SFL praxis in U.S. teacher education: a critical literature review

Abstract

This literature review analyzes the influences of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) in U.S. teacher education from 2000 to 2019. First, we describe how SFL has been contextualized in United States in response to changing demographics, new technologies, policies, and the impacts of globalization. Second, we outline our methodology, which yielded 136 publications from the fields of literacy research, teacher education, and applied linguistics. Third, we present four findings: (1) the main vehicles for introducing U.S. teachers to SFL theory and practice are grant-funded university-school partnerships, courses in colleges of education, and self-contained professional development workshops; (2) most interventions focused on introducing teachers to functional metalanguage and text analysis, with fewer focusing on multimodality; (3) SFL interventions positively influenced teachers’ level of semiotic awareness and ability to design focused disciplinary literacy instruction. Teachers’ critical awareness and confidence for literacy instruction were influenced to a lesser extent; and (4) more sustained investments in teacher professional development led to greater gains in teacher learning as well as a critical awareness of the relationship between disciplinary literacy practices and ideologies at work in K-12 schools. Based on these findings, we conclude with three recommendations for the future of critical SFL praxis in teacher education.

Keywords:

• Systemic functional linguistics
• teacher professional development
• critical language awareness
• disciplinary literacies
• pedagogical knowledge

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Though beyond the scope of this article, readers interested in how teachers’ implementation of SFL concepts and pedagogies has influenced K-12 student learning can consult de Oliveira and Smith (2019). Gebhard, Accurso, and Chen (2019), or Schwarz and Hamman-Ortiz (2020).

2 This review followed a rigorous and systematic literature review procedure, but it is not exhaustive. Notably missing are professional development programs and university teacher education courses known to the authors of this review, but not well represented in published literature (e.g. Project CREATE at St. Michael’s College; University of Pittsburgh’s Expanding Students’ Language Repertoires). Further, we acknowledge that our inclusion and exclusion criteria may have removed some studies for consideration that present important findings related to this topic of inquiry.

3 Note that absence of a code does not necessarily indicate an affordance was not found; rather, it may not have been part of the investigation.

4 Annabelle Lukin (2019) offers a helpful and thorough treatment of SFL’s theorization of the relationship between language and ideology, which researchers and teacher educators pursuing this line of work might wisely draw on.

5 U.S. researchers and teacher educators pursuing explorations of multimodality might helpfully look to work conducted in public school contexts in Canada (Early, Kendrick, and Potts 2015) and Australia (e.g. Unsworth 2001).