出版物 |Sophia Linguistica

Analysis of High School Students’ Compositions from the Perspective of the Hallidayan Approach

AUTHOR

Takako Sugawara

ABSTRACTS

Some high school teachers say that one of the most efficient ways to learn English as a foreign language is to learn English grammar. However, it has been a long time since people have pointed out that there are not very many Japanese EFL high school students who are reasonably skilled at spoken or written English even though they spend an enormous amount of time studying English. The aim of the study reported here was to investigate a possible way to implement Halliday’s systemic functional grammar in the Japanese EFL high school setting as an attempt to address this situation by making use of the SFL framework to consider grammar from different perspectives. The research was carried out with thirty-five students in a private high school, whose compositions were analyzed at the ideational level of the lexicogrammar proposed by Halliday. Verbs were especially focused on and categorized into the six types of processes in Halliday’s grammar. The results showed that the implementation of the systemic functional approach helped the teacher as well as the students:1) the teacher could utilize the analysis of the students’ compositions to search for what area of language features the students really lacked and what remedies they needed for their future study, and 2) the students could raise their awareness of various types of verbs and became more conscious about the relationships between subjects, diverse types of verbs and circumstances in their sentences.