Browsing by Author "Humphrey, Sally L."

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    New descriptions of metalanguage for supporting English Language Learners’ writing in the early years of science: A discourse perspective
    (Wiley-Blackwell, 2019) Humphrey, Sally L.; Hao, Jing; de Oliveira, Luciana C.; Australian Catholic University; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
    TESOL educators working alongside content area teachers have demonstrated the efficacy of metalanguage informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) for supporting English Language Learners' (ELL) disciplinary literacies. Using science as an example, this chapter reports on new descriptions of SFL systems “beyond the clause,” which have provided valuable ways of talking about knowledge building. We report on the application of this metalanguage in analysis of texts composed by young multilingual learners for text-based science investigation in the early years of schooling, including how this analysis revealed the literacy needs of ELLs. We further report on how the teacher of these young learners drew on a principled recontextualized “bridging” metalanguage to facilitate productive discussion of scientific writing.
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    Reading nominalizations in senior science
    (Elsevier, 2019) Hao, Jing; Humphrey, Sally L.
    The paper examines the challenges faced by senior Biology students in reading 'nominalizations' in textbook materials and illustrates how the challenges can be addressed through pedagogical activities. The study draws on emerging descriptions of field and discourse semantics in Systemic Functional Linguistics that are inspired by Halliday's distinction between 'live' and 'dead' grammatical metaphors. It first presents a metalanguage to discriminate functions of nominalization. Two different kinds of 'mismatches' of meaning are discussed, including how field activities are reconstrued through discourse semantic resources, and how discourse semantic resources are remapped as lexicogrammatical resources. The paper attends to nominalization from the perspective of the knowledge that is at stake in its use. In addition to providing linguistic metalanguage, the paper demonstrates pedagogic practices designed to support teachers to make this knowledge visible. These pedagogic practices include cross-mode redescription and Detailed Reading from SFL-informed Reading to Learn pedagogy. (c) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.