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Article published In:
Language, Context and Text
Vol. 4:1 (2022) ► pp.84–113

Construing FL writers’ meaning-making choices in a historical recount genre in Spanish

A functional approach to developing academic literacy

ORCID logo | University of Technology Sydney

This study reports on a four-semester teaching programme for foreign language (FL) intermediate writing abilities in Spanish to be implemented in educational practice. The study conducts qualitative analysis, drawing on systemic functional linguistics (SFL), of developmental changes in twenty undergraduate, Spanish Level 4 students, based on their performance of, and comments on, pre- and post-instructional written tasks, focusing on meaning-making choices in the construction of a historical recount genre over one semester of instruction at an Australian university. Responding to the need for research on academic writing in FL, the paper shows that SFL facilitates students’ understanding of writing development in an FL as they explore textual, ideational and interpersonal meanings in conjunction with required lexicogrammatical choices to fulfil the rhetorical demands of this genre.

Keywords: foreign language teaching, register, SFL genre theory, textual meaning, ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning, rhetorical demands, nominalisation, grammatical metaphor, literacy skills in a foreign language
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Writing as meaning making in L2
    • 2.2Genre within SFL and FL: Meaning making through writing
    • 2.3Theorising grammatical metaphor
    • 2.4Establishing a context for studying the development of writing in Spanish as FL
  • 3.Educational context of the study
    • 3.1Renewal of the Spanish curriculum
    • 3.2Historical recount and the teaching curriculum
  • 4.Methods
    • 4.1Research ethics and reliability of data analysis
    • 4.2Participants
    • 4.3Data collection
    • 4.4Holistic practitioner assessment of language and content learning
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1RQ1 How did genre awareness and knowledge of genre-appropriate linguistic resources change over time as a result of an SFL genre-based pedagogic intervention?
    • 5.2Changes to the alignment of key lexicogrammatical and semantic resources in historical recount
      • 5.2.1Developing genre awareness and knowledge
      • 5.2.2Textual perspective on making meaning: Historical recount
      • 5.2.3Ideational perspective on making meaning: Historical recount
      • 5.2.4Interpersonal perspective on making meaning: Historical recount
  • 6.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 6 April 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/langct.21005.she
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