Hello and welcome to a Quick Introduction to Linguistics, part of the series on teaching writing when you’re not a writing instructor. So why talk about linguistics when we’re thinking about teaching writing? The purpose of this video is to provide you with vocabulary to better describe what you are wanting students to master when you teach writing skills.

So how do we talk about language often when we look at student writing and try to speak with them about it or give them feedback? We find ourselves using words like grammar, word choice, organization, punctuation, sentence structure. But is this all the language we can use and is this really the best language to help our students understand how to build up their writing skills?  

So the principles I’m going to introduce in this video come from Systemic Functional Linguistics, often abbreviated as SFL. This particular school or type of linguistics was developed by M. A. K Halliday and a key principle is that language isn’t just about grammar but language is a tool for making meaning in a particular social context. Systemic Functional Linguistics has often been used in educational contexts, particularly in Australia, but other places as well to support academic language development.

So let’s take a look at how some of these principles might work themselves out. So, the first principle when we’re thinking about making meaning is to look at the social context. So, when we introduce our writing tasks to students, a first step is often to help them consider how this task might look in the real world. In other words, to make a specific connection with professional communication.

In the diagram on the right hand side of the slide, you see that we have Extralinguistic Levels what’s going on around the language in the social context and that Language is embedded in there. So the Linguistic levels of how we structure a text, the words we use, the way we organize those, those are inside of the particular social context.

Let’s unpack the social context a little bit more looking at genre and register. So genre is a way that we talk about cultural context and here we don’t mean cultural context just in the sense of national cultures. We also mean cultural context in the sense of professional or disciplinary cultures. So if I was talking about a cultural context that shaped genre, I could talk about the Canadian culture of professional business writing. So in that context, we have genres like a report, like a business presentation, like an executive summary and the way that these genres are worked out what we expect to see when we get a report a summary, a presentation, that’s shaped by the cultural context and Genre functions within that.

Within genre, we also have a relational context and we can speak about that as the register. So that deals with what the relationship is between the two people that are communicating. So a simple way to think of it often when we look at writing something I often hear is that “all my student writing has a lot of text speak in there”. And that’s actually a clash between the register that’s being used (the text speak) and the register that we’re expecting (the professional business communication). So the register is shaped by the relational context.

So if we have two people in a professional relationship, we expect to see a certain type of language come out of that. If we have two friends in a very informal conversation, we expect to see different language come out of that.

So let’s unpack genre and register even more. So we can divide the register component up even more into three components. The first of these is field, and field is also talked about as ideational meaning and you can look at the word “idea” in there to help you remember. So what’s happening? What is the situation in which the communicators are involved? The next part is the tenor and that’s the interpersonal meaning. So what’s the relationship in between the participants (the reader and the writer, the presenter and the audience)? is it an equal relationship? Unequal? Is it a formal relationship? Is it informal? These elements of the situation often shape what we expect to read or what we expect to hear. Then lastly, we have the mode, which is the textual meaning. So how is communication organized? What types a rhetoric or organization are used? Is it persuasion? Is it explanation? So in any kind of communication within the register, we have this interaction between the ideas, the relationship of the people, and how things are organized. All three of these things (the field, the tenor, and the mode) affect the way that language is used.

So we see here in the big picture, the cultural context, the disciplinary cultural context, the professional cultural context, we have some genres. So genres are different ways of making meaning. So we could say for example in a business context, a business report is a way of making meaning. An executive summary within a business report is a way of making meaning in business. In a business context, a professional presentation is a way of making meaning. Then this works out in terms of the register (the relationship in between the people) and then both of these things (genre and register) work themselves out in language. So another way of saying that is that the communication conventions of a genre and register are realized through language and again we can go back to that example. How is the genre and register of a text message different from the Genre and Register of a professional report?

So what? What are the implications of Systemic Functional Linguistics (the terms, the ideas that we’ve just been talking about) for teaching writing. The first one I would offer is, often when we observe a student struggling with writing, the main challenge is not so much with the lower level language functions like the grammar or word choice (even though that’s what we might notice), but, in the bigger picture, figuring out how to realize the cultural and situational factors of the professional context in the organization and the language choices of the writing.

So when we observe a piece of a student writing or listen to a presentation and feel like “Okay, I am really struggling to understand here”, often what’s going on is that the student is still working on learning some of those big picture things with genre and register. So start to think and look for these higher level functions and then how they’re realized or worked out in the lower level language functions rather than the other way around. Some other implications: genre and register are often unspoken. So, as instructors, we’ve often built up this instinctive knowledge about what we want to see. So we know when a report looks right, when it meets our expectations, and when it doesn’t but how do we know that? So this is actually grounded and rooted in our cultural, academic, and professional experience.

The pedagogical methods that we’re going to look at that flow out of Systemic Functional Linguistics help us to unpack genre and register for our students and help them to more thoughtfully connect their language choices to our contextual expectations. Systemic Functional Linguistics tools can also provide us with a framework for analyzing the text that we want our students to write and to more thoughtfully unpack the relationship between genre, register and language choices. So we can work through a text step by step asking ourselves some key questions at each of these levels, in each of the aspects of field, tenor, mode, interpersonal, and textual meaning to come up with some ways of unpacking that text of explaining it differently to our students.

Systemic Functional Linguistics has also been promoted as a way to really provide equal access to “genres of power” to all students. So we know that we see some of our students struggling more than others to meet these expectations and this is often because of unequal access that some students have had to learning what are the kinds of language structures that in the Canadian context (or even more specifically in a context like the Canadian business context): “What are ways that people communicate?” “What are ways that people make meaning that are valued, that are powerful, that give us access to what we want?” So by unpacking the text that we use, the Genres behind them, the expectations that shape them, this is a way of providing access to all students to these Genres of power.

Thanks so much for listening to this quick introduction to linguistics. In the videos, that follow we’ll learn more about how we can, step by step, put these principles into practice with some practical pedagogical tools.