Abstract
Which professional book have you read recently that impressed you the most?
The choice is a relatively easy one for me: Schleppegrell’s The Language of Schooling: A Functional Linguistics Perspective. This book was an extremely valuable resource for my MA dissertation in 2016, and just recently, I have had to revisit the book as I needed to develop lesson plans in teaching argumentative essays to my Grade 9 and 10 students.
What aspects of the book did you find the most interesting?
I love the compelling style employed by the author in presenting the need for a functional perspective in analysing language by arguing that language use is never decontextualized. Reading the introductory chapter alone, I was excited to know that Halliday’s functional framework, which highlights the relationship between language and learning, is critical to my work as a language learning specialist. Adding to my excitement is a contrasting feeling of fear and optimism. Fear, as I could imagine the struggles of students, especially those who speak English as a second language, in fulfilling the language demands of schooling. Optimism, as the functional perspective that Schleppegrell advocates offers a powerful lens in describing the grammatical and linguistic features of academically valued texts, helping students raise their awareness of the relationship of language choice to situational contexts in the different genres of schooling.
Also, the author is able to present numerous examples of deconstructing texts according to the linguistic features of academic registers in Chapters 3 and 4. The explicit deconstruction and analyses of process types, lexical densities, and theme-rheme have been useful for me in understanding why one text is valued and the other is not. I have been able to apply the same analyses in my students’ writing.
Finally, the guidelines on the grammatical features of expository writing were a useful resource when I designed and developed the intervention package for the experimental group during my MA dissertation in 2016. In fact, I have just recently revisited this particular part of the book when I needed to design and develop a sequence of argumentative lessons for my Grades 9 and 10 students.
Who would you recommend read this book, and why?
This book would be a particularly useful resource to several groups. Language learning and writing specialists who have learners that have limited exposure to the kind of academic language that is expected at school and university will benefit from reading it. This is because explicit instruction is needed in how different grammatical structures lead to different kinds of texts that are valued in different ways. This book would also suit researchers who are relatively new to the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework who want to learn more about its descriptions and applications using authentic texts. Moreover, this book could be helpful to content teachers. The registers of subjects such as Science and Humanities are structured in an authoritative way and language is written in an objective manner. Students need to be made aware of these conventions. This book will give insights to content teachers about how to use SFL to help students to follow such convention as expressing interpersonal meanings that show objectivity.