The application of systemic functional linguistics to teaching individual brief narrative speaking to junior secondary students = 系統功能語言學在初中記事短講敎學的應用

Abstract

Many educators have commented that 'reading', 'writing', 'listening' and 'speaking' (i.e. oral) are the four core elements in teaching Chinese language. For 'speaking', it includes both 'individual speaking' and 'group discussion'. With respect to individual speaking, narrative genre is one of the most common genre that has been being used in our daily life. In this regard, this research intends to explore the possibility and effectiveness on the application of 'systemic functional linguistics' to 'individual brief narrative speaking' for Chinese language to junior secondary students by experiments. The researcher first derived a teaching model based on theories of Systemic Functional Grammar. Then the ability and performance in individual brief narrative speaking of two classes of similar ability, the experimental group and the control group, were benchmarked. The derived teaching model was implemented in the experimental group but not the control group. After the completion of the teaching model, the ability and performance in individual brief narrative speaking of two classes were measured again. Findings show that after the implementation of the ‘Systemic Functional Grammar’ based teaching model, the ability and performance in individual brief narrative speaking of the experimental group have improved. It is hoped that this research could provide a source of reference for future researches in the application of 'systemic functional linguistics' to teaching 'individual speaking' and 'group discussion' in Hong Kong. i