Teaching and learning interpersonal meanings in EFL in the school years

Abstract

Literacy development in English as a foreign language (EFL) involves teaching and learning meanings that are experiential, interpersonal and textual in nature yet curriculum guidelines and course-books foreground experiential ones over the other two. The interpersonal meanings most visibly taught are concerned with the semantics of speech functions and modality. Those related to the vast area of attitude, intensification and dialogism are less frequently explicitly taught even when they are clearly part of the semantics implicated in the course contents and part of teachers' expectations when they evaluate students’ production. All these interpersonal meanings are theorized as discourse-semantic resources in negotiation and appraisal, within Systemic-Functional Linguistics, seminally by Macken-Horarik & Martin (2003); Martin & White (2005); Hood & Martin (2007) and Martin & Rose (2007). This article traces the developmental pathway (Christie, 2012; Christie & Derewianka, 2008) of interpersonal meanings explicitly or implicitly part of the contents of three course-books widely used for teenagers at a pre-intermediate level of public instruction in Argentina. The attitudinal meanings, types of attitude, strategies to express, intensify or mitigate them and the resources to construe a textual voice are identified, analyzed and sequenced. The results strongly reveal that vast areas of interpersonal semantics are not included explicitly as course contents, and if they are, it is not always with a functional and contextual approach. These observations point to the need to develop complementary teaching materials that visibly teach these meanings, a critical step to prepare students for the increasingly complex range of interpersonal meanings students are expected to produce in their years of schooling.