讲座：Reflecting on Literacy Education: A Systemic Functional Linguistic Perspective

Date: Thursday 1 December, 2016

Time: 4:30-5:45pm

Place: Room 210 School of Foreign Languages

Abstract: SFL scholars can fairly claim to have developed initiatives in literacy education that have been internationally significant over many decades.  These began in the 1970s with British School Council projects led by Michael Halliday and his colleagues (e.g. Breakthrough to literacy and Language in use), and have extended through genre-based pedagogy, developed by Jim Martin and his colleagues, to major initiatives in academic literacy, such as those focused on students’ understanding of grammatical metaphor led by Heidi Byrnes and Mary Schleppegrell in the United States. Central to much of the later work has been the metaphor of ‘scaffolding’, a term first introduced by Woods, Bruner and Ross in 1976 as an interpretation, for pedagogy, of Vygotsky’s theory of psychological development. 

In this talk I will argue that it is now important to review the use of this metaphor, and to complement the pedagogic focus it produces with a different metaphor, with a different pedagogic focus.  The need for this change derives from a different orientation to literacy education, as proposed by Ruqaiya Hasan.  She describes three broad types of literacy education: ‘recognition literacy’, ‘action literacy’, and ‘reflection literacy’. She suggests that what is needed in schooling is the development of reflection literacy since it is only through this type that students learn to be producers of knowledge. However, it is ‘recognition’ and ‘action’ literacy that dominate school curricula internationally. Her proposal raises the important question: what might reflection literacy education look like in practice? The talk will conclude with examples of reflection literacy education, drawn from work with elementary school children.

Bio:  Emeritus Professor Geoff Williams

Professor Williams is an Honorary Professor of Education at the University of Sydney, where he is currently based, and an Emeritus Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a past Chair of both the Australian and the international systemic functional linguistic associations.

He wrote his PhD in Linguistics at Macquarie University, supervised by Professor Ruqaiya Hasan, focussing on semantic variation in early literacy development.

Additional to this topic, he has been particularly interested in children learning to use systemic functional grammatics in their literacy development.  He conducted the first projects internationally in this field, collaborating with Drs Ruth French and Joan Rothery.  More recently he has been exploring the value of reflection literacy (Hasan, 1996, 2011) in early primary school literacy education.

Professor Williams is the co-editor with Ruqaiya Hasan of Literacy in Society (Longman) and, with Annabelle Lukin, of The development of language (Continuum).  He recently contributed the chapter ‘Reflection literacy in the first years of schooling: Questions of theory and practice’ to Society in Language, Language in Society: Essays in Honour of Ruqaiya Hasan edited by Wendy L.Bowcher and Jennifer Y. Liang.