Abstract
In a complex communicational environment and at the dawn of an Australian curriculum, teachers need new kinds of knowledge about language (KAL). Our paper investigates the character of a ‘good enough’ KAL through ‘grammatics’—a metalanguage based on careful study of grammar—a way of thinking with grammar in mind. It identifies four challenges facing any grammatics that is going to be adequate to the discipline: (1) Building a coherent account of KAL for contemporary English; (2) Fashioning a rhetorical grammatics for improving students’ compositions; (3) Improving continuity and cumulative learning through the years of schooling; and (4) Developing a grammatics adequate to multimodal communication. Our paper draws on the resources of systemic functional grammatics to explore these challenges and considers the implications for teachers and students.
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Macken-Horarik, M., Love, K. & Unsworth, L. A grammatics ‘good enough’ for school English in the 21st century: Four challenges in realising the potential. AJLL 34, 9–23 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03651843
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03651843