Editorial.

Exley, Beryl

As Halliday (2004, p. 329) poignantly reminds us, 'language is the essential condition of knowing, the process by which experience becomes knowledge' (emphasis in original). In the same way that the pursuit of knowledge is a lifetime undertaking, by default, so too is the pursuit of language. However, it's not just because of the knowledge/language dialectic that 'learning how to mean' (1) is a never ending story. Language is in and of itself equally responsible. The modes of language are expansive; language is not limited to simply spoken and printed words, but inclusive of visual, sound, spatial and gestural texts and their multiple and ever-expanding forms. Language is also alive; it is a social system, formed by and through ever-evolving contexts of culture and social situations.

It thus stands to reason that language in its broadest form consumes the work of teachers whose aim is the pursuit of knowledge production. The six papers that form this special edition of the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy come together because of their interest in language and its implication for our work as teachers. All papers were refereed presentations from the Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association (ASFLA) Annual Conference, held in conjunction with ALEA Queensland and the English Teachers Association of Queensland (ETAQ) at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane during September, 2009. I would like to offer my sincere thanks to my co-convenor, Garry Collins (ETAQ President), and the conference planning committee comprised of Kay Bishop, Kev Bishop, Michele Endicott, Dr Lenore Ferguson and Lindsay Williams. Special thanks to Allan Henderson and Margaret Burrowes for administrative support. It was indeed a stellar event (http://www.meanjin.edu.au/past_events/2009_past_events. htm#asfla_conf).

The first four papers all foreground the role and function of grammar and its relationship with multimodal text. The first paper, written by Mary Macken-Horarik, Kristina Love and Len Unsworth, considers the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) Australian Curriculum for English. The authors suggest the multiple and often conflated definitions of grammar, 'the language we use and the description of language as a system' (Commonwealth of Australia, 2009, p. 5), can be resolved by adopting Halliday's (2002) nomenclature for the latter: grammatics. They then explore the constitution of a 'good enough grammatics' so teachers and students can share understandings of how meaning is made and remade through effective choices, particularly in relation to multimodal texts. The second paper, written by Kathy Mills, offers one answer to this question. She draws on empirical work with a middle primary class to provide a rich description of the design conventions in a claymation movie project. The third paper focuses on one case study lesson on 'nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs' with a Year 3 class. The authors of the paper, Pauline Jones, Lisa Kervin and Sophie McIntosh, examine the affordances of technology, in this case, an interactive whiteboard (IWB) in the prelude and consolidation phases of a lesson vis-a-vis floor work in the expose phase. Whilst the IWB increased interactivity, it also disrupted the learning outcomes and pacing of the lesson to the point that the expose and consolidation phases of the lesson were cut short. Thus, the IWB influenced notions of literate practices in this grammar lesson. Ann Daly and Len Unsworth write about image/text relations in multimodal texts. They sharpen their analytic lens onto the 2005 and 2007 Basic Skills Test (BST), the precursor to NAPLAN in the state of New South Wales. Drawing on analytic categories developed from the work of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1994/2004) and visual grammar (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996), they concluded that images and written language can be either concurrent or complementary. The elected form affects ease or otherwise of text comprehension. The implication is that young students need to be guided through the complexities of this integrated semiotic; the assumption that the addition of visuals makes written text easier to comprehend is assuming too much.

The final two papers are both interested in the pedagogical enactment for teaching about language. David Rose's paper introduces the concept of a pedagogic genre and reiterates the importance of teachers having at the ready a detailed knowledge of the language demands of their disciplinary area and the learning and assessment tasks. The paper offers a systematic account of the Reading to Learn program, a third generation genre based literacy pedagogy (Martin & Rose, 2005) that has achieved substantial success with improving students' learning outcomes in a range of curriculum areas. In the final paper of this edition, Sally Humphrey and Lucy Macnaught detail the outcomes of a teaching and learning cycle that leads tertiary students through exploring the significant textual features of genre, teachers and students jointly constructing a text, and then students independently constructing their own texts. Rather than treating all of the pedagogical phases as linear, they document the effects of interspersing the aforementioned phases with a well developed grammatical metalanguage focused on why certain representations are more valued than others, field building and context setting. In doing so, they mount an eloquent and convincing argument of the purposes and procedures for scaffolding adult learners towards a control of the form and function of tertiary level texts.

Enjoy developing your professional knowledge about language!

References

Commonwealth of Australia, (2009). The shape of the Australian curriculum (National Curriculum Board), ACT, Australia.

Halliday, M.A.K. (2004). The Language of Early Childhood. London: Continuum.

Halliday, M.A.K. (1994/2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar (3rd ed.), revised by Christian Matthiessen. London: Arnold.

Halliday, M.A.K. (2002). On grammar and grammatics. In J. Webster (ed.) The Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday Vol. 3 (pp. 384-417). London: Continuum.

Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading Images: The grammar of visual design. London: Routledge.

Martin, J.R. & Rose, D. (2005). Designing literacy pedagogy: scaffolding asymmetries, In R. Hasan, C.M.I.M. Matthiessen and J. Webster (eds.) Continuing Discourse on Language (pp. 251-280). London: Equinox.

Guest Editor: Beryl Exley

Queensland University of Technology

(1) Taken from M.A.K. Halliday, (1975) Learning how to mean. In E. Lenneberg & L. Lenneberg (eds). Foundations of Language Development: A multidisciplinar}) perspective. USA: Academic Press. pp. 239-265.