Areas of Interest

• educational linguistics
• socio-semantic variation and early literacy development
• functions of grammatical description in literacy learning
• poetics of children's literature
• child language development

Research Activities

• children learning orientations to discourse structure through everyday talk
• functional grammatics for literacy learning
• social semiotic analysis of children's picture books
• protolinguistic development

Protolinguistic development of very young children
A study of a child's early attempts to mean through 'language', examining Halliday's theoretical suggestions in Learning how to mean (Edward Arnold, 1975). Of particular interest is the suggestion of an 'interpersonal first' principle in very early language development.

Children’s development of knowledge about language
This series of projects is investigating children's ability to learn elements of systemic functional grammar and to use this knowledge in literacy work. The project began in 1994 with a group of eleven-year-olds, then extended to work with six-year-olds and older children. Reports of some outcomes of this research appear in the references below.

The poetics of children's picture books
Using a social semiotic perspective for the analysis of images and language (eg Kress and van Leeuwen 1996; Halliday 1978, 1994) this study is examining how the ‘design’ of picture books contributes to children's literacy development. One key issue is how this ‘design’ contributes to children's understanding of point-of-view, narrative time and ‘voice’.

Socio-semantic variation and literacy development
This is an on-going project in several phases, involving both practical work on difficulties some children experience when beginning school literacy work and theoretical work on semantic variation (e.g., Hasan, 1996). The first phase examined various orientations to literacy developed through caregivers' talk with four-year-old children during joint book-reading, and relations between these language variants and the variant typically used by teachers in the first months of children's formal schooling. The semantic variants were found to be systematically related to family social positioning, and therefore likely to be significant for children's initial literacy development.

One new phase is exploring how caregivers construct initial orientations to ‘commonsense’ and ‘disciplinary’ knowledge through talk about children's memory of events during joint book-reading.

Recently Published Work

Williams, G. (2008). Language socialization: A systemic functional perspective. In P. Duff & N. Hornberger (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Language and Education: Vol. 8, Language Socialization (2nd ed., pp. 57-70). New York, NY: Springer Science+Business Media LLC.

Hasan R., C. Cloran, G. Williams and A. Lukin 2007. Semantic networks: the description of linguistic meaning in SFL. In Continuing Discourse on Language A Functional Perspective. Volume 2. Eds. R. Hasan, C. Matthiessen and J. Webster. London: Equinox. pp. 281-310.

Williams G. Guest Editor. 2005. Linguistics and the Human Sciences. Special Issue on Language, Brain, Culture. Issue 2.

Williams G. 2005. Semantic variation. In Continuing Discourse on Language. Volume 1. Eds. J. Webster, C. Matthiessen and R. Hasan. London: Equinox. pp. 457-480.

Williams G. 2005. Grammatics in schools. In Continuing Discourse on Language. Volume 1. Eds. J. Webster, C. Matthiessen and R. Hasan. London: Equinox. pp. 281-310.

Hasan R., Cloran C., Williams G. and Lukin A. 2005. Semantic networks. In Continuing Discourse on Language. Volume 2. Eds. J. Webster, C. Matthiessen and R. Hasan. London: Equinox.

Martin J. and Williams G. 2004. Functional sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society. Eds. U. Ammon, N. Dittmar, K. Mattheier and P. Trudgill. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ms. 30pp.

Williams G. and Lukin A. Eds. 2004. The Development of Language: Functional perspectives on species and individuals. London and New York: Continuum. 272pp. (to be published in soft covers, March 2006)

Williams G. 2004. Ontogenesis and grammatics: Functions of metalanguage in pedagogical discourse. In The Development of Language: Functional perspectives on species and individuals. Eds. G. Williams and A. Lukin. London and New York: Continuum. pp. 241-267.

Lukin A. and Williams G. 2004. Emergent language. In The Development of Language: Functional perspectives on species and individuals. Eds. G. Williams and A. Lukin. London and New York: Continuum. pp. 1-14.

Williams G. 2001. Literacy pedagogy prior to schooling: Relations between social positioning and semantic variation. In Towards a Sociology of Pedagogy: The contribution of Basil Bernstein to research. Eds. A. Morais, I. Neves, B. Davies and H. Baillie. New York and Oxford: Peter Lang. pp. 17-45.

Updated March 2009