3.1 Participants
The participants of the study were from a convenient sample. They were 30 students from an intact class in the English department of a western Chinese university “Chongqing Technology and Business University”. Informed consent of the students and department deans to participate in this study were also gained. The participants were divided into 6 groups with 5 students in each group to ensure the equal number of group members according to the final examination scores (the accuracy of grammar points and words' spelling, the vocabulary range) of the previous writing course “Basic English Writing I” taught by the researcher of this study as well. All of the participants were divided into three levels (12 participants above 85 scores were classified as high-level, 12 participants below 70 were classified as low-level, the other 6 participants were classified as middle-level) and then they were assigned into 6 groups, with 2 high-level participants, 2 middle-level participants and one low-level participant in each group. The first author is teacher participant of the study, who is also the data collector and the implementer of the teaching instruction of the present study.. The course for the teaching instruction was Basic English Writing II. According to the department curriculum, these English majors had to take English writing course for four semesters in their university study (Basic English Writing I, Basic English Writing II, Advanced English Writing, Academic English Writing respectively from the first to fourth academic year). The writing course for the experimental teaching instruction was at the first semester in their second academic year. There were two reasons for choosing the course of Basic English Writing II. One was that in the second year of university study, the number of students was stable. The other was that after the first year’s study, especially the study of previous semester’s writing course of Basic English Writing I, the participants solved language problems in English writing such as vocabulary, syntax and other grammar use. Thus, they would be able to practice their genre writing ability in the following semester, which was also the main teaching objective for the experimental semester’s writing course.
3.2. Intervention design
The study is to explore students’ persuasive writing performance after a semester’s SFL-based genre instruction. The intervention is taking the commonly used genre teaching model of teaching/learning cycle. Since the proposal of teaching/learning cycle by the Sydney school, it has many variations based on the contexts and has gone through adaptations by researchers for different research purposes. For example, the three-stage model modelling, joint negotiation and independent construction proposed by Callaghan and Rothery (1988), the four-stage model of context exploration, text exploration, joint construction and individual application proposed by Derewianka (1990) and Butt et al (2001), and the five-stage model of Sharpe and Thompson (1998) and Derewianka and Jones (2016). The difference between the previous four-stage model and this five-stage model of Sharp and Thompson (1998) is that the first stage of the four-stage model “Context Exploration” is subdivided into two steps: preparing the context and developing the context. Another difference is that the joint construction stage is replaced by the term “teacher-led” construction, but the contents of these two terms are actually the same. recently, Derewianka and Jones (2016) developed another five-stage model by adding the stage of supported reading to help students consolidate the genre features and replacing different terms to summarize the learning activities in each stage. However, as stated in the literature review section, whatever the modification, the core concepts of explicit instruction, scaffolding, and collaborative writing don’t change. By incorporating into the above-mentioned models and the three core concepts of genre-based teaching\cycle model, the present study adapted the teaching/learning cycle into a four-stage model by linking the teaching context and adopting the new terms. To be specific, the language and structural features in different types of texts are explored in the stage of context exploration and then presented to students explicitly in the text construction stage. Then teachers take the role to “scaffold” the learners to move from their current level toward the potential level of performance in the stage of guided practice and teacher-led construction. Finally, by interacting and joint collaborating with more experienced peers, students consolidate their learning in the Independent Group Construction stage. In each stage, various language activities and steps are designed for classroom teachers to follow. The present study referred to the steps put forward by Paltridge (2018) to help the writing teachers to focus on discourse and genre.
The details of the cycle are diagrammed in the following Fig. 1.
There were 28 hours covering 14 weeks (two hours for each week) in the experimental semester. First, in order to help the participants to have a clear understanding of the technical terms, two lectures on the Systemic Functional Linguistics and the lexical-grammatical features of persuasion were given to students in the first two weeks before the intervention. The introduction to Halliday’s Functional Grammar focused on the three meta-functions of language to help students get to know some basic concepts of functional grammar and its significance for language learning in the first week.
Then the introduction of the genre of persuasion from the perspective of functional grammar was given to students in the second week. To be specific, the introduction included the following four aspects:
⬤ Brief introduction of persuasion: its social purpose and the relationship with argumentation and exposition.
⬤ Persuasion in daily life and study: its importance.
⬤ Generic structure of persuasion: the introduction of generic structure and one example analysis on the generic structure of “Should we pay for plastic bags?” taken from Derewianka and Jones (2016: 236).
⬤ Typical language features of persuasion: listing important features and their respective examples; taking the writing composition of “Should we pay for the plastic bags?” as an example to display the use of these language features.
The teaching/learning cycle instruction was implemented from the third week.For the ground that lexical-grammatical features are different from traditional grammar and vocabulary learning, and it involves knowledge of SFL, the intervention is iterated three times to enhance students’ understanding of the generic structure and lexicogrammatical features of persuasion. In each iteration, the intervention is slightly adapted according to students’ performance. In order to avoid repeated tediousness in writing and reading with one topic, the topic for each iteration changes. But the difficulty level did not change. All of these three writing topics were from the College English Test (CET) Band 4. The related reading materials and model writings were all from college English teaching textbook “New Horizon English II” and CET 4 reading tests. The topic difference would not exert influence on the generic structure and the lexicogrammatical features because they themselves are a set of languages for learners to choose and the structure pattern is the same for groups of writing types with the same social purpose. Therefore, the topic difference in this study was not considered to make a difference for students’ writing performance. In addition, in order to help the participants have a clear understanding of the technical terms, two lectures on the Systemic Functional Linguistics and the lexical-grammatical features of persuasion were given to students before the intervention.
The specific intervention sequence is diagrammed in the following Fig. 2.
3.4 Data analysis
The present study adopts a qualitative research design and one of the most popular qualitative analysis techniques “discourse analysis” is applied to deal with all the writing data. The research design is diagrammed in the following Fig. 3.
The data analysis method applied in this study is discourse analysis, which focuses on two purposes: to investigate the functions of language and how meaning is constructed in persuasion. To be specific, the discourse analysis instrument applied in the study is a designed textual feature checklist for persuasion, which was used to analyze all the group writings after each iteration of curriculum cycle.
The checklist in the study includes these two parts: one is the generic structure.The generic structure of persuasion is mainly based on its social purpose. As one important type of exposition, the purpose of persuasion is to persuade a reader or listener by presenting one side of an argument. To be specific, by taking a point of view and justifying it, the genre of persuasion aims to convince readers to see only that side of an issue. Researchers in this field explored the generic pattern for the genre of persuasion. Among them, the structure of exposition (persuasion is one of the two types of exposition) summarized and put forward by Foley (2012: 151) realized the social purpose of persuasion in an effective way as shown in the following Fig. 4. .
From the figure, there are three parts in a typical persuasion: statement of position, argument and reinforcement of position. Through these three steps, it can satisfy the social purpose of persuasion well. In each part, there are some specific steps to follow. Based on Foley (2012) and the Chinese English teaching contexts, the study proposed that for persuasive writings, the following elements are important constituents: part one containing providing background information for the topic/issue, stating the controversial problem, taking a position clearly, and previewing the arguments to state the position, part two containing presenting argument points and the corresponding elaborations for each argument to argue, and part three containing restating the position and reviewing the arguments to restate the position. The particular generic structure pattern adapted in this study was as the follows shown:
Among these elements, some are optional and some are essential. A good persuasion does not have to include all these elements, but it has to include all the essential ones such as taking a position, presenting arguments and elaborations, and restating the position.
The other part of the checklist is lexicogrammatical features: they are a set of language choices to express language functions. According to Halliday (1985b), there are three broad categories of language functions: ideational, interpersonal and textual. The genre of persuasion has its typical lexicogrammatical features to express these three metafunctions. In this study, a set of lexicogrammatical features are selected to conduct the discourse analysis. The selection principles are based on three aspects: (1) The features of the English language itself and the three meta-functions of SFL (Halliday, 2014). (2) The language proficiency of the subjects in the study. If the participants have no problems in applying some features, then these features will not be chosen as an indicator in the template to evaluate students’ writings. (3) Based on the language use in authentic contexts, some features are essential for persuasion, then they will be selected to evaluate persuasive writings.
To be particular, the lexical-grammatical features are selected to express each metafunction for the genre of persuasion:
(1) For the ideational function:
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Generalized participants: it can be mainly general person related words or abstract words concerned with the topic or issue.
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A variety of processes: mental, material, verbal and relational processes
(2) For the interpersonal function:
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The appropriate use of modal finite verbs (such as should, can, could, might, would…)
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Six important types of mood adjuncts for persuasion: probability, usuality, obligation, time, degree and intensity.
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Effective comment adjuncts, especially some that can help the writers take a position clearly (such as we think, in our opinion, from my standard point…).
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Referring to or citing reputable sources such as expert comments, research results, and statistics and examples to provide effective evidences for an argument.
(3) For the textual function
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Using conjunctions and text connectives to do with sequencing and adding ideas, cause and effect, and clarifying examples or instances as the text openers, paragraph openers or sentence openers to unite the text.
By combining the elements and factors mentioned in this section, the discourse analysis was used to analyze all the writing composition and then an instrument of “textual feature checklist” was designed to evaluate the writings. In the discourse analysis process, a set of symbols and colors were used the mark each language feature, and then frequency of the same symbols or colors was counted. The validity and reliability of the discourse analysis are ensured from the following two aspects: (1) The identification of themes for lexicogrammatical features: In the works of Halliday school, such as Halliday, & Matthiessen (2014), Li, Wenxia. (2006) etc., the typical themes for each language feature were listed. While identifying the themes in the process of discourse analysis, the researcher referred to these books, the previous studies in the field and her own understanding of the functional grammar theories to ensure the validity. (2) The reliability of discourse analysis: All the identification work including the generic structures and lexicogrammtical features were analyzed by three researchers of the present study. And for some language features, especially the use of various types of processes such as material and verbal processes, if they had different understandings, they would confirm with the participants to get the accurate meaning that they wanted to express in particular contexts.
In this section, one of the group writings is presented as an example to show the specific data analysis process.
Firstly, the discourse analysis process is presented in the following Fig. 6.
After the discourse analysis, the instrument of textual feature checklist is applied to check the appearance of each element of generic structure and frequency of lexicogrammatical features as shown in the following Table 1.
Table 1
Textual feature checklist for the sampled group writing
Generic structure items (occurrence) | Lexicogrammatical features (frequency) |
Social purpose | To persuade one point of view | ✓ | Generalized Participants | Topic/issue | 12 |
Person related word | 7 |
Text Structure | Introduction | Background information | ✓ | Processes | Material process | 16 |
Stating the problem | ✓ | Relational process | 6 |
Preview of argument | 🗴 | Mental process | 1 |
Taking a position | ✓ | Verbal process | 1 |
Arguments | Point | ✓ | Modality | Modal finite verbs | 8 (3 types) |
Mood adjunct | Probability | 0 |
Usuality | 0 |
| Obligation | 0 |
Degree | 3 |
Intensity | 1 |
Elaboration | ✓ | Time | 0 |
Reiteration | Review of arguments | ✓ | Attributions | 2 |
Restatement of position | ✓ | Connectives | Sequence | 4 |
Reason | 3 |
Clarifying | 0 |
The generic structure in this writing was more clearly shown and organized by including most the elements expected in persuasive type texts except previewing the arguments.
The issue was “tourism” and repeated many times in the text. The participants were generalized personal pronouns. References were made to data (8%, 79.91, 10.29) emphasizing mainly the benefits of tourism but also the disadvantages.
The use of processes was varied by including the material, relational, verbal and mental process.
For modality, modal finite verbs were used (may, can, will). Mood adjuncts of time (Nowadays), degree (fairly, greatly) indicating intensity, comment adjuncts (luckily, truly) gave a more positive evaluation.
The sequence connectives were used (in the first place, what’s more, in conclusion).