Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education by Nat Bartels

BURNS AND KNOX 249Bobbi reported later that she was constructing her understanding of this particulargrammar point ‘on the run’ as it were.I know even reading it through it’s when I’m actually thinking very rapidly like, ‘whichway will I go? what will I do now? um do I pick this up?’ Yeah and I’d say that those‘ums’ there represent me sort of deeply thinking about, ‘do I know what an intransitiveverb is? Let me just think for a second’.Like Sandra, Bobbi stated that grammar should be taught in context. In discussing theabove extract, we asked Bobbi whether and how she would have followed this particulargrammar point up in subsequent lessons.B:I:B:I tend to recycle information and refer back all the time but um in a moreformalised way I mean I probably have to sit down and really think about it.... But I think, I think um...in most of my teaching I don’t actually teach sortof pure grammar at all. I tend to teach it very much in context in terms ofwhat it is that we’re doing and...yeah like...connectives or you know -So it’s connected to the activity?Very much to the um activity and particularly so at the lower levels toobecause um we’ve really got here at [the language centre] it’s very differentbecause you’ve got sort of people with fairly strong academic frameworkswhereas there [teaching adult migrants] often they don’t have formalframeworks at all. And um...yeah and I just find that if I get into the rarefiedarea of grammar their attention span is fairly short so I tend to use appliedgrammar if you like. [laughs]In this lesson, the grammar point, and grammar explanation in the extract were largelyconceived and explained in terms of traditional grammar. Bobbi outlined the grammarexplanations in terms of the grammar focus of the lesson and the ensuing activities,rather than in terms of target texts or specific social situations.It seems that at this early stage of the research, Bobbi was struggling to find practicalclassroom applications of SFL, perhaps partly as a result of her ongoing struggle with itstheoretical complexity, and with teaching grammar in general.I very often actually learn as I teach ... For me it’s actually, I’ve learnt a great deal ofgrammar just through teaching because you know you come up against a problem youhave to think about it and then you go away and you read about it and then you comeback in a more prepared way but I’m finding students are always throwing up stuff Ican’t answer or can only partly answer.In the three subsequent lessons, Bobbi taught a course for students preparing to enteruniversity. After this initial follow-up interview where we asked her about using SFL,Bobbi showed a shift of perspective on language and grammar.In the first of these subsequent lessons, Bobbi worked with the students to examinethe construction of cohesion through lexical chains in a text written by one of thestudents.