1. This session will discuss SFL approaches to education, focusing both on teacher training and on students’ development at high school and college level. Participants will report on successful experiences of SFL implementation in educational settings drawing on genre-based syllabus design, particularly for the development of academic literacy, and technologies for mediating web-based distance education. Different cultural contexts for literacy building will be discussed, ranging from developing language skills in Spanish and Portuguese speaking contexts to Spanish development in an English speaking context, as is the case of Spanish literacy attempts in the U.S.A.

1. Though teaching of ‘grammar’ has returned to elementary school mother-tongue syllabi after decades of absence from many national education systems, approaches to it are still under-theorized and fragmentary.  SFL theory has made significant attempts to engage with this problem in English: it has assisted teachers to re-imagine the potential of grammatics in elementary schooling, contributed research to demonstrate both the accessibility and efficacy of SFG to young children, assisted development of language syllabi, and has of course critiqued reproduction of traditional school grammar.  These are as yet modest contributions, though, and a more extensive and robust theory of grammatics in elementary education is needed.
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3. One basic problem is to clarify what grammatics is for in elementary schooling.  Is it introduced, for example, mainly to improve literacy achievement levels for children without ‘natural’ access to privileged and privileging genres/registers by describing typical and differential patterning of lexicogrammatical features?  This has been a major feature of SFL work, and one that has made a material difference to accessibility. But the orientation positions lexicogrammar as secondary to genre/register pedagogically. This seems to me to be undesirable for several reasons. Thinking stratally, the approach foregrounds a realizational orientation over construal and effectively elements of lexicogrammar primarily serve to illustrate genre/register differences.  Most importantly, the potential of grammatics as a metasemiotic tool is blunted because discussion of features is subordinated to work on text-types.  Grammatical features may appear to have only local significance.
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5. A way to try to clarify purpose is to use both realizational and construal perspectives.  A construal orientation suggests that children would need more systematic introduction to grammatical systems, together with some of the primary meaning effects their features bring about.  
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7. Thinking about grammatics from both perspectives would allow us to clarify some critical issues, amongst which are the following:
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9. -    what are the key initial functions of grammatical concepts in developing metasemiotic perspectives on language use?
10. -    is there a desirable developmental sequence for the introduction of grammatical concepts?
11. -    how do we manage pacing of the introduction of concepts so that teaching about grammatics is educationally inclusive?  (This is, of course, crucially important for children for whom language is not already a familiar object of reflection.)
12. -    what principles of multimodal design should inform our production of learning materials for grammatics in elementary education?
13. -    what uses of IT might help children systematically explore some of the more complex aspects of lexicogrammar such as rank scale, metafunctionality, and feature conflation?  (I’m thinking here of Halliday’s comments about meaning effects being produced by configurations of grammatical features, and the implied need in education to avoid reductive accounts of meaning construal from isolated features.)
14. -    what approaches to assessing learning might be fruitful, taking into account Vygotsky’s emphasis on the need for complex concepts to evolve.

1. In my contribution to the Round Table, I would like to address practical issues of classroom research using SFL analyses of textbook and classroom discourse in conjunction with ethnographic techniques in investigating the complex relations between the language of school textbooks, the ways in which teachers act (or do not act) as mediators of this language for their students, patterns of classroom interaction and learning processes. The work I will comment on has been in two phases: the first concentrating on the identification of sources of difficulty in textbook language, the way teachers handle (or do not handle) these difficulties and the associated levels of learning discernible in students’ discourse as observed in classroom interaction and in interviews; the second concentrates on the ideology of the textbook discourse, the teachers’ mediation of it and its implications for citizenship education. All this work has been carried out in Spanish, thus also raising some interesting questions regarding the functional grammar of Spanish.
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3. Phase 1
4. As regards sources of difficulty in textbook language, we have identified a number of features which our “linguists’ intuition” suggested could be sources of difficulty; this was confirmed by the analysis of associated levels learning among students.
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6. As regards teacher mediation we have found that most of the teachers observed are unaware of the difficulties inherent in the text and tend to attribute lack of understanding to failure to read carefully on the part of the students. Many teachers encourage students to reproduce the text in literal form in their class participations, notebooks and examinations. Assessment is constant.
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8. Through analysis of observations and interviews, we have identified six levels of learning observable in the students. I will be providing examples of each with comments on the linguistic indicators used to identify them and their relation to certain patterns of classroom interaction.
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10. The final stage of Phase 1 was an action research intervention with 2 teachers, 1 in each of our two areas of study. Improved levels of learning were observed as a result.
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12. The main remaining problem in this phase is teacher development: how to design and implement practicable and affordable in-service programmes and how to convince university schools of education to address these topics in initial teacher education.
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14. Phase 2
15. The ideology studies are still in progress. Results so far suggest that in Natural Sciences a superficial and irresponsible approach to ecological problems is being promulgated whilst in Social Sciences a deterministic view of historical processes prevails. Both would seem to promote a non-participative, fatalistic approach to citizenship. As in Phase 1, we have observed a tendency for teachers and students to reproduce textbook discourse without questioning. I will be showing examples of discourse features which contribute to these ideological positions.

1. I shall summarize here the main points I intend to discuss in my contribution to the Round Table:
2. (1) SFL theory has a long history of involvement with Language Education. From the point of view of Halliday and his colleagues, there is no clearcut distinction between theoretical and applied linguistics interests, for research in the one supports and challenges research in the other.
3. (2) SFL theory by its nature is challenging and indeed subversive, since it seeks to explain the nature of social experience, seeing language as a primary semiotic system involved in the construction and negotiation of social reality.
4. (3) From the early 1960s till the present, SFL theory has been involved in  development of a theory of Language in Education, which has embraced a number of dimensions, covering matters as various as: language and social class, a language-based theory of learning, a theory of knowledge about language (KAL) for teaching purposes, pedagogic grammar, children’s writing development, reading pedagogy, ‘subject specific’ literacies and multiliteracies.
5. (4) Wherever the SFL theory of Language Education are developed and used they tend to provoke controversy. This is partly because they challenge many more ‘mainstream’ theories of language and/or theories of literacy. It is also partly because such theories have always been associated with other social theories – most notably sociological theories in the tradition of Bernstein- which have sought to address questions of social equity and social justice.
6. (5) At least in English-speaking traditions (which are the only ones that I am qualified to discuss), SFL Language Education theories have provoked debates over such issues as: (i) language as ‘process’ versus ‘product’ models of language for teaching and learning;  (ii) ‘prescriptive’ and ‘descriptive’ accounts of genres for teaching and learning; (iii) ‘static versus ‘dynamic’ discussions of genres for teaching and learning; (iv) ‘empowerment’ versus ‘conformity’ as goals of teaching and learning.
7. (6) These and other related formulations of debates in the SFL tradition have been useful in that they have served to challenge SF theorists to clarify their positions and to develop their pedagogies more and more fully.
8. (7) SFL theories of Language Education will always be at their most effective when involved in variously challenging established practices.
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2. Starting by clarifying our view on the role of school in the world we live today and the place of language in it, the aim of this participation is to raise questions on the challenge of discourse analysts to meet school expected goals.
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4. Paulo Freire (1996), M. A. Celani (2003) and L. P. Moita Lopes (2003) agree that the main purpose of the school is to enable students to understand the world they live in from a critical perspective so as to allow them to act politically upon it and transform it.
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6. This view of school is coherent with two of the most relevant theoretical foundations underlying the majority of the research on language in school in the area of applied linguistics in Brazil: the ones elaborated by development psychologist Vygotsky and language philosopher Bakhtin. For Vygotsky (1993/1933) apart from its social, communicative purpose, language is also the privileged mediating psychological tool used by human beings to intervene and transform cognitive processes.  It is through language that we become what we are, learn the world, and struggle to change it (and ourselves) according to our values and beliefs – which are in turn also socially constructed. Sharing Marxist principles, Bakhtin sees the word as a social and ideological sign. This implies that the meaning of language is always associated to unique communication constraints, which are linked to social structures.
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8. Taking the above into account, how can the analysis of language help understand the difficult problems faced in schools all over the world? How can it contribute to overcome them and build a stronger proposal to meet the many existing challenges?
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10. Three different approaches to language/discourse analysis have been trying to find answers to the problems posed: the French Discourse Analysis (Pêcheux, 1975/1988), the Swiss Socio-discursive interactionism (Bronckart, 1999), and SFL. The two first ones find their tenets in marxist principles, while SFL, although originally not clearly discussed these issues, also shows a converging view, since it likewise conceptualizes language as a social construct, crucial in the process of construction and organization of the human experience.
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12. The issues to be debated are whether one approach can learn from the other, how we as systemicists can interact with the other language analysis approaches in order to make our unique contribution more evident, while we are also led to the reflection of what it all means in terms of investment for teacher development.
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