Session Eight: Functional Grammar and Related Pedagogies

Session Eight: Functional Grammar and Related Pedagogies

1. Pedagogies

Re-orienting the teaching focus

A well written conclusion is like a well written paragraph. This means that the sentences need to be
written in a logical order of ideas with appropriate use of linking words. Here is a conclusion from
another report on the analysis of brittle material. The sentences have been jumbled so that they are not in
the correct order. Read through the sentences and number them in the order you think would be best.

Conclusion

1 Much was gained through the execution of this experiment.

The length of a brittle specimen under a load also affects its mechanical properties.

All in all, brittle materials exhibit a sensitivity to their surface conditions as well as their
physical dimensions.

Not only does the presence of a crack cause premature failure, but the width, depth, and
orientation of the crack also play an important part in determining just how much weaker the
material will be made.

It was also seen that cracks initiate at the atomic level of a material.

The short specimens were much more rigid than the longer specimens.

2 An initiated crack on the surface of a brittle material will cause the material to fail at a much
lower stress level than expected.

From Killingsworth, M. J. 1996. Information in Action – A guide to technical communication. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Now, recall the way you completed the task just now. What are the contextual clues that helped you
reorder the sentences? Did you rely only on the linking words? In other words, how are ideas connected?

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 Session Eight: Functional Grammar and Related Pedagogies

Other Relevant Concepts of Teaching and Learning Grammar

discourse whole text
Context (Nunan, 1998)
In textbooks, grammar is very often presented out of context. Learners are given isolated sentences,
which they are expected to internalize through exercises involving repetition, manipulation, and
grammatical transformation. These exercises are designed to provide learners with formal, declarative
mastery, but unless they provide opportunities for learners to explore grammatical structures in context,
they make the task of developing procedural skill—being able to use the language for communication—
more difficult than it needs to be, because learners are denied the opportunity of seeing the systematic
relationships that exist between form, meaning, and use.

As teachers, we need to help learners see that effective communication involves achieving harmony
between functional interpretation and formal appropriacy (Halliday, 1985) by giving them tasks that
dramatize the relationship between grammatical items and the discoursal contexts in which they occur. In
genuine communication beyond the classroom, grammar and context are often so closely related that
appropriate grammatical choices can only be made with reference to the context and purpose of the
communication. In addition, only a handful of grammatical rules are free from discoursal constraints.
This, by the way, is one of the reasons why it is often difficult to answer learners' questions about
grammatical appropriacy: in many instances, the answer is that it depends on the attitude or orientation
that the speaker wants to take towards the events he or she wishes to report.

If learners are not given opportunities to explore grammar in context, it will be difficult for them to see
how and why alternative forms exist to express different communicative meanings. For example, getting
learners to read a set of sentences in the active voice, and then transform these into passives following a
model, is a standard way of introducing the passive voice. However, it needs to be supplemented by tasks
which give learners opportunities to explore when it is communicatively appropriate to use the passive
rather than the active voice.

Now read the following text – guess who the target audience is:

When the compressive wave component reaches a free face, it reflects as a tensile wave and travel back
towards the source. Since rock has low tensile strength, it will be broken into pieces by the tension and
can be further enhanced by the stress concentration effect. This process is called spalling.

textbook language

definition
form and function

communicative purpose

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 Session Eight: Functional Grammar and Related Pedagogies

Consciousness-Raising (Widodo, 2006, p. 124)

Ellis (2002) defines consciousness-raising as an attempt to equip learners with an understanding of a
specific grammatical feature, to develop declarative (describing a rule of grammar and applying it in
pattern practice drills) rather than procedural (applying a rule of grammar in communication) knowledge
of it. Richards, Plat, and Plat (1992) define consciousness-raising as follows:

It is an approach to the teaching of grammar in which instruction in grammar (through drills,

grammar explanation, and other form-focused activities) is viewed as a way of raising
learner’s awareness of grammatical features of the language. This is thought to indirectly
facilitate second language acquisition. A consciousness-raising approach is contrasted with
traditional approaches to the teaching of grammar in which the goal is to instill correct
grammatical patterns and habits directly (p. 78).

The main characteristics of consciousness-raising activities proposed by Ellis (2002) involve:

1. there should be an effort to isolate a specific linguistic feature for focused attention;
2. the learners are provided with data which illustrate the targeted feature and an explicit rule
description or explanation; inductive more advanced learners
3. the learners are expected to utilize intellectual effort to understand the targeted feature;
4. misunderstanding or incomplete understanding of the grammatical structure by the learners leads
to clarification in the form of further data and description or explanation; and
5. learners are required (though not crucial) to articulate the rule describing the grammatical feature.

In short, in consciousness-raising, learners are required to notice a certain feature of language (that is,
sentence patterns), but there is no requirement to produce or communicate the certain sentence patterns
taught. Consciousness-raising activities differ from other types of explicit grammar teaching in that they
make no claim that the knowledge gained from such activities can become automatized and available for
immediate use.

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Grammatical metaphors (http://www.engl.polyu.edu.hk/academic_writing/grammetaphor.html)

Grammatical metaphor is the compaction of a clause (“literal”) into a nominal group (“metaphorical”) so
that events, originally separated in clauses, can be condensed into one single action. Take for an example
from a citation found in the literature review in the following table, a single clause with long nominal
groups can be broken down into three clauses, which relationship is connected in terms of adverbials of
condition (“if” clause) and place (“where” clause). In earlier schooling, literal or “congruent” construal of
experience is common (Christie, 1998, 2002 in Christie & Derewianka, 2008); as students turn into late
childhood and adolescence, incongruent grammatical formulations start to emerge in their writing, with
the use of embedded clauses (e.g. relative clauses, participles) and turning a full clause to nominal group.
Successful writers are capable of managing grammatical metaphor in their written work, especially in
exposition and argumentation, in which a more sophisticated and technical register is required.

Metaphorical: information packed into Literal (or “congruent”): information unpacked into
one clause clauses

Furthermore, reliance on scripted spoken 1. 1. Furthermore, as students rely on scripted spoken texts,
texts retards students’ ability to interact 2. 2. they become less able to interact outside the classroom
in the unscripted world of 3. 3. where people in the world converse without a
conversation outside the classroom (Burns
script (Burns 2001).
2001).

Although both the literal and metaphorical instances mean the same, they serve different functions. The
literal instance portrays a sequence of concrete experience such as an observation, and narrates as a matter
of fact. Meanwhile, the metaphorical notion is the concentrated experience into “a general notion of
‘abstraction’” (Ravelli, 2004, p. 117), refined into an understanding of knowledge or ideas. In other
words, grammatical metaphor is the naming of processes and sequences, and “one of the most important
ways to technicalise” (ibid, p.117).

Apart from making the written text look sophisticated and technical, grammatical metaphor also acts as a
means to foreground and background the body of text. High lexical density in the form of grammatical
metaphor at the position of higher level Themes and News serves as a point of departure to further
develop the text and to accumulate and distil information.

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