My interest in SFL

I'm reading a new very interesting collection of articles on Systemic Functional Linguistics (Continuing Discourse on Language, vol 2) and it has made me think about: what exactly is my relation to SFL?

[My goodness it was interesting trying to punctuate the end of that sentence: italise 'is' or place it as the last word - 'what exactly my relation to SFL is'; colon or no colon].

I think of it like this: my interest is in plundering SFL to find things that can be re-purposed as guides for writing and reading in educational contexts. Thus I am not interested in describing as such, but in prescribing. My frame is a practical context, not theoretical. So I am not interested in exhaustive description of language or texts, nor in trying to define descriptive terms so that they form a coherent theoretical or analytical fabric for describing or explaining any and all text.

I think of Wittgenstein's insistence that we are not paralysed in belief or action simply because we have not or until we have grounded ourselves in a legitimating foundation. (fix this - see On Certainty). Similarly, our students are already 'in language'. They are not starting from scratch or ground zero. They are already highly skilled in language and understandings. What they need is their understanding, attunement, to the context - call it exigencies - tweaked. And fluency in some new text patterns needed to respond to these demands of the situation. In contemporary education this largely means understanding the task and being able to perform it. It is more like a sports coach intervening by saying 'Put more pressure on your left foot as you step off'. Or some such. That is, they bring to consciousness, focus attention on, one small aspect of the total performance as a point of leverage for rebalancing or re-something the whole performance. They (coaches) are not giving their charges a theoretical account, nor pointing to a cause underpinning the entire event, but rather getting the performer to use their body slightly differently by getting them to attend to one aspect of the performance, not some other. and the assumption is that this conscious attention will gradually fade away but in the meantime a new alignment of movements will have been established.

So, as coaches, Language and learning support is a matter of fine tuning, re-aligning, bringing something to consciousness, steering, guiding. In short, shaping. (I should look at Alexander and Dewey on all this. And guy on phil as therapy, aesthetics, body -???). Shaping, not teaching from scratch where all students follow a set of procedures for instrumentally producing an object. Different students need different treatment.

For future: This raises the question about the balance between discussing the content and discussion of the language.