SFL and language development

SFL understands learning as a process that goes hand in hand with language and its development since, “[t]he distinctive characteristic of human learning is that it is a process of making meaning‐a semiotic process; and the prototypical form of human semiotic is language. Hence the ontogenesis of language is at the same time the ontogenesis of learning” (Halliday, 1993: 93).

As it can be seen from the citation, Halliday suggests to conceive learning as a

makes the creation and development of language and its features an essential aspect of learning. Moreover, Halliday considers language not as a domain of knowledge (as many educational theories do) but as the key concept for knowing. He argues that most theories of learning, even the ones that take account of language learning, come from outside the study of language. Therefore, they tend either to ignore language development, or to treat it as just one learning domain. Halliday defends that language cannot be considered a domain of human knowledge. However, he makes an exception in the context of linguistics, where language is an object of scientific study. Thus, for Halliday “language is the essential condition of knowing, the process by which experience becomes knowledge (1993:94).

Building on this idea and drawing on the study of language development, Halliday presents his theory of language development. However, from the very beginning, two limitations are mentioned: the first, that the theory would be based on natural data (and not experimental) and the second, that it would not dissociate the system from the instance (Halliday, 1993). Bearing these two constraints in mind, Halliday enlists 21 features in language development that his theory would address which later constituted the main descriptors of the systemic functional conception of language development (see Table 2.1).

Feature

number

Feature description

Comments 1 A human infant engages in symbolic acts referred to

as acts of meaning

2 Symbols begin to be established as regular signs and they are characteristically iconic.

3 These sets of symbolic acts develop into systems 4 The system as a whole is deconstructed, and

reconstructed as a stratified semiotic that is, with a

grammar Grammar or lexicogrammar

5 Symbols now become conventional, or “arbitrary 6 Children adopt the “trailer strategy in learning the

language. “trailer strategy” is a kind of preview of

what is going to come 7 Another learning strategy is acquired which Halliday

calls “the magic gateway”. “the magic gateway” is finding a special way into a new world of meaning.

8 Generalization occurs The move from proper name to common

name.

9 The metafunctional principle is acquired Metafunctional principle: meaning is at once both doing and understanding (interpersonal metafunction)

10 Children now have a range of what Halliday calls

“semogenic strategies” available for expanding their

meaning potential

11 Emergence of information

Imparting meanings not yet shared by the

listener.

12 Introduction of ideational term through the

“interpersonal gateway”

New meanings construed in interpersonal contexts and later transferred to ideational ones: experiential and /or logical.

13 Dialectic of system and process appears The system of language is construed from acts of meanings and from the systems, acts of meaning are also engendered.

14 The principle of filtering or “challenge zone” is used. Learners decide what is and what is not in their learning agenda.

15 Children learn options and their relative probability.

e.g., they learn grammar by starting with

the most salient options).

16 Return to the metafunctional principle (features 9

and 12) by building a third, textual, metafunction . It is the resource for creating discourse.

17 The principle of complementarity in the grammar is introduced.

Contradictory interpretations are used to build the whole as a result of the tension resulting from them.

18 Development of abstractness Significant for the development of literacy.

19 Children reconstitute reality as a result of

reconstituting language

20 Reconstruction due to appearance of grammatical

metaphor. They reinterpret their experience in the

written mode.

21 Children learn through synoptic/dynamic complementarity

Learning to understand things in more than one way.

Table 2.1: 21 features in language development (Halliday, 1993)

some researchers argue that this process takes a similar path in the L2 or foreign language (FL henceforth). As Halliday and Webster (2007) state:

<…> the second‐language meaning potential is being elaborated just as the first one was – not of course along the same route as the first language (because the point of departure is quite different and anyway it is impossible to do anything for the first time twice), but by a process that is by now well‐tried and familiar (2007:346).

Thus, Llinares (2006) adapted Halliday’s (1975) and Painter’s (2000) classification of the child’s language to design a taxonomy of functions in order to analyse children’s L2 language development in preschool contexts.

Features 1 to 3 describe how the infant engages in what Halliday calls acts of meaning which gradually become regular and iconic until they transform into a system, namely protolanguage or child tongue. After this, the system is deconstructed and reconstructed as a stratified semiotic with lexicogrammar (feature 4), which is the moment when the protolanguage becomes language (Halliday, 1993: 96).

The next features (features 5 to 10) described by Halliday (1993) entail significant change in the child’s language. Thus, these features describe the “explosion into grammar” that the child’s language suffers (Halliday, 1993:100). The most important feature at this stage of language development is described by Halliday as the metafunctional principle (see feature 9) where meaning is simultaneously doing and understanding (idem). He further expands on this aspect by adding how an act of meaning is formed through the intervention of both the experiential and the interpersonal. Therefore, all learning is both action and reflection (Halliday, 1993:101).

Next come features 11 to 21, which are very relevant for language learning. Feature 11 corresponds to a turning point in the child’s language development, and therefore in language teaching and learning, namely the moment when the child learns to create and ask for information, that is when they learn to tell or ask people about things they still don’t know. Halliday describes this telling as “a complex

operation, because it involves using language to “give” a commodity that is itself made of language” (Halliday, 1993:102). Asking for or demanding also becomes more complex moving from purely pragmatic‐oriented utterances to a division in two types of demands. To the demands for goods and services or “pragmatic” ones a new type of demand is added, a demand for information. This makes language ready to be learnt and taught, making learning for the first time “a two‐way semiotic process, based on the reciprocity of learning and teaching” (idem).

Feature 12 describes “the interactional gateway principle” or the process that leads to the incorporation of the ideational metafunction into the child’s linguistic system.

Examples of this principle are the moments when the child gives unknown information, extends into new experiential domains, develops logical‐semantic relations, learns abstract terms or moves into grammatical metaphor (Halliday, 1993:104). The dive into the ideational metafunction (features 12 to 15) is what constitutes the semiotic conception of language learning. Only one last step is missing in this process: the textual component (feature 16), which children acquire when they start learning to read and write. In Halliday’s (1993:107) words:

I have suggested that learning consists in expanding one’s meaning potential, and up to this point, meaning potential has been defined in terms of the ideational (experiential plus logical) and interpersonal metafunctions. <…>

Together these make up a semiotic resource for doing and for understanding as an integrated mode of activity. The intersection of these metafunctions defines a multidimensional semantic space. This becomes operational through being combined with a further component, the textual.

This moment initiates a new phase in the child’s language development (features 17‐21), whose main feature is the emergence of abstraction and the attention to language itself (feature 18). It also involves a new kind of knowledge that Halliday calls “educational knowledge”: it is mainly written and opposed to the “spoken knowledge of common sense”. However, the process of incorporating the written language is not merely an additional process, it implies a new way of building up knowledge through reconstruction and regression (Halliday, 1993: 109), thus adding a whole new dimension to language – grammatical metaphor (feature 20).

This last reconstruction (feature 20) where the doings and happenings that reality

“thinginess” (Halliday, 1993:111) which is the central constituent of grammatical metaphor. According to Halliday, metaphor could be linked to multimodality as it reflects how all learning involves learning to understand things in more than one way (1993:112). However, he argues, children only accommodate to this phase at the age of puberty, around the age of 9. Summing up, the 21 features presented constitute what Halliday (1993:111) viewed as three‐step model of human semiotic development where protolanguage represents a pre‐semiotic stage: (protolanguage

) generalization  abstractness metaphor.

According to Christie and Unsworth (2007), the language development process accounted for by Halliday (1993) may clearly be divided into three phases: the protolanguage phase, the transitional phase and the final phase. The first one, the protolanguage phase (features 1 to 4), covers the period from about nine months on when utterances (or “signs”) produced by an infant reveal their use of the

“communicative system to achieve certain immediate needs [and] <…> [bear] no relation to the ‘mother tongue’ the child would learn to produce, but they [are]

instead his creation” (Christie and Unsworth, 2007:221). The second or the transitional phase (features 5 to 21) starts with the first attempts to use the “mother tongue” and particularly when the child’s utterances can be recognized as related either to “learning about the world” or to “participation and interaction in the world”, or “mathetic” and “pragmatic” macrofunctions in Halliday’s terms (idem).

The third and final phase (beyond feature 21) corresponds to the period in the child’s language development in which mathetic and pragmatic mucrofuntions further develop into three full meaning making metafunctions: ideational, interpersonal and textual.

In this section, the Systemic Functional perspective on language development has been presented. The language of the child develops into three broad metafunctions in the language of the adult: ideational, interpersonal and textual. This study

focuses on the interpersonal metafunction byusing Eggins and Slade’s (1997) speech function analysis in the design of the discourse layer of the analytical model. This will be further developed in section XX.