Abstract
Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) theory focuses on developing language learners’ meta-linguistic understanding of the interrelation among linguistic form (grammar/vocabulary), meaning, and context. Guided by SFL when using a mandatory textbook and open educational resources, this study investigates how exposure to this blended teaching and learning context may impact English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners’ adjustment to materials used in their learning, as well as their learning practices. By drawing on the written documents of four students written, and on interviews conducted with these students over an academic semester in an EFL writing course, this qualitative study, through content analysis and discourse analysis, shows that the SFL theory-based material adoption did a good job of supporting EFL students in their internalization of language knowledge from both open educational resources and traditional textbooks, while also enabling students to use materials flexibly instead of passively following along with the content in the mandatory textbook. The flexibility of the students participating in the study was particularly reflected by their ability to construct principled knowledge informed by SFL and to independently apply such knowledge to effectively navigate literacy practices (e.g., critical construction and deconstruction of discourses).
Highlights
In many language classrooms, student learning is primarily reliant on the way in which the teacher delivers textbooki content (Tomlinson, 2003)
The finding echoes the call from researchers that classroom learning can be diversified and enhanced in terms of learning resources so as to prepare students for meeting the challenges of international English language communities (e.g., Blyth, 2014). Another finding of this study shows that, when guided by Systemic functional linguistics (SFL), the mixture of open-educational resources (OER) and the mandatory textbook seems to effectively transform students into learners who have effective meta-linguistic knowledge of language and who are able to regulate their own language learning, positioning themselves as linguistically and culturally sensitive language users
Despite the innate constraints of case studies in making generalizations (Yin, 2013), the case study on an SFL-based blended learning context has yielded two important findings
Summary
Student learning is primarily reliant on the way in which the teacher delivers textbooki content (Tomlinson, 2003). In the current, globalized English context, to effectively participate in diverse communicative contexts EFL learners are expected to have knowledge of English that is sophisticated enough to assist them in constructing and/or deconstructing diverse modes of discourses in multiple dimensions: grammar and vocabulary, and how grammar and vocabulary are used to realize the meaningful content of discourses (Macken-Horarik, 2012; Paltridge, 2001; Yasuda, 2015) This means that textbooks used in the classroom should deliver effective information that can help students understand how to create and unpack content. As Donato and McCormic (1994) claim, the value of materials is dependent on how a teacher mediates those materials; without this mediation, the content of materials will always be statically embedded
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