Grammar Meets Genre: Reflections on the 'Sydney School'
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Grammar Meets Genre: Reflections on the 'Sydney School' J. R. MARTIN* Orientation In this paper I'd like to look back over two decades of action research in which I have participated as a functional linguist. I say 'action research' because the enterprise involved an interaction of theory and practice which pushed the envelope of our understandings about modelling language in social life and which at the same time led to innovative literacy teaching across sectors in Australia and overseas. The work got under way in August 1979, at the Working Conference on Language in Education organised by Michael Halliday at the University of Sydney. I began teaching that same year in the MA Applied Linguistics program organised by Halliday in co-operation with the Faculty of Education-the first program of its kind in the southern hemisphere. These activities put me in touch with educators and their concerns, in particular with Joan Rothery, who has worked closely with me on several projects since that time, and with Frances Christie, whose contributions in terms of research, government reports, publications, conference organisation and pre-service teaching materials have been immense.! In hindsight, the research can be divided into five overlapping phases, beginning with the Writing Project (1980-1985), which developed genre analysis as a way of thinking about the kinds of writing students undertook in primary and secondary school. Around 1986 our connection with the Metropolitan East Region * J. R. Martin holds a personal chair in Linguistics in the University of Sydney. This inaugural lecture was given on 31 August 2000. 47 of the New South Wales Disadvantaged Schools Program began, with what they called the Language and Social Power Project. As well as developing our work on genre in infants and primary schools, this project also concerned itself with pedagogy and came up with a distinctive teachinglleaming cycle for introducing students to unfamiliar kinds of writing across the curriculum.2 By 1990, thanks to Sue Doran's tireless enterprise, this DSP centre was able to mount a $2,000,000 research initiative called Write it Right, which extended the work into secondary school and three workplace sectors (science industry, media and administration). Around 1995 our work began to have a big impact on the mainstream curriculum, as the NSW Board of Studies designed their new English K-6 syllabus. Currently, the drift of research interests appears to be in the direction of multiliteracies, with an expanded focus on multi modal texts comprising image, sound and activity alongside language- and with a renewed concern for literacy in Indigenous communities in post-colonial contexts, particularly in South Australia and South Africa. Of course, this is just my gaze, looking out from the confines of the derelict Transient Building where my Department is housed (sic). Lots of other work was going on, ever more so as graduates from our MA Applied Linguistics program, several of whom went on to do PhDs, returned to ground-breaking work across sectors. Throughout the 1980s, for example, the main partner for our work was the Queensland Department of Education, which at that time was developing the most forward looking language in education programs in the world. Similarly, throughout the 1980s and 1990s the NSW Adult Migrant Education Service worked intensively on curriculum and pedagogy for English as a Second Language teaching; their efforts were so impressive that they formed the basis of national curricula for teaching English to migrants. Similarly, what is currently known as the Learning Centre in this University worked through these years on programs for teaching academic English to migrant, and later all, university students; their EAP materials, 48 some of them developed in close co-operation with participating departments and faculties, are at the cutting edge of academic literacy teaching and regularly attract visitors and invitations from overseas. More recently, several of our colleagues have been involved in projects at the Australian Museum concerned with communication in exhibitions; the guidelines they have developed for text panels have brought international recognition to these initiatives,3 and Maree Stenglin's brilliantly scaffolded materials for visiting school children are the best implementation of Bruner's spiral curriculum notion I have encountered. By the early 1990s this accumulating body of work had earned a name, not that we gave it one ourselves. Instead, Green and Lee4 introduced the term 'the Sydney School' , in recognition of the instrumental role played by functional linguists and educational linguists in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Ironically, by 1994 the name was already well out of date, since the research I'm outlining was being developed at all the metropolitan Sydney universities, at Wollongong University, at the Northern Territory University, at Melbourne University, and beyond. By 2000 the work has become an export industry, with centres in Singapore and Hong Kong and around Britain ('the empire strikes back', as it were). For better or worse, Green and Lee's christening was published in America, and has become the name by which our work is known.5 It is not easy to get rid of, like all nick-names, especially where there is a grain of truth in them and they continue to serve the interests of those using the name-thus my reference in the title to the 'Sydney School', with scare quotes all around. Pedagogy and curriculum As an action research project concerned with literacy development, we had to be concerned with both pedagogy (how to teach) and curriculum (what to teach); as a functional linguist, my job was to access and design theory which could be used by educators to inform these tasks. As far as pedagogy was 49 concerned, our strategy was to look to work by Halliday6 and Painter7 on pre-school language development in the home and adapt their findings to institutionalised learning in school settings. The basic principle which we took from their work was that of 'guidance through interaction in the context of shared experience'. 8 This principle, which resonates with neo Vygotskyan work on scaffolding, emphasises the leading role played by caregivers as they enable children to mean things with them in conversation in familiar familial contexts by way of preparing the children to take the initiative and mean these things on their own in less familiar settings. Painter9 shows that talking about language plays a critical role in scaffolding of this kind, which reinforced our feeling that a shared metalanguage for talking about language was important for teachers and students in school. After some initial resistance, terminology for talking about genres was quickly adopted by teachers and students as a key resource for learning; resistance to appropriate grammar terminology to support these understandings continues to this day, about which I'll have more to say below. Our work on curriculum was informed by our studies of grammar and discourse across genres. This work enabled us to specify primary literacy goals and secondary subject areas as a set of genres students were expected to master before moving on.10 Beyond this, it enabled us to specify what kinds of understandings depend on other understandings, so that learning could be scaffolded in steps, with manageable gaps between levels and no need for repeat teaching of the same basic understandings year after year. I believe that this functional linguistic orientation to scaffolding provides a firmer basis for the implementation of spiral curricula than has been possible in literacy teaching over the years. It is hard to know how best to reconstruct the social and political motivations for this work. My own experiences, visiting Brian Gray at Traeger Park School in Alice Springs, and my work with teachers at Lakemba public school, were certainly influential. At Lakemba, for example, I worked in classes where 50 over 95 per cent of students were from non-English speaking backgrounds, mainly Arabic, with some Vietnamese. 1 came to realise that my ll-year-olds were often the oldest fluent English speakers in their families; but under the progressive process writing pedagogy then hegemonic in Australia, the only genre we could count on them having learned to write by the end of primary school was what we called an observation-a short piece of writing about something that had happened (for example, 'I went to the zoo. 1 liked the lion' .). Many students could not even write a recount. Here's one of my son Hamish's by way of illustration (it's not all he can write, by the way): Taronga Park Zoo Last Wednesday all Year 1 went to Taronga Zoo. First we went to have a lesson. We all saw a ringtail possum and the teacher showed us a koala's hand. We saw a great white shark's mouth and 1 saw a lion. We saw a peacock while we were having lunch and my Dad came to the Zoo with me and monkeys and a big gorilla and we saw zebra and a giraffe and I had a good time at the Zoo. I went back to school. 1 felt good. I liked the lion and the elephant and giraffe but the best thing was going on the train and the ferry and the bus and I felt good going back home and when I got back home I felt exhausted and we had a snack. But if this is in fact all you can do then, (i) you can't really write across the curriculum in primary school, (ii) you aren't in very good shape for learning to read and write across subject areas in secondary school, and (iii) you're not in position to deal with your own family's literacy needs as far as dealing with private services and government agencies are concerned.