AN APPROPRIATE MODEL OF LANGUAGE

● Complete the chart below

DISCOURSE Educational

FIELD OF KNOWLEDGE Pedagogy, teaching

GENRE Academic textbook

AUTHOR Beverly Derewianka

INTENDED READER Students that need further knowledge in language for

academic purposes or teachers or teachers training course

● Identify and explain the main concepts developed in the text:

According to Halliday, the language system can be seen as a complex network of choices,
those choices being affected by the context in which language is used. Halliday stated that
there are three key factors in the context that affect the choices we make from the language
system: field (refers to the content or subject matter), tenor (refers to the roles we take up
and our relationship with our interlocutors) and mode (refers to the channel of
communication being used (written, spoken, visual, etc.)) Any combination of these
contextual features creates the register of a situation.
However, language choices are not only affected by the context of production, but it is also
affected by the relationship between language and the broader context of culture (culture
thus being understood as a collection of discourse communities, subcultures or social
institutions,) and we use it to achieve a variety of social purposes, for example inviting a
friend to a party or instruct someone to follow a recipe. Language in different scenarios have
different characteristics, and those different scenarios can be referred to as genres. Genres
are goal-oriented social practices that have evolved in our culture to enable us to get things
done. Each genre has a characteristic structure and goes through a number of stages to
achieve its purpose.