I am an Australian,a former agricultural scientist but now teaching English in a seaside area south-west of Tokyo. I love this second life but have become frustrated at the slow progress of my students. This despite trying to find the best materials and techniques (and having done the Cambridge CELTA). Incidentally my main grammar reference is a well-thumbed copy of the superb American "Understanding English Grammar" by Kolln & Funk. Why is Japan ranked almost bottom of all countries on the TOEIC scale? A year ago,to stave off Alzheimer's I commenced a M.Ed(TESOL) with an Australian university. I have completed about half of this now but with the discovery of Systemic Functional Linguistics this is consuming all my energy. An Australian professor (Derewianka) has written several books on functional grammar based on SFL for use in Australian schools. These books offer to me a glimpse of hope that similar techniques could be introduced into functional grammar/SFL teaching in Japan. I have recently corresponded with Sally,a teacher in Canada and she told me of some work done on the simple teaching of basic concepts there. I have introduced some of these ideas in my classes such as Theme and Rheme, identifying participants,processes etc.,and genre writing. However,it is very difficult as I have almost to craft my own manual. Surely somebody has done this before but if so I can not locate them. Anybody out there? This is my first contact with ATEG and I am doing this mainly because I know Martha Kolln is associated with the organisation. Her texts on Linguistic Grammar seem to be on the same wavelength as the works of Halliday. I hope I am sending this to the right email address and I am pushing the correct buttons. Here goes.. John Curran To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/