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This paper aims to analyze how middle schoolers developed a critical awareness of language while participating in a curricular unit informed by systemic functional linguistics (SFL). This unit was developed to understanding and taking action to protect a local bat population in the context of school reforms shaping teaching and learning in the USA. It was designed to support a heterogeneous class of seventh graders in learning to read scientific explanations, write letters to government officials and develop a functional metalanguage to support them in analyzing how language simultaneously constructs ideas, enacts power dynamics and manages the flow of information in disciplinary texts. The questions guiding this study are: How do students use SFL metalanguage in text production and interpretation practices? Do their uses of SFL metalanguage support critical language awareness and reflection? And, if so, in what ways?

This study uses ethnographic methods to conduct teacher action research. Data include classroom transcripts, student writing samples and interviews.

The findings illustrate how students engaged with SFL, often playfully, to create their own student-generated functional metalanguage in highly productive ways.

This study contributes to a growing body of scholarship that suggests SFL metalanguage can provide teachers and students with a powerful semiotic toolkit that enables them to navigate the demands of teaching and learning in the context of the Standardization and Accountability movement.

This study has implications teachers’ professional development and students’ disciplinary literacy development in the context of school reform.

To date, few studies have explored how students take up and transform SFL metalanguage into a tool for critical reflection, especially adolescents.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the usefulness of Halliday’s linguistic theory known as Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) in analysing qualitative data. In order to do this, it initially presents an overview of SFL, and then explains how and why four linguistic features namely, nominalisation, grammatical metaphor, thematic structure and lexical density are useful in examining qualitative data. The paper also discusses three social metafunctions of language known as the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual metafunctions which are significant for understanding and interpreting texts.

This paper employs SFL as the main theoretical framework to discussing the usefulness of this linguistics theory in qualitative data analysis.

SFL can be seen as a paradigm shift in linguistic theory moving away from the traditional focus on syntax to the inclusion of the interface between language and pragmatics. The focus of SFL is language in use. It deals with texts in social contexts, which is the main focus in qualitative data analysis. Thus, SFL provides both research tools and theoretical insights for understanding and interpreting texts.

This paper provides significant insights into language which are crucial for understanding and interpreting texts in social contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the utility of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as an underlying model to examine the similarities/differences between spoken and written peer-to-peer (P2P) communication.

An embedded mixed methods experimental design with linguistically standardized experimental stimuli was used to expose the basic linguistic differences between P2P communications that can be attributed to communication medium (spoken/written) and product type (hedonic/utilitarian).

The findings show, empirically, that consumer’s spoken language is not linguistically equivalent to that of written language. This confirms that the capability of language to convey semantic meaning in spoken communication differs from written communication. This study extends the characteristics that differentiate hedonic from utilitarian products to include lexical density (i.e. hedonic) vs lexical sparsity (i.e. utilitarian).

The findings of this study are not wholly relevant to other forms of consumer communication (e.g. viral marketing). This research used a few SFL resources.

This research shows that marketers should ideally apply a semantic approach to the analysis of communications, given that communication meaning can vary across channels. Marketers may also want to focus on specific feedback channels (e.g. review site vs telephone) depending on the depth of product’s details that need to be captured. This study also offers metrics that advertisers could use to classify media and to characterize consumer segments.

This research shows the relevance of SFL for understanding P2P communications and has potential applications to other marketing communications.

The purpose of this paper is to reframe the role and function of perceived “bad English” in an international business (IB) context to illustrate that “bad English” could in fact facilitate cross-cultural communication in individuals who do not have English as first language.

This study uses the Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia as a theoretical framework. For the method of analysis, applied linguistics is used in particular through the lens of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as discourse analysis method to analyze transcribed interview texts. Data collection is via long interviews with 33 top level managers in Swedish managed organizations in Singapore offices.

The study illustrates, through respondent interviews and discourse analysis, that perceived “bad English” could help facilitate communication across cultures in a cross-cultural working context. The study also shows how different individuals, depending on personal experience and cultural background, employ different means to navigate and manage language differences at work.

The findings confirm a Baktinian perspective of language as a heteroglot, where individual identities and understanding of context at work including work behavior are an amalgamation of collected experiences. While many individuals who do not have English as mother tongue might feel embarrassed by their poor English, this study shows that there are many Englishes existing in different working contexts. This study has a limited sample of respondents, pertaining to Swedish and Singaporean top managers in Swedish managed organizations in Singapore.

This study could be useful for multinational corporations that are interested in strategically managing their corporate language policies, taking into account cognitive differences or cultural identities in different offices worldwide.

At a social level, Bakhtin’s language as a heteroglot brings to awareness that at any one time, while individuals are drawn to identify with their dominant (national) culture and language, in effect, with increased contact with other cultures in working environments, both language and cultural identities shift and evolve with the workplace.

This study contributes to the growing language in IB research. The novelty in this study is the employment of a Bakhtinian perspective and specifically the employment of SFL as a method of data analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the statements by the chairman and CEO in BP plc’s Annual Report 2010 for linguistic evidence of reader positioning. This is based on the premise that reputational fallout from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill would have heightened the need for such positioning to repair the company’s legitimacy.

Applying Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL) framework, a comparative register analysis was undertaken of the respective statements of the chairman and CEO of BP plc. This was informed by corpus analysis of these statements, of comparative statements from industry competitors and of two larger-scale corpora constructed from the chairman and CEO statements extracted from the annual reports of 25 FTSE100 companies.

The findings suggest that readers’ perceptions are likely to be shaped by the statements of the chairman and CEO of BP plc in the company’s 2010 annual report, but similarities and differences are apparent in the way this positioning is engineered. Broader corpus analysis hints that these similarities and differences are not localised to BP plc.

The analysis relies on the assumptions that the chairman and CEO are the writers of each piece. As with prior research, questions of intent on the part of the corporate authors and impact upon target readers remain unanswered.

This paper demonstrates and highlights the issue of reader positioning through lexico-grammatical choices in corporate disclosures.

This paper makes a contribution to the literature by demonstrating how reader positioning may be engineered through lexico-grammatical choices in corporate disclosures. This paper further responds to a call from Sydserff and Weetman (1999, 2002) for interdisciplinary approaches to investigating corporate narrative reports involving linguistics, through foregrounding Halliday’s SFL framework as an analytical tool.

The paper presents an investigation into the validity and robustness of the concept of competitive productivity (CP) using linguistic analysis and theory to explore the foundational CP concepts and the relationships between them.

The aim of this paper is to make a theoretical contribution to the conceptualisation of CP in order to inform its understanding, measurement and application.

The investigation indicates the relevance of three dimensions (instantiation, stratification and system) to understand CP as a complex, multidimensional system. Instantiation both clarifies CP as a multilevel system and highlights the need for an additional dimension(s) to understand the relationship between national, firm and individual CP (NCP, FCP and ICP). In combination, the two dimensions of stratification and system model CP as a series of nested strata (theory/models, concepts, constructs, variables and measures) through which marketing and management theory and knowledge is created and demonstrate how the options at each level can be articulated as system networks.

Managing the complexity of CP by mapping different aspects along different dimensions and, in doing so, better understanding the nature of and relationships between different phenomena within the domain can potentially inform future qualitative and quantitative research in business studies and beyond.

The paper uses a novel, interdisciplinary approach to demonstrate the existence of CP as a complex, multidimensional system, where such dimensions inform the understanding, measurement and application of CP, and so is of value to marketing and management researchers and practitioners.

This study aims to seek to demonstrate how explicit teaching of SFL metalinguistic and multimodal “grammars” enhanced 8-9-year-old children’s deeper understanding and production of multimodal texts through critique of the construction of mini-documentaries about animals: the information, language of narration, composition of scenes and resources to engage the viewer. It also seeks to demonstrate how a knowledge of metalinguistic and multimodal “grammars” contributes to students achieving both content knowledge and understanding of the resources of semiotic modes.

A design-based approach was used with the teacher and author working closely together to implement a unit of work on mini-documentaries, including explicit teaching of the metalanguage of information reports, mini-documentary narration (aka script) and multimodal resources deployed to scaffold students’ creating their own mini-documentaries.

The students’ mini-documentaries demonstrate how knowledge of SFL written and multimodal SFL-informed “grammars” assisted students to learn how meaning was created through selection of resources from the written, visual, sound and gestural modes and apply this knowledge to creating multimodal texts demonstrating their understandings of the topic and how to make meaning in a multimodal mini-documentary.

The research is limited to the outcomes from one group of students in one class. Generalisation to other contexts is not possible. Further studies are required to support the results from this research.

The linguistic and multimodal SFL-informed grammars can be applied by educators to critique multimodal texts in a range of mediums and scaffold students’ production of multimodal texts. They can also inform assessment criteria and expand students’ conception of what is literate practice.

Knowledge of a linguistic and multimodal metalanguage can provide students with the tools to enhance their critical language awareness and critical multimodal awareness.

The purpose of this paper is to examine a selection of creative writings by students at one Australian secondary school over a period of 50-plus years, charting the frequency with which key markers of gender appear in student storytelling over this period and sampling the types of gendered representation demonstrated in these stories.

Taken from a larger study, and grounded in feminist and poststructuralist reading practices, the research draws on Critical Discourse Analysis and quantifies verbal processes relating to gender using Halliday and Matthiessen’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (2004).

The research finds the visibility of females in the selected corpus has increased considerably, yet the nature of female and male participation in these texts remains comparatively unchanged when measured by the process types of Halliday and Matthiessen’s SFL (2004).

If past decades of (pro)feminist choices are only challenging gendered patterns of representation at the level of quantity but not type, this has significant implications for teachers of English. The paper’s conclusion considers what more might be done in present and future teaching to assist students to problematise their own, as well as others’, representations of gender.

This paper aims to analyse how Environment Sections in Malaysian corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports disclose environmental CSR.

The analysis is grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which helps to examine the macrostructure (topics) and microstructure (language features) of Environment Sections. It is complemented by interviews with corporate representatives to obtain insights about these structures.

The macrostructure consists of five topics of Introduction, Initiative, Featured Initiative, Adherence and Finance to enable a comprehensive understanding about environmental CSR. The microstructure emphasizes language features about corporate actions and descriptions to enable environmental CSR in a particular time, place and way. Through the macro- and microstructures, the disclosure in Environment Sections portrays corporate involvement as bringing environmental improvement. It displays the corporate perspective, which promotes corporations as agents of positive social change. The disclosure is seen to be influenced by Malaysia’s corporate context.

As the corpus is limited to ten corporations in three years, future research should expand the corpus to comprise Environment Sections from other years, countries, languages and industries.

The paper is useful to people practicing and studying corporate communication, as knowing SFL can improve discursive competence or a systematic way to decipher and deploy language.

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate for social studies teachers and teacher educators the ways in which students' disciplinary writing is scaffolded within the context of the inquiry design model; trends in such scaffolding are called “the learner's pathway,” since it leads students to more abstract levels of historical argumentation. The author argues that engaging historical writing genres is a necessary component of historical thinking and that understanding the ways that teachers support students' historical writing capacities can help them to make more intentional choices when building inquiries.

To study genre-related scaffolding across inquiries, this study draws on systemic functional linguistics (SFL)-based genre theory as an analytical structure and seventy-four history-focused secondary social studies inquiries to determine any patterns in the ways that teachers scaffold students' writing genres through an inquiry.

Findings suggest that there is a learner's pathway that teachers use to develop students' argumentative writing capacities; however, there is also evidence to suggest that notetaking and source synthesis are not valued instructional products, limiting the potential impact of historical thinking work within the inquiry process.

The existence of this learner's pathway has implications for the ways that teachers and preservice teachers can be professionally developed to leverage this pathway. Rather than the often-used methods of support students' generic writing capacities, professional development should focus on the ways social studies teachers can guide students to more abstract reasoning through their writing. This study's findings also have implications for the ways that social studies teachers assess students' summative arguments. Assessment practices should focus on the genre-features of “argument” rather than just the stages of the argumentative essay.

This piece is original because genre-based research is missing from much of the social studies education research. This study's findings present an additional paradigm through which social studies teachers and teacher leaders can explore the purposes of historical writing tasks and assessment.