Abstract
This thesis presents the first extensive study carried out in the Welsh education policy context to adopt a Hallidayan „functional‟ approach to identifying curriculum language demands and planning English as an additional language development within the National Curriculum (NC) in Wales at Key Stage 3 (KS3).The study is located within the field of English as an Additional Language (EAL), specifically within the sub-field which examines the relationship between „language and content‟. The thesis characterises the language demands of the KS3 curriculum by working from an overview of subject disciplines and discourses, through individual curriculum goals, to language models suitable for supporting EAL pupils in the classroom. The main argument of the thesis proposes that teachers use the contextual information available to them in advance of a subject lesson to construct integrated language and learning goals and to identify suitable models of language which may be used in activities directed at achieving the curriculum goals. The study draws upon several insights into the nature of the English language from Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory. These insights explain how the constraints of context act to narrow the options in language choice and how inherent variability in the language system allows for differentiation of language models to express similar meanings. Throughout the thesis, points are illustrated by examples and findings from a computer-assisted textual analysis of the text of the statutory KS3 National Curriculum orders for Wales (2000) carried out to inform the study about the roles and purposes of language use in the service of teaching, learning and assessment goals. The thesis concludes that to assist teachers in making more appropriate choices about which language models to use, a substantial corpus of texts, written to fulfil curriculum purposes, should be analysed for typical structures, collocations and patterns.
| Date of Award | 26 Oct 2010 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Robert Morris Jones (Supervisor) & Peter Sydney Neil (Supervisor) |