CFP: Exploring the Use of Systemic Functional Linguistics for Critical Textual Awareness

Special issue call for papers from English Teaching: Practice & Critique

Deadline for Abstracts: August 1, 2017
Deadline for full manuscripts: November 15, 2017

For this upcoming special themed issue of “English Teaching: Practice & Critique”, the guest editors, Beryl Exley (Griffith University, Australia), Cynthia Brock (Wyoming University, USA), and David Caldwell (University of South Australia, Australia) call for research papers and theorised practitioner narratives that consider the application of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) for raising Critical Textual Awareness (CTA) in L1 English Language Arts and L1 English Medium Disciplinary Studies.

This special issue hones in on Michael Halliday’s concept of SFL and this thesis that language is a social semiotic (Halliday, 1978) organised via a network of three simultaneously occurring meta-functions. These three metafunctions are the ideational metafunction which construes experience, the interpersonal metafunction which enacts social relationships and the textual metafunction which organises the text into a coherent whole (see Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). SFL theory extends to consider the patterns of design of other modes of communication such as visual images (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), gestures, posture, movement (Mills, 2011), audio and/or music (Barton & Unsworth, 2014).

In this special issue, CTA considers texts to be forms of social action that construct versions of reality. Drawing on Hilary Janks’ (2006) notion of Critical Language Awareness (CLA) and its focus on the different choices available to language users and the inherent questions around power, this special issue explicitly embraces the broader term text to include multimodal texts and their intermodality (Bateman, 2014).

This call is for papers where SFL is part of the content of instruction in L1 English Language Arts and L1 English medium disciplinary studies is used by educators and learners to explore the power relations inherent in texts. The learning situation might be in either the early, primary/elementary, or secondary years of schooling, or in teacher education or higher education. The L1 English language learning situation might also take place in a community event or social situations outside formal institutional learning. The focus of this special issue is on how SFL contributes to CTA for disparate groups of L1 English language learners. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • pedagogical strategies for using SFL to engage L1 English Language Arts learners of a specific age or stage of learning in CTA;
  • implementing a unit of work in an L1 english medium classroom in any disciplinary field (e.g. math, science, humanities, arts, etc) where SFL is used to engage learners in CTA;
  • evidence that using SFL to engage L1 English language learners in CTA improves inferential reading comprehension of linguistic texts;
  • evidence that using SFL to engage L1 English language learners in CTA improves inferential reading comprehension of multimodal texts;
  • evidence that using SFL to engage L1 English language learners in CTA improves writing outcomes;
  • evidence that using SFL to engage L1 English language learners in CTA improves the production of multi-modal texts;
  • evidence that using SFL to explore CTA engages L1 English language learners; or
  • assessment practices in classrooms that use SFL to engage L1 English language learners in CTA.

Interested scholars and practitioners whose manuscript fit the remit of this special issue on “Exploring the Use of Systemic Functional Linguistics for Critical Textual Awareness” are invited to submit a 250 word abstract to ETPCAssist@gmail.com by August 1, 2017.

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