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.

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.

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.

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)

Meanwhile in Bologna - ESFLCW 23

A fantastic array of papers were lined up for the "limited-places only" 23rd European Systemic Functional Conference and Workshop in the beautiful setting of the University Residential Center of Bertinoro, hosted by the Center for Linguistic-Cultural Studies (CeSLiC), University of Bologna from 9th - 11th July.. I only wish I could have been there but you cannot be too greedy! 

I sincerely hope that there is a publication in the near future around the theme of "Permeable contexts and hybrid discourses". In the meantime we have videos of the three plenary speakers: Srikant Sarangi on Hybridity-types, role-sets and professional practice, Caroline Coffin on Re-orienting semantic dispositions: the role of hybrid discourses and Geoff Thompson on Hybridisation: how language users graft new discourses on old root stock.

Michael Halliday @ Connecting Paths, Nov.2010

Thanks again to Annabelle Lukin for posting this video to the Vimeo SFL Linguists Group. In this talk, Michael Halliday draws various links from SFL to Sydney Lamb's linguistic theories, including stratificational linguistics, and points out that the differences between their approaches are mostly a result of their different  research areas rather than a difference in their views on language.

Other talks from the same Connecting Paths Symposium are also available from Annabelle's vimeo page, including the talks by Ruqaiya Hasan, Jim Martin and Sydney Lamb. Congratulations to City University of Hong Kong and to Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou for hosting such an interesting forum and for making it accessible to the rest of us.

Martin & Matthiessen on Genre

Just a quick post for this 11-minute interview which was conducted following this Plenary talk at TESOL 2011:
James R. Martin and Christian Matthiessen
Modelling and Mentoring: Teaching and Learning From Home Through School
Friday, March 18, 2011
8:30 am–9:30 am
Adopting a longitudinal perspective on teaching and learning language from home through school to working life, Martin and Matthiessen bring out the inherent complementarity of teaching and learning processes, showing how parents and teachers serve as mentors for learners by modelling meaning for them in dialogic interaction.

Lots of interesting points, but I do have one criticism - Speak up Jim! We can hardly hear you, and we couldn't get what you were saying in your ISFC plenary. Could you please turn up your volume when in the presence of technology. It does not seem to pick you up very well. Thanks.