Longitudinal Study of EFL Students Using the Systemic Functional Linguistics Method

Abstract

This study examined the progress of English as a foreign language (EFL) writers using the instructional framework of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and the communities of practice (CoPs) model. The study participants comprised 11 first-year undergraduate students in Japan with intermediate-level English proficiency who were exposed to SFL in a single EFL classroom (CoP). The participants' genre understanding and meaning-making decisions when writing discussion essays were studied over two semester-long courses. To do so, their developmental changes were analyzed using pre-and post-instructional writing tasks. In particular, their ability to convey interpersonal meaning, such as through the use of modal verbs, was examined and compared between the pre-and post-tasks. To triangulate the findings, participants' genre awareness in relation to discussion essays was also examined using in-depth qualitative analysis of their self-reflective texts and peer assessments, based on a grounded theory approach. In the pre-writing task, it was apparent that the learners lacked understanding of the components of discussion essay writing. However, analysis of their post-instructional tasks revealed that most had begun to apply the language components required to convey interpersonal meaning in their discussion genre texts. These results suggest that the changes in learner's genre awareness and knowledge affected the lexicogrammatical features they used when writing discussion essays. Thus, this study concludes that applying the SFL framework to writing instruction enhanced EFL learners' awareness of textual meaning and their understanding of the function of discussion essay texts.

Assessing the Development of English Learners’ Understanding of the Discussion Genre

“…How do understandings of the basic structures and lexicogrammatical features of texts differ between novice and experienced learners? The pre-and post-survey results of the present study indicated that the learners' understanding of the structure of the discussion genre improved, regardless of whether the learner was a novice or an experienced student of genre-based writing, which is consistent with the findings of Nagao (2017). In addition, the results of our analysis of the learners' preinstruction/noninstructional and post-instruction essays showed that their structural understanding had also improved, although in this regard there were differences between novice and experienced learners.…”

A Genre-Based Approach to Writing Instruction in EFL Classroom Contexts

“…The questions that comprised this peer genre analysis task, which are listed in Table 2, were especially focused on modal verbs and the features of the generic structures. The task involved students reflecting on their peers' writing in order to increase their own genre awareness (Yasuda, 2011;Nagao, 2017). In Task 2, the students shared and discussed their genre analyses with one another, as a group activity, trying to discern similarities and differences.…”

Developing Chinese university students’ academic literacies in English language classrooms via a production-oriented approach: an action research perspective

“…Studies have shown that EFL students face significant challenges in developing their academic literacy skills ( Correa, 2010 ; Nagao, 2017 ; Singh, 2019 ; Zhang W. J., 2020 ; Rodas and Colombo, 2021 ). Among them, one major challenge is the lack of proficiency in English, which hinders their ability to read and write academic texts in the English language.…”