Geoff Williams Professor ACLA
Presentation: Japanese Exchange Students'
Rhetorical Development of English Academic Texts. Abstract of a paper presented to The American Applied Linguistics Association 30th Annual Conference, Washington, April 2008: Basil Bernstein’s Codes Recontextualized |
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Areas of Interest
- educational linguistics
- socio-semantic variation and early literacy development
- functions of grammatical description in literacy learning
- poetics of children's literature
Research Activities
- children learning orientations to discourse structure through everyday talk
- functional grammatics for literacy learning
- social semiotic analysis of children's picture books
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.
A second new phase, in collaboration with Rob Munro (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) is exploring the statistical modelling of language features crucially implicated in semantic variation through machine learning.
Recently Published Work
Williams G. Guest Editor. in press. 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 June 2008
