Accessing Academic Discourse

Systemic Functional Linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory

J. R. Martin, Karl Maton, Y. J. Doran, J. R. Martin, Karl Maton, Y. J. Doran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367236083
• eBook ISBN: 9781000696417
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Academic discourse is the gateway not only to educational success but to worlds of imagination, discovery and accumulated wisdom. Understanding the nature of academic discourse and developing ways of helping everyone access, shape and change this knowledge is critical to supporting social justice. Yet education research often ignores the forms taken by knowledge and the language through which they are expressed. This volume comprises cutting-edge work that is bringing together sociological and linguistic approaches to access academic discourse.

Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is a long-established and widely known approach to understanding language. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) is a younger and rapidly growing approach to exploring and shaping knowledge practices. Now evermore research and practice are using these approaches together. This volume presents new advances from this inter-disciplinary dialogue, focusing on state-of-the-art work in SFL provoked by its productive dialogue with LCT. It showcases work by the leading lights of both approaches, including the foremost scholar of SFL and the creator of LCT. Chapters introduce key ideas from LCT, new conceptual developments in SFL, studies using both approaches, and guidelines for shaping curriculum and pedagogy to support access to academic discourse in classrooms.

The book is essential reading for all appliable and educational linguists, as well as scholars and practitioners of education and sociology.

1
ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

An inter-disciplinary dialogue

J. R. Martin, Karl Maton and Y. J. Doran

Introductions

As the gateway to educational success, academic discourse is a critical source of future opportunities and quality of life. Embodying worlds of discovery and imagination, academic discourse is also a key repository of accumulated human knowledge and wisdom. To access academic discourse is to access means for achieving social power, epistemological power, or axiological power. Access may lead to success in myriad ways. Of course, academic discourse is not the only form of knowledge with power. Scholars can succumb to the seductive illusion that their own professional discourse is the only legitimate currency and fail to see that non-academic knowledge possesses its own forms of power, its own wellsprings of understanding and luminous insight. Yet, academic discourse is particularly powerful. In its manifold forms it offers access to wealth, health and the capacity to create or destroy worlds, real or imaginative. Accessing academic discourse, that is to say the task of understanding its nature and developing ways of enabling everyone to grasp, shape and change academic discourse, is an issue of social justice. It is to explore diverse knowledge practices and determine how to enable everyone to have the opportunities offered by mastery of those knowledge practices, including the opportunity to fundamentally change them. This volume explores the nature of academic discourse from the perspective of two fields that enjoy a highly productive inter- and cross-disciplinary dialogue: systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). Specifically, the papers brought together here illustrate how LCT is pushing and provoking SFL into generating greater explanatory power and theoretical innovation in its engagement with accessing academic discourse.

As you are likely to know, SFL is an approach to language originated by M. A. K. Halliday (1985, 1994) that is now the basis of an extremely wide-ranging international community of scholars and educators exploring all manner of meaning-making. The field is well established: the International Systemic Functional Congress in 2020 will be the forty-seventh such conference. You may be less likely to know that LCT is a sociological approach to understanding and shaping social practice. Though quickly establishing itself through international conferences, book series, research centres and so forth, LCT is much younger. LCT extends ideas from Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu (among others) that were developed from the late 1960s and the first papers were published at the turn of the century (e.g. Maton 2000). However, it was not until 2009 that the name ‘Legitimation Code Theory’ appeared in print (Maton 2009) to describe the conceptual framework that had emerged as sui generis. Yet, LCT has become widely used to access academic discourse by a growing number of systemic scholars and educators. One reason is that the origins of this dialogue began earlier and built on existing foundations.

In 2002 the English sociologist Karl Maton delivered a plenary address at the annual conference of the Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association. This was perhaps the first occasion on which scholars in SFL encountered Maton’s work. Among the audience were linguists whose work on education had already been inspired by the sociological ideas of Basil Bernstein, who had died two years earlier. Many were excited to learn that those ideas were being extended further. Of particular interest at this time were developments of Bernstein’s notion of ‘knowledge structures’ (2000) by Maton (2000) and fellow sociologists Rob Moore (2000) and Johan Muller (2000). Inspired by this work, Frances Christie and Jim Martin organized a conference at the University of Sydney in December 2004 at which Maton and Muller presented papers alongside talks by SFL scholars. This dialogue was extended further by a second Sydney conference in December 2008, organized by Frances Christie and Karl Maton, which included both linguistics papers and sociological talks by Maton, Moore and Muller.¹

Much has happened since that plenary address in 2002. At the time Maton’s ideas were extending existing concepts from Bernstein. Subsequently those new ideas expanded and cohered into a systematic conceptual framework that became known as LCT. In 2005 Maton migrated from England to Australia, intensifying the burgeoning dialogue by bringing him into direct relations with the Sydney register of SFL. Fast forward to 2020 and there is now a large and thriving community of scholars and students enacting LCT and SFL together in the study of education and other social contexts (e.g. Maton and Doran 2017c, Maton et al. 2016b). This dialogue has been extended at International Systemic Functional Congresses and at International Legitimation Code Theory Conferences through keynotes, courses and workshops. Formal links have been established between the Martin Centre for Appliable Linguistics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and the LCT Centre for Knowledge-Building in Sydney, Australia. Intensive collaboration has been fuelled by major collaborative research studies and a growing number of PhDs that draw on both theories. In short, scholars from SFL and LCT have continued to work closely together. This volume illustrates some of the gains made from that dialogue and collaboration.

In this chapter we review the foundations for this dialogue and comment on key aspects of current research. Our use of ‘academic discourse’ in the book title does not limit this dialogue, which embraces practices far beyond education, including the legal field (Zappavigna and Martin 2018), museums (Blunden 2016) and the armed services (Thomson 2014). Nor does it concede to disparaging connotations of ‘academic’ as impractical or insignificant, for both SFL and LCT have direct appliability and their dialogue involves impact on practice (e.g. Martin and Maton 2013). Rather, it points both towards a regular foci for dialogue, the meaning-making practices of scholars, educators and students, and to the dialogue itself, an ongoing discourse between two academic approaches to meaning-making. There is a lot more to this dialogue than can be introduced here. LCT and SFL are proving particularly productive at challenging beliefs and provoking new ideas in one another. Nonetheless, we hope this introduction will provide insight into some of the issues bringing these complementary approaches together.

We start with SFL. We begin by reviewing work on the linguistic concept of field, before discussing how this brought educational researchers in SFL to engage during the early- to mid-2000s with Bernstein’s model of ‘knowledge structures’. We discuss how this engagement raised a series of questions that set up the ongoing encounter with LCT, a framework that extends and integrates Bernstein’s concepts. We then introduce LCT and discuss how concepts from two dimensions – Specialization and Semantics – helped resolve problems raised by systemic linguists with Bernstein’s notion of ‘knowledge structures’. We conclude by briefly discussing issues requiring vigilance when bringing SFL and LCT together, based on our experiences on major research studies of education.

Field (SFL)

The strand of SFL research that first attracted systemicists to LCT (via Bernstein’s ideas) was work developing the register variable field. This line of work emerged as part of the literacy focused action research associated with the ‘Sydney School’, as documented in Rose and Martin (2012).² The basic challenge here concerned moving on from a mastery of genres and their staging in primary school to developing genres which help build the uncommon sense knowledge of secondary school. For this, a focus on field and mode, alongside genre, was crucial. Initial work on physical geography (Wignell et al. 1989) and History (Eggins et al. 1993) was supplemented with work on a range of secondary school and workplace fields – see Rose et al. (1992), Halliday and Martin (1993), Iedema et al. (1994), Iedema (1995), Christie and Martin (1997), Martin and Veel (1998), Coffin (2006), Wignell (2007) and Martin (2012). Most of this research was based on a collaboration between the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney and the Metropolitan East Region’s Disadvantaged Schools Programme, in the ‘Language and Social Power’ and ‘Write it Right’ projects (see Rose and Martin 2012; Veel 2006). By the mid-1990s federal funding for such programmes was diverted away from regional centres by state departments of education and redistributed to individual schools. This led to a brief hiatus in this trajectory of educational linguistic research.

The model of field being developed in this work was inspired by Halliday’s work on the language of science (Halliday 2004) and drew heavily on Martin’s conception of field (1992) as a set of activity sequences oriented to some global institutional purpose, alongside the taxonomies of entities (people, places and things, both abstract and concrete) participating in these activities (organized by both classification and composition). The linguists involved were especially interested in how everyday sequences and taxonomies (Bernstein’s ‘common sense’) differed from the academic ones (Bernstein’s ‘uncommon sense’) challenging students across subject areas in secondary school. Particular attention was paid to the phenomenon of technicality whereby everyday or less specialized meanings were distilled as more specialized ones and used to build the uncommon sense taxonomies and implication sequences of humanities, social science and natural science disciplines. This process, of course, flagged the critical role played by grammatical metaphor in academic discourse (Halliday 1998; Martin 1993, 2008), both in definitions and explanations and in the composition of disciplinary genres. This brought the register variable mode into the picture, since abstraction was a critical resource affording technicality, cause/effect relations inside the clause and evaluation. For overviews of this work, see Martin (2007a, 2007b).

Martin (2007a) draws on meteorology to introduce the model of field in play here, drawing on information provided by the Australian Government’s Bureau of Meteorology website.³ As far as sequencing is concerned, they offer the following explanation of cloud formation:

[1] Clouds have their origins in the water that covers 70 per cent of the earth’s surface. Millions of tons of water vapour are evaporated into the air daily from oceans, lakes and rivers, and by transpiration from trees, crops and other plant life.

As this moist air rises it encounters lower pressures, expands as a result, and in doing so becomes cooler. As the air cools it can hold less water vapour and eventually will become saturated. It is from this point that some of the water vapour will condense into tiny water droplets to form cloud (about one million cloud droplets are contained in one rain-drop). Thus, whenever clouds appear they provide visual evidence of the presence of water in the atmosphere.

This uncommon sense implication sequence gives a simple explanation of how clouds form, working through a set of logically connected steps: water evaporates from bodies of water and transpires from plant life, and if it does so and rises, then it encounters lower pressures, and if it does, then it expands, and if it does, it becomes cooler, and if it does, it becomes saturated, and if it does, then some water vapour will condense into tiny water droplets (and so we see clouds). Such a sequence typifies uncommon sense ones – you cannot often see them happening (it takes too long, our eyes are not sharp enough and we rarely have a suitable vantage point), they are generalized (happening over and over again) and their steps are logically contingent (if one step happens another must follow).

Beyond uncommon sense sequencing, the entity emerging from this process (clouds) enters into uncommon sense taxonomies of both classification and composition. The following report introduces their classification into 27 subtypes and the criteria through which they are classified (their elevation):

[2] There are ten main cloud types, which are further divided into 27 sub-types according to their height shape, colour and associated weather. Clouds are categorized as low (from the earth’s surface to 2.5 km), middle (2.5 to 6 km), or high (above 6 km). They are given Latin names which describe their characteristics, e.g. cirrus (a hair), cumulus (a heap), stratus (a layer) and nimbus (rain-bearing). It’s an interesting fact that all clouds are white, but when viewed from the ground some appear grey or dark grey according to their depth and shading from higher cloud.

The main groups and subtypes construed in this clas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Academic discourse: An inter-disciplinary dialogue
• Part I Legitimation Code Theory: Opening ideas
• Part II Systemic functional linguistics: Responses to LCT
• Part III Bringing SFL and LCT together to explore knowers and values
• Part IV Academic discourse in the classroom
• Index