Abstracts - Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

DEREK IRWIN, UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM NINGBO CHINATEACHING GRAMMAR ´´RULES´´: A FUNCTIONAL APPROACH TO PRESCRIPTIVISMEnglish-language writing instructors also versed in SFL theory can observe acontradiction between the theoretical underpinnings of the writing guides that weteach from and the type of grammar we believe best describes the language.Invariably, such guides borrow from the realm of traditional grammar to attempt toexplain academic written sentence formation, but in doing so they often employgrammatical jargon in a piecemeal and inconsistent fashion. A further problem isthat prescriptivism as a tradition is, for some very good reasons, almost antitheticalto the SFG approach to language. Nevertheless, writing instructors are responsiblefor ensuring that students emerge with the ability to avoid common “errors.”Having recently written a chapter on mechanics in a writing guide for first-yearuniversity students (Irwin, Jovanovic-Krstic and Watson, forthcoming), I had tostruggle with the necessity of providing students with the ´´rules´´ that they wouldencounter in university-level writing assessments via a comprehensible underlyingsystem of grammar, while simultaneously attempting to keep technical jargon to aminimum. In order to accomplish this, I began with an extremely simplistic versionof the experiential metafunction for “chunking” clause-level units, then used thisscaffolding to move into more sophisticated grammatical ground. This paper willexplore some of the benefits and drawbacks of this approach to first- and secondlanguagewriting pedagogy.ReferencesIrwin, Derek, Jovanovic-Krstic, Viktoria, and Watson, Bruce. (2012) So, What’s Your Thesis?Toronto: Nelson.PAPER SESSION 7E - ROOM 5 - THURSDAY, 28 JULYISFC38 Book of Abstracts Page 49 Lisbon, July 2011