Kimberly thought Systemic Functional Grammar might be valuable to our work so she started reading up on it and introduced us to it over the summer. Then she asked me to start coming up with a way to use it to analyze student writing to see what we could learn. So I'm attempting to do that!
I don't know what you know about SFG--but the biggest piece is that there are 3 functional building blocks (of word groups) instead of abstract parts of speech. Participants (noun groups). Processes (verb groups) and Circumstances (adjective/adverb groups). Here's a simple example.
I've placed our students in low, medium, and high groups and added a same-age hearing peer group. I'm taking each groups' writing samples and analyzing them to see what kinds of participants, processes, and circumstances the groups are using. It's pretty fascinating. Difficult because I'm really jumping into it without knowing enough about it or having a real plan . (Not always the best approach! ha!) But neat because I'm seeing already how some of the objectives we've set in the past for some students based on what we saw as a need area may not have been the most appropriate objective simply because we didn't have a good way to determine what might be the next logical step. I think in deaf ed. often we don't know how to scaffold their learning appropriately--how do you know what's in their ZPD if you you don't really know what should come next?
It's been a really concrete way of seeing how the writing differs from across the 4 groups. For example I can see that the low group is only using first person pronouns, whereas the high group is using first, second, and third person pronouns. It's helpful to me to see what kinds of language students are using to make meaning instead of being distracted by the micro-level errors that can be easier to see in their writing. I really think it has a lot of potential as a way to look at the expressive language development (written, signed, or spoken) of deaf students, which is what I'm most interested in. I'm a teacher through and through...so I want my research to be helpful in understanding the things I struggled with most in the classroom. When Kimberly first brought up SFG I doubted it's ability to be helpful in a practical way (mostly because I saw the teachers' responses at the summer PD--ha!) But as soon as I started creating tables of my findings, I realized that I was seeing things that I hadn't been able to see with all the other ways I've looked at and analyzed student writing. SFG is crazy and tedious so I'm still not sure that I see it as a tool for teachers, but I can definitely see the potential is has for research in language development, learning, and education.
Right now I'm just finishing up an initial analysis of our experimental groups' baseline independent writing (recount) samples. But in the next few weeks we'll start using it inform objective setting and progress monitoring. In fact I have a lot to do...because we're doing a PD on it with the teachers on Friday! And then we'll continue to use it with other genres and see what we learn.
I don't know what you know about SFG--but the biggest piece is that there are 3 functional building blocks (of word groups) instead of abstract parts of speech. Participants (noun groups). Processes (verb groups) and Circumstances (adjective/adverb groups). Here's a simple example.
(This picture is from this website. Which helped me learn the basic groups.)
I've placed our students in low, medium, and high groups and added a same-age hearing peer group. I'm taking each groups' writing samples and analyzing them to see what kinds of participants, processes, and circumstances the groups are using. It's pretty fascinating. Difficult because I'm really jumping into it without knowing enough about it or having a real plan . (Not always the best approach! ha!) But neat because I'm seeing already how some of the objectives we've set in the past for some students based on what we saw as a need area may not have been the most appropriate objective simply because we didn't have a good way to determine what might be the next logical step. I think in deaf ed. often we don't know how to scaffold their learning appropriately--how do you know what's in their ZPD if you you don't really know what should come next?
It's been a really concrete way of seeing how the writing differs from across the 4 groups. For example I can see that the low group is only using first person pronouns, whereas the high group is using first, second, and third person pronouns. It's helpful to me to see what kinds of language students are using to make meaning instead of being distracted by the micro-level errors that can be easier to see in their writing. I really think it has a lot of potential as a way to look at the expressive language development (written, signed, or spoken) of deaf students, which is what I'm most interested in. I'm a teacher through and through...so I want my research to be helpful in understanding the things I struggled with most in the classroom. When Kimberly first brought up SFG I doubted it's ability to be helpful in a practical way (mostly because I saw the teachers' responses at the summer PD--ha!) But as soon as I started creating tables of my findings, I realized that I was seeing things that I hadn't been able to see with all the other ways I've looked at and analyzed student writing. SFG is crazy and tedious so I'm still not sure that I see it as a tool for teachers, but I can definitely see the potential is has for research in language development, learning, and education.
Right now I'm just finishing up an initial analysis of our experimental groups' baseline independent writing (recount) samples. But in the next few weeks we'll start using it inform objective setting and progress monitoring. In fact I have a lot to do...because we're doing a PD on it with the teachers on Friday! And then we'll continue to use it with other genres and see what we learn.
So that's it...I'm just getting my feet wet. But I definitely see it as having a lot of application to things I'm interested in. I wish there was someone at UT who did some work in SFG/L. Hopefully after this semester, I'll find a little time to explore it more on my own. I need to start learning more about it so that I can determine if and how I might want to approach a dissertation using it. Kimberly and Hannah are presented on it at AAAL in March, but I'll be in Haiti. But...Kimberly and I are putting a proposal in for the International Systemic Functional Congress in Argentina in April. I'm hoping I'll be able to go because it'll be a good opportunity to get some feedback on our work and learn more about current research in the field. And there is a pre-congress institute on SFL and language education this year...which would be perfect. We shall see...
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