Dear Mike,

I've sent your note on to Bill Vande Kopple, my colleague here in the
English Department.  He has worked in the Halliday/functionalist camp for
quite a while, and he's probably got some suggestions if not answers for
you.  Have you seen the new Celce/Murcia textbook on ESL?  It has
incorporated a functionalist approach in a very interesting text.

Best wishes for the course and for the new year.

JVB

At 12:43 PM 1/7/99 +0600, you wrote:
>Middle school & secondary English education majors are not exactly
>thrilled about taking a required English grammar course.   I have
>been thinking of ways to motivate them by showing them how
>grammatical choices and functions are text-driven, so that they can
>understand the relationship between sentence level grammar and
>written (or spoken) texts.   I think this is a key to helping them
>see the relevance of grammar-study and moving them away from the
>relatively meaningless taxonomies and parsing of "traditional
>grammar" (at least as they are taught in isolation).
>
>One tradition that has paid attention to this kind of
>textlinguistics is systemic functional grammar--Michael Halliday, et
>al.     That tradition has given a lot of attention to pedagogical
>grammars, I have been told, but I never encountered any of these in
>the American educational system.
>
>I have worked a little with systemic grammar myself.   Just last
>year I studied Linda Gerot and Peter Wignell's book _Making Sense of
>Functional Grammar_ (that is systemic functional grammar).  The book
>(an Australian publication available here in the US) does a fairly
>good job of making Hallidayan functional grammar accessible to
>undergraduate students.  I was a little frustrated at times when the
>book failed to use the kind of linguistic reasoning I am accustomed
>to in setting up categories and justifying analyses of sentences. I
>sometimes felt I was being asked to accept too much "on faith."
>
>As I thought about using this approach in my own English grammar
>class, two objections stared me in the face: (1) students who are
>somewhat familiar with "traditional grammar" have to learn a whole new
>set of terminology--and that is a tedious task for most and a
>formidable challenge for some;  it is also formidable to require this
>kind of tedious learning in a course that is required for education
>majors (who may rather not be there); (2) young teachers going out
>into our school system (where sometimes the worst kind of "traditional
>grammar" still reigns) would be at a total loss of how to make use of
>what they learn about systemic grammar.  It would be totally foreign
>to the kind of textbooks now widely in use in the US.  It would take
>more determination, skill, and courage than most of our graduates
>have to be able to take their knowledge of systemic grammar into
>middle and secondary school class rooms.
>
>So despite these two giant negatives....fools press on where angels
>fear to tread!  Does anyone know of other materials in the systemic
>functional tradition or does anyone have any experience using this
>approach with teachers in training here in the US?  Could you dispel
>either of my big negatives?  Thanks.
>
>Mike Medley
>
>
>
>
>**********************************************************************
>R. Michael Medley       VPH 211                Ph: (712) 737-7047
>Assistant Professor     Northwestern College
>Department of English   Orange City, IA  51041
>**********************************************************************
>
James Vanden Bosch              (616) 957-6592
Department of English           [log in to unmask]
Calvin College                  fax: (616) 957-8508
Grand Rapids, MI 49546          http://www.calvin.edu/~vand
for PureVoice software:         http://www.eudora.com/epro/purevoice.html