Shoshana Dreyfus

University of Wollongong | UOW · English Language and Linguistics

This paper examines how an adult’s letter to the New South Wales Minister for Disability regarding problems identified within the disability service sector resulted in successful outcomes: that is, the changes asked for were delivered. A range of discourse semantic tools of analysis including appraisal ( Martin and White 2005 ) and connexion ( Mart...

This study focuses on how animal metaphors are deployed by Chinese social media users to evaluate others and negotiate social positioning in online grassroots political discourse. Animal metaphors are important devices for expressing judgement of human behaviour. This is due, first, to perceived similarities and differences between humans and (othe...

Background: Adults with severe/profound intellectual disability typically face poor communication outcomes as they are often nonverbal and need their supporters to provide for their communication needs. This review aimed to identify studies focused on the communication resources people with severe/profound intellectual disability use for functiona...

This paper reports on the adaptation of Sydney School genre pedagogy’s Teaching Learning Cycle for the design of a workshop that aims to encourage disability support workers and their managers to think more expansively about the people with intellectual disabilities they work with and support. The paper introduces the pedagogy and its theoretical u...

This paper explores how emotion is conveyed in spoken language based on a sample of three stories for children read aloud by a trained storyteller. It draws on both Martin & White’s appraisal framework ( 2005 ) and a systematic account of vocal features. Interpreting and profiling emotion is a challenge both for researchers interested in spoken lan...

This paper explores the role of a particular set of commonly occurring temporal meanings relating to the shared experience of being in a pandemic (e.g., in these unprecedented times) and how these foster ambient affiliation on Twitter. Temporal meanings can be realised as a range of grammatical structures in texts and are linguistic resources that...

Exploring the relationship between theory and practice in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this volume offers a state-of-the-art overview of Appliable Linguistics. Featuring both internationally-renowned scholars and rising stars from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Chile, Denmark, Indonesia, New Zealand, Singapore and the USA, Appliab...

This study reports on the development of the interpersonal discourse semantic system of involvement based on the analysis of evaluative meanings in 3 different data sets of Chinese digitally mediated communication. It builds on prior work developed within tenor and interpersonal meanings. Within the proposed system, 3 kinds of interpersonal meaning...

The voices and opinions of people living with severe intellectual disability (ID) who are functionally nonverbal (FNV) and/or have complex communication needs (CCN) are often excluded from projects that concern them as well as from research projects about them. This research note details how one community-based research project included the opinion...

The research examined the use of one grammatical metaphor (hereafter GM) syndrome frequently found in Indonesian language research articles (hereafter RAs). This syndrome followed the lexicogrammatical structure of Process+Range or Process+Medium. An interesting feature of this GM syndrome, which, to date, had not been studied, was that while GM ty...

In the past four years, Australia has undergone a major change in the way it funds supports and services for people living with disability. Part of this change has, of course, occurred in the discourse of disability, and the emergence of the term “support” rather than “care” has been a feature of this discursive shift. In this paper we used aspects...

This paper provides a “broader” understanding of what is previously known from a grammatical perspective as “circumstantial meaning” or circumstantiation. This “broader” perspective takes into account more abstract meanings beyond grammar, considering both field (at the register stratum) and discourse semantics, in addition to lexicogrammar. The pa...

This paper reflects on the influence of Halliday's work in the way three educators conceive and conduct their teaching of English for academic purposes in various degree courses at the same university in Australia. Several ‘big ideas’ from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) are considered within the general aim of helping students master the spe...

Consumer‐directed care (CDC) was introduced as part of aged care policy reforms in Australia in 2012. CDC aims to promote choice and control for people with complex needs who need home care and supports. While more choices may bring benefits, information and resources are needed by people to navigate new and complex care‐related decisions. In 2017,...

Background: Research into parents’ experiences of living with a family member with intellectual disability and challenging behaviour does not specifically address what parents say about themselves and their lives. This paper explores “I-statements” parents made about their day-to-day actions in life with their family member. Methods: Semi-structure...

This paper argues for a view of circumstantial meaning as a region of ideational meaning that is instantiated across a range of lexicogrammatical structures: from the rank of the clausal constituent of circumstance in both directions: up to clause rank and down to below or within constituent rank (eg as Qualifier). This paper brings together and ex...

This article explores how we take responsibility for our past actions in language, using an ideational perspective. It focuses on the way we construe actions in transitive and ergative language patterns and from this develop a cline of responsibility, which has maximum responsibility at the one end and minimum responsibility at the other. The artic...

This study investigates staff and family attitudes towards the use of the fences that surround many aged care facilities in Australia, in the context of indefinite detention of people with dementia. This indefinite detention has been described in a report from an Australian Senate Inquiry as “a significant problem within the aged care context”, whi...

In this chapter we move from reporting key findings of our discourse analysis of Biology and Linguistics to reporting on the implementation of the intervention stage of the SLATE project. Specifically, this chapter focuses on the design of the training provided for tutors (language coaches) who were employed to support participating students from C...

In this chapter we provide a thumbnail sketch of the key English resources relevant to an understanding of academic discourse. In Chapter 2 we introduced the basic SFL concept of stratification and the way in which SFL sees context as a more abstract level of meaning realised through language. This conception is outlined in very general terms in Fi...

This chapter examines the SLATE project’s implementation of the joint construction step of the Teaching Learning Cycle (TLC), which was carried out in an online context. As introduced in Chapter 5, the TLC is a curriculum macro-genre designed to support the literacy development of student writers. Following the deconstruction step, which focuses on...

This book has introduced the SLATE project from a theoretical, research and practical perspective, outlining the ways we approached the research and implementation of Sydney School genre pedagogy for two undergraduate programs at City University Hong Kong. This brief conclusion reflects on the innovations of the SLATE project, including what was le...

In Chapters 6 and 7 we modelled the key texts that were needed for learning across undergraduate linguistics and biology at CityU. We provided details of the key linguistic features of these texts and described pathways to cumulative learning in both disciplines. These understandings were essential for tutors to support students’ literacy and learn...

In many parts of the world today, English is seen as the language of higher education and knowledge production. For example, in countries and territories such as Hong Kong, India, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Philippines, a large number of universities and colleges use English as the medium of instruction, even though these countries have recognised n...

This chapter explores the findings from the research conducted into the undergraduate linguistics program at City University Hong Kong (hereafter CityU). The aim of this research was to gain an understanding of the discursive practices within the CityU linguistics program, through a study of the genres of the texts collected from the program. The g...

This chapter discusses the SLATE project’s development and implementation of the final step of the Teaching Learning Cycle (TLC). As explained in Chapter 5, in a typical enactment of the TLC, the Joint Construction step is followed by an Independent Construction step. In this step, students write a text of the same genre as the ones that are modell...

This chapter introduces ‘Sydney School’ genre-based literacy programs, which form the theoretical underpinning for the pedagogic interventions of the SLATE project. Sydney School literacy programs involve a model of literacy teaching that aims to maximise all students’ ability to read and write texts across a range of contexts by providing high lev...

In this chapter we describe how we recontextualised the systemic functional linguistics (hereafter SFL) model of language presented in Chapters 2 and 3 as a bridging framework to support the analytic work of SLATE tutors. This framework, which was conceptualised as a 3 × 3 toolkit1 (Humphrey et al., 2010), makes visible the metafunctional organisat...

This chapter continues the report of our research into the literacies of the particular disciplines involved in the SLATE research project at Hong Kong City University (referred to as CityU). Here we focus on describing the key genres used for both reading and writing across four courses of undergraduate Biology and the way these genres build knowl...

In this chapter we introduce in general terms the model of language and context informing this monograph — namely systemic functional linguistics (hereafter SFL). Only foundational concepts are introduced here: stratification, axis, metafunction, and rank. A more detailed account of the understandings of language and context informing our research...

This chapter explores classroom interaction enacted within ‘Sydney School’ genre pedagogy. Specifically, it explores the step of Joint Construction in the Teaching Learning Cycle (Rothery and Stenglin 1994, Humphrey 1996). Joint Construction involves a teacher leading a class in writing a text of the kind they have been exploring in earlier stages...

This paper presents a framework for the description of the semiotic world of a male adolescent (17 years) with a severe intellectual disability who does not use speech as his primary form of communication. The framework is based on selected aspects of systemic functional linguistic theory, including exchange structure analysis and affiliation theor...

This paper concerns pedagogical approaches to literacy implemented in the Scaffolding Literacy in Academic and Tertiary Education (SLATE) project. In particular, this paper focuses on the Joint Construction step of the Teaching Learning Cycle (Rothery & Stenglin 1994; Martin this volume). Through whole-text genre analysis (Martin & Rose 2008), we w...

The importance of teacher-student collaboration in text production is well established in education literature (Cazden 1996; Green 1988; Mehan 1979). Teacher-student collaboration is a key feature of Sydney School Genre pedagogy, particularly in the Joint Construction stage of the Teaching Learning cycle. Joint Construction supports the literacy de...

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This case study uses Systemic Functional theory to describe and analyse the multimodal communication of an eight year-old boy, Bodhi, with both a severe intellectual disability and a severe communication impairment. The study specifically explores the meanings Bodhi makes and the resources he uses instead of speech to make those meanings. The study...

The notion of the body as “a medium of culture” (Bordo, 1990, p. 13), and specifically the female body as a site on which the oppression of patriarchy is inscribed or played out has been discussed by many feminist theorists (Bartky, 1988; Bordo, 1990; Dimen, 1989). More recently there has been increasing interest in the material body as a source of...

In the year in which the new Australian government has officially apologized to the Stolen Generations for taking them away from their "place" of origin, that is to say, from their families, communities and lands, we think it appropriate to revisit the notion of place as it relates to voice, identity and culture. In systemic functional theory, noti...