Realization(s): Systemic-Functional Linguistics and the Language Classroom
SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS
Contextual factors mediating the teaching of grammar
Throughout the interviews, Sandra referred to several contextual factors that mediated her teaching. There were the tight timeframes to which she must work:
They have created this course that is just a five week course and it aims at making students aware of critical thinking, mainly critical thinking and essay writing...so we give them the language background and the grammar that they will need in order to achieve these goals
and the pressures on her students. “They all get desperate to get into uni. Since the very first week they were saying are we going to fail, are we going to fail? Come on, just relax!” Also, she was required to work within syllabus specifications prescribed by the centre:
We are given the worksheets to work on ... and there are so many things, they want to cover so many things it’s like, oh it’s too late, they’re always in a rush to cover so many things that will be relevant to them ... and sometimes it looks a bit traditional but it’s umm, sometimes it does but in a way you connect.
These extracts depict some of the potent institutional influences and constraints mediating the construction of Sandra’s teaching practice. She was required to teach pre-specified grammar points that she saw as traditional. She was not entirely convinced that the syllabus met student needs and felt under considerable pressure to cover the content in a short period.
Sandra’s practice also interacted with her own pedagogical analyses of her student group and their grammatical needs and challenges:
Nominalization, paraphrasing, summary writing that’s one of the main things they find difficult.
Some of them, I could see, still find it difficult to grasp the idea of what a clause is...Maybe through this I realize that they still have some problems with grasping the idea.
Her pedagogical beliefs were further reflected in her personal theories about learning, “giving them the choice to express ideas”, and teaching, “it must be a contextual approach”, “you can’t assume the students have learned the content” and “it’s important to elicit the grammar information from the student”.
A third set of factors influencing her teaching were her personal experiences as a learner of language, her previous training as a teacher, and her experiences of teaching before she arrived in Australia. For example, in her initial online contributions to the course she noted, that her grammar learning had involved knowing about parts of speech and the syntax of sentences. She made the following comment about her teaching experiences:
Most English teachers follow the communicative approach, so the lessons are very dynamic providing students with opportunities to interact with each other through role plays, simulations, games, debates and so on. Writing activities are also carried out in class, though most of the written work is done at home.
