Disciplinarity and the case of school subject English

Frances Christie and Mary

Macken-Horarik

Subject English

Unique in the curriculumSeries of modelsReview (i) developmental growth in language

& (ii) history of subjectPropose a renewed model of English using

SFL theory to give coherence and direction across the years of schooling

Developmental growth in control of language

Textually: emergent control of theme and reference

Ideationally: emergent control of nominal group structure, verbal group structure, prepositional phrase, adverbial group; enhanced range of conjunctive relations and clause types

Interpersonally: emergent control of modality and attitudinal lexis

And of course grammatical metaphor.

Periods

Models

Mid to late 19th century

Basic Skills

Late 19th to 20th

century

Cultural Heritage

1960sto

1980s

Personal Growth

Functional Language Studies

Late 20th to

early 21st century

Cultural Analysis

&Multi-

literacies

New LiteracyStudies

Some Broad Developments in Schooling Late 19th century – early 21st century

Mid to late 19th century to end of WW1

• elementary schooling mainly for the poor; secondary education for the privileged few

• Basic Skills– Object of Study: Language as spelling, phonics,

sentence grammar. – Subject Position: Apprentice to expert– Semiotic practices: Mastery of discrete language

skills

Late 19th to 20th century

• elementary schooling made compulsory. After WW II some expansion of types of secondary education at least to the junior secondary level

• Cultural Heritage– Object of Study: Language as Art & as civilising

cultural artefact.– Subject Position: Novice to mentor– Semiotic practices: Language of artistic and

symbolic control

1960s- 1980s 2nd half of 20th century

• secondary education for all expanded. After the 1950s emergence of comprehensive secondary education, involving notion of common education for all students

• Personal Growth– Object of Study: Language

as instrument of ‘self expression

– Subject Position: Personal responder to trusted adult

– Semiotic practices: Language as personal self expression

• Functional Language Studies– Object of Study: Language as

system and as text. (Phase i: register & dialect; Phase ii: register & genre)

– Subject Position: Linguistically informed user of language to expert

– Semiotic practices: Language to engage with texts in contexts

Latter years of 20th century into 21st century

• comprehensive secondary education maintained but often under challenge, causing emergence of selective (academic) secondary schools and/or specialist secondary schools e.g. arts, technology. A splintering of different types of schools

• Cultural Analysis/ Multiliteracies– Object of Study: Language

as infinite number of texts– Subject Position: Analyst to

critical friend – Semiotic practices:

Language for critique and subversion

• New Literacy Studies– Object of Study: Language as

‘situated’ in diverse literacy events

– Subject Position: Investigator of literacy events to mentor

– Semiotic practices: Language for localized social events

A distinctive disciplinary

structure? 1. Some kinds of knowledge (or KoKs) are

preserved in all models of English - to do with mastery of literate textuality. This means that verticality is generated through textuality.

2. Two questions: (i)What purview of literate textuality is offered in each model (from point of view of semiosis each makes possible)?(iii) Can the gazes made available in each model be made pedagogic?

Multiliteracies & the semiotic economy of contemporary English

• A diverse range of multimodal texts to interpret - a centrifugal expansion in curriculum possibilities;

• Increasing stratification of teacher-examiner readings of students’ response texts - the centripetal pull of assessment regimes

• Hierarchies in diversities (all models are equal but ……...)

Multimodal offer, literate response

• In answering Q 50, students must identify and explain the contrast between two frames. The literate response is what is evaluated, not the multimodal reading.

A visual text, an open question & the gap

• What kind of journey is represented and how?

A visual metaphor & open questions

What impressions are we given by the drawing on the opposite page?

And what is suggested by the drawing?

(from trial Australian Scaling Test, ACT, 2007)

The potential of each model for enhancing ‘verticality’?

• The open question requires recognition of the contextual demands of the discipline. Students’ responses are linguistic manifestations (realizations) of their acts of recognition.

• What do their responses to stimulus texts and the grades these earn have to teach us about the consequences of different models?

• Use SF grammatics to read KOKs embodied in students’ texts - SFG as meta-model.

Dimensions of each model and associated code

• Knowledge - different ways of construing language in texts (object of gaze);

• Knower - subject positions adopted in relation to text (gaze);

• Semiotic practices - particular uses of language that generate the gaze and its object.

Text as springboard - Personal Growth

Knowledge code: arbitrary(speculating about what the text could possiblymean); Logic of aggregation-aseries of things about text;

Knower code: voicing student’s thoughts &feelings;

Semiotic code: a local orientation to task - a scatter of impressions.

Example 1: Yr 10 School Certificate – What is the story The Red-Back Spider really about?The effective part of the story to me was at the beginningWhen it explained what they were doing there in that point of time. To me it had a few things the story was about. + How the father is away from his wife and son + and telling us howthe wife is surviving with her son + and then it goes near the end of the story + how Mrs Burnett reacted x when she saw the horse in the pocket + and it sounded like she didn’t care if they got hurt. She only cared about her work being done…..

+ But I think the story was not about the spider x because it was killed straight away. The main thing that caught my attention was when Mrs Burnett asked about the toy horse and told him not to play with toys. That was the most confusing part of the story X when it doesn’t say why she acted like that. X So there must have been something with those toys that he was playing with.

D range

Text as window - Basic Skills

Knowledge code: Mimetic -

looking through text to

experience and its significance;

Logic: Retelling story &

identifying characters’ reactions;

Knower code: voicing

characters’ thoughts/feelings

and identifying the message;

Semiotic code: global &

empirical orientation to task.

Example 3: The story is about a mother and a young boy who migrated here. + They live in a migrant hostel, + the mother works on a farm as a domestic servant for Mrs Hunter who recommended her to Mrs Burnett. + Mrs Burnett hired her to cut out all the weeds around her house. + Mrs Burnett didn’t seem like a very nice and trusting lady X because she would always lock the door after her X when she returned to go inside. + The mother would work for Mrs Burnett on the days between she worked for Mrs Hunter. + Her son would come along with her + and play with his toys, X but one day he found a suitcase with toys in it X so he decided to play with them, X whilst doing so he heard a cry from his mother; she had found red-back spider, she feared for her son’s safety X so she burnt the spider along with its large nest of

eggs, X as she knew they were poisonous.

C range

Text as prism: Cultural Heritage

Knowledge code: symbolic -

interpreting meanings refracted

in text(s); analogic reasoning.

Logic: = semiotic reframing;

Knower code: voicing the text

and what it teaches;

Semiotic code: global and

abstract orientation to task.

Example 5: The story is made effective because of the spider.= The spider is like a comparison of the boy and his mother. = They are treated in the way the spider is; = they are seen as if they are poisonous. = They are kept outside + and the boy is made to put the toy back, = like he is poisoning it. The spider is like something foreign and dangerous, = just as the migrants are seen as. The description of the spider laying its eggs hidden away is a comparison of how the migrants must be. The woman’s son is seen as a hindrance,= she has to protect him from those who look down on him + and accuse him unfairly, = like when she stands up for him when he is found with the horse. = This is just like the spider = who hides her eggs for protection. ….

A range

TEXT AS KALEIDOSCOPE - Cultural Analysis

Knowledge code: theoretical

– how particular readings

render meanings differently

Logic: (=, x) semiotic

explanation.

Knower code: voicing

different ways of reading

with and against text(s);

Semiotic code: Abstract and

reflexive orientation to task.

Example 7: Transformations of Shakespeare’splays pop up a lot. Everyone seems to know how to change the story to make it better. Some people try to make it easier to understand, some try to modernise it and some want to make it more accessible to a particular audience. Romeo and Juliet has been transformed many times, but this time, the transformation is so massive that it’s ruined thestory. ……That’s all well and good, but what Luhrmann has created is not just a modern transformation of Romeo and Juliet. He has created a foul film out of a beautiful play. He’s changed the context of Romeo and Juliet from 15 Century Italy to a mixture of modern day Mexico City and California. This disgusting mix changes the story to focus on guns, brawls, drugs, and sex. Shakespeare would bealarmed…...

What kind of textuality is valued?

According to the 2001 examiners, students in the upper range of achievement produced:

• a synthesized response;• a strong line of argument about the theme;• demonstrated the ability to sustain a thesis• with judicious reference to various texts;• and an ability to integrate material,• and write confidently on each text in turn.

[NSW Board of Studies, 2002: 8]

Verticality & its preferred KoK• ‘Synthesis’ … symbolic abstraction• ‘Strong line of argument’… rhetorical organization• ‘A sustained thesis’ ………. coherence• ‘Judicious reference to text’ .... meta-awareness• ‘Integration’ ….. A global orientation to textuality* So, what students generate through literate ‘know how’ can become the basis of our ‘knowledge about’ disciplinarity. We move from realization back to recognition, construing the codes via analysis of semiosis and its fate.

But here’s the dilemma …..

• “Just as language construes the social order without referring to the system it is constructing, so likewise language construes the natural order - through the unconscious, cryptotypic patterns in the grammar, which create their own order of reality independently of whatever it is they may be being used to describe. … The question is whether we can use it to think with consciously. It may be impossible. I don’t mean that it is impossible to understand the cryptogrammar of a natural language, but that it’s reality-generating power may be incompatible with explicit logical reasoning.”

[Halliday, 1993: 113]

Thinking with grammatics: widening the purview

• How to use the grammatics to widen students’ purview of literate textuality?

• How to develop a metalanguage adequate to the different KoKs valued in the discipline?

The deictic ‘I’, puzzling over text

I think/feel

The difficult text and its internal voices

he or she thinks/feels

The symbolic construct and its significance

the text reveals …

Readings and what they generate

Different readings & how they generate meanings

Deictic centre of semiosis

• Responding to bits of text

• Responding holistically but empirically to text

• Responding holistically but abstractly to text

• Voicing readings

•Interpretingsymbolically

• looking through

•Interpreting theoretically

•Speculating

• Listing

• Voicing self

• Retelling

• Voicing character

• Explaining

• Reframing

• Voicing text

Responding reflexively

Disciplinarity & development• Gaze is a creation of a particular form of literate

textuality. Interpretation is a task that appears to invite a range of readings (What kind of journey is represented and how? What is the text really about?). Here is the dilemma of the open question: Whose social is speaking? (Bernstein, 1999). But the grammatics can reveal something of the supervenience hidden in each model. If we look closely at the texts generated by students, cultural analysis generates a form of literate textuality supervenient on earlier forms. How to turn the insights into pedagogy good enough for development in a complex disciplinary structure?

• A quick look at one site - the romance unit taught by Bill Simon at Wiley Park Girls.

Making it pedagogic - return with a difference

Enriching semiosis Getting ‘meta’

Developing know-howBuilding knowledge about semiosis

My view of the film

Producing a romance narrative

Discussing gender discourses in film

Producing an essay about ‘dubious messages’ in film

Genre - global structure (formula)

Field - behavioural processes

Genre -how the formula naturalizes gender inscriptions

Mode shift - applying formula to film