On Describing Contexts of Situation

Abstract

My general purpose in linguistics is to provide information which I hope will be helpful to teachers of English. Schoolteachers I have worked with have said that they see themselves as (a) extending the range of choices open to their students and (b) helping the students to make the choices appropriately. I have written elsewhere (Berry, 20 3a, b) about the importance of the SFL notion of ‘choice’ for work with teachers. The present chapter is relevant to (b). ‘Appropriately’ presumably means appropriately in relation to context. I hope to work towards an answer to the question: what contextual features do adult native speakers and writers respond to when they speak and write appropriately? These would seem to be the contextual features that it would be most worth teachers alerting their students to, so that the students might speak and write appropriately also.

I am grateful to the following for discussing with me points relevant to this chapter: Hilary Hillier, Geoff Thompson, Tom Bartlett, Chris Butler, Ruqaiya Hasan, Sarah Mukherjee and Jeff Wilkinson; also to the editors of this volume, and to the organizers and members of the audience of the European Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference and Workshop, Coventry, July 2013, where an early version of this chapter was presented. Of course I alone am responsible for any errors or misrepresentations.