Functional Grammatics

Re-conceptualizing Knowledge about Language and Image for School English

Mary Macken-Horarik, Kristina Love, Carmel Sandiford, Len Unsworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317364993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

This book provides a re-conceptualization of grammar in a period of change in the communication landscape and widening disciplinary knowledge. Drawing on resources in systemic functional linguistics, the book envisions a 'functional grammatics' relevant to disciplinary domains such as literary study, rhetoric and multimodality. It re-imagines the possibilities of grammar for school English through Halliday's notion of grammatics.

Functional Grammatics is founded on decades of research inspired by systemic functional linguistics, and includes studies of grammatical tools useful to teachers of English, research into visual and multimodal literacies and studies of the genre–grammar connection. It aims to be useful to the interpretation and composition of texts in school English, portable in design across texts and contexts and beneficial for language development.

The book will be of interest to researchers and teacher educators, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students and practicing teachers committed to evidence-based professional development.

1

NEGOTIATING THE TERRITORY OF ENGLISH THROUGH FUNCTIONAL GRAMMATICS

The problem of grammar

For decades now, school English has had a contentious relationship to grammar and perhaps never more so than in the current era with its constantly morphing digital media and new forms of textuality and a simultaneous pressure to ‘deliver’ quality outcomes for students in high stakes national and international tests. In many Anglophone countries, teachers are working with expanded notions of text and their disciplinary practices require a rethinking of available metalanguages. In this communicative environment, calls for a return to ‘the basics’ so students can succeed on high stakes tests appear anachronistic at best, misguided at worst. Instruction narrows to accommodate superficial grammatical rules and conventions; grammatical terminology is restricted to forms of standard English; interesting grammatical study of ‘textese’, non-standard forms in beat poetry, news captions or tweeting are abandoned. As one student put it, “Grammar has an air of unhappiness about it.”

Could it be different? Could grammatical study become not only a valid avenue of study but an exciting field of inquiry? Could it play a vital role in the interpretation and composition of texts? Might it be extended to images and multimodal texts? This book responds in the affirmative. It argues for a conception of grammar – what Halliday has come to call ‘grammatics’ – that is adequate both to the study of texts of many kinds and to crucial disciplinary practices in English (Halliday, 2002). It images this field of practices as territory that makes distinctive demands on grammatical study. In particular, it aims to show that a grammatics good enough for English will have four attributes: It will be relevant to disciplinary practices with narrative and persuasion; it will contribute to knowledge of language (and image) as a resource for meaning; it will be relevant to practical tasks in teaching of writing; and it will offer interesting ‘ways in’ to texts of all kinds. Happily for us (and for the profession), new descriptions are emerging that deal with images and other resources for meaning in picture books, graphic novels, posters and movies. Our hope is that the excursions we undertake in this book will encourage teachers to explore the possibilities of grammatically informed knowledge for interpreting and composing texts of all kinds.

Re-imagining grammar in these ways is difficult however, not least because subject English is more vulnerable than other school subjects to the expectations and anxieties of those beyond the school walls: it is the lingua franca in Anglophone countries, the primary means for learning most other school subjects and (for many students) the basis on which lives beyond the school can be optimised. Knowledge of language (and of grammar within this) is both important and unfamiliar territory for many in English and in the broader community. If collocation is the study of ‘the company a word keeps’ (Carter, 1998, p. 38), the noun ‘grammar’ often conjures adjectives like ‘correct’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Such associations reinforce a view of grammar as a standard against which language use (and user) is judged. For many, it evokes memories of the red pen on the margins of written work, comments about unsatisfactory forms of expression and ‘correctionist’ impulses that seek to erase rather than understand non-standard wordings. It is closer to the kill-joy than to the expressive gesture.

If grammar has an image problem, it is partly the result of a brace of studies that appear to have confirmed its adverse consequences (Braddock, Lloyd-Jones & Schoer, 1963; Hillocks, 1984; Wyse, 2001). For example, a meta-analysis conducted by Andrews and colleagues revealed that grammar instruction has either a negligible or (worse) a negative effect on student writing, if only by virtue that it takes up time that could be spent on more profitable tasks (Andrews, 2005; Andrews et al., 2006). Perhaps because they were based on traditional or transformational generative models of grammar (the latter of which was never intended for education), studies like this are limited by the familiar assumption that grammar instruction “is about the avoidance or remediation of error” (Myhill, Jones, Watson & Lines, 2013, p. 104). Furthermore, the research was mostly conducted in classrooms in which grammatical instruction was conducted separately from work on composition. The implicit assumption is that disciplinary relevance is unnecessary to the study of grammar. Professionally influential research into effects of grammar instruction has entrenched anachronistic views of grammar.

And yet knowledge of language as system and structure is important to teachers. And they are worried about their lack of knowledge about grammar. In the United Kingdom, for example, studies of teachers’ grammatical knowledge either confirm gaps in understanding (e.g. Cajkler & Hislam, 2002; Hudson & Walmsley, 2005; Watson, 2015) or report higher levels of confidence than can be demonstrated in tests of knowledge amongst primary and secondary teachers (e.g. Sangster, Anderson & O’Hara, 2012, p. 18). A similar picture has emerged in Kolln and Hancock’s historical review of grammar within English teaching in the United States. They note a general unpreparedness to teach grammar across the profession, underpinned by a “general public failure to recognize grammar as anything but a loose collection of prescriptive mandates” (Kolln & Hancock, 2005, p. 11). Comparable profiles of fragmentary linguistic knowledge amongst teachers have been detected in Canada (Williams, 2009) and New Zealand (Gordon, 2005; Meyer, 2008). In Australia, several studies have identified gaps in teachers’ linguistic knowledge (Commonwealth of Australia, 2009; Hammond & Macken-Horarik, 2001; Harper & Rennie, 2009; Jones & Chen, 2012; Louden et al., 2005). One recent study undertaken by two authors uncovered high levels of ‘avowed confidence with grammar’ amongst Australian teachers and profound uneasiness with specifics of grammatical knowledge (Love, Macken-Horarik & Horarik, 2015). Like others, these teachers have an ambivalent relationship to grammar.

These are important questions to explore that have not yet been taken up in previous research into grammar, despite claims of empirical robustness. For example: Just how is identification of grammatical forms to be related to descriptions of their function? How do teachers interpret these in larger patterns of meaning in texts? In what ways can they relate descriptions of verbal texts to multimodal texts? More generally, how far can they stretch grammatical descriptions in this vastly expanding digital world? A crucial starting point in addressing such questions rests on the assumption that grammar is about meaning. However, understanding how grammar makes meaning is too difficult if one’s conception of it is too narrow. The results for teaching can be grim, as Myhill and colleagues point out:

Weak linguistic knowledge can lead to an over-emphasis upon identification of grammar structures without fully acknowledging the conceptual or cognitive implications (Myhill 2003) of that teaching. Equally, it can lead to sterile teaching, divorced from the realities of language in use.

(Myhill, Jones, Lines & Watson, 2012, p. 142)

A pattern of weak linguistic subject knowledge presents an intellectual challenge for a subject dedicated to the study of language and historically resistant to its re-imagining. In reality, the approach to grammar that many in subject English eschewed decades ago was too limited to serve the demanding tasks of the discipline. In reflecting on the wholesale rejection of grammar in English during the sixties, Halliday argues that “Grammar had largely been disappeared from the curriculum, because teachers in the schools found the traditional grammar boring and useless; but nothing had come in in its place” (Halliday, 1991/2007, p. 283). For Halliday, responding to this difficulty means that grammatical instruction should be a properly constructed avenue of study rather than “a kind of linguistic nature study, with lists of parts of speech and rules of behavior” (Halliday, 1991/2007, p. 288). Re-conceptualizing grammar is vital if teachers are to invest in and profit from its study.

But there is a third problem for the re-imagining of grammar, this time emerging from neo-conservative forces in the socio-political environment. Grammar is always a fraught issue in public discourse, particularly in times of great change. At times of curriculum renewal, we often find political leaders offering opinions about the curriculum of English that will win them the support of disaffected popular opinion. As Deborah Cameron observes of this period in the United Kingdom, public debates about grammar quickly descended into a preoccupation with ‘the particular values and standards the idea of grammar has been made to symbolise” (Cameron, 1995). Five years later, Myhill was led to claim that rational argument about grammar “had been hijacked to support political arguments concerning the decline of moral standards and the need for order and authority” (Myhill, 2000, p. 152). Similar forces emerged in Australia during the development of the national curriculum, championed by Murdoch press journalists at The Australian newspaper such as Luke Slattery and Kevin Donnelly (see Macken-Horarik, 2009 and 2011 for discussion). In the United States, a period of ferment followed standards-based reforms like ‘No Child Left Behind’ that was signed into law by George Bush in 2002. In contexts such as these, talk of grammar is never just about grammar. It is about anxieties originating elsewhere and favours metaphors such as ‘grammar wars’ that bear little relationship to teachers’ everyday work (Snyder, 2008; Locke, 2010).

In sum, re-conceptualizing grammatical instruction in English is problematic for several reasons. Here we have outlined three factors that make this enterprise more challenging: the ‘aura of unhappiness’ that grammar has accumulated in discourses of deficit (an image problem), a pattern of weak linguistic knowledge across the profession (a knowledge problem) and the controversies that grammar constellates in public media (a distractor problem). In addressing such challenges, we need to begin with meaning making to develop a principled and coherent knowledge of language in the profession and to find ways to demonstrate the power of this in students’ literacy practices.

Re-imagining grammar through systemic functional grammatics

There are hopeful signs emerging in recent studies of meaningful approaches to grammatical instruction. The work of Myhill and colleagues in England has presented clear evidence of the positive effects of contextualized grammar teaching on students’ writing (Jones, Myhill & Bailey, 2013; Myhill, Jones, Lines & Watson, 2012; Myhill & Watson, 2014). This parallels interesting work in the United States on ‘rhetorical grammar’ (e.g. Kolln & Hancock, 2005; Hancock, 2009) and ‘contextualized grammar’ instruction (Weaver, 2010). Despite decades of dismissal of a role for grammar in English by the National Council of Teachers of English, there are signs that teachers are moving from ‘error to pattern’ in approaches to grammar (Gartland & Smolkin, 2016, p. 395). Teaching inspired by functional linguistics continues to improve academic learning for English Language Learner (ELL) students (e.g. Brisk, 2015; Moore & Schleppegrell, 2014; Schleppegrell, 2013).

In New Zealand, functional approaches have informed critical approaches to grammar instruction (e.g. Locke, 2005, Locke, 2010) even if many teachers lack a secure base in linguistic knowledge (Gordon, 2005; Meyer, 2008). A little way across the Pacific, Australian educators have long been conversant with the notion of grammar as a resource for meaning in texts (Christie & Derewianka, 2008; Derewianka, 2012; Humphrey, Love & Droga, 2011). It is the home of genre-based approaches to literacy teaching, inspired by decades of ‘Sydney School’ work (Christie, 2002; Axford, Harders & Wise, 2009; Rothery, 1989, 1994; Rose & Martin, 2012). The national survey referred to above revealed an extremely high percentage (93.5%) of teachers expressing confidence in knowledge of, and capacity to teach, text types (Love et al., 2015).

Because of decades of such work, it is easier to situate grammatical study within meaningful frames of reference such as genres. Even so, English teac...