For those of you who are planning to attend the annual NCTE convention in Chicago November 17 - 22, the North American Systemic Functional Linguistics Association co-sponsored session will feature Mary Schleppegrell, Jason Moore and Ebony Thomas presenting a session titled Using systemic functional linguistics to focus on language and meaning in teachers' professional development.
The session is
Session G.15: 9:30 – 10:45 AM, Saturday, 11/19/2011, in the Chicago Hilton Conference Room 4A, fourth floor.
An extended abstract for the session is below.
I also noticed some other names on the NCTE program that may be familiar to members of this list. Perhaps those of you who are presenting there might like to provide additional information on your presentations there.
Peter Fries
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Each of the three presenters will describe a professional development (PD) context in which teachers are developing an understanding of SFL approaches to literacy. The first reports on PD with elementary grade teachers that makes links between reading and writing. The second describes a project that uses SFL constructs to support bilingual students’ development of disciplinary literacy in secondary English Language Arts. The third describes a university course for preservice and inservice teachers that focuses on language. The session will begin with a brief introduction from Peter Fries. Then each presenter will speak for 15 minutes, followed by five minutes of discussion. After the three presentations, we will have ten minutes for general discussion.
FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR IN THE ELEMENTARY CLASSROOM
Mary Schleppegrell will report on a project currently underway to introduce elementary grade teachers to a functional linguistics metalanguage that supports talk about text. The goal is to help teachers support English Language Learners’ reading and writing development, enabling children to read for deeper meaning as well as to construct the text types that are valued in early literacy contexts. Artifacts from the project will illustrate how attention to an author's language choices, focused on particular areas of meaning informed by SFL, enables discussion about character development, plot elements, and the themes of a story. In addition, student texts written with careful scaffolding of overall structure and relevant language features will be used to illustrate how children's language development is supported by this approach.
FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR IN THE SECONDARY CLASSROOM
Jason Moore will report on a project that is developing SFL approaches in the secondary English Language Arts classroom. Students at the secondary level, in particular, need support making form-meaning connections, where they face more challenging, discipline-specific literacy tasks. Records of practice will be presented to illustrate how a class of 9th grade students used SFL-based metalanguage to make sense of a text, and some major affordances and challenges of using SFL to plan and implement instruction will be reported and discussed. In addition, the presenter will share insights gained from the feedback of a classroom teacher unfamiliar with SFL who observed and reflected on this instruction. Finally, the presenter will draw some implications from this work for preparing other English teachers to use SFL as a pedagogical resource.
FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR IN THE TEACHER EDUCATION CLASSROOM
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas will report on ongoing curriculum re-development in a required course for elementary language arts and secondary English education students at an urban university. The purpose of the course is to provide preservice and inservice teachers with knowledge about grammar and usage that is relevant to their English language arts classrooms. Students in the course selected nonfiction texts appropriate for their level of specialization and learned to conduct functional grammar analyses on those texts. Using SFL constructs such as text types (genres), participants and processes, and interpersonal resources, students then created language-focused units of instruction. This work will be contextualized through artifacts created by the instructor, and the ways students took up this kind of learning about language will be illustrated.
--
Peter H. Fries
Box 310
Mount Pleasant MI 48804
Phone: 989-644-3384
Cell: 989-400-3764
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web page: <http://cmich.edu/chsbs/x23516.xml> [among 'emeritus faculty']
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/
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/