and the problematizing of its practical implementation within the time constraints of our course. Given the complexity, and for most students the newness, of the theoretical concepts taught in the course, this has posed a great challenge for us as teachers, assessors, and curriculum developers. Even so, requiring students to develop applications of the theoretical principles to their professional practice in structured pedagogical and assessment tasks (with support from ourselves and other students) has been a rewarding process for us as teacher educators, and has been evaluated very favorably by students studying the revised curriculum. In adopting this approach, we have aimed put into practice the pedagogical principles of scaffolding briefly discussed in the section on SFL and language teaching above.
Beyond our teaching practice, we have also begun to think about the broader reasons why teachers might find taking up SFL approaches difficult in the ELT profession. SFL-based pedagogy, often referred to as genre-based teaching (see Johns, 2002), is still very much in its infancy in English language teaching profession. Thus, considerable tensions exist for language teachers wanting to use SFL when institutional requirements, teaching material and textbooks, and student expectations are primarily based on dominant traditional grammatical frameworks. This is typically the current situation even in Australia where SFL theory has been more pervasive than elsewhere in curriculum development. For our international Masters students returning to teaching environments which are often heavily constrained by formal, discrete-point, high-stakes tests and examinations, and institutional, social, and cultural expectations of a traditional approach to grammar, content and methodology, the tensions are likely to be even more extreme.
SFL is not yet widely known and criticisms have been levelled at the pedagogies related to it (see Burns, 2000; Hammond & Derewianka, 2001; Freedman & Medway, 1994) for being too “recipe-like”, prescriptive, and likely to stifle “creativity”. For many teachers, it may be almost impossible in their environments to go against the mainstream of more widely known and accepted communicative language teaching approaches and materials in order to adopt an approach which has its genesis primarily in Australia (Hyon, 1996). One added problem is the difficulty finding resources; there are few teaching materials and resources that teachers can draw on for SFL-based teaching (but see Bonanno and Jones, 1997; Butterworth, 1994; Carter, Hughes and McCarthy, 2000; Cornish, 1992; Delaruelle, 1998; Lock, 1996; Webb, 1991, 1995).
