Halliday’s View of Child Language Learning: Has it been Misinterpreted?

Abstract

This paper gives a brief summary of Halliday's theory of how children learn to talk, illustrating the development of children's language from the microfunctions through the macrofunctions and into the metafunctions of adult language. The paper points to a possible source of the misinterpretation of Halliday's theory in the work of Frank Smith (1983), which appears to have "trickled down" into some of the textbooks written for pre-service teachers in Australia. Links are made to teachers' knowledge about language (KAL) and the current Australian Curriculum English (ACE). It is suggested that while any number of functions of the language of school-aged children may be described, it is perhaps misleading to refer to the microfunctions as "Halliday's functions".

Shared reading as a practice for fostering early learning in an Early Childhood Education and Care centre: a naturalistic, comparative study of one infant's experiences with two educators

“…Educators may consider how, through their own talk, they create particular contexts in which infants may or may not actively participate in making meaning from the picture book text. By listening carefully and mindfully to the verbal contributions of infants during shared reading, educators can gain valuable insights into how infants express their own funds of knowledge as they interpret the visual images they encounter (Halliday, 2004;Painter, 1984Painter, /2015Thwaite, 2019;Torr, 2015). Such insights can guide educators in planning further rich and engaging learning experiences, based on infants' own interests and background knowledge.…”

“…SFL theory has been widely used in educational research because it makes systematic connections between social and linguistic behaviour. SFL posits an underlying organising principle determining young children's transition from prelinguistic communication to adult-like words and structures, thus resolving an apparent discontinuity between adult talk and child talk (Halliday, 2004;Painter, 1984;Thwaite, 2019;Torr, 2015).…”

“…We now compare the nature of Charlie's verbal participation during the two shared readings. Table 4 presents the words Charlie produced, the function they served (pragmatic or mathetic) and their status in the discourse (initiating or responding) (Halliday, 2004;Painter, 1984Painter, /2015Thwaite, 2019;Torr, 2015). Please note that in Table 4, if a word was produced more than once, the number of times it was spoken is presented in brackets.…”

Questioning in TOEFL iBT speaking test: a case of washback and construct underrepresentation

“…They further asserted that a wellconstructed test needs to sample tasks consistent with those in TLUS, or otherwise, its authenticity and construct validity might be questionable. On the other hand, as the results of the study indicated, TOEFL iBT speaking test fails to measure its applicants' skill in performing, at the very least, the heuristic function of language which is typically carried out through questioning (Thwaite, 2019). From Bachman and Palmer's perspective, negligence of applicants' questioning skill, in other words, would also point out traces of inconsistency between the test tasks and those in TLUS, threatening the authenticity, content validity, generalizability, construct validity, and, as a result, the usefulness of the tests.…”

Demographic Factors and Parents’ Communicative Acts: Their Implications on Models of Child’s Use of Language

“…to demonstrate another language use that Halliday did not find in his study. This is understandable since Halliday based his theory on his observations of his son Nigel up to the age of 18 months only (Thwaite, 2019). This technique found in the Filipino boy appears to reflect the diversionary function of child language as posited by Canadian psycholinguist Frank Smith (Thwaite, 2019).…”