Systemic Functional Linguistics Interest Group - SFLIG

🎉Thank You from the Conference Committee! 🎉

As the conference comes to a close, we would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who made this event such a success!

To our incredible plenary and keynote speakers, engaging presenters, and enthusiastic participants joining us from around the world, thank you for sharing your energy, passion, and insights. Your contributions have made this conference truly memorable and intellectually enriching.

We would also like to acknowledge the tireless efforts of academic reviewers, our organizing team and volunteers, for their dedication, hard work, and professionalism throughout the event.

Until we meet again at the next conference, SFLIG 2027, thank you for being part of this wonderful community!

Please do keep in touch with us through our communication channels (email lists, website, and social media) for future updates about SFLIG activities!

Warmest regards,
SFLIG 2025 Organising Committee

SFLIG 2025- Day 4, 13 November 2025

4: Keynote 4: Using ideational concurrence to create accessible classroom metalanguage

Dr Lucy Macnaught, Auckland University of Technology
Dr Ruth French, University of Technology Sydney

Abstract

SFL scholars have long argued that a shared metalanguage is essential for making valued meanings explicit. Metalanguage enables teachers and students to talk about types of language choices and share reasoning about when and where to deploy them. Recent research has also illuminated how a multimodal view of metalanguage, including intonation and hand movements that accompany verbiage, takes into account the relationship between what teachers and students may talk about and the dynamic process of how they talk about it. Extending Hasan’s reading of semiotic mediation, such multimodal metalanguage contributes to making what is being mediated visible to students.

In this paper, we examine how teaching materials contribute to students developing knowledge of semiotic systems. We focus specifically on how images, with their constituent colors and shapes, contribute to classroom metalanguage. We trace earlier scholarship and then investigate the system of concurrence in teaching materials. Examples involve materials for Master’s of Nursing Science students undertaking research projects and undergraduate trainee teachers taking a literacy subject. Findings highlight how shapes and colors make meaning in combination with their co-text. Such ideational concurrence contributes to making language choices visible and accessible. It also provides insight into how convergent intersemiotic couplings are a mechanism through which non-disciplinary fields are ‘imported’, in this case, for teaching knowledge about language. These findings invite further investigation of the recontextualized systems that our students experience. They also point to current limitations with GPTs and the kinds of AI capacities that we might want.

Biography

Lucy Macnaught, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer/Learning Advisor at Auckland University of Technology. Her book, Writing with Students: New perspectives on collaborative writing in EAP contexts, is currently shortlisted for the M.A.K. Halliday Book Prize. It illuminates how metalanguage and the organisation of classroom talk enables students to critique and justify their choices and teachers to guide but not provide wording. Additional research interests include GenAI for writing development and embedding academic literacy in coursework and research programs.

Ruth French, PhD, is a Lecturer in the School of International Studies and Education, University of Technology Sydney. Her research and teaching interests include language and literacy education, children’s literature, primary curriculum and pedagogy. A particular research interest is the development of children’s knowledge about language, including grammar.