Abstract
Over the past decade, systemic functional linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) has been cooperating to offer insight into education, especially knowledge building. In the special issue of Linguistics and Education in 2013, Karl Maton highlights the significance of semantic waves in knowledge building. These semantic waves involve recurrent movements in the semantic gravity and semantic density. Based on this theory, considering the technicality and abstractness of high stake reading and writing expected from students, the functional linguist J. R. Martin put forward the practical concepts of power trio, including power words, power grammar and power composition as tools for teachers to use for purposes of knowledge building from the perspective of lexicon, clause and discourse. In this paper, specific attention is first paid to introduce the development of LCT to power trio. Finally, the paper will move on to raise important issues regarding the problems lies in the theories.
Highlights
Everyone in education shares a desire for cumulative knowledge building
Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) is being increasingly used alongside concepts from across the framework of SFL
This paper began by introducing the concept of LCT, especially the dimension of semantics, namely semantic waves, realized by semantic density and semantic gravity
Summary
Everyone in education shares a desire for cumulative knowledge building. It can enable students to build on previous understandings and transfer what they learn into future contexts. The two obstacles to enable knowledge building are knowledge blindness and segmental theorizing [1]. Biglan [3], Bloom [4], Schulman [5], and Kolb [6] offered typologies in categorizing knowledge Bernstein’s model has inspired a renewed focus in sociology and linguistics on knowledge practices [8] [9] [10]. To explore how to build cumulative knowledge learning, principally based on the foundational framework of Bernstein’s knowledge structure, Maton [1] proposed the notion of LCT. There are five dimensions of LCT, namely autonomy, density, specialization, temporality, and semantics, among which, semantics are the most correlated with linguistics, especially SFL
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