Social Semiotics & Social Justice: ESFLC 2020 comes to Sheffield

I am delighted to be hosting the next European Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference (ESFLC 2020) at Sheffield Hallam University from 1st to 3rd July 2020.

Our theme is "Social Semiotics and Social Justice". I view SFL as providing a significant, rigorous framework for providing an analysis of discourse that can expose embedded uses of social power. SFL has been adapted in critical discourse analysis, educational linguistics and multimodal analysis and so I really hope that this conference will provide a suitable venue for all of these voices to come together and speak to each other in common cause.
Our plenary speakers, Tom Bartlett, David Block, Ruth Harman & Theo van Leeuwen, will all examine our theme from different perspectives.
We are online as a website here: https://www.esflc2020.org.uk/ which includes the Call for Papers, Guidelines for Submissions, more information about Sheffield, and much more.
We are accepting submissions from here: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=esflc2020
You can contact use through email: esflc[at]shu.ac.uk 
And you can catch up with the latest news by following @esflc2020
I hope I can welcome you personally to Sheffield next July.

Farewell CADAAD 2018

Thank you to the lovely people at Aalborg University, Denmark for hosting a fine conference. The city and its people were very welcoming and offered an excellent location for CADAAD 2018. We eagerly await news for the next venue - which is likely to be outside Europe for the first time.
The programme contained plenty of interesting papers and lots of fascinating research projects. Main topics included healthcare, education, identity, the language of Brexit, and issues of methodology. The conference offered papers of a very high standard and most parallel sessions required difficult choices to be made of what to see and what to miss.
The plenary sessions were informative and thought-provoking (er, with one exception) and fortunately all of them are available from here. Here is a small sample:

Finally, here is the presentation that I was lucky enough to share with some of the delegates. I am glad to say that it generated a lot of questions (and not all of them supportive in nature). Thank you Aalborg.

LLL: Language, Literacy & Learning

So, I felt I just had to post this notice of this  workshop arranged by University of Reading's 'Language and Literacy in Education' group, called Language, Literacy and Learning in EAL children. Well, it almost matches the name of this blog, doesn't it?

This is an event from a fairly new research group, so I wish them well.

I missed the workshop, which took place on 21st March, but you can still find slides from the main presenters from here.

To quote from the site:
The event focused on four areas of research and practice with EAL children:
• Policy (Emily Waddilove and Naomi Flynn)
• Assessment (Katherine Solomon and Claudine Bowyer–Crane)
• Vocabulary, language and literacy (Kay Clarke and Holly Joseph)
• Home language and literacy (Jamie Earnshaw and Hamish Chalmers)

Analysing Casual Conversation

This is what great linguistic analysis looks like. Eggins & Slade took a seemingly impossible object of analysis and through careful application of key principles reveal significant insights into the apparently random phenomenon of conversation. Synthesising insights from conversation analysis into a systemic functional framework they introduce us through sympathetic prose to a model that will inform the linguistic analysis of conversation for years to come.

Another lazy Goodreads steal.

Words on the brain

The Visual Thesaurus (see this earlier posting and this link) may not just be a representation, according to this research: Alexander G. Huth, Wendy A. De Heer, Thomas L. Griffiths, Frédéric E. Theunissen, & Jack L. Gallant. (2016). Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that tile human cerebral cortex. Nature, 532(7600), 453-8.
In this study, subjects were placed in an fMRI scanner while listening to stories, and measurements
were taken in order to correlate blood flow with the words from the story. What they found, perhaps surprisingly, is that across subjects, words cluster semantically across all regions of the brain, producing clustered networks of semantically related words, much like the visual thesaurus. That is, words with a similar meaning appear to be associated within the same small area of the brain.
You can explore these relations and see the sample lexical items that were matched up in the stories in the experiments from the website here. The tour also shows how you can adjust the settings to view more detail and adjust the image. As well as the astonishing results, the visualisations that realise the findings are amazing.
Although it is not especially new, the paper and the website offer a valuable insight into semantic mapping. What we now need is a similar study that allows a more dynamic approach so that the networks and relationships between all of these items and clusters can also be mapped.

Late to the Akala Party

I have always liked to be ahead of the curve, especially when it comes to music, but I have to admit to being WAY behind the curve on Akala. I saw him performing live last year for the first time (on his 10th anniversary tour!!) and he restored my faith in hip-hop as a musical genre not because of his imaginative approach to music but more because of his use of the medium to deliver important messages - like the one he delivers here, but without the backbeat.
What I like about Akala's discussion of Everyday racism and more (see links below), is the way he communicates so clearly about the power of everyday 'mundane' experience, and the everyday language that we use, but is able to relate that directly to the injustices imposed through history and by a society run on division. I can't help but wonder how discourses around 'identity', no matter how well-intentioned, only serve to support this everyday racism and stereotyping of all divisions.

Akala recently hit the mainstream with a BBC4 documentary on Jamaican music "Roots, Reggae, Rebellion" but regularly features in a lot of online video interviews, discussing a wide range of topics, and on talk shows.
Here are more links to talks (some long, some short) and to some of his music: "Lose Myself" & "Carried Away".
I got to the party late - unfashionably so - but am so glad I got the right address.

Just How Tasty is Englicious?

I just became a member of Engliscious.org (username n.moore). It cost me nothing and offers a range of calorie-free menus full of in-class information and activities linking the ever-spectacular Survey of English Usage with the UK national curriculum for English, including samples of tests.

I found out about it because of an advert for a job. The site organisers are looking for someone to update the site. Cos... Damn! It needs it! It is white, or yellow, or red on black - never good on the eyes - and while I would rarely disagree with the information it provides, it is kinda - how can you say this politely? - DULL! The classroom activities provide a variety of activities to raise awareness of the many categories of grammar in the menus which can be ordered by level, grammar, and activity type as well as being fully searchable. As you can imagine, all examples are taken from 'the Survey' and represent authentic language use.  I hope this is a work-in-progress and that 'the Survey' can find someone who will be able to develop the resources here further.

Caldas-Coulthard & Iedema: Identity Trouble - Critical Discourse and Contested Identities

At last! A group of writers who are willing to take on the notion of identity and reveal how so many authors have not interrogated its basis in theory. Caldas-Coulthard & Iedema have gathered together some key perspectives on Identity that help to expose its fragile foundations. Highlights for me were Lemke and Skeggs who take nothing for granted. My only real complaint is that I think there were still a few 'filler' chapters by writers who are happy not to be troubled by, or to trouble, identity. One of my lazier Goodreads reviews.

Butler - Gender Trouble

Not really what I expected from such an influential writer. As a book intended to promote gender rights I found it very excluding as a non-LGBTQ reader. "But we are excluded from all straight theory" would be a response that endorses the exclusion. With, imho, an over-emphasis on (post-)psychoanalytic theory, the message is lost in the minutae. An anticlimax.
Not much of a Goodreads review, but there you  go.

IVACS 2016

Sincere thanks go to the organiser(s) of IVACS2016, at Bath Spa University, UK with the theme of 'Corpora and Context' (also see here for IVACS). The conference was well attended and ran very smoothly. Both plenary speakers were able to contribute clear and original perspective to the field of the study of language varieties using corpus methods, and the conference featured a wide range of high quality presentations. I was delighted to offer a session called 'The co-text and context of research into identity in applied linguistics' (see the Prezi below).

Two projects in particular were well represented at the conference. The first was the English Profile project, supported by Cambridge Examinations, which uses examination scripts to map grammatical errors and thus specify which structures students should show mastery over at which CEFR stage. The methodology for this corpus investigation was both  rigorous and original. A clear conclusion from this project was that this progression is only very roughly correlated with the sequence of structures presented in the majority of language teaching coursebooks. The project team has given feedback to CUP, so we wait to see if the publishing industry can respond to these important findings. (Don't hold your breath!!).

The second project that was described over a number of sessions was the CorCenCC (Corpws Cenedlaethol Cymraeg Cyfoes - The National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh, a largely spoken Welsh corpus), based at Cardiff University. This is clearly meant to move on from the current corpus of Welsh currently available. Using modern technology to build up the corpus through an innovative smartphone app, the team is struggling with ethical issues relating not to the consent of the data gatherers but their interlocutors. The aim also appears to be to make the corpus relevant and useful to the welsh-speaking community and involve the community as much as possible in the collection, design and exploitation of the corpus.

What's the Point?

"What’s the point? The role of punctuation in realising information structure in written English" has been published online here in Functional Linguistics.
I would like to reproduce the acknowledgements section here:
This article is dedicated to the memory of Geoff Thompson who supervised the PhD thesis from which this paper is derived. Needless to say, the ideas in this paper would not have been realised without his support and encouragement. Sincere thanks are also due to Professors Michael Hoey, David Vernon and Cathy Burnett for further inspiration, discussion and comment, to colleagues past and present at Khalifa and Sheffield Hallam universities, and to the reviewers for Functional Linguistics, although any remaining errors in the paper are entirely my responsibility.

Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities

Imagined Communities is often cited as the single volume that changed the way that a range of disciplines view nationalism. Written as a response to the failure of Marxist scholars to account for why (typically) men were willing to lay down their life for their country, Anderson equates the nation to a modern religious force in most people's lives, providing them through print and other media technologies with a community that they imagine are carrying out the same activities at the same time in countless locations in the same nation.
I read the whole book (229 pages), from the perspective of critiquing Identity studies, so that I could use this quote: "Out of this estrangement [from one's own unremembered childhood past] comes a conception of personhood, identity (yes, you and that naked baby are identical) which, because it cannot be 'remembered,' must be narrated. Against biology's demonstration that every single cell in a human body is replaced over seven years, the narratives of autobiography and biography flood print-capitalism's markets year by year." (p.204) and write this statement: Anderson (2006) explains in glorious detail how one of the most apparently stable forms of identity - Nationalism - is the product of a particular historical moment, conducive to the economic transformation from imperial state, supported by divine right, to capitalist state, supported by economic might, enabled by mass education, print literacy and linguistic imperialism.
So worth it!!
(This last bit is from my Goodreads.com review)
As a footnote, I found this obituary on the author, but there are plenty of others.

IJLS Special Issues

Two special issues of the International Journal of Language Studies focusing on Systemic Functional Linguistics have recently been published.

Volume 10 no.2 is entitled "Systemic Functional Linguistics and (Critical) Discourse Analysis"

http://www.ijls.net/pages/volume/vol10no2.html 

It features the following papers:

• Teresa OTEIZA & Claudio PINUER: Appraisal framework and critical discourse studies: A joint approach to the study of historical memories from an intermodal perspective

• Felipe Leandro de JESUS, Debora de Carvalho FIGUEIREDO & Fabio Santiago NASCIMENTO: Screening the unspeakable: The representation of gender/sex roles and same-sex love in Brokeback Mountain

• Viviane HEBERLE & Marcos MORGADO: Discussing the representation of immigrants: An integrated view from SFL, CDA and Multimodality

• Hector J. MCQUEEN: Exploring the intonation of appraised items in one speech by Obama: The case of prominence

• Lucia Ines RIVAS & Miriam Patricia GERMANI: Analysing correlations between generic patterns and prosodic realizations in interviews in English

• Tazanfal TEHSEEM: Investigating character construal of rape victims in Pakistani news reporting

Volume 10 no.3 is entitled "Systemic Functional Linguistics and Education"
http://www.ijls.net/pages/volume/vol10no3.html
It features the following papers:

• Lucia ZUPPA & Susana REZZANO: The construction of the role of the teachers in academic articles on ICT and education

• Susan HOOD & Jo LANDER: Technologies, modes and pedagogic potential in live versus online lectures 

• Mark Shiu-kee SHUM, Dan SHI & Chung-pui TAI: The effectiveness of using 'reading to learn, learning to write' pedagogy in teaching Chinese to non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong

• Mary MACKEN-HORARIK & Carmel SANDIFORD: Diagnosing development: A grammatics for tracking student progress in narrative composition

• Maria Susana GONZALEZ: Discussion and challenge: Linguistic resources

Both of these issues are available for FREE from the IJLS Academia page.

Evaluating Integrating English with EEF

Enfield Council sponsored a project that used the LILAC (Language in learning across the curriculum) training programme to improve learning in all subjects for their EAL (English as an Additional Language) students. They were really pleased with the results, and wondered if the programme would work across the country. With significant help from the Bell Foundation, the Education Endowment Foundation have chosen the project as one of their approaches to researching EAL students.
I am very honoured to be part of the evaluation team at Sheffield Hallam University. There are more details in the form below and from this page.

Birkbeck Applied Linguistics @50

The department of Applied Linguistics at Birkbeck College, University of London, is celebrating their 50th anniversary. A range of talks and a one-day conference have been organised to make this a memorable year.
So far, the events have included talks by Peter Skehan, Jennifer Jenkins, and John O'Regan. If you could not get to London on the day in question, the good people at Birkbeck have recorded the talks and the videos are available for everyone to see. Happy 50th, Birkbeck!

SELT Out?

Something smells very fishy at the Home Office - but what's new?
Not long ago, UKVI announced that from 5th April 2015 (that's this week) only TWO examination boards would be able to implement Secure English Language Tests (SELT). Worldwide. This means that anyone who wants to apply for a UK visa for anything more than a visit (Tier 4, Spouse, Parent, ILR, FLR - leave to remain - etc.) must pay either the IELTS Consortium (which consists of Cambridge Examinations, the British Council and IDP Australia) or Trinity College London (TCL) (see this very self-congratulatory press release). Ka-ching!!
Previously a wide range of examinations were accepted by the UK Visa and Immigration body and its predecessor UKBA (two public bodies that seem incapable of meeting publicly-announced targets). These included Cambridge English's Key English Test (KET), Preliminary English Test (PET), First Certificate in English (FCE), Business English Certificate Vantage, Cambridge Advanced English (CAE), Cambridge English Legal, Certificate in Financial English, Cambridge Proficiency in English (CPE), and ESOL Skills for Life, a range of examinations from City and Guilds, and Pearson's Test of English (PTE) which, like IELTS, offered an Academic and Workplace option (see here while you still can!). Many of these examinations offered the visa applicant the opportunity to sit an English language examination which would not only give a good indication of their CEFR level but would be relevant to their immigration, career or professional needs, unlike some of the examinations which are now accepted by UKVI. For instance, the TCL examination offered for the leave to remain visa (GESE) will only let the candidate know if they have passed the required level (e.g. A2) in speaking and listening.
What is very odd is that nobody seems able to explain why the examinations offered by City and Guilds, Pearson or Cambridge English (outside IELTS) are no longer acceptable as a SELT. In fact, UKVI seems determined that nobody will find out what the new conditions are for a SELT or why only the IELTS Consortium and TCL have been granted the 2-year contracts.

There are some very important questions that remain unanswered. If Cambridge English's facilities and procedures are secure enough to run IELTS, why are they not secure enough to run PET, FCE, CAE or CPE? If Pearson are trusted enough to run the country's driving theory tests, why are their language tests and test centres not up to spec, according to UKVI?

Pearson is a commercial organisation. It invested heavily in the PTE system and, imho, has produced a very good computer-adaptive test that assesses a range of (academic) English skills and was designed from the beginning with the CEFR in mind (unlike the IELTS test which was 'retro-fitted' to CEFR descriptors). Why was it not awarded the contract? Let's ask them shall we? Well, the nice people at BALEAP did, and here is the reply they received:
As a global education company, Pearson regularly receives and assesses Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for government contracts. In this instance, after careful consideration, Pearson took the decision that there were a small number of conditions which we were unable to agree to.
Consequently, the Home Office did not assess our application and Pearson Test of English Academic (PTE Academic) will not be accepted as a UK Home Office SELT from 6th April 2015. Tests taken on or before 5th April 2015 will continue to be accepted by the UK Home Office until 5th November 2015.
We are very disappointed that we will not be able to continue to offer PTE Academic as a UK SELT as we believe that the unrivalled security, speed and convenience of PTE Academic delivers an outstanding service to visa applicants and score users.
As you may know, any approved Higher Education Institution (HEI) can still use PTE Academic to assess a student’s level of English as part of a Tier 4 application for degree level study and above. PTE Academic continues to be accepted by the Australian and other governments around the world, as well as by thousands of institutions in the UK, Australia, USA and Canada.
So what were those 'small number of conditions' which Pearson were unable to comply with, despite preparing a commercial test precisely for this purpose and which, I would agree, offers "unrivalled security, speed and convenience" for "visa applicants and score users"? I guess we'll never know because nobody is allowed to disclose the details of the tender, as Password ELT (another commercial venture that have invested significant funds to produce a reliable CEFR-standardised test) have informed us:
As you and some of your members may know, in July 2014 the Home Office started the process of drawing up the recently announced new approved SELT list that will take effect from 6th April 2015. As a major English language test provider, Password ELT were invited to the briefing meeting where the new requirements for SELT providers were announced. Unfortunately all in attendance were required to sign a confidentiality agreement, thus we are not able to say anything substantial about the meeting or subsequent discussions. However I think it is allowable to comment that the due to the onerous operational and contractual requirements we weren’t sure any of test providers would be able – or willing – to submit compliant bids.
Pearson were unable to comply with a small number of terms and Password were not only unable or unwilling to comply with the 'onerous operational and contractual requirements' but they are unable to tell us what those terms were. The UKVI has put a gag order on all these companies presumably because it knows the new conditions it has placed on these companies are not only unacceptable to the public but in all likelihood unethical. Possibly illegal.
Will the UKVI come clean and reveal publicly why it has handed just two companies the contract to test English?

Let's hear it for LLT

Sometimes you just have to remember the good things that are not news, but they keep on going... good!
Language Learning & Technology is one of those good things. Now on Volume 18 - yes, technology in language learning has been studied seriously for at least 18 years - it remains a journal of quality and distinction - and FREE!
Supported by the University of Hawai'i National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) and the Michigan State University Center for Language Education and Research (CLEAR), LLT recently moved its founding editor Mark Warschauer to the advisory board. He has been replaced by Trudi Heift and Dorothy Chun who was previously assistant editor.
This issue included two articles in particular that caught my eye. Hee-Jung Jung of Chosun University in Gwangju in South Korea set out to discover what might make ubiquitous learning successful. His study identified that the factors of omnipresence, context customization, interactivity, self-directed learning, and perceived enjoyment of technology and the factors of innovation and computer self-efficacy in learners were significant in a student population of 376 learners.
Huifen Lin, of the National Tsing Hua University of Taiwan, carried out a meta-analysis of (quasi-) experimental research studies into the efficacy of computer-mediated communication on language learning. "Results from 59 primary studies show a positive and medium effect from CMC interventions" (from the abstract), with no significant difference between synchronous and asynchronous communications. Interestingly, this result is still tentative due to the typically small number of respondents and participants in the studies under review. Despite at least 18 years of serious research, I think it is still important that we remember that very few substantial studies exist that can reliably make claims about technology in language learning - which is why Jung's article, and many others in LLT, are so important.
That is the thing about LLT - in every issue there are always articles that catch my eye, and add a welcome perspective on the use of technology in language learning. It adds serious, academic research to an area of study that is regularly populated by hope, hype, unreliable studies and blind faith.

41st ISFC & X Congreso Latinoamericano de Linguistica Sistemico-Funcional, Mendoza: SFL & Language Education

Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina, is host to the 41st International Systemic Functional Congress in conjunction with the 10th Latin American SFL Congress. You can see more of Mendoza, a city at the foot of the Andes, here:

I am fortunate enough to have my abstract chosen by the committee, and this is the prezi for my paper called 'The Evolving Contribution of SFL to EAP":

More information is available from the conference website.

Emery & Moore (eds.) Teaching, Learning and Researching Reading in EFL

Published by TESOL Arabia in 2014, "Teaching, Learning and Researching Reading in EFL" has produced a number of well-researched papers on reading, many of which were produced in the Arab world. The images here show the cover and the contents pages.
Here is the introduction, written by myself and my co-editor Helen Emery, for the volume to give a flavour of what is included, and an indication of some of the significant insights the book provides.

This volume presents the reader with a thorough discussion of a wide range of issues all related to the teaching of reading in contexts where English is taught as a foreign or second language. The majority of papers present original research while others provide an overview of key topics. While the majority of contexts are located in the Arab-speaking world, a good proportion of other countries and contexts are also presented. This introduction aims to provide the reader with a general guide to the papers and attempts to highlight some of the key themes and significant contributions.

The papers in section one focus on the language learner as a reader. The approach taken by Helen Donaghue and Jason Thompson in the first paper is to elicit from students what they do to practice and improve their reading skills, as part of an evaluation into the innovative reading programme implemented in a college of higher education in the U.A.E. As interesting as the results is Donaghue and Thompson's assertion that by taking the time to listen to our students and respond more directly to their needs, preferences and practices, we can significantly improve the way we teach reading. Tariq Alkhaleefah and Nilüfer Demirkan-Jones look at how the type of text affects the use of reading strategies by university undergraduates in Saudi Arabia through a carefully controlled study. In doing so, they construct an impressive range of reading strategies that will be of great value to students, teachers and researchers alike. Victoria Tuzlukova, Fawzia Al-Seyabi, Ahlam Al-Rawahi and Abeer Al-Owasi also investigate the reading strategies of their students in an Omani university foundation programme, as well as their attitudes towards reading, and are consequently able to offer clear directions for syllabus planners. In the final paper in this section, Sasan Baleghizadeh and Mohammad Dehghan use two instruments to investigate the issue of reading anxiety in university students in Iran. Both instruments help to reveal the importance of reading anxiety and how it can significantly impact students' reading performance through their selection of reading strategy.

The papers in section two take the classroom as the focus of research and investigation. In the case of Helen Emery and Halima A'Thehli this involves investigating students' attitudes twoards the reading component of the Omani national curriculum and resulting issues connected to the teaching of reading using the course book English For Me. Their survey of teachers' attitudes, beliefs and practices highlights the central role that appropriate reading materials take in producing a successful reading programme. In an innovative study, Marwa Hegazy and Muhammad Abdelatif show how the practice of repeated reading in Egyptian prep schools can make a significant difference to students' ability to read fluently. Selma Deneme's paper reports on a research project that compared students' experiences of learning how to write summaries in universities in Jordan, Spain and Turkey. Across all three countries, it is evident that students recognise that they do not receive enough training in how to read for summary-writing or in how to prepare summaries. Based on a project in Indonesia, Handoyo Puji Widodo provides suggestions on how to plan and prepare materials for Vocational Education using a social semiotic approach. The next two papers, by Melanie Gobert and by Salma Al-Humaidi and Abdullah A'Riyami, both look into the use of graded readers in U.A.E. and Oman, respectively. While Gobert's study indicates significant gains made by students who were provided with relevant titles, the study in Oman offers interpretations as to why the graded reading materials offered by the Ministry of Education did not make a lot of difference to student progress or motivation. The final two papers in this section examine the assessment of reading. The very practical paper by Beth Wiens, Christine Coombe and Peter Davidson offers step-by-step guidance on how to prepare a reading test. In the final paper in section two, Nick Moore, Gillian Knight and Claudia Kiburz describe an assessment tool for reading that, despite the many changes that they describe, continues to develop a wide range of reading habits, particularly for students that start below the required standard of reading to gain entry into undergraduate studies in a U.A.E. university.

The aim of the final section is to take the attention of our readers to issues related to reading that are situated outside the classroom walls. The topic of leisure reading in both English and Arabic is investigated in a study by Melanie van den Hoven, Gillian Westera and Samia El Bassiouny that uses multiple perspectives to seriously challenge the notion that young Arab students are not readers. The data they gathered on the reading habits and attitudes of trainee teachers at a college in the U.A.E. reveals a complex picture of biliteracy that enables effective action to be taken. In a second study that looks into reading habits in both English and Arabic, Josephine O’Brien and Jill Cook examine in detail the reading abilities of their students in both languages to discover that there are, in fact, significant similarities across languages. That is, their Emirati students' reading strategies show considerable consistency across English and Arabic reading tests. In the next paper, Amanda Howard provides a detailed overview of research into reading from across the Middle East. The survey highlights that common themes in research into reading include discourse analysis, vocabulary and the use of the first language. The innovative programme Reading to Learn is described by Claire Acevedo in the next paper. The paper focuses on the repeated success that the programme has had in closing the performance gap between the stronger and weaker readers, detailing the results in Sweden where a large proportion of the previously-underperforming students were foreign language learners. The final paper in this collection questions the traditional notion of literacy. In describing some recent research into multiliteracies, Guy Merchant provides a valuable framework to interpret the role of different technologies in the teaching and learning of literacy in its more traditional guise and in other modes of meaning-making enabled by easy access to digital tools.

The majority of papers in this volume address the relatively un-researched notion that students in the Arab world do not appear to be good readers, especially by the time that they reach tertiary education. What all of the papers also show, however, is that there are many approaches to understanding this notion, to challenging the attitude that Arab students can not or do not read, and that for students that are struggling with reading in English, there are many solutions to guide them towards fluent reading. It is the hope of the editors and contributors to this book that, through the papers presented here, teachers and students will discover ways to bring more success in reading to all EFL learners.

The editors would like to thank all of the people involved in this project, including the TESOL Arabia Executive and the publications officers (past) Peter Davidson and (present) Peter Maclaren. They are especially grateful to all of the contributors whose hard work, kind nature and dedication to this book project have been inspiring.

The book should soon be made available to order online from TESOL Arabia publications. There are also plans to make the book available online, but these are likely to take some time.

Bartlett: Analysing Power in Language - A practical guide

"Analysing Power in Language" starts very positively for a book on linguistic analysis. Bartlett tells the reader that they already know a lot about discourse analysis, but what his book will try to do is to put that knowledge into focus and provide a framework that allows the reader to discuss discourse in a principled way.
The framework is systemic functional linguistics (SFL), and Bartlett's approach is to reveal only as much of this rich framework as is required to deal with the interesting range of texts that are analysed in the book. This is done carefully through a step by step approach.
The tone of the book throughout is very friendly, and reads like you are having a chat with the writer, which may make it easier for some to cope with the range of concepts and labels in SFL, but may also make it harder to use as a reference book. The sections in the book are often quite long and may include a range of ideas and terms. More subsections would make it easier when the reader wants to return and find a point or cross-reference one idea to compare with another. Ironically, the very feature that makes this book reader-friendly - the friendly, narrative tone - is the feature that makes it more difficult to read as a textbook, because it is difficult to re-locate ideas that you half-remember or did not really understand the first time round. If you can find it, the explanation will be good. The trouble is finding it.
That complaint aside, the book is very practical. The text analysis does what it says on the tin (or the cover, at least) - it shows how different aspects of language are used in various contexts (Martin Luther King's famous'I have a dream' speech, Lord Coe's final address to the IOC, and Bartlett's own fieldwork research in Guyana, among others) to exercise power through language.
Overall, Bartlett makes a valuable and unique contribution to the range of books attempting to introduce people with different concerns to the model of discourse analysis provided by SFL. If you are the kind of person that likes to learn by talking ideas through with a friend, this book is as close to a personal guide as you will find.

As with my other reviews, this is also posted as a Goodreads review.

Open Academics

I was recently alerted to Martin Haspelmath's blog call to use technology to release academics from the
stranglehold of publishing houses - not the first and not the last to do so (Thanks to Beatriz Quiroz). As he puts it,

Publishers normally expect that the manuscript of your book is not freely downloadable from your website, so by“publishing” a book, you actually make it less public. While not published yet, it’s freely available on your website to anyone in the world, and after publication, it exists as a paper copy in a few dozen libraries in the rich countries – this is what I call absurd.

In one of the responses, Sebastian Nordhoff points out

reviewers (paid by the state) work for a publishing house (a private company), which then sells the product (the reviews) back to the state. Since reviewers work pro bono anyway, there is no reason why they could not work pro bono for a non-profit enterprise as well.

Clearly an absurd situation!
So what to do?
Well, as it happens like there is for so many things today, there is an open source solution. And then some. Haspelmath's response is to set  up an author-led publishing company called Language Science Press using open source publishing software. All you need to do is learn LaTeX - a formatting language, not unlike html or the early versions of WordPerfect that some may remember, where all formatting in a document is coded.While that may sound like a challenge to most linguists, I know a great many engineers that write more comfortably in LaTex than in "normal" trousers text (sorry couldn't resist that one!).
This brings us to the tasty bit of this post. Instead of going to all the trouble of setting up software to help with the publishing and printing, Haspelmath and  Stefan Müller (FU Berlin) used the open source OMP - Open Monograph Press. This allows you to edit, publish and maintain books:

Open Monograph Press is an open source software platform for managing the editorial workflow required to see monographs, edited volumes and, scholarly editions through internal and external review, editing, cataloguing, production, and publication. OMP can operate, as well, as a press website with catalog, distribution, and sales capacities. - See more at: http://pkp.sfu.ca/omp
But, wait, that's not all. Surely, if you can do that for books you can do it for journals as well? Of course they can. The PKP (Public Knowledge Project hosted by Simon Fraser University) also offers an open source journal management system called "Open Journal Systems" (so, no surprises there, then). Does just what it says on the tin!

And, if that is not enough, there's more. Yes, what else do academics do alongside publishing? Running conferences was the answer that I was looking for when I asked the question that I already had the answer for (Yes, academics do that more than anyone else, too). So, does PKP have a free, open source solution to advertising, administering CFPs and delegates, registrations and preparing proceedings? You bet your plenary speaker they do.And it's called OCS. That stands for Open Conference System, in case your imagination switch had been turned off. What exactly does it allow you to do?

• create a conference Web site 
• compose and send a call for papers electronically 
• accept paper and abstract submissions 
• allow paper submitters to edit their work 
• post conference proceedings and papers in a searchable format 
• post, if you wish, the original data sets 
• register participants 
• integrate post-conference online discussions (See more at: http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs) 

Just in case you're still not impressed, one more job that SFU want to take away from the privateers is the aggregating of citations and publications. They have produced a system called OHS. You are not going to guess what that stands for. No, really you won't. It's Open Harvester Systems which will allow you to create a searchable index of metadata from Open Archives Initiative-compliant archives (see here for more info).

Process Types Graphic

The cover of Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd Edition) by Michael Halliday (Arnold, 1985) featured a graphical version of the array of process types in English identified by Halliday. As well as it being a very attractive image, I have always marvelled at the simplicity and explanatory power of this illustration. The relationship between the process types and how they are realised in English is explored further in both IFG and "Construing Experience through Meaning" by Halliday and Matthiessen. Unfortunately, even in  this digital day and age, I have yet to find a good quality version of the image. The best on the net is here - it looks like a scanned and trimmed copy from the cover.
So, I tried to re-create the image, if not in detail at least in spirit. My apologies to Michael Halliday and the illustrator if my version does not match up to the original, and I will be more than happy to remove it if someone feels it is infringing a copyright. In the meantime, I will use it where I can, remembering to acknowledge it wherever possible.

Model of Process Types (from Halliday, 1985)	Model of Process Types (from Halliday, 1985)
This is a PNG version	This is a JPG version

Learn 2 Read 4 Life

November sees the inaugural conference for the Reading4Life organisation in Uppsala, Sweden entitled "Education for Social Justice." The name says it all, really! But, just in case you are not clear what Reading4Life might be about, here is their mission:

Reading for Life works towards the goal of democratising education so that all learners are given the best opportunities to develop cognitively, linguistically, socially and emotionally regardless of age, sex, ethnicity or social background and have available a range of options to enable them to participate fully in society.

Based on the successes of ReadingToLearn, this European organisation has already found partners in at least 8 countries, and counting.
The principles and philosophy that the organisation are based on also provide a clear picture of their understanding of learning and education:
Principles and philosophy 
Reading for Life’s work is based upon the beliefs that:

• knowledge is a social construct,
• linguistic and cognitive development are inextricably linked and dependent on social interaction,
• school learning depends on classroom interactions, so teacher–student interactions have a powerful impact on learning and the construction of learner identity,
• learning is fostered through a range of different experiences and reflection from multiple perspectives so learning occurs best in heterogeneous groups,
• powerful learning occurs by experiencing success in accomplishing challenging tasks. Therefore schools/teachers need to carefully plan how to support or “scaffold” learners so that they move through continuous cycles of success,
• language is the most important tool for learning. Therefore schools/teachers not only need to teach explicitly through language but they must also teach how language operates to make meaning in all subject areas. Therefore chlidren/students learn language, learn through language and learn about language,
• language is the most effective tool for self-expression, communication and exercising power and influence. Therefore, all children/students need to understand and learn to use language for a variety of purposes, so that everybody has equal opportunities to make an impact and influence the development of society,
• while competence in the official language of any country is an essential goal for education, all languages are important, for the individual and for society at large. Therefore, students’ knowledge of any language must be encouraged and supported by schools as well as the learning of new languages
• the role of the teacher is to scaffold student learning by modelling, guiding and joint work in students’ “Zone of Proximal Development” (Vygotsky). A socio-cultural, teaching-learning centred, model of learning supports the notion of scaffolding rather than dichotomies such as teacher-centred (traditional) or student-centred (progressive/constructivist) models of teaching and learning 
• school development is best promoted in ”learning organisations” where ideas and pedagogies are critiqued and tested in the classroom through action research. Reading for Life does not believe that school improvement will be achieved by privatisation and competition.

Just to give us a further insight into the principles of the organisation and how it operates, here are some interviews with one its main founders, Dr. David Rose

Introduction to Reading To Learn

More information on Reading to Learn

A Talk by David Rose (thanks to "Manxman" Alan Hess for sharing this)

New Journal: Functional Linguistics

At the official opening of the M.A.K. Halliday library at Sun Yat-sen University during ISFC 40 (see news here), the library announced that it will sponsor the new SpringerOpen journal Functional Linguistics. The journal has the great and good of the SFL community serving as editors and on its editorial board and promises to be a major source for new research in SFL.
In addition to regular research articles, authors are invited to contribute book reviews, reviews, commentaries and short reports to Functional Linguistics. Here is the description of the journal from the website:

Functional Linguistics publishes scholarly articles and reviews in the broad area of functional studies, with a special focus on systemic functional linguistics. The journal aims to provide a platform for the exploration of language and linguistic issues from a functional and meaning-oriented perspective. Areas to be covered in this journal include: language and context, functional grammar, semantic variation, discourse analysis, multimodality, register and genre analysis, educational linguistics, etc.

The journal will have the support, quality and prestige of Springer publishers because of the peer review process, but will be Open Access thanks to the generous sponsorship of the library and so all of the articles will be freely available. This appears to the ideal combination. Congratulations to everyone involved in this project. The journal is now accepting papers for publication. What are you waiting for?

IFG4

It's here. (I told you it was coming.) For its 4th edition, An Introduction to Functional Grammar (known to its friends as IFG) has been re-branded as "Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar." Following on from the major revision by Michael Halliday and Christian Matthiessen for the 3rd Edition, IFG4 contains copious corpus samples and detailed descriptions of theory and sample analyses. IFG has now been revised four times in the last four decades and is published (officially in 2014), for the first time, by Routledge instead of (Edward) Arnold.

IFG4 is now much more of a reference grammar than the teaching grammar that appeared as IFG1 in 1985. This is probably because we now have the very useful guides by Geoff Thompson ("Introducing Functional Grammar" now in its 3rd Edition), Bloor and Bloor ("The Functional Analysis of English" also 3rd Edition), Eggins ("An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics" 2nd edition), Butt et al. ("Using Functional Grammar" 3rd edition), Drogba and Humphrey, Martin, Matthiessen and Painter, and so on.

It seems to me, at first glance, that a majority of the revisions come from connecting to other research in SFL - an extended bibliography constitutes more than 20 of the approximately 100 new pages. This, and the extended index, add great value and functionality to the volume, particularly compared with IFG1, while maintaining almost the same analytical framework.

IFG remains the definitive guide to Systemic Functional Linguistics. It is not the only approach to Systemic Functional Linguistics, (Martin's "English Text" and various volumes by Fawcett offer alternative views on SFL analysis) but it is undoubtedly the most influential and the version that most newcomers to discourse analysis try to learn.