I like this forum because I am constantly being challenged on why I
teach what I do and provide me with ideas for what I should be
teaching.  Likewise, I read the journals and texts in my field to try to
understand how the field is evolving.   I do not want to be the
professor 15 years from now who repeats what he learned in grad school
in thirty years previously. (When I did my MA TESL degree, I had several
professors like that.)

The best professors and courses I had taught me how to evaluate new
perspectives critically and try to understand what those perspectives
offer for understanding the nature of language.

I entered into the recent exchange with Judy Diamondstone in this
spirit.  A day ago Judy wrote the following:

> I suppose it does not make much sense to argue here again for more
> consideration of systemic functional grammar as a 'lens' -- even in
> Australia, where it has had real influence on curriculum and pedagogy, there
> is no hard evidence that it has been helpful in the ways it has been used.
> It's also flawed by many lights -- aren't all theories? Still, I hope that
> the vocabulary for functional terms grows a bit more elaborated both in
> teacher education & in schools. And idealistically, I'd like to see ever
> deeper understanding of language _as our means for making meaning_ in talk
> as well as writing -- that is, ultimately, to aim for showing students not
> how sentences work but how meanings happen (a much more difficult, complex
> problem than how to talk about grammar to help students revise their
> writing).

As I indicated earlier, Jim Kenkel and I have taken these claims made
for systemic functional grammar very seriously and have examined some of
the texts designed as introductions into its description of language.
We concluded that the very assumptions of SFG make certain valuable
insights into language from other perspectives unavailable to language
teacher educators and their students.

It is possible I have misread the SFG literature, but I still think this
observation is correct.

> > If Judy is right that "no language system exists independently of its
> >uses," then all of the suggestions offered by Rei Noguchi to show
> >students that they can recognize grammatical subjects and independent
> >clauses are wrong.  The tag question test and the yes/no question test
> >work because ALL clauses in English, regardless of the function
> >(ideational, interpersonal, textual) those clauses perform, have the
> >same underlying abstract structural property.

No dialogue is possible when this is the response to this observation.

> Bob, you clearly do not agree with functional grammar. I find it an endless
> source of insight into language on multiple dimensions. It's not on my
> agenda to convince you or anyone else. Regardless of what we come "wired"
> with, a language system develops, phylogenetically and ontogenetically,
> through its uses.

I would love to know one important insight into language which classroom
teachers get from SFG.

Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University