Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education by Nat Bartels

S:L:S:BURNS AND KNOX 247Yes, you say what you did there. What about which? Are we saying what wedid at Govett’s Leap or are we describing it?If we want explainOK, exactly. Explaining the noun. You give information about this, so wedon’t know what this is so we have an explanation which is a lookout. Sothese are the sort of things you can find in a recount. You can find the placesand you can find time, the different times when you did different things andif you want to explain something about a place you can use which and givethe explanation or if you want to explain what you did at that place you cansay where...Sandra’s perception was that she was gaining confidence and successfully beginning touse grammatical instruction in a more textual and contextualised way:Yeah, in this one relative clauses came up but it was more natural and morespontaneous...because we were talking about recounts and so we were analysing one inparticular, so they were looking at things related to time or um I guess place...soobviously it’s getting them to recognise why that ‘which’ is there, what the clause isdoing, what the relationship is between the clause and the noun that is before it.She spoke about her growing confidence in using SFL and her sense that her reflectionshad led to a substantial shift in her teaching practice over these three lessons:And laterI think that it helped me become more as I said conscious about or more confident withthis new approach... Because as I said to you at the beginning I felt like I really did notknow how to put this into practice so um...the first lesson you came to see the way itwas out of control in that sense at that stage um so it helped me see how I could put thatinto practice...getting the questions from you that would make me think so...S:I:S:When I think of having taught essays in the past...I didn’t get into it thatmuch in the sense of really taking every single thing of a modelDo you mean the structure or the grammar?Could be the grammar, the structure, yeah both things...it’s totally changedthe way I look at that now...For instance when I explained how to write arecount, how to write a news story the way I did that was different from theway I would have done it before. I wouldn’t have spent so much time lookingat the different aspects because I never thought of it that way.Overall, there is obvious movement over these lessons away from decontextualisedgrammatical explanation, with the primary focus on syntax and constructed textbooksamples, towards the use of authentic text, text modelling and joint text constructionwith the students. Sandra appears to feel more confident in using some of the mainpedagogical approaches associated with SFL and genre theory, although her majorapplications still relate to text structure and the grammar of field. Nevertheless, her