Peter R. R. White

Linguistically Based Inequality, Multilingual Education and a Genre-Based Literacy Development Pedagogy: Insights from the Australian Experience.

This chapter addresses the issue of pedagogy and bilingual/multilingual education: how best to match teaching-and-learning approaches to the literacy development needs of students in multilingual educational settings. More specifically, it makes the case for what is known as the ‘Sydney school’ genre-based literacy development approach. It argues that, in providing explicit knowledge about the social functions, structures and stylistic properties of the modes of communication associated with academic success and social mobility, it has the potential to address the linguistically based social and economic inequality often experienced by students whose home language is other than the politically dominant, ‘majority’ language of the school. A brief account is provided of this ‘genre-based’ approach, followed by an account of its implementation in South Australia over the last decade or so in schools with large numbers of students who speak at home a language other than Australias majority language, English. Finally, outcomes for students involved in such genre-based literacy development are explored, with findings of a study reported which point to these students making significant advances in their literacy development. This study is of potential interest to South African educators, illustrating the long-term gains that genre-based pedagogies can afford socio-economically and linguistically disadvantaged learners.

Crime reporting as storytelling in Persian/Farsi news journalism – perspectives on the narrative function

This paper is concerned with the nature of storytelling and how different types of story or narrative might be classified and characterised by reference to their generic structures and ultimate social functions. More specifically, it is concerned with Persian/Farsi-language reports of crimes in Iranian newspapers. It describes and analyses the various ways in which these texts are organised structurally, informationally and with respect to “newsworthiness”, the various ways in which they deal with chronological sequence and the various ways in which they position the reader attitudinally vis-a-vis the events described and/or their protagonists. In so doing, it provides insights into the similarities and differences between these instances of Persian/Farsi journalism and what the journalism studies literature has presented as “typical” of modern news reports in English and other languages. It also provides insights into the nature of these Iranian crime reports as instances of storytelling or narrative, pr...

Attitude: Ways of Feeling

In this chapter we outline a framework for mapping feelings as they are construed in English texts, referring to this system of meanings as attitude. This system involves three semantic regions covering what is traditionally referred to as emotion, ethics and aesthetics. Emotion is arguably at the heart of these regions since it is the expressive resource we are born with and embody physiologically from almost the moment of birth (Painter 2003). We will refer to this emotive dimension of meaning as affect.