Scaffolding L2 writers’ metacognitive awareness of voice in article reviews: A case study of SFL-based pedagogy

Abstract

Halliday’s threefold perspective “learning language, learning through language, learning about language” (Halliday, 1993, p. 113) has shed light on the ways language learners learn to mean in contexts of use. Grounded in Halliday’s language-based theory of learning, this study explores how Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) metalanguage can scaffold language choices in the EAP writing classroom and help L2 writers learn how to mean in article reviews. This case study translates Halliday’s (1978) SFL and its recent development of the Engagement framework (Martin & White, 2005) into a pedagogical instrument, exploring how the framework can serve as a heuristic to scaffold L2 writers’ awareness of voice. The findings show that the Engagement constructs focused students’ attention on key voice resources and the rhetorical goals they enabled, providing a heuristic that students could use in their writing. Their varied uptake of Engagement metalanguage and the differential repertoires displayed in their writing reflected different metacognitive developments. Findings from this study can provide EAP instructors with immediately useful metalanguage for discussing voice with their students in more accessible ways, in their efforts to help students gain greater discoursal control of voice as their students manage to accomplish key rhetorical goals in article reviews.