ECIS MLIE Conference

How language works in context: insights from functional grammar (Lise Fontaine) - 60 minutse
The conference theme is an important one as it highlights how significantly language can vary: growing home, host and instructional languages. We may think immediately that these may well be different languages and in many cases they are, but even a single ‘language’ can be thought of as a set of different varieties of the language, each one shaped by its use. One of the key differences between home and instructional languages is due to the very different functions language serves in each context. The notion of language variation due to its function in context was an important part of Halliday’s development of functional grammar in the early 1960s, and eventually becoming important and influential in the UK and Australia, as it offered a way of developing approaches to literacy from a functional linguistic perspective. This session will provide an introduction and overview of the teaching of functional grammar and its place across the curriculum. We will consider what it has to offer teachers and students.  In doing so we will also discuss whether or not there is a need for a/some metalanguage in the classroom and whether or not training teachers to develop their understanding of how language works in context can provide them with important support. Finally, I will share my experience of working with teachers from 17 schools in the Buckinghamshire county where I offered training in functional grammar as part of the Buckinghamshire’s WRITE Project.  

Teaching across semiotic modes with multilingual learners: translanguaging in an Australian classroom (Sue Ollerhead) - 30 minutes
This session presents the outcomes of a collaborative research project between school and university-based researchers that investigated the use of multilingual and multimodal teaching approaches with culturally and linguistically diverse students at an Intensive English Centre in Australia. I will describe how a unit of work on poetry was designed and taught in a way that drew upon newly arrived migrant students’ diverse funds of knowledge, their first languages, digital technology and other multimodal resources such as colour and music. Not only did these practices increase the students’ meaning making resources, resulting in expanded vocabularies and a broader range of expression, but they also contributed to a classroom ecology in which students’ unique linguistic and cultural identities were both legitimised and celebrated.  The aim is to present practical examples of how to draw upon students’ observable languaging practices from their full linguistic repertoires, and to tap into their existing cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge to support their academic language development and literacy engagement.  A vibrant illustration of how planned multimodal and multilingual practices can work hand in hand with students’ embodied and sensory experiences of literacy when semiotic elements such as colour and music are added to classroom lessons, evoking emotive and individual responses.