Across a period of 6 months, Verity Neeves and Evelyn Hargett established a voluntary collaboration to inquire into ways to improve Verity’s students’ academic writing for high-stakes mock exams in the GCSE. This collaboration arose because of the BAWESS team’s interactions with Verity’s school through visits and leading continuing professional development sessions. An open-minded, curious English Language and Literature teacher as well as whole school disciplinary literacy lead, Verity acknowledged Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) could enrich her toolbox of strategies and provide the means to better support her team and ongoing future development. England, like many contexts globally, recognizes that every teacher is a teacher of language, thus building Verity’s capacity to support her team to respond to that shift felt logical. As a doctoral student working within the scope of the BAWESS Project, Evelyn partnered with Verity to develop the use of SFL in the classroom with the aim to enhance students’ learning.
Goal setting
At the start of our partnership, we invested time in developing a shared understanding about the connection between UK KS4 requirements in English and SFL scope and sequence documents (Polias, 202) to uncover the subskills that could lead to success (Department for Education, 2014; WIDA, 2024). Our mutual interests, curiosity, and collegial spirit led to a positive collaborative learning journey that allowed us to navigate the natural internal tensions of scaffolding professional learning, developing resources and trialing a new pedagogy.
Our first step was the assessment of students’ needs within the classroom to answer the question: What skills would best serve the students in their development of academic language and writing? To limit our scope, we determined that the best starting point would be a focus on making the register continuum accessible to the students and examine the role of nominalisation within the subject English Language and English Literature.
Strategies
Over the year, we encountered many successful strategies to make SFL come alive and become a familiar metalanguage for both the students and their teacher. Here are some examples:
- Using transcripts of class discussions to highlight the language used in different social purposes and situations. Then contrasting that transcript with a written critical analysis for GCSE.
- Identifying student sample texts that could be deconstructed at the level of the paragraph to examine the language choices students made that demonstrated critical analytical techniques. The outcome was class input and teaching material that focused on joint construction and improvements to students’ writing.
- Using deconstruction practices encouraged class dialogue about the writer’s moves, such as the role of the nominal group, nominalisation, and cohesion in making meaning. This change enabled Verity’s class to rely less on memorised prescriptive structures and resulted in purposeful dialogue about what students notice in the text that reflect the author’s choices. As a consequence students made mor purposeful choices when drafting a response.
- Target specific skills (i.e. nominal group, clause structures, sentence starters that support cohesion) by highlighting a carefully chosen text and posing critical questions to encourage observation, reasoning and understanding the choices made. Some questions posed to encouraged structured noticing might include:
- What is happening in this sentence [clause, part of the text]?
- What purpose does it serve?
- Why might the author have made that particular choice?
- What do you notice about this group of words [phrase(s)]?
- What other choices could be made and how would it alter the text? …the message?
- Target processes or participants (verbs and verb phrases, nouns and noun phrases) within one carefully selected paragraph from a student produced text or from the story. Students have a copy of the text with the teacher modeling on the visualizer through guided noticing, discussion and engagement with language choice. Som activities students were involved:
- Highlighting the verbs – what do we notice about the verb choices?
- Within academic writing, discussing how the writing becomes certain or tentative through modality.
- Where is writer’s interpretation expressed tentatively or with more certainty?
- How does verb choice affect the modality of the text?
- Could other process (verbal groups) be chosen? Why/Why not? What meaning would the make?
- Within academic writing, discussing how the writing becomes certain or tentative through modality.
- Highlighting the verbs – what do we notice about the verb choices?
- Target specific skills (i.e. nominal group, clause structures, sentence starters that support cohesion) by highlighting a carefully chosen text and posing critical questions to encourage observation, reasoning and understanding the choices made. Some questions posed to encouraged structured noticing might include:
Observations and Successes
The most exciting part of this was expanding Verity’s own toolkit for teaching. She experienced a culture change as the students developed their metalanguage, with phrases such as ‘academic register’ and ‘nominalisation’ used regularly and without fear. Students began to see themselves as authentic academic writers and recognised the value of deconstructing text and meaning.
Writing thus became an active process with no set tick list or heavy reliance on early scaffolds such as structure strips, PEEL or PETAL. The thought and dialogue built a shared understanding about the genre demands, structure and choice of language. What Verity observed was that when her students understood why they were writing the essay [purpose] or producing a critical analysis, they felt ownership for constructing a personal, critical response to the text.
For both Evelyn and Verity, the coach-teacher experience as co-researchers was enjoyably, mutually and professionally beneficial. The opportunity to learn and grow together opened the door to new ways of participating in professional development. SFL came alive in the classroom and was seen as an extremely valuable tool for learning and teaching which had a positive impact on learner outcomes.
References
Department for Education, 2014. The national curriculum in England: Key stages 3 and 4 framework document [Online]. London, EN: Department for Education. Available from: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5da7291840f0b6598f806433/Secondary_national_curriculum_corrected_PDF.pdf [Accessed 03 January 2026].
Polias, J. 2022. Language & Learning Development Continuum (LLDC) [Online]. Lexis Education. Available from: https://lexised.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/LLC-11-15-years-A4-for-printing.pdf [Accessed 03 January 2026].
WIDA, 2020. WIDA English language development standards framework, 2020 edition: Kindergarten–grade 12. Madison, WI: Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Available from: https://wida.wisc.edu/sites/default/files/resource/WIDA-ELD-Standards-Framework-2020.pdf#page=30 [Accessed 12 February 2026].
