Applying functional language analysis approach in Chinese college English reading classes

2.1. FLA approach

Over the last three decades, SFL has had a strong influence on literacy (e.g., Halliday 1975, 1978, 2007; Halliday and Hasan 1989; Christie 1989), and among various achievements from the application of SFL on education (e.g., Huang 2004; Huang and Morgan 2003; Huang and Mohan 2009; Schleppegrell 2004,  2010, 2012; Pitcher and Fang 2007), FLA approach makes a unique and much-needed contribution to text understanding by exploring three meta-meanings of the text in terms of content, organization and attitude. Content refers to what the text is about; Organization refers to how the meaning is presented in a coherent way, and attitude refers to social or personal relationship enacted by the text or style/tone/voice reflected in its interpersonal meaning. The framework of FLA approach (Fang 2011) is shown in Table 1.

We can see that this framework presents a very detailed illustration about what text meanings need to be explored and how to approach these meanings. Three basic meanings are included in the framework, the content, the organization, and the attitude. Accompanying each is some eliciting questions aiming to guide the learners for these meanings. In order to answer these questions, a concrete list of specific language strategies is provided, which are related to some distinctive language features of the text.

As the element of content corresponds to the ideational or experiential meaning in SFL, transitivity patterns realized through process types, participants, and circumstances are highlighted in the framework. Four major types of processes, that is, processes of doing, sensing, being, and saying are emphasized in FLA approach. As the participants involved in these processes are typically realized in nominal phrases, and circumstances such as time, space, and conditions in which the processes happen are typically realized in adverbs or prepositional phrases, these linguistic features are listed in the framework to make clear what is going on in the text.

The element of an organization involves the logical and textual meanings of a text shown at three levels: the organizational pattern of the whole text, cohesion patterns between paragraphs and logical links and dependency relationships among clauses. By examining some cohesive links, the theme/rheme structure in the text, and clause combination devices, the organizational meaning about how the author calibrates information flow and builds up an argument is achieved.

The third element, attitude, refers to the interpersonal meaning in SFL – that is, the relationship among people – is realized as Mood and Modality systems. In the Mood system, four functions are categorized according to the exchange of information or goods and services: offer, commands, statements, and questions. The Modality system allows users to express possibility, usuality, inclination, and obligation. People’s stance, judgment, and evaluation can also be identified through modal verbs, modal adjectives, modal adverbs, and modal nouns together with other attitudinal lexes. Analysis of the interpersonal meaning can make readers understand the author’s attitude and how this attitude exerts influences on readers.

We can see that the FLA framework helps readers gain access to three meanings of a text. By offering an array of analytical tools for engaging students in discussion of a variety of language resources, this framework makes explicit how these meanings are constructed.

2.2. Related studies

Since it was first put forward, FLA has been applied in various readings and text related situations, among which one important application area is American secondary education. Scholars (Fang and Schleppegrell 2008) noted that many students in America lack literacy competency necessary to succeed in secondary schooling. One explanation is that academic texts in secondary content areas contain more complex language patterns than those in the texts the students read before. First, technical and dense language characterizes academic texts the students are studying, and nominalization is frequent in subject lessons such as science, mathematics, and history. Second, some basic reading skills and strategies are not enough for students to understand fully the new type of texts. These challenges require students with more subject-specific skills than ever before. Fang and Schleppegrell (2008, 2010) applied FLA approach in secondary schooling, and by describing features of texts in science, history, mathematics, language arts, and other secondary school subjects, they made use of this approach to help the students better engage with school knowledge across different academic content areas.

Schleppegrell (2011) has applied the FLA approach in history teaching with the aim of better-developing students’ language ability and history knowledge. Some concrete analysis strategies and classroom activities were carefully designed and used following the framework. Her findings suggest that FLA approach is effective in developing students’ disciplinary literacy in secondary education and has broader implications for helping students cope with academic texts in other subjects.

In the process of learning, students need not only much sufficient exposure to language resources, but also a good understanding of the functions of these language resources. Related to this, Fang (2010) presented a series of tasks in science education, including morphemic analysis, noun deconstruction, noun expansion, paraphrasing, sentence combining, sentence completion, and syntactic anatomy and integration. These tasks engage students in learning the language while learning about knowledge. They turned out to be very useful for students’ understanding of features of science language, enabling the students to better deal with the challenges in their science reading and writing.

The research mentioned above reveals that FLA approach, with attention drawn to different types of texts and their linguistic resources, is effective in developing students’ subject area knowledge, their language analysis ability, and critical thinking. Besides its application in literacy development, FLA approach can also be applied to the evaluation of writing. Nowadays, rubrics have been commonly practiced for evaluating students’ writing competence. Several score levels are differentiated in the rubrics-based writing assessment from aspects of content, organization, fluency, language conventions, and so on. For example, for the content aspect, a good piece of writing should present a clear, focused idea, with strong relevant supporting details. As for the organization, high-quality writings should be logical and coherent. However, this assessment standard is often criticized for being too vague to follow, and teachers have to rely on their institution in making judgments (e.g., Fang and Wang 2011). In addition, these rubrics ignore genre- and register-specific requirements for the writing. To overcome these disadvantages and achieve the purpose of evaluating students’ writing abilities in a more objective and scientific perspective, Fang and Wang (2011) advocated FLA approach in the writing evaluation. Examining writing from aspects of content, organization, and attitude, and evaluating the corresponding linguistic resources used for expressing these three meanings, this approach can be used as a good alternative for traditional assessment.

In addition to research on how to use this approach for teaching and assessment purposes, researchers have also studied the applicability of the approach from the teacher’s perspective. Achugar, Schleppegrell, and Oteiza (2007) launched a project that engaged teachers in activities of language analysis for the purpose of developing their reflective literacy, the ability to both recognize semiotic resources that construe knowledge and reflect on how these resources construe ideologies as well. In this project, FLA was introduced in a 3-week-long professional development session for history teachers. Most teachers who participated in this session reported that FLA approach helped greatly in developing their language awareness. They said that this project promoted their meta-linguistic knowledge, and stimulated their critical reading ability.

Fang et al. (2014) carried out an empirical research, examining 39 inservice teachers’ perception towards their use of the approach in the classroom. It was found that most teachers showed great interest in employing FLA in the class. However, challenges were also revealed, with the major one coming from teachers’ lack of related knowledge of the language. The authors drew the conclusion that although teachers accepted this approach in their classes, implementing it confidently demanded considerable professional support, especially in how to identify text types and their corresponding linguistic features, and how to apply analysis strategies.

FLA approach has also been suggested for use in developing college students’ literacy (e.g., Fang 2011). According to Fang, students are facing more challenging reading materials than before when they enter colleges. They need to read texts of different academic disciplines, and these texts may vary greatly in structure, meaning, and tone or style. The language becomes denser, more abstract and more complicated. Each discipline may have its own language features. Even disciplines which share common language features may function differently in their specific situations, and consequently, a more variety of discourses appear. Therefore, students at the college level need to develop high-level reading skills in order to handle such a big variety of texts. The approach, Fang (2011) suggested, has the potential to achieve positive results in guiding college students towards an in-depth reading comprehension and high-level language learning.

Although FLA has been extensively employed in various contexts for educational purposes, few studies have been carried out to integrate FLA with reading instruction in a Chinese college context, and no research has been done to observe the application process and its effectiveness. The purpose of the present study is, therefore, to investigate the possibility of applying this approach in Chinese college reading instruction, and to be specific, how Chinese college students use FLA approach to comprehend their English reading material and their perception towards this approach.

3.1. Adapted framework for the present study

By directing the students to comprehend the text from three aspects of content, organization, as well as attitude, and helping the students understand how language works to create these meanings, FLA makes a unique and much-needed contribution to the reading instruction. However, as FLA framework (see Table 1) involves some technical terms in SFL, which requires much professional and theoretical knowledge, Chinese college teachers and students may find it hard to follow in its application. In consideration of this actual situation, this study adapted the original FLA approach with some simplification, as shown in Table 2.

We can see that in the new framework, three key questions in the second column remain the same with the original, while some items for analysis in the third column are replaced by grammatical terms more familiar to teachers and students. The adapted framework for the present study is very handy to use in the classroom. Firstly, it directs the learners to the exploration of the text meaning by answering three major questions: what is going on in this text? How is the text organized? What is the author’s attitude/tone/voice/style of the text? These three questions correspond to the three key text elements–content, organization, and attitude, respectively.

Secondly, the items listed in the third column, being typical grammatical terms familiar to both teachers and students, make it possible to be easily identified from the text. Through the analysis of these items, students can work out how these language resources construct different meanings of the text. For instance, items of verbal groups, nominal groups, adverbials, prepositional phrases need to be analyzed for answering questions about the content meaning. Verbal groups show what mainly happens in the text; Nominal groups indicate what kinds of participants are involved and adverbial groups and prepositional phrases show the time, space and conditions of the event. Through analyzing these items, the content of the text is constructed. In the same way, analysis of what begins each clause, such as conjunctions (e.g., and, or) and pronouns, makes explicit what logical relations between sentences are, and how the whole text is organized. Similarly, identification and analysis of voice (active voice or passive voice), grammatical subject, personal pronouns, attitudinal words, modal verbs, sentence types and so on help readers understand the author’s attitude. For instance, passive voice is often used in formal texts and abstract nouns tend to function as subjects in an objective context. Analysis of the use of attitudinal lexis (nouns, adjectives, adverbs), modal verbs, modal adjectives, and modal nouns help reveal authors’ attitude, judgment, and evaluation. Finally, the analysis of mood helps readers gain insights into authors’ positions and feelings.

3.2. Participants

The present study took place in an English-as-Foreign Language (EFL) reading class at a university in Beijing, China. The reading course was a 16-week course which lasted 90 min each week. Thirty freshman students aged from 18 to 20 from six colleges took this course, and their majors were economics, physics, history, geography, education, and English. The students had learned English as a foreign language for 6 to 11 years and their native language was Mandarin Chinese. The teaching materials covered disciplines of news reports, computer science, English literature, geography, and history. Text genres included academic papers, popular science articles, novels, travel brochures. The adapted FLA framework was instructed and applied in the reading course.

3.3. The teaching procedure

As FLA approach was new to the students, the teaching curriculum employed a three-stage model: teacher instruction, group discussion practice, and individual presentations. The duration for each stage was 4 weeks, 4 weeks, and 8 weeks, respectively. During the whole term, the students were asked to employ FLA approach in the classroom reading activities and encouraged to use it in reading as well as other language skill learning outside of the reading class.

As the reading material covered a variety of disciplines and genres, which was linguistically and conceptually challenging, students were in the first four weeks taught by the teacher how to use FLA framework to comprehend the text, especially how to acquire various meanings of the text from clues of language features of that particular type of text.

In the second stage, students were divided into groups, discussing together some specific language choices which contribute to the formation of the knowledge and meanings of the text. By answering questions and using strategies presented in the framework, students were asked to discuss the meanings of the text from its content, organization, and attitude, and how these meanings were realized. During this stage, the teacher gave students necessary guidance to ease their difficulty and help them arrive at the correct understanding. For example, in the understanding of attitude, the following questions were provided by the teacher:

1. What is the likely relationship between the speakers in the dialogue? (e.g., teacher and student? Father and son? Colleagues? Friends?)

2. List all the phrases that show the author’s feelings. Consider these expressions in terms of the pronouns, the verbs and verb forms (e.g., modal verbs, active/passive voice), and which kinds of verbs and verb forms are used with different pronouns.

Under the help of the teacher, students gradually learned the way language was used in particular contexts to express the meanings specific. After four weeks of group practice, students gradually gained more confidence and expertise in applying the FLA approach, and it was time for them to take a more active role. In the next eight weeks, students were required to report their understanding of the text and their reading comprehension process individually through reading task analysis. At the same time, presentations were performed in groups to demonstrate their understanding of the texts selected by the students themselves. The teacher assisted the students to deal with any possible difficulties they might encounter before, during, and after the presentation.

3.4. Instruments and data collection methods

A qualitative method was adopted in the research, in which three instruments were utilized: (1) three reading analysis tasks, (2) students’ presentations which demonstrate their integration of FLA approach in the reading process, and (3) two open-question questionnaires for the students’ perceptions towards this approach.

Three reading tasks were assigned to the participants in the ninth week, the twelfth week, and the sixteenth week, respectively. The three tasks were of different genres with different topics, with the first one featuring a descriptive text of a war event, the second an account of the history of the English language, and the third an expository text about how coins were made. Students were required to analyze the three texts individually from perspectives of their content, organization, and attitude.

Presentations were students’ group demonstrations, and the purpose was to evaluate how well the students could apply FLA approach in their disciplinary reading through cooperative work, and whether they could make their understanding of the text explicit to the whole class. Groups were formed mainly according to their majors (or related majors), and texts for the presentation were selected by students themselves from their own major (or related) disciplines. Altogether, eight groups were formed and demonstrated their presentations.

Two open-question questionnaires were distributed to the students during this course. The first was at the beginning of this course, aiming to probe the students’ attitudes towards English reading and their reading habit before applying FLA approach. Besides some basic information about the students, such as their major, age, English learning time, the questionnaire was made up of three open questions:

1. Do you like English reading? Why or why not?

2. How do you usually deal with English reading? What methods do you often use to help you comprehend the reading texts?

3. What are your main problems in your reading?

The second questionnaire was administered at the end of the course, aiming to find out the students’ perceptions towards the FLA approach. Their comments on the teaching effects, changes in their attitudes and what they gained in the course were also collected through this questionnaire. This questionnaire was also composed of three open questions:

1. In our English reading course, we tried to comprehend the text from aspects of content, attitude, and organization. We also made use of some language clues to help acquire these meanings. How do you perceive this approach? Is it effective for you?

2. Is the approach useful in other language learning situations?

3. Do you have any attitude change towards English reading after this course? If yes, what are the changes? If not, what are the possible reasons?

4.1. Students’ use of FLA approach in their reading

Analysis showed that during the 16 weeks’ reading instruction and practice, the students were able to apply FLA approach successfully for the exploration of text meanings, which could be explained through their performance in the three reading tasks and their group presentations.

4.1.1. Analysis of three reading tasks

Positive results can be seen through analyzing how students actively made use of the FLA framework and language prompts suggested in the framework to comprehend the reading tasks from aspects of the content, the organization, and the attitude.

4.1.1.1. Students’ understanding of the content

Understanding the content means working out what is happening in the text, that is, what the topic is mainly about. It was found that the students could grasp the content of the text accurately. Here is one student’s analysis towards the content meaning of the three reading tasks:

This text is about an important war happened in America. The first part of this text tells us how the war began … (Task 1)

This passage mainly introduces four main stages in the development of English: old English, Middle English, early Modern English, and late modern English. At the end of the passage, the author mainly talks about the modern stage. (Task 2)

The content of the two texts are similar. Both texts talk about the process of making coins. (Task 3)

Further analysis showed that most students could actively use strategies listed in the FLA framework to acquire the main idea of the text. The following is from one student’s analysis of the first reading task, illustrating how he/she comprehended the content of the text from clues of verbs.

The first part tells us how the war began. In this part, many specific verbs such as “organize”, “protest”, “close” and so on are used to help us identify what is happening in the text. Some colonial leaders wanted independence from Britain, so they organized “Boston Tea Party”, which infuriated George III. Then George III closed the port of Boston. In this background, the First and the Second Continental Congress were established. Then the war began.

For the second part, verbs such as “favored”, “asserted”, “said”, “issue”, “write”, “refused”, “justify” are used, which explain why and how the Declaration of Independence was written. Because the Americans wanted to have the same rights as the English, which was refused by the king, the Declaration was necessary to break the final tie between America and Britain.

For the third part, the verb “explain” tells us what this part is about, that is, it explains the main reasons that led the success of the war. Three reasons are mentioned and they are high motivation of Americans, mistakes made by the overconfident English generals and the attitude of the weary British people. (Task 1)

We can see that by focusing on some important verbs and verbal groups used in the text, this student was able to construct the content meaning accurately, and meanwhile, in the procedure of doing the analysis, the student could not only understand what the text is mainly about but how language works to make the meaning happen.

4.1.1.2. Students’ understanding of the organization

Understanding the organization is to identify how the text is structured. Compared with the content meaning, students experienced some difficulties in making use of the language prompts listed in the framework for mapping the organization of the text, especially at the beginning of the course. Some students were rather slow in identifying language resources such as the linking devices, the beginning of each clause and other language features which contributed to the text organization, and they were not very sure about how to make use of these resources to help construct the structure of the text. But after a period of learning and practicing, progress was made and the students’ ability to locate these language hints for the organizational pattern improved gradually.

The following is from one student’s analysis of Task 1.

The first part of the text is organized in a chronological order, as many sentences in this part begin with time expressions such as “over the next decade”, “in 1773”,“in September 1774”,“On 19 April 1775”. The following part develops with views about how the war broke out, which can be seen from conjunctions and adverbs such as “therefore”, “since”, “although”, “but”. The third part is organized by presenting a series of reasons, as can be seen from the topic sentence, “several reasons explain their success”. The linking words “first”, “second”, “third”, “finally” help construct the sequence of the reasons. (Task 1)

We can see that this student could successfully construct the organization of the text with the help of some important language devices. Firstly, the student noticed the beginning part of each clause, that is, the theme played an important role in structuring the text. In the first part of the text, most clauses began with time expressions such as “over the next decade”, “in September 1774” and so on, which indicate that the writer gives a recount of events in a sequence of time. The student recognized this feature accurately and pointed out that this part of the text followed a chronological pattern. In the second part, the themes changed to some conjunctions and other linking devices, such as “although”, “but”, “therefore”, and “since”, and for these features, the student drew the conclusion that the second part of the text was not an account of events anymore, but points of view behind the war. In the third part of the text, the student noticed that the first sentence, “several reasons explain their success” was the topic sentence of this section. Themes in the next few sentences “first”, “second”, “third”, “after a few years”, and “finally” also drew the student’s attention, which helped him construct the rhetorical organization of this section.

Below is what another student wrote for the third reading task:

The first text begins with an introduction and greetings, and even a little joke. Then it introduces the progress of making coins by the sequence of steps. We can see it from the words or phrases like ‘begin’, “after that” “then” and “finally”.

The second text, however, begins directly with the introduction. After a brief introduction, it explains the process of making cons. Similarly, by the sequence of steps. The words, “first” “after”, obviously show the sequence. (Task 3)

In this analysis, the linking words indicating the sequence of actions “first”, “after that”, “then”, “finally” made the student form a good understanding of the text organization.

We can see that the students could make good use of the language clues listed in the framework for understanding the organization of the text. The practice of analyzing reading texts made the students learn not only how to identify the relationship among sentences from a local perspective, but also how to structure the whole passage and how to sequence ideas from a global view.

4.1.1.3. Students’ understanding of the attitude

Attitude in the FLA framework means the tone or the style of text. It may also refer to the author’s explicit or implicit emotions conveyed in the text. It is found that among the three meanings – the content, the organization, and the attitude, recognizing the right attitude of the reading text is the most difficult, especially at the early stage. However, over the term, the students improved greatly and they could make use of attitudinal lexes, modal verbs and other language items presented in the framework to capture the right attitude of the text, as can be seen from their reading analyses:

It is obvious that the two texts have different styles. In Text one, the active voice dominates, and for the other, the passive voice dominates. In addition, Text one is funny and attractive. For example, in Text one, the author says, ‘first of all, I want to apologize if you are attending this talk in order to find out how to become a successful businessman or a millionaire.’ The author uses phrases ‘we just make … ’ ‘we used to do this … ’ and so on, which makes the reader feel like a friend is talking. Text two is serious and academic. For example, the author uses words such as ‘approximately’, ‘the initial designs’, which are formal, objective with no personal feelings. Obviously, the first text is telling a story or some interesting things in life. The other is a real science reading, which may appear in science magazines. What is more, Text one uses plenty of ‘we’, ‘our’ to introduce. Text two does not use these words. To conclude, Text one is an informal speech and Text two is an official document. (Task 3)

In this analysis, the student compared the styles of the two parallel texts from voice, pronouns and other lexical choices used before concluding that these two texts belonged to two different genres. That is, one is a speech and the other is an academic document.

The students could also work out the author’s feeling successfully from the attitudinal adverbs and adjectives used in the text, as can be seen from the analysis below:

The author shows deep love for English language by using some positive adverbs, such as “inarguably”, “overwhelmingly”, “firmly”, as well as adjectives like “remarkable” and “useful”. (Task 2)

In addition to some attitudinal lexes, students also paid attention to subjects of the sentences for understanding the text style. Here is how one student analyzed the last task:

The text is very formal, as the subjects of most sentences are entities or things, such as “the Renaissance of Classical learning”, “the invention of printing”, “the dialect of London”, instead of persons. (Task 3)

Noticing that the subjects in the sentences were not persons that usually initiated the activities, but entities and things realized as complex nominal groups, a key grammatical resource for abstraction and information condensation contributed to the technicality of texts, this student drew the conclusion that the text was presented in a formal style.

We can see that the students could identify some important language resources in the text, such as attitudinal lexes, voices, pronouns, subject features and so on, and by analyzing these features, students were able to form a good understanding of the feeling, the tone or the attitude of a reading passage.

4.1.2. Analysis of students’ presentations

After stages of FLA instruction and group practice, the students were required to demonstrate their use of FLA approach in text understanding in presentations. It was found that the presentation groups could apply successfully what they had learnt from the FLA instruction and made good use of questions and language strategies in the framework, thus achieving a very satisfactory result.

The presentation activity started with the students’ own selection of reading materials. As the presentation group was formed according to the students’ majors (or related majors), each group was asked to read extensively in their own discipline before deciding a text for presentation. After the text was chosen, they re-read the text carefully, discussed the details of the text, and then made their plan for presentation. Figure 1 displays the text chosen by one group and how the group worked on the reading material and tried to figure out the text meanings for demonstration.

Figure 1.

An example of group presentation.

This text is from the Geography group, and the topic is on Earth–Sun relationships. We can see that the group started with circling and highlighting two key concepts in the article, rotation and revolution in the first sentence for understanding the whole passage. The group drew lines between the two concepts and some explanations, reasons, and sub-factors, which helped to construct the content meaning of the text. The group also circled some cohesive devices such as “furthermore” and ordinal numbers “first”, “second” to mark the organizational pattern of the text. This analysis enabled them to understand the main relationships mentioned in the text and helped make clear how the author weaved information about these relationships.

When the presentation started, each student in the group took a role in the demonstration. In groups of four students, for example, the first presenter usually introduced some background disciplinary knowledge of the text; The second one guided the class to read the whole text, following the normal teaching procedure such as raising some comprehension questions, organizing class discussion of the answers, and asking the class to report the discussion results; The third explained how the meanings were identified, and the fourth one summarized the whole lesson with an emphasis on some prominent disciplinary features of the text.

The presentations showed that the students could integrate FLA approach into their demonstration. Take the Chemistry group as an example. Before reading started, the first presenter introduced some basic background knowledge related to the text, including five categories of chemistry and explained important technical terms appeared in the text. Then the second presenter raised some questions concerning the reading text from aspects of the content, the organization, and the author’s tone. Some special disciplinary language features were also highlighted to the class. The reading lasted 12 min. After the whole class completed the reading, the third presenter led the class into the discussion around the comprehension questions. At the final stage, the fourth presenter summarized the whole reading with comments on language features of the text. Here is part of the last presenter’s summary:

The text is a brief introduction to analytical chemistry and how it is classified. The author holds the view that analytical chemistry is closely related to our daily life, which can be seen from the adjectives and adverbs used in the text, ‘fundamentally’, ‘vitally’, ‘close’, ‘important’ and ‘popular’.

The language of the text is accurate. We do not find expressions like “approximately”, “almost”, “a little” and so on. Instead, we find some accurate numbers like 0.000001g. There are many formal words and a large number of professional terms. No rhetorical expressions are used. The reason for it is that the text aims to tell you something about a chemical reaction or the properties of a certain substance, and therefore, the information must be accurate, formal, and concise.

This presentation example shows that the students were able to integrate what they had learnt in the FLA instruction for their understanding and explanation of the chosen text. By drawing attention to some prominent language resources typically used in the text, the students were able to actively explore how these different lexical and grammatical elements functioned to construe the main content, the organization, as well as the style of the text.

Presentations in group forms also suggested that students working cooperatively could help to solve many challenges in their disciplinary reading, which would bring the students a sense of achievement, and consequently make the demanding tasks of disciplinary reading both enjoyable and rewarding.

4.2. Students’ perceptions towards the FLA approach

Analysis of the questionnaires revealed that the students held positive views towards this approach, as can be seen from their change of attitudes towards English reading and their report of positive influences on other skills in English learning.