Making Language Visible

Misconception 1: SFL is concerned only with academic language or the language of school.

Reality: SFL is centrally concerned with how language makes meaning and how it varies across contexts. In K–12 settings, this means talking with students that the ways we use language at home, in the community, with peers, and in school are all meaningful, but they serve different purposes. In K-12 schooling contexts, SFL cares about the expansion of students’ repertoires to develop “action literacies” – “a social process which enables students to engage with discourses, rather than passively consuming previously constructed knowledge. Genre pedagogies which illuminate the linguistic structure and features of disciplinary knowledge can foster action literacy” (Harman, 2018, p. xiii). SFL helps students see how to expand from everyday registers into the many registers of schooling—without losing the value of their existing repertoires. Translanguaging practices can play a key role here, allowing students to draw flexibly on their full linguistic resources to make meaning. For example, a child may first recount a personal story in their home language or through a spoken-like string of clauses, then shift into a more structured written recount for school. However, that shift must be explicitly scaffolded because language in the written mode is vastly different, and SFL provides a framework for seeing those differences and teaching students how to shift from spoken-like to written-like.  (See here for more on that topic). In this video, you’ll see how to enact it in your classroom. In this video by Lexis Ed Lynette Lingard explains it with brilliant clarity.

Reality: While multilingual learners deserve an explicit language pedagogy that makes visible how meanings are realized through language, SFL is not only for them. All students—monolingual and multilingual alike—benefit from learning how language functions in context. In fact, it applies to you and me.  Just notice how you make choices when you write an email to your boss next time.  All those rewrites that you do is the choice making process. How should I start it? How should I greet them? Well, I don’t know this person, so I should briefly say something about myself, but how much is too much? What should I say as the first sentence? What should I put as a sentence opener: unfortunately, before I get to the point, with all due respect? Should I repeat this word for emphasis or should I replace it with a synonym? 

Misconception 3: SFL is just about finding nouns and verbs (or parts of speech with a functional tweak).

Response: SFL is not about labeling grammar but about analyzing how language works in contexts (what words do in texts)—how language functions to create meaning. For example, in traditional grammar students might identify “action words,” but in functional grammar we look at what meanings those verbs create. In stories, action verbs can build character feelings (she slammed the door → anger, he skipped home → joy). Adjectives, too, don’t just “describe”—they evaluate and judge (e.g., a brave soldier vs. a reckless soldier). Nouns in history don’t just “name”; they repackage actions into things, adding abstraction and sometimes hiding agency. For instance, “the destruction of the village” conceals who acted, unlike “soldiers destroyed the village.” This feature of historical discourse has been analyzed by de Oliveira (2011) and highlighted in the Reclaiming the Language blog as a way to teach students how history texts compress and obscure agency through nouns.

Misconception 4: SFL is only for linguists, not teachers.

Response: This misconception might stem from the belief that one needs to know all of SFL to do it right. But I what I have found in my work with teachers is you can do a lot with very little theory. I have been working noun groups with teachers across a variety of genres and content areas and we are able to do many things with one powerful language feature! (Blog with Lessons on noun groups.) Another stumbling block is the technical metalanguage. That technical metalanguage is used by linguists. When working with teachers and students, we can use what Sally Humphrey calls “bridging metalanguage” to create access points to the powerful ideas that the theory affords. However, we found in our work with students and teachers that students aren’t the ones who are afraid of metalanguage, it is actually the teachers because it differs from the “parts of speech” grammatical categories they are used. Meg wrote a paper “Miss, nominalization, is nominalization” where she describes how middle school students take up metalanguage easily.