A great deal of the work in SFL can be traced to Halliday’s Language as Social Semiotic, in which Halliday describes how “the network of meanings” that constitute any culture, what he calls the “social semiotic,” is to a large extent encoded in and maintained by its discourse-semantic system, which represents a culture’s “meaning potential” (100, 13). This is why, as Halliday argues, language is a form of socialization, playing a role in how individuals become socialized and perform meaningful actions within what he calls “contexts of situation.”
Halliday explains that contexts of situation are not isolated and unique, but often reoccur as “situation types,” a set of typified semiotic and semantic relations that make up “a scenario . . . of persons and actions and events from which the things which are said derive their meaning” (28-30). Examples of situation types include “players instructing novice in a game,” “mother reading bedtime story to a child,” “customers ordering goods over the phone” (29). Because contexts of situation reoccur as situation types, those who participate in these situation types develop typified ways of linguistically interacting within them. As these situation types become conventionalized over time, they begin to “specify the semantic configurations that the speaker will typically fashion” (110).
Halliday refers to this “clustering of semantic features according to situation types” as register (68). By linking a situation type with particular semantic and lexico-grammatic patterns, register describes what actually takes place (the “field”), how participants relate to one another (the “tenor”), and what role language is playing (the “mode”). For example, the “field” of discourse represents the system of activity within a particular setting, including the participants, practices, and circumstances involved. The “tenor” of discourse represents the social relations between the participants—their interactions—within the discourse. And the “mode” of discourse represents the channel or wavelength of communication (face-to-face, via e-mail, telephone, and so on) used by the participants to perform their actions and relations (Halliday 33). When linguists identify a “scientific register,” then, they not only describe a style of language but also the practices, interactional patterns, and means of communication associated with scientific contexts.
What happens at the level of context of situation in terms of field, tenor, and mode corresponds to what happens at the linguistic level in terms of what Halliday refers to as the three language “metafunctions”: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. “Ideational” refers to the linguistic representation of action (who is doing what, to whom, when, and where). As such, the ideational metafunction corresponds with field. “Interpersonal” describes interactions between participants (such as asking questions, making statements, or giving commands) at the linguistic level. The interpersonal corresponds with tenor. “Textual” describes the flow of information within and between texts, including how texts are organized, what is made explicit and what is assumed as background knowledge, how the known and the new are related, and how coherence and cohesion are achieved. The textual metafunction thus corresponds to mode. At the level of register, then, context of situation and language realize one another as follows (informed by Martin, “Analysing” 34-40):
In connecting situation types and semantic/lexico-grammatic patterns, Halliday’s work has served as a foundation for Systemic Functional (what is commonly known as “Sydney School”) approaches to genre and their focus on helping students “learn to exercise the appropriate linguistic choices relevant to the needs, functions or meanings at any time” (Christie, “Genres as Choice” 24).5 Led by the work of J.R. Martin and supported by scholarship in the field of education linguistics in Australia, Systemic Functional approaches to genre arose in part in response to concerns over the efficacy of student-centered, process-based literacy teaching, with its emphasis on “learning through doing.” Such an approach, its critics argued, ignores the contexts in which texts are acquired and function, in ways that naturalize and privatize what is actually a social process of literacy acquisition. As such, process approaches deprive students of access to the systemic, patterned textual choices that function within different contexts of situation. Far from empowering students via a student-centered approach that encourages student expression and discovery, process approaches instead reproduce social inequality by denying traditionally marginalized students access to academic and cultural texts. As Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis explain, process-based approaches are actually “culture bound;” with their focus on student agency and ownership, the power of voice and expression, student control and motivation, such approaches reflect and privilege the “cultural aspirations of middle-class children from child-centered households” (6). By the same token, “its pedagogy of immersion ‘naturally’ favours students whose voice is closest to the literate culture of power in industrial society” (6). In short, by keeping textual structures and their social functions hidden, process approaches exclude even further those students whose cultural and linguistic backgrounds leave them on the margins of the dominant culture. An explicit focus on genre in literacy teaching, its proponents argue, helps counter such imbalance by revealing the relationship between text structures and social purposes in ways that enable all students to produce texts more effectively and critically.
Beginning in the early 1980s with research that examined children’s writing in Australian elementary and secondary school classrooms, and extended in the early 1990s through research related to the New South Wales Department of Education’s Disadvantaged Schools Program, SFL approaches to genre have been influenced most widely by the work of J.R. Martin, who has helped define genres as “staged, goal-oriented social processes through which social subjects in a given culture live their lives” (“Analysing” 43). As further explained in Martin, Christie, and Rothery, genres function as social processes “because members of a culture interact with each other to achieve them; as goal-oriented because they have evolved to get things done; and as staged because it usually takes more than one step for participants to achieve their goals” (59).
Martin builds on Halliday’s work by locating genre in relation to register so that genre and register relate to and realize one another in important ways. According to Martin, while register functions on the level of context of situation, genre functions on the level of context of culture. The relationship can be diagrammed as follows:
In such a model, genre connects culture to situation, and register connects situation to language, or, as Martin puts it, “register (encompassing field, tenor and mode) contextualizes language and is in turn contextualized by genre” (“Analysing” 37).
Martin’s formulation enriches our understanding of genre by showing how social purposes/motives are linked to text structures, and how these are realized as situated social and linguistic actions within register. Indeed, this has been the most common trajectory in SFL genre analysis: Moving from the identification of social purpose as represented in generic structural elements (involving the analysis of what Hasan calls “generic structure potential”—the range of staging possibilities within a particular genre) (Eggins and Martin 240);6 to the analysis of a text’s register as represented in field, tenor, and mode; to language metafunctions; to more micro analyses of semantic, lexico-grammatic, and phonological/graphological features.
Within Australian genre pedagogy, Martin’s view of genre has been used as part of the influential LERN (Literacy and Education Research Network) project. The project set out to identify what genres were the most important within school literacy (and has since been expanded to include adult migrant ESL settings and workplace settings), and to develop pedagogy to teach those genres most critically and effectively (Cope and Kalantzis 9). That pedagogy