Culturally Sustaining Systemic Functional Linguistics Praxis

By introducing a framework for culturally sustaining Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) praxis, Harman, Burke and other contributing authors guide readers through a practical and analytic exploration of youth participatory work in classroom and community settings. Applying an SFL lens to critical literacy and schooling, this book articulates a vision for youth learning and civic engagement that focuses on the power of performance, spatial learning, community activism and student agency. The book offers a range of research-driven, multimodal resources and methods for teachers to encourage students’ meaning-making. The authors share how teachers and community activists can interact and support diverse and multilingual youth, fostering a dynamic environment that deepens inquiry of the arts and disciplinary area of knowledge. Research in this book provides a model for collaborative engagement and community partnerships, featuring the voices of students and teachers to highlight the importance of agency and action research in supporting literacy learning and transformative inquiry. Demonstrating theoretically and practically how SFL praxis can be applied broadly and deeply in the field, this book is suitable for preservice teachers, teacher educators, graduate students and scholars in bilingual and multilingual education, literacy education and language policy.

This volume explores how educators conceptualized and implemented critical approaches to systemic functional linguistics that support bilingual students in appropriating and challenging dominant knowledge domains in K-16 contexts. The researchers exhibit a shared commitment to enacting a culturally sustaining SFL praxis that validates multilingual meaning making, pushes against social inequity, and fosters creative re-mixing of available semiotic resources. It should prove a valuable resource for students, teachers and researchers interested in applied linguistics, education and critical theory.

This collection is a comprehensive resource on conducting research in applied linguistics involving written genres that is distinctive in its coverage of a multiplicity of interdisciplinary perspectives. The volume explores the central approaches, methodologies, analyses, and tools used in conducting genre-based research, extending the traditional focus on a single framework for defining genres by explicating the major approaches that have been invoked in applied linguistics. Chapters address a mix of commonly used methodologies (e.g., case studies, ethnographic approaches), types of analyses (e.g., metadiscourse, rhetorical move-step analysis, multidimensional analysis, lexical bundles and phrase frames, CALF measures, multimodal analysis), and studies that focus on other areas of second language (L2) teaching and learning (e.g., multilingualism, the Teaching and Learning Cycle). Taken together, the volume provides a theoretically and methodologically diverse introduction to foundational topics in genre-related research, supported by detailed discussions of the challenges and practical considerations to take into account when conducting research involving written genres. This book is a valuable resource for graduate students, faculty, and researchers in applied linguistics, particularly those working in second language acquisition, L2 writing, and genre theory and pedagogy.

This book explores the importance of language in content learning. It focuses on teachers’ roles, knowledge and understanding of language in school contexts (including academic language and disciplinary languages) to support students. It examines teachers' language-related knowledge base for content teaching, which include teachers' knowledge of and about language, knowledge of (their) students and their pedagogical knowledge. This book also explores how teachers’ knowledge of language, students and content are linked as part of a larger pedagogical content knowledge, which includes knowledge of the role of language in content learning. As well, it further considers literacy (and literacies) as part of this examination of teachers’ knowledge of language.

The studies in this volume show how multilingual learners use language play in second language acquisition to internalize sets of ‘voices’ (rather than decontextualized linguistic systems), namely complexes of linguistic and non-linguistic features incorporating the personalities of significant others. In sociocultural terms, these internalized heteroglossic voices become tools that learners can adapt and use playfully to enact chosen roles, stances, and identities in subsequent oral interactions. Different chapters explore these sociocultural constructs using different approaches, including variationist sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, translanguaging, and positioning theory.

This critical volume provides accessible examples of how K–12 teachers use systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and action research to support the disciplinary literacy development of diverse learners in the context of high-stakes school reform. With chapters from teachers, teacher educators, and researchers, this book paves the way for teachers to act as change agents in their schools to design and implement meaningful curriculum, instruction, and assessment that builds on students’ cultural and linguistic knowledge. Addressing case studies and contexts, this book provides the framework, tools, and resources for instructing and supporting multilingual students and ELL. This volume – intended for pre- and in-service teachers – aims to improve educators’ professional practice through critical SFL pedagogy and helps teachers combat racism and anti-immigrant rhetoric by contributing to an equity agenda in their schools.

An essential text on discourse theory and analytic methods, this book demonstrates the possibilities of using discourse analysis to better understand language, literacy, culture, and teaching. Each chapter provides coherent, extended examples of individuals engaged in the process of doing discourse analysis. The narrative approach highlights the individual experiences of the discourse analysts and provides a unique, inside-the-mind view of the process and choices along the way. Across the book, stories describe processes involved in analyses, including identifying aims, formulating questions, selecting discourse, transcribing oral and multimodal discourse, translating discourse, chunking discourse, choosing and applying discourse and other theory, generating and supporting claims, and communicating findings. Chapters also feature sidebars with key theories and methods, recommended readings, and additional resources. This book is ideal for courses on discourse analysis, qualitative research, or language, literacy, culture, and teaching. Readers are invited to imagine the possibilities for using discourse analysis to answer their own questions.

Drawing on critical and sociocultural frameworks, this volume presents narrative studies by or about Latinas in which they speak up about issues of identity and education. Using narratives, self-identification stories, and testimonios as theory, methodology, and advocacy, this volume brings together a wide range of Latinx perspectives on education identity, bilingualism, and belonging. The narratives illustrate the various ways erasure and human agency shape the lives and identities of Latinas in the United States from primary school to higher education and beyond, in their schools and communities. Contributors explore how schools and educational institutions can support student agency by adopting a transformative activist stance through curricula, learning contexts, and policies. Chapters contain implications for teaching and come together to showcase the importance of explicit activist efforts to combat erasure and engage in transformative and emancipatory education.