Toward Mastering the Discourses of Reasoning: Use of Grammatical Metaphor at Advanced Levels of Foreign Language Acquisition

Abstract

Situated within the framework of the systemic-functional linguistics (Halliday, 1994) and language-based theory of learning (Halliday, 1993), this article examines a shift toward a more objectified and "scientific" representation of reality in texts written by foreign language (FL) learners at various levels of acquisition. It argues that linguistic variation in style impacting communicative effectiveness of written texts created by learners representing different levels of FL acquisition can be partly captured by means of grammatical metaphor, as a phenomenon of transcategorization, whereby processes (typically realized by verbs), attributes (typically realized by adjectives), or whole propositions (typically realized by sentences) are encoded as nouns. Based on a study conducted on 55 book reviews written by advanced American learners of German and 30 texts written by native speakers in the same genre, the article identifies various types of grammatical metaphors or approximations toward it as characteristic of various acquisition levels. It also demonstrates the role and functions of grammatical metaphor in enhancing the ability of writers to construct a logical argument or a persuasive evaluation. Comparisons to the use of grammatical metaphor in the texts produced by native writers of German show it to be a prominent feature of adult language use in literate and academic contexts, by native or nonnative language users. THIS ARTICLE SEEKS TO SINGLE OUT A KEY feature of advanced foreign language (FL) development in instructional settings and demonstrate variation in frequency and use of this feature in the discourse of advanced language users. It views advanced language learning as a process of literacy acquisition that can enable learners to use an FL beyond informal and mundane communication. Realization of advanced language abilities would then seem to be inseparable from involvement in public, particularly professionalThe Modern Language Journal, 94, ii, (2010) 0026-7902/10/181-197 $1.50/0 C 2010 The Modern Language Journal or academic spheres of social life. These spheres are primarily dominated by the conventions and practices of literate language use and characterized by the central role of written text for the construction of meaning in these settings, even when language use itself might be oral. In line with Halliday (1989), use of language in the written mode in academic or professional contexts represents and manifests a different and more complex type of meaning making. Whereas the ability to use language in oral everyday situations is acquired in the native language as a result of primary socialization into the society, expertise in written communication in the professional environment can be developed in the native language only as a result of schooling on the secondary and even

Grammatical metaphor in Swedish monolingual and multilingual upper secondary school students’ writing

“…As Figure 3 illustrates, the texts written in 9th grade were found to occupy a narrower GM range than texts written in 11th grade, where increased GM use may be in response to greater demands for more formal and academic discourse (cf. Baratta 2010;Byrnes 2009;Derewianka 1995Derewianka , 2003Ryshina-Pankova 2010).…”

“…GM has been investigated in English as a second language (Schleppegrell 2002(Schleppegrell , 2004b, in German as a foreign language (Byrnes 2009;Ryshina-Pankova 2010) and in Spanish as a heritage language (Colombi 2006) in studies focusing on the writing of university students. Byrnes (2009) observed an increasing use of GM (confined to nominalizations) in the writing of 14 university students during the course of the university program.…”

“…GM has previously been studied in texts written by monolingual, English-speaking children (Christie & Derewianka 2008;Derewianka 1995Derewianka , 2003, and, with respect to L2 and foreign language texts, primarily in the writing of university students (Byrnes 2009;Colombi 2006;Ryshina-Pankova 2010;Schleppegrell 2004b). Few studies have investigated the writing of younger, multilingual students.…”

Patterns of tasks, patterns of talk: L2 literacy building in university Spanish classes

“…In English, connectives such as causal and adversarial conjunctions like because and although allow for ideas to be subsumed, facilitating the lexical density of a text (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014). Academic discourse is often characterised as having much in common with written language in that it is lexically dense and characterised by less congruent language and higher instances of grammatical metaphor and nominalisation (Ryshina-Pankova, 2010). Nominalisation refers to the process of converting verbs and adjectives into nouns and noun phrases (Schleppegrell, 2004).…”

EAP and the Status of the ESL Professional at the University of Kansas

“…Each discipline has a specific way to structure knowledge through language (Martin, 2007). Moreover, academic content is constructed from and exists as (1) general academic vocabulary (Coxhead, 2000;Hyland & Tse, 2007), (2) specialized language or jargon (Woodward-Kron, 2008), (3) academic collocations (Durrant, 2009), (4) grammatical metaphor (Halliday & Martin, 1993;Ryshina-Pankova, 2010), (5) other metaphors (Lakoff & Nuñez, 2000), (6) analogies and similes, (7) hierarchical organization patterns, (8) rhetorical styles and (9) academic genres (Swales, 1990(Swales, , 2004Hyland & Sancho Guinda 2012). This point gets obscured by standardized tests.…”