Once I have some understanding of a piece of (systemic-functional)
linguistic theory, once I see its usefulness, I can use it in my
teaching, but in doing so, I will likely change it, bring it closer to
the common sense language of my own experiencing, closer to
the language of the students' experiencing, so that students
can appreciate the value of the meta-knowledge, the handle on
language use, that I can see and make available for their seeing,
without their having to see from the overarching view of linguistic
metafunctions, or to learn about the cryptogrammatical resources at
stake, or to appreciate the rank of delicacy at which SFL describes
the tool.
Here's an example, although it didn't result from learning SFL.
I think it's important for teachers to read the ideology of texts,
to be able to focus their students' attention on the ideology of
texts. SFL provides a powerful system for ideological analysis,
mainly in specifying the transitivity system that realizes the
"field" of what's going on. But I don't have to mention SFL or even
transitivity to point out the importance for text analysis of asking
who's doing what to whom under what circumstances, where's agency
located, etc.
On the other hand, struggling with the system specifications brings
to my attention features of how language works that were previously
hidden to me, and more important, glimmers of the system itself, of
the interconnections of these resources, of the types of resources
available, etc., gives me leveraging for using any piece of it.
So my question is not whether struggling with the technical stuff
is useful to me but how much technical stuff is useful and in what
form is it useful in language arts education.
Judy
....................
Judy Diamondstone diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
Graduate School of Education Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place New Brunswick, NJ 08903
Eternity is in love with the productions of time. - W. Blake