Teaching and learning EFL through genres PDF

Preview

Summary

teseopress.com TEACHING AND LEARNING EFL THR THROUGH OUGH GENRES teseopress.com teseopress.com TEACHING AND LEARNING EFL THR THROUGH OUGH GENRES Cristina Boccia Samiah Hassan María Emilia Moreschi Grisel Salmaso Alejandra Farías Mercedes Romero Day teseopress.com Teaching and learning EFL through G...

Description

teseopress.com

TEACHING AND LEARNING EFL THR THROUGH OUGH GENRES

teseopress.com

teseopress.com

TEACHING AND LEARNING EFL THR THROUGH OUGH GENRES

Cristina Boccia Samiah Hassan María Emilia Moreschi Grisel Salmaso Alejandra Farías Mercedes Romero Day

teseopress.com

Teaching and learning EFL through Genres /Cristina Boccia … [et al.]; coordinación general de Cristina Boccia; editado por Sara García Gutiérrez. – 1a ed. – Mendoza: Cristina Boccia, 2019. 352 p.; 20 x 13 cm. ISBN 978-987-86-0220-2 1. Enseñanza de Lenguas Extranjeras. 2. Inglés. 3. Lingüística. I. Boccia, Cristina, coord. III. García Gutiérrez, Sara, ed. CDD 420.7 ISBN: 9789878602202 Coordinadora general: Cristina Boccia Diseñadora gráfica: Macarena Saravia Correctora de estilo: Sara García Gutiérrez The content and opinions expressed in this publication are solely those of the author(s).

Teaching and learning EFL through genres TeseoPress Design (www.teseopress.com)

ExLibrisTeseoPress 14096. Sólo para uso personal teseopress.com

Table of contents Acknowledgements.........................................................................9 An invitation .................................................................................. 11 1. A functional, contextual view on language....................... 15 Cristina Boccia 2. Guess what happened to me! ................................................ 63 Samiah Hassan 3. Reporting on the world around us.................................... 125 Cristina Boccia 4. Reacting and evaluating: the oral interpretation .......... 183 María Emilia Moreschi 5. Taking a stance, becoming public: opinion editorials . 257 Cristina Boccia, Grisel Salmaso, Alejandra Farías and Mercedes Romero Day · Pedro Ángella (collaborator) References..................................................................................... 341

teseopress.com

7

teseopress.com

Acknowledgements

• The article ‘Separating families is a humanitarian and health crisis’ has been reproduced with permission of the author, Dr. Elizabeth Dawson-Hahn. • The report ‘Your immune system’ has been reproduced with permission of The Nemours Foundation/KidsHealth®. • The report on elephants included in Chapter 3 has been reproduced with permission of coolkidfacts.com. We would like to thank all the colleagues, students and friends who contributed with texts, ideas and their encouragement to work on this book. We are grateful to all the people who proofread our chapters and gave us their invaluable feedback. Special thanks to Nancy Dobson, always a keen and willing mentor; Mary Macken-Horarik, a generous and knowledgeable reader we were fortunate to have; and Sara García and Macarena Saravia, our sharp, tireless editors.

teseopress.com

9

teseopress.com

An invitation This book is for teachers of English as a foreign, second, or additional language (EFL, for short). It is the result of our interaction with many teachers whose drive and vocation lead them to wonder about how to make teaching EFL as significant as we can. We would like to invite our readers to consider ‘learning to mean’, as Halliday (1975) puts it, as the most compelling way to conceive EFL teaching and learning. It would be hard to think of learning to mean without considering the situational contexts and the semiotic ‘settings’ in which meanings are made, that is, the genres we participate in as we live our lives. So we cannot really separate making meanings from the familiar, communal and cultural contexts in which they are made. Teaching our students to mean involves enabling them to understand and produce genres, to function effectively in the social activities in which language is a key resource. Telling an anecdote, applying for a scholarship, writing up an ad to sell our bike, filing a complaint because the rafting excursion we took fell short of the promised deal, writing a letter to the school principal arguing for more sports facilities at school are just some of the multiplicity of significant genres that we can engage in as we build our individual and social identities. Besides being conceptually central, genres are productive in terms of our pedagogic practice: they constitute a middle ground between the concrete wordings we need to teach our students so they can use language effectively, the contexts that determine the meanings they need or care to make, and the wider culture in which social activities are carried out. Teaching genres is a way of resignifying the grammar and the vocabulary we teach. It is not replacing

teseopress.com

11

12 • Teaching and learning EFL through genres

them, it is just changing the focus. It is teaching grammar and vocabulary not as a goal in itself but rather as a resource to mean in socially significant ways. This view on EFL teaching is very much akin to the current contents and teaching objectives specified in official national and provincial documents in Mendoza, Argentina that regulate the teaching and learning of foreign languages and that can be summarized as the need to teach language in socially relevant ways. This conception is also reflected in the EFL course books that are used locally and nationally in both public and private education. And it can also usefully co-habit with several theories and frameworks, such as those informed by cognitive and neurolinguistics. The genre-approach to teaching language is a means of enhancing our teaching practice, adjusting its focus, if need be, not of doing away with what is already working for us. As we explore the ways in which we mean as members of communities, we draw upon Systemic Functional Linguistics, as theorized seminally by Michael Halliday, Ruqaiya Hasan, Christian Matthiessen and James Martin. It is a theory that describes language functionally and contextually, and helps us to think about it as a huge array of meanings we need to make and of wordings at our disposal to make them. We complement our discussion of genres with the Genre Approach to teaching and learning texts as developed originally by Joan Rothery, James Martin and Frances Christie. In this book, we initially describe what thinking of language functionally and contextually entails and, in each chapter that follows, we stop to consider a genre that will take us step by step along the family, school, public and academic contexts relevant to our students’ lives. As we take up each genre, we discuss features that are critical to it as well as to other genres. Our approach all along is

teseopress.com

Teaching and learning EFL through genres • 13

descriptive and pedagogic. We describe how texts do what they do and how we can teach them in our classroom as key pedagogic objects. We invite you to consider our ideas and to think along with us about ways in which we can make our teaching as relevant as we can to us and to our students. Teaching genres makes our profession so much more compelling: enabling our students to mean what they need to mean in the contexts in which they wish to enact interactions, represent experience and use language effectively. Alejandra, Cristina, Emilia, Grisel, Mercedes, Pedro and Samiah

teseopress.com

teseopress.com

1 A functional, contextual view on language CRISTINA BOCCIA

This first chapter reviews the powerful notion of genre in the context of teaching English as a foreign, second or additional language and the implication for our teaching and learning practice of adopting genres as a key organizing principle. It also reviews key notions of Systemic Functional Linguistics, the theory on language that informs our work with genre and the pedagogy for the writing of texts that is presented. At the end of the chapter, the contents of the book are described.

1.1 Overall plan As we anticipated in the Introduction, our overall purpose in this book is to explore the importance and the implications of adopting the powerful notion of genre as a key pedagogic object in the context of teaching and learning English as an additional language, both foreign and secondary (EAL, for short). Our main aim is to show how adopting genre as a key organizing construct is particularly productive for curriculum, course and class planning.

teseopress.com

15

16 • Teaching and learning EFL through genres

Our discussion will draw upon Martin’s (1992) definition of genre as a “staged, goal-oriented, purposeful social activity that we engage in as speakers of a language and members of a culture.” We will spend most of the book fleshing out these ideas and will now illustrate them with a brief review, written in school by Alex, at 7, after reading Extreme Insects.

The review Alex writes fulfills the functions of identifying a book he has read, giving his personal opinion on it, substantiating his opinion with some analysis and then recommending the book to his friend Camren. It is a simple text which clearly fulfills functions we associate with reviews in our culture. These functions are not carried out all at once, but rather, as the text unfolds, in stages. Language is the key resource with which meanings are made with some help from graphology and lay-out. But meaning is clearly substantially expressed verbally. Martin’s definition above is very effective in capturing several ideas about what teaching a language involves. We consider that teaching and learning a foreign language is most critically

teseopress.com

Teaching and learning EFL through genres • 17

about helping our students successfully take part in the social contexts in which they wish and need to operate. As members of a culture, they take part in social activities that go from the very everyday, here-and-now context of family and friends, to the more impersonal, abstract context of professional, academic or scientific endeavor. When we take part in social life in this wide range of contexts, we do so participating in activities that have a purpose, more or less interpersonal and intangible to more concrete or pragmatic. We talk to friends and partners to build our individual and social identities, as Eggins and Slade (1997) tell us about casual conversation, we take part in service encounters or write a letter of enquiry with a much more pragmatic purpose. We tell recounts and anecdotes, leave a message at home, write a personal e-mail, apply for a job or a grant, read an editorial, listen to the news and the weather forecast, read a story or a research article. As we live our private, civic, professional, academic lives, we participate in or are exposed to a myriad of social activities with a goal that is fulfilled stage by stage and in which language plays a key role. These activities are all genre. So if we wish our students to be able to take part in the activities that speakers of English engage in around the world, the best thing we can teach them is, in fact, genres. Genres are a very productive middle-ground between the more abstract ‘culture’ and the very concrete language resources that we need in order to operate successfully in a given culture. Genres allow us to position ourselves at the level of culture (a culture we could argue, is, actually, made up of genres!) and from there examine and teach the more concrete situational contexts, familiar, educational, civic and professional in which language is used differently, in which distinct types of meanings need to be made which, in turn, are expressed by a multiplicity of concrete language resources. If our key pedagogic object becomes the genres our students need to learn to live their lives in a given social context, our task as teachers of EAL becomes so much more significant. Our

teseopress.com

18 • Teaching and learning EFL through genres

role goes far beyond teaching the lexis, the grammar, the phonology of a foreign language. We will actually continue to teach all these aspects of language as intensively as we always have, but not because a wide vocabulary, a precise grammar or a fluent pronunciation are in themselves the object of teaching a language, but rather, because they are the resources we need to operate effectively as social beings in a given cultural context. Rich vocabulary, good grammar and pronunciation will strongly empower our students to be able to make effective choices as they read, write or participate in social activities in which language is used. Taking genres as key pedagogical objects that we wish to teach, practice with our students, have them read and write and evaluate them on will make us consider several associated questions, such as: • What genres should we teach given the huge number of genres we come across as we live our lives? • How should we sequence those genres along years of studying or along a single course? • What should we teach about a genre? • How can we best teach students to become good readers and writers of genres? These are some of the questions we will take up in this chapter. Some of them, we will be taking up all along the book. Before we move on to answering them, we will briefly review the model of language that we draw upon to study genres, to better understand how they do what they do and to describe and explain the role language plays. Having a model that informs us gives us the huge advantage of being able to ask principled questions of texts and make principled teaching and learning decisions.

teseopress.com

Teaching and learning EFL through genres • 19

1.2 A functional and contextual view on language We draw upon Systemic Functional Linguistics (hereafter, SFL), a theory that views language in functional and contextual terms, two features that make it a most appliable language theory. SFL was foundationally theorized by Michael Halliday in Halliday (1975), Halliday and Hasan (1976), Halliday and Matthiessen (1999, 2014), Matthiessen (1995), Martin (1992a), and by a host of linguists who have continued to develop the theory to this day. One of the main developments spinning off from the theory has been the area of educational linguistics in which important applications to the teaching of L1 and additional languages, in all educational levels, have been made. Authors such as Christie (1999, 2012); Byrnes (2002, 2006); Martin and Christie (2007); Christie and Derewianka (2008); Unsworth (2008); Martin and Rose (2012); Coffin and Donahue (2014); Dreyfus, Humphrey, Mahbob and Martin (2016); Derewianka and Jones (2016) have contributed widely with theoretical and pedagogic tools for the teaching of language, genres and multimodal literacy pedagogy.1 SFL has a functional and contextual approach to language. It views language as having the key function of making meanings, actually, three kinds of meanings simultaneously. Whenever we use language, SFL linguists claim, we make meanings about the world around us both external and internal, about the roles interactants take up as they use language and the attitude they express toward experience, and finally, meanings that have to do with how we use language in a text, how it relates to its co-text and context and how it is put together. These three kinds of meanings are called experiential, interpersonal and textual meanings. 1

For further reading on the ideas briefly reviewed in the rest of this chapter, we recommend accessible introductions such as Eggins (2004), Martin, Matthiessen and Painter (2010), Thompson (2013).

teseopress.com

20 • Teaching and learning EFL through genres

If we say, for example: Hey, I’d really appreciate your telling me everything about your new job, we are first calling somebody’s attention to request pretty earnestly that s/he engage in the verbal activity of telling the speaker about a new job. The speaker is requesting information with some pressure in a relatively informal manner (interpersonal meaning), the activity he requests is verbal and what is to be told is ‘everything about her new job’, a semiotic phenomenon (experiential meaning). The request opens with Hey in prominent, initial position, effectively calling the attention of the interlocutor (textual meaning). Whenever we use language, we make these three kinds of meanings: we talk about something and, as we do so, we refer to participants doing things under certain circumstances, we interact with somebody in a particular way depending on the roles we hold in the exchange, and we organize information so that our message gets across effectively. This is a very interesting approach to the meaningmaking role that language has. Traditionally, we have typically concentrated on the most obvious meanings made through language – the who, why, when, where, how related to experience. Recreating experience is, of course, a good part of what language is doing, but there is more to it. It is also important to consider what language is doing in terms of expressing, construing and maintaining the role relations that hold between those who are interacting and the ways a message is organized to communicate meanings effectively. Interpersonal and textual meanings can also be part of what we teach as they contribute to making the message more effective. Problems in effective communication are often related to those meanings. As we use language and make these three types of meanings simultaneously, we choose the language resources we need to use based on the specific context in which we are using language. This is another important claim made by SFL. It emphasizes the inseparable connection between certain aspects of context and language use

teseopress.com

Teaching and learning EFL through genres • 21

and theorizes on them, as part of what describing language itself entails. If we really wish to understand how language works, we need to consider the role of context. This is very relevant to what happens in our classrooms. The importance of context, or ‘teaching in context’ is clearly not new. Yet, what exactly do we mean when we say we need to teach ‘in context’? SFL’s view on language and context can give us insights into this. SFL claims that there are three key aspects of context that affect in a systematic and predictable way the language choices that we make, that is, the meanings we wish to express and the concrete lexis and grammar – the wordings – we use. These aspects are: the field or subject matter that a social interaction is about, the tenor or the role relationships between those that participate in the interaction and the mode in which language is used, most basically oral or written, and more and more nowadays, multimodally. This means that what we talk about – the subject matter – has the obvious impact of determining the language we need in order to talk about food, animals, a movie or liberty. The impact of field also refers to the more or less specialized way in which we speak about a particular topic: is it about a meal in familiar, common-sense terms? Or more specialized terms? Or even technical or scientific terms? These distinctions are all about field and they will obviously have an impact on the language choices we need to make. Let’s consider the following text, particularly the way in which the ginkgo tree is described: Ginkgo biloba, known as the maidenhair tree, is one of the oldest trees on earth, once part of the flora of the Mesozoic period. The ginkgo tree is the only surviving species of the Ginkgoaceae family. This ancient deciduous tree may live for thousands of years. Ginkgo is indigenous to China, Japan, and Korea, but also thrived in North America and Europe prior to the Ice Age. This drastic climate change destroyed the wild ginkgo tree throughout much of the world. In China, ginkgo was cultivated in temple gardens

teseopress.com

22 • Teaching and learning EFL through genres

as a sacred tree known as bai gou, thus assuring its survival there ...