The Thought Occurs

Tuesday 4 May 2021

Buyer Beware!


Teaching Science has been published.

Edited by Karl Maton, J. R. Martin and Y. J. Doran, this collection includes cutting-edge new ideas from SFL and LCT. That claim is made often about books, but it is true here. Papers in this collection are going to fundamentally shape SFL and LCT.

Chapters will advance the modelling of meaning-making in SFL into new areas and kickstart new forms of research into science discourse, including new ways of understanding field, ideational discourse semantics, and multimodal analysis.

Two chapters outline and illustrate concepts from the new LCT dimension of Autonomy to explain integrating mathematics into science and using animations in science teaching, and the method of constellation analysis is unleashed to show how relations among ideas in explanations can shape how they are taught.

And there’s a lot more!



Blogger Comments:

Scholars who are new to SFL Theory should be warned that the SFL papers in this new publication are written only by Jim Martin and his former students.

Evidence of Jim Martin's serious misunderstandings of SFL Theory is available here (English Text 1992), here (Working With Discourse 2007) and here (email list discussions).

A clear hint of the misunderstandings within the publication is provided by the title itself, which distinguishes knowledge from language. SFL Theory models knowledge as meaning, and language as the quintessential system-&-process of meaning.

The only way to get a solid grounding in Halliday's theory is to read Halliday (± Matthiessen).