Construing FL writers’ meaning-making choices in a historical recount genre in Spanish
A functional approach to developing academic literacy
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.
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