J. R. Martin is a lecturer in the Linguistics Department at the University of Sydney, Australia and is internationally recognized as a leading researcher in the field of Register and Genre Theory and its practical applications in both teacher training and curriculum design. He has also worked closely with the linguist and founder of functional grammar, M. A. K. Halliday. Professor Martin shared his expertise and experience in the field of applied linguistics in a recent interview for The Language Teacher.
Professor Martin, could you explain for our readers what is meant by functional grammar and outline some of the key concepts involved?
The main objective of a functional grammar is to explain language in terms of what people do with it, how they use the language to live. It tries to do that by adopting more of a semantic and pragmatic orientation inside the grammar. It does not see semantics and pragmatics as extra levels of organization but sees them as integral to the organization of the grammar. The way in which Halliday has handled this is to say that the grammar of all human languages is organized with respect to three purposes or three different types of meaning, and he refers to these as metafunctions.
Could you please describe these metafunctions?
These are highly generalized functional orientations to meaning in the grammar. One is called interpersonal meaning and that has to do with the speaker's resources for interacting in dialogue and for expressing his or her opinions and attitudes. The second dimension which he calls ideational meaning involves grammatical resources for constructing peoples' theories of experience, and how people construct reality in ways that seem natural to them. The third function is the textual meaning, which he calls the "information flow management function," having to do with the problem of organizing what you have to say with respect to what you've said and what you're going to say, and making what you've said relevant to the context in which you're speaking. So it's a kind of management function I suppose that you encode into interpersonal and ideational meaning. The textual meaning manages ideational and interpersonal meaning and distributes them into a flow of information that's digestible.
What is distinctive about the organization of functional grammar?
I think the notion of looking at the clause or the nominal group or any different part of the grammar from three points of view and asking what it's doing interpersonally, textually, and ideationally is what is distinctive about the organization of functional grammar.
What is meant by register and genre and how are they related to functional grammar?
The register of a text is defined in terms of the three register variables of field (the topic of an activity or ideational meaning), mode (the role of language or textual meaning) and tenor (the power and solidarity relations between speakers or interpersonal meaning). The level that we refer to as genre deals with how the grammar can be related to the higher levels of discourse such as narratives and expositions. I think that the strength of a functional grammar is that it looks at grammar from the point of view of meaning, and so the grammar gives you quite a nice semantic and pragmatic interpretation of what's going on in the discourse. Then you can begin to think about other discourse considerations. You can think of what a narrative is or what an exposition is--as bundles of meaning, particular configurations of grammatical choices that people recurrently use in the culture in order to get certain kinds of work done. So in terms of first getting into functional grammar, the notion of genre, the culturally specific order of actions (greetings, requests, etc.) used by participants to complete certain tasks such as purchasing something in a service encounter, is the easy way in for teachers. Functional grammar can then be used to examine register sentence by sentence as you work through a text, analyzing and labelling the field, mode, and tenor. Texts written in the same genre, for example that of a scientific report, may show some variation in the sequence of stages and register.
Could you please summarise both the origin and development of functional grammar?
Halliday first worked on Chinese and he is often accused of making English look like Chinese. He is a scholar of Chinese in the first instance--he studied and worked in China. He was trained by a Chinese linguist, Wang Li and was also a student of J. R. Firth, the first major distinctive British linguist, the founder of the London school, and the first professor of linguistics in Britain. Halliday's inspiration comes from him.
Halliday was also influenced by various European scholars such as the Prague school, and the Danish linguist, Hjelmslev. So there are some cross-cultural influences in his work. Firth was mainly a phonologist; since Halliday was mainly a grammarian, you can say that he developed Firth's ideas in his description of grammar. As a member of the third generation of scholars in this tradition, we are moving on into discourse beyond grammar, and looking at discourse and context relations.
In my own students you can see developments in terms of work across languages and specialized studies in different registers of English. The whole area of evaluation is also quite exciting: the study of speakers' opinions and attitudes, and their subjective intrusion into what they say.
What advice would you give those interested in developing a functional grammar for analysing the Japanese language?
There's been quite a lot of work done, including a very recent outstanding thesis by Kazuhiro Teruya (1998), which is a detailed grammar of Japanese. He has presented Japanese in functional terms the way native speakers use the language. I think you could say it's even more detailed than Halliday's (1994) grammar of English!
Could you please describe the current state of research into different languages?
The challenge in this kind of work is to not simply interpret other languages as a version of English. We've suffered in linguistics for centuries, everyone treating languages as if they were some version of Latin. Now it's English that holds sway. I think it's very exciting that we now have systemic functional descriptions of so many languages. We have descriptions of two Aboriginal languages in Australia: Gooniyandi and Pitjantjatjara. I've worked myself on Tagalog, the major language in the Philippines (Martin, 1981; 1983; 1985; 1986; 1996). There are descriptions of German, French, Finnish, and Indian languages such as Urdu. It's quite an exciting period for work across different languages.
Please relate and evaluate your own experience training ESL/EFL teachers in the use of functional grammar in the classroom. What kind of feedback have you received?
I think that the teachers I've worked with here [in Australia] generally have a semantic orientation. They've been influenced by communicative language teaching and the functional-notional syllabus. The question is how to give that something that has some teeth so you can manage it and put it to work. My experience is that coming in at the level of genre in terms of the global social purpose of texts and recognizing different text genres, recognizing the kind of staging that genres have is a very useful way in. It allows the teachers to relate to the needs of their students in terms of social purpose--what kinds of genres do these students need to manage. The students have to be handling meaning, dealing with whole texts.
We've had a lot of success at that level across all sectors of education, primary, secondary, tertiary, adult education, second language teaching. However, here in Australia when it comes to the grammar, the functional grammar itself which supports the genre teaching, it's much more of a struggle. The current generation of teachers in Australia has been trained in a such a way that they have perhaps no knowledge of grammar whatsoever. They may even have been taught that knowledge of grammar is of no use to them, that a knowledge of grammar gets in the way of students' learning. I think that's nonsense. It's been proven to be nonsense (Williams, 1998a). Without a grammar base you're starting from "zero." However, the attitudes of teachers change once they become involved with the work and see the results.
How can functional grammar and an understanding of register and genre be applied to everyday classroom language teaching?
I've tried to show the critical role that literacy plays in learning science, history, economics, etc. Models have to be provided and most students need help in learning them. Some kind of needs-based assessment is necessary in terms of what the students need to learn in English, genres students have to learn, and the expectations of the curriculum. Every subject area has specialized genres that it uses and there may be quite different parts of the grammar that are highlighted. For example, in science we find reports and explanations featuring identifying clauses used to define technical terms; in history on the other hand there are very few technical terms, and history genres featuring action processes are used to chronicle events and relate causes to effects (See Christie & Martin, 1997; Martin & Veel, 1998). There are also vast differences between written and spoken English. Halliday's done a lot of work looking at the use of nominalized English in scientific discourse (Halliday & Martin, 1993).
The genres identified by the students should be ranked in terms of priority in a needs assessment. Careful thought should be given to how these genres can be modeled for the students. Teachers need some support and assistance from linguists familiar with Halliday's work--someone with experience to go in on and off over a period of a few weeks to work with the teacher in the classroom. That gives them the confidence to re-orient what they're doing. Adequate funding is crucial in order to make a systemic change in the way language is taught in the school system.
I also favour what's called front-loading in the curriculum. You make very clear to the students what the goals and objectives are and provide very good models of what you expect the students to be doing. I find a lot of teachers are reluctant to provide models and the students are left continually searching for what it is they are supposed to be doing. There is also an important stage where the students do joint writing with the teacher, who uses an OHP for example. They also craft a text together with the teacher before they write on their own. It is important for the teacher to first work with and guide the students in their production of a certain text genre such as an exposition. Given models and scaffolding, it is amazing what students of all ages are capable of doing!
Thank you for sharing your expertise in this fascinating field.
References
Christie, F., & Martin, J. R. (1997). Genre and institutions: Social processes in the workplace and school. London: Cassell (Open Linguistic Series).
Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An introduction to functional grammar, 2nd ed. London: Edward Arnold.
Martin, J. R. (1981). Conjunction and continuity in Tagalog. In M. A. K. Halliday & J. R. Martin (Eds.), Readings in systemic linguistics (pp. 310-336). London: Batsford.
Martin, J. R. (1983). Participant identification in English, Tagalog and Kate. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 3(1), 45-74.
Martin, J. R. (1985). Factual writing: Exploring and challenging social reality. Geelong, Australia: Deakin University Press [republished by Oxford University Press 1989).
Martin, J. R. (1996). Transitivity in Tagalog: A functional interpretation of case. In M. Berry, C. Butler, & R. Fawcett (Eds.), Meaning and form: Systemic functional interpretations (pp. 229-296). Norwood, N.J.: Ablex.