English Language Teaching in its Social Context

~ note,LEARNING A NEW REGISTER 259The language modelWhere the teaching of a new language is to be integrated with the teaching of subjectcontent, then program planning needs to be informed by a model of language which relateslanguage to meaning, and to the context in which it is used. This study draws on systemicfunctional grammar (Halliday, 1985) and related descriptions of register theory (Hallidayand Hasan, 1985).A major organising principle of the teaching program described was the construct ofmode (which refers to the channel of the text, whether it is spoken or written) and thenotion of a mode continuum (Martin, 1984), because it offers a linguistic frameworkagainst which teaching activities can be sequenced from most situationally-dependent (andthus for ESL learners the most easily understood), to least situationally-dependent. Thefollowing four texts illustrate this mode continuum, and show how certain linguistic featureschange as language becomes increasingly closer to written forms.Text 1 : (spoken by three 1 O-year-old students and accompanying action)this . . . no it doesn’t go . . . it doesn’t move . . . try that . . . yes it does . . . a bit . . . thatwon’t . . . won’t work it’s not metal . . . these are the best . . . going really fast.Text 2: (spoken ly one student about the action, $ter the event)we tried a pin . . . a pencil sharpener . . . some iron filings and a piece of plastic . . . themagnet didn’t attract the pin.Text 3: (written by the same student)Our experiment was to find out what a magnet attracted. We discovered that a magnetattracts some kinds of metal. It attracted the iron filings, but not the pin.Text 4: (taken from a child’s encyclopedia)A magnet . . . is able to pick up, or attract, a piece of steel or iron because its magnetic fieldflows into the magnet, turning it into a temporary magnet. Magnetic attraction occurs onlybetween ferrous materials.Text 1 is typical of the kind of situationally-dependent language produced in face-to-facecontexts. Because the visual context obviates the need to name the referent, exophoricreference is used (this, these, that), and there is a relatively low lexical density, or number of‘content’ words per clause. In Text 2 the context changes, because the student is tellingothers what she learned, and no longer has the science equipment in front of her. She mustnow reconstruct the experience through language alone, and so makes explicit theparticipants (we, pin, pencil sharpener, ironjlings, piece of plastic) and process (attract) she isreferring to. Text 3 is a written text and, since the audience is now unseen, it cannot relyon shared assumptions, and so the writer must recreate experience through language alonefor example, the orientation which is needed to provide the context for whatfollows: Our experiment was to . . . InText 4 the major participant (a magnet) is generic: itsproperties are those of all magnets. There is a further increase in lexical density, and thetext includes a nominalisation, the coding of a process term as a noun (attraction) which istypical of much written text.While spoken and written language obviously have distinctive characteristics, thiscontinuum of texts illustrates that there is no absolute boundary between them.Technology