Exploting Aspects of Tenor in the Design of Language Activities

Revista del Centro de Investigación Lingüística y Didáctica de la Lengua Inglesa

Centro de Investigación en Lingüística y Didáctica de la Lengua Inglesa

Lugar: Córdoba; Año: 2014; p. 43 - 48

The development of SFL (Systemic Functional Linguistic) has opened up endless opportunities to foster language learning in a number of different and creative ways. Conceived as ´meaning potential´ (Halliday, 1973), language is viewed, from this perspective, as made up of interconnected systems, each with ´a set of options from which the speaker selects according to the meaning he or she wishes to make´ (Lock, 1990, p. 267). It is definitely this idea of choice that enables users, all things being equal, to appropriate language for their own particular purposes. By this it is meant that, when communicating, speakers can normally make informed selections of what linguistic features and structures to use in order to participate effectively in a variety of settings and reach specific goals. In the context of learning a foreign language, because of the very nature of that process, students´ choice opportunities can be said to range from scarce in early stages to numerous depending on such variables as age, motivation, amount of instruction and proficiency levels, to name but a few. The exercises proposed have been designed in order to develop awareness of mood and modality choices and the implications of using informal and formal language. By reflecting about and analyzing the texts and their contexts, it is hoped that learners will identify features which are appropriate or inappropriate depending on communicative situation. They will be asked to act upon the texts and make them suitable according to different settings. In so doing they will be activating prior knowledge of grammatical features and looking for alternative forms of expressing the content presented. No special rubrics or classifications are deemed necessary, at least at this phase of instruction. Deeper-level metalinguistic analysis may be put off until higher degrees of abstraction and language proficiency have been attained.