Functional Grammar and Its Implications for English Teaching and Learning

Feng, Zhiwen

doi:10.5539/elt.v6n10p86

Cited by 20 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…A viable pedagogical heuristic for engaging students in this sort of work is 5Esexplore, engage, examine, exercise and extend (Fang, 2020). With a focus on text interaction, this heuristic (see Figure 3) places enquiry in the centre of the instructional cycle, inviting students to inquire into a question or issue that is of personal interest or disciplinary significance in a unit of study through a variety of tasks and activities that are authentic and meaningful to the discipline.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Voice in adolescents' informational writing

Park

Fang

2021

Literacy

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Voice is a key component of interpersonal meaning that denotes a writer's value judgement or personal feelings. An important aspect of voice in informational writing is epistemic stance, which indicates a writer's judgement of the information presented. This exploratory study examined adolescents' use of hedges and boosters to convey epistemic stance in their informational writing. Ninety-three seventh-grade and ninth-grade students from one American public school were asked to write a science report on crocodilia for a peer audience. The writing corpus was coded for the presence of linguistic markers of hedges and boosters. Statistical analysis reveals that the students as a whole used significantly more boosters than hedges and that there was no significant difference between the two grade levels in the use of hedges or boosters. Moreover, the students drew heavily on everyday language resources to instantiate either hedges or boosters, and there was a lack of lexical diversity in their linguistic choices. These findings suggest that adolescent learners were able to infuse voice in their informational writing but needed to expand their linguistic repertoires for instantiating voice in order to develop advanced literacy.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Voice in adolescents' informational writing

Park

Fang

2021

Literacy

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“…Using the metafunctions (ideational, interpersonal and textual) to augment the teaching of PPs, as suggested by previous research (Aguirre-Muñoz et al 2015;AlHamdany, 2012;Ali et al, 2017;Derewianka, & Jones, 2010;Feng, 2013;Schleppegrell, 2004), might elucidate the complexities of PPs. Thus, giving EFL students a better insight into syntactic functions and structures of PPs which pose a complex configuration that affects learners' understanding of the topic.…”

Section: Why Functional Grammarmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic Awareness of the Prepositional Phrase Complexities in the English as a Foreign Language Context

Zapata-Leal

Ávila-Portuanto

2021

Rev. Electr. Educare

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This essay focuses on a description of the complexities of Prepositional Phrases (PPs) and their challenges for EFL learners. The rationale is to raise language awareness of the multifaceted nature of the PP in teachers and students. The grammatical explanations offered in the literature review are based on Functional Grammar. Moreover, previous research conducted addressing the issues of EFL learners facing problems with PPs are proposed in four configurations: semantic, syntactic, lexical and socio-cultural. Such configurations address scenarios for the identification of multiple meanings, different syntactic functions and structures, regional variations, typology, formal and informal language usage, among others, which represent obstacles and difficulties in the comprehension of the topic by EFL learners. Finally, we conclude that the limited use of syntactic functions, poor internal configuration of PPs, as well as the high frequency of errors reported by previous research indicate PPs are complex to use. Thereby, explicitly reinforcing the teaching of all the configurations of PPs is suggested.

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“…Readers are encouraged to access DLLI ’s Appendix, with resources that provide concrete examples of disciplinary literacy instruction (e.g., Brock, Goatley, Raphael, Trost‐Shahata, & Weber, 2014; McConachie & Petrosky, 2010). Other relevant resources include Fang (2020) and Langer (2011). Taken together, these resources provide specific examples of how to integrate language and literacy work in disciplinary teaching/learning in a way that promotes the building of content knowledge, understanding of disciplinary ways of making meaning, and cultivation of disciplinary habits of mind.…”

Section: Moving Forwardmentioning

confidence: 99%