Continuum Language and Literacy: Functional Approaches

Product Description This volume examines the relationship between language and literacy from a systemic functional perspective. The book starts with a retrospective view on the development of language education practices, written by eminent linguistics Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, and then shows how this approach is implemented today. The second section presents a detailed analysis of how considerations of literacy education are approached in educational systems around the world. The contributors examine issues such as metadiscourse, genre, cultural politics, and how systemic functional grammar can help to raise literacy standards. The final section looks at literacy in more specific disciplines, including history, literature, science and student writing. Review "In the United States, where so-called balanced literary is often discussed and promoted an articulation of the language-centered, SFL-inspired approach to literacy education seems timely. This work chronicles how the SFL movement has situated itself in the middle ground between authoritarian instruction (e.g., phonics) and progressive instruction (e.g., whole language). Instructors working in the SFL tradition maintain simultaneous perspectives on language as structure and language as social action, and the examples in this book illustrate, with detail and specificity, just exactly how these perspectives are realized in day-to-day, genre-based instruction. In describing these practices, this book provides its readers with one method for working toward balanced literacy in the classroom. Language and literacy graduate students, language teachers, and those interested in international trends in language and literacy are likely to find this work useful and informative." -Mary M. Juzwik and Anne Heintz, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, December 2008mention- Book News Inc./ August 2007 About the Author Rachel Whittaker is Lecturer in the Department of English at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain.Anne McCabe is a full-time professor in the Department of English and Communication, Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus.Mick O'Donnell is Lecturer in the Department of Informatics at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain.