Sally Humphrey

‘We Can Speak to the World’: Applying Meta-linguistic Knowledge for Specialized and Reflexive Literacies

This chapter reports on the work of one teacher and her students in an urban multicultural high school as they applied their growing knowledge of language to access and deconstruct discourses of power across rhetorical contexts. Informed by Australian models of Critical SFL praxis (Martin JR, Rose D, Genre relations: mapping culture. London, Equinox, 2008; Macken-Horarik M, Literacy and learning across the curriculum: towards a model of register from secondary school teachers. In R Hasan, G Williams (eds) Literacy in society. London, Longman, pp 232–278, 1996a; Macken-Horarik M, Construing the invisible: specialised literacy practices in Junior Secondary English. Dissertation, University of Sydney, 1996b), as well as by international research in literacy education and sociology (Bernstein B, Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: theory, research, critique. London, Taylor & Francis, 1996; Maton K, Knowledge and Knowers: towards a realist sociology of education. London, Routledge, 2014; Rose D, Martin JR, Learning to write, reading to learn: Genre, knowledge and pedagogy in the Sydney school. Sheffield, Equinox, 2012; Schleppegrell M, The language of schooling: a functional linguistics perspective. Mahwah, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004; Schleppegrell M, The role of meta-language in supporting academic language development. Language Learning 63(1):153–170. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9922.2012.00742.x., 2013), the chapter focuses on the crucial role of meta-language in expanding the critical social literacies of socio-economically and linguistically marginalized adolescent students.

An Introduction to ‘Sydney School’ Literacy Programs

This chapter introduces ‘Sydney School’ genre-based literacy programs, which form the theoretical underpinning for the pedagogic interventions of the SLATE project. Sydney School literacy programs involve a model of literacy teaching that aims to maximise all students’ ability to read and write texts across a range of contexts by providing high levels of support. Based on sociocultural theories of learning (such as Vygotsky, 1978; Wood et al., 1976), language development (e.g. Halliday, 1975,2003; Painter, 1984, 1989, 1999), and language (as introduced in Chapters 2 and 3), the Sydney School model does not ask students to produce work independently until they have experienced at least one cycle of support and engagement with a target text, provided by a teacher or more knowledgeable other. This kind of approach can be informally characterised pedagogically as a ‘prepare’ model, and sits in contrast with ‘repair’ models, which give students little support prior to reading and writing, and which instead focus on providing feedback after students engage with or produce text. Sydney School genre pedagogy has two main foci — curriculum and pedagogy. In other words, the focus is on both what to teach and how to teach it.

An Exploration of the Linguistics Program at CityU

This chapter explores the findings from the research conducted into the undergraduate linguistics program at City University Hong Kong (hereafter CityU). The aim of this research was to gain an understanding of the discursive practices within the CityU linguistics program, through a study of the genres of the texts collected from the program. The genre profile arising from this work was used to inform the literacy interventions implemented in the SLATE project, as described in Chapters 9–11. The genre profile highlighted the fact that the linguistics program at CityU, like most around the world, comprises subjects from many different subfields within the field of linguistics, which gives rise to a diversity in literacy practice. This diversity indicates that the relation of genre to field is a complex one. In order to make sense of this complexity, this chapter examines the key genres students are required to write for the undergraduate program, detailing the differences in staging and linguistic patterns that realise field and mode.

Negotiated Independent Construction: Feedback in the SLATE Project

This chapter discusses the SLATE project’s development and implementation of the final step of the Teaching Learning Cycle (TLC). As explained in Chapter 5, in a typical enactment of the TLC, the Joint Construction step is followed by an Independent Construction step. In this step, students write a text of the same genre as the ones that are modelled in the Deconstruction step and co-constructed with the teacher in the Joint Construction step. As noted in Chapter 10, some students in the SLATE project participated in online Joint Construction lessons, whereas other students went straight from Deconstruction to Independent Construction, bypassing the Joint Construction step altogether. The SLATE project’s enactment of the Independent Construction step differed from traditional face-to-face versions in that it involved iterative cycles of feedback and revision after students had written a draft of their assignment independently but before being finalised and submitted to the lecturer. This adapted Independent Construction, or Negotiated Independent Construction step, involved asynchronous interaction between a student or novice writer and an expert other (a tutor) using an online platform. In this chapter, we describe how the Negotiated Independent Construction step was implemented and also present an analytical framework to explain the nature of feedback given.

A Focus on Biology

This chapter continues the report of our research into the literacies of the particular disciplines involved in the SLATE research project at Hong Kong City University (referred to as CityU). Here we focus on describing the key genres used for both reading and writing across four courses of undergraduate Biology and the way these genres build knowledge cumulatively across these courses. Our findings complement those from the discipline of linguistics, which were provided in Chapter 6.

Knowledge about Language (KAL)

In this chapter we provide a thumbnail sketch of the key English resources relevant to an understanding of academic discourse. In Chapter 2 we introduced the basic SFL concept of stratification and the way in which SFL sees context as a more abstract level of meaning realised through language. This conception is outlined in very general terms in Figure 3.1, which positions genre as made of meanings and thus ‘realised’ through language.

Training Tutors to Work with Students in the SLATE Project

In this chapter we move from reporting key findings of our discourse analysis of Biology and Linguistics to reporting on the implementation of the intervention stage of the SLATE project. Specifically, this chapter focuses on the design of the training provided for tutors (language coaches) who were employed to support participating students from City University, Hong Kong (hereafter CityU), through the cycles of literacy intervention designed by SLATE researchers.

Modelling Language in Context — Systemic Functional Linguistics

In this chapter we introduce in general terms the model of language and context informing this monograph — namely systemic functional linguistics (hereafter SFL). Only foundational concepts are introduced here: stratification, axis, metafunction, and rank. A more detailed account of the understandings of language and context informing our research will be presented in Chapter 3. In this chapter we base our introduction of basic concepts on examples taken from the following text excerpted from Lasn’s1 Meme Wars (2012, p. iv), an engaging multimodal advocacy monograph composed as an appeal to economics students to liberate their discipline from neoclassical economic theory; the author of this excerpt is Luke Sherlock, from Oxford, UK.

Setting up a Toolkit for Academic Literacy

In this chapter we describe how we recontextualised the systemic functional linguistics (hereafter SFL) model of language presented in Chapters 2 and 3 as a bridging framework to support the analytic work of SLATE tutors. This framework, which was conceptualised as a 3 × 3 toolkit1 (Humphrey et al., 2010), makes visible the metafunctional organisation of language but pragmatically simplifies SFL’s model of stratification and rank as three ‘levels of text’.

An Introduction to the SLATE Project

In many parts of the world today, English is seen as the language of higher education and knowledge production. For example, in countries and territories such as Hong Kong, India, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Philippines, a large number of universities and colleges use English as the medium of instruction, even though these countries have recognised national languages. These national languages are typically used in primary and secondary schools, but then replaced with English in tertiary education (although English is increasingly being introduced as a medium of instruction in primary and secondary schools, at least for some subjects). The choice of adopting English in tertiary education in such countries is a result of a combination of complex historical, political and attitudinal factors — historical in that the five countries listed were all colonised by English-speaking countries, political in that these countries are multilingual and English is seen as a ‘neutral’ language, and attitudinal in that a large proportion of the population believes that English is key to educational and scientific development. Regardless of the reasons for institutionalising English in tertiary education in these countries, the fact remains that English is the medium of instruction in institutions of higher education in many countries around the world, even though a large number of students who attend these universities have limited proficiency in English.