Dr. William Feng Dezheng
Department of English
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Designing Overt Instruction in Teaching English Language Arts: A Socio-functional Model
Abstract: The Hong Kong English Language Curriculum Guide (CDC, 2007) explicitly encourages the use of language arts (e.g. poems, dramas, short stories, comics, movies) in English language teaching at primary and secondary levels. A salient feature of the language arts materials used in class is that they are increasingly multimodal, combining visual, audio, as well as linguistic modes to convey meaning in much richer ways than traditional textbooks. Challenges and opportunities brought by multimedia are being investigated under the term “multiliteracies pedagogy” in education (e.g. New London Group, 1996; Cope and Kalantzis, 2000; Lankshear and Knobel, 2011; Mills, 2011). This pedagogy contains four inter-related components: situated practice, which involves building on the life-world experiences of students and situating language learning in real-world contexts; overt instruction which guides students to use an explicit metalanguage of design; critical framing, which encourages students to interpret the social context and purpose of designs of meaning; transformed practice, which occurs when students transform existing meanings to design new meanings (Mills, 2011; New London Group, 1996).
Among the four components, overt instruction is the most complex and the “metalanguage” of design needs to be further explicated. In this talk, I’ll propose a theoretical framework of overt instruction drawing upon the notions of socio-functional linguistics (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2013; Martin and Rose, 2008). This metalanguage incorporates two components: “what” to teach, which draws upon the notion of semiotic strata to map out the aspects of language teaching, and “how” to teach, which draws upon the interpersonal semantics to explicate the scaffolding process. Theoretically, this research demonstrates the “appliablility” of socio-functional linguistics on the one hand and enriches the theory of multiliteracies by explicating the realization of overt instruction on the other. Practically, it provides a systematic metalanguage for the design of explicit instruction in language teaching, especially in teaching multimedia language arts, which has been used in teacher education in Hong Kong and mainland China.
About the Speaker: Dr. William Feng Dezheng is Research Assistant Professor at Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His main research interest include multimodal discourse analysis, systemic functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics, language education, etc. He has published over twenty articles in international journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Visual Communication, Semiotica, Linguistics and Education, Narrative Inquiry, and Review of Cognitive Linguistics, and Chinese journals such as 《外国语》，《当代语言学》，《现代外语》，《外语界》，《外语学刊》，《外语研究》. He is currently Principle Investigator or Co-Investigator of several projects, ranging from national, provincial and university levels, with the main focus on the multimodal construction of information/knowledge in public media (e.g. Public service advertising and news) and English language education (e.g. Textbooks and classroom teaching).