Using systemic functional linguistics in academic writing development: An example from film studies

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Abstract

On film studies courses, students are asked to treat as objects of study the same films which they may more commonly experience as entertainment. To explore the role of academic writing in this, an action research project was carried out on a university film studies course using a systemic functional linguistics approach. This paper presents a key assessment essay genre, referred to as a taxonomic film analysis. This genre was analysed drawing on the work of Halliday and Mathiessen, 2004, Martin, 1992 and Lemke, 1985, Lemke, 1990), focussing on three aspects: the genre acts performed in the process of analysing film; the conceptual frameworks of film studies knowledge, or 'thematic formations’ (Lemke, 1993) drawn on and re-constituted in the assignment; the particular ways that language is used to perform these acts and build these thematic formations. For EAP to be relevant to film students, it is proposed that EAP specialists need to engage with these three aspects of film study. This application of SFL in film studies EAP is intended as an illustration of how SFL tools can be used for relevant EAP provision across the HE curriculum.

Highlights

► The key genre identified was taxonomic film analysis. ► Deploying film studies language and genre converts film into an object of study. ► EAP lecturers need to engage with both the language and the meaning making of film students.

Introduction

The situation is a well-resourced, high-tech lecture theatre in a 'new’ British university. A film studies lecturer has just completed a lecture on film genres and the role of mise en scene in classic Hollywood cinema. The students have returned from their break carrying sweets, crisps and soft drinks. There is a sense of expectation as the lights in the theatre dim, the mournful notes of a country and western guitar sound out, and the screen where the lecturer’s slides had been projected now shows the actor Nicholas Cage climbing out of a beaten-up Cadillac on a North American desert highway. It is the start of Red Rock West and the students are about to begin analysing the film for how visuals are used in the narrative of this 'country noir’ genre.

At least they are if they can resist the urge to suspend their disbelief in response to the power of the film narrative, the visual devices they are being asked to analyse, and the hypnotic effects of a darkened room and a flickering screen. After a lifetime of induction into the world of cinema – particularly of the Hollywood variety - they know what is expected of them as cinema-goers. What they are less familiar with is what is expected of them as film analysts. This is an early film viewing in their film studies course and for many the tension between the two roles is still acute. Over the coming two semesters, they are likely to develop the film analyst role to the point where some of them will complain that their enjoyment of a Friday night at the cinema has been irreparably damaged. Others will develop into articulate and well-informed participants in film studies seminars and in post-cinema pub discussions. Still others will have been watching with more practical purposes, motivated by the ambition to produce their own films and eager to understand the tricks of the trade.

This paper comes out of an action research project into the teaching of English for academic purposes in this first year university film studies course. The film studies course consisted of two core introductory modules for media studies students of whom it attracted about seventy each year. The action research project was a collaboration between the film studies lecturer and the author of this article, in which the film studies lecturer created a space within the film course for a writing development lecturer to teach academic writing. Together, we developed an EAP intervention which was motivated by the film tutor’s desire to focus explicitly on writing development in the light of his experience with student writing over a number of years, reinforced by repeated comments from external examiners about the need for the department to address the writing performance of final year students. I was motivated by the opportunity to explore how systemic functional linguistics could enhance the teaching of academic writing in a disciplinary context.

The paper focuses on one of the essay assignments which students wrote early in their study, and is identified as an exemplar of a key student film analysis genre. This genre is referred to as taxonomic film analysis in this research. The assignment is key to film students’ development because it modelled and developed fundamental film analysis procedures and at the same time introduced one of the course’s 'threshold concepts’, mise en scene. As Meyer and Land (2005) observe, such 'threshold concepts’ are transformative of a student’s understanding of a subject.

The research entailed both text and context analysis. Texts were analysed across two years of the course. First, in preparation for the English for Academic Purposes teaching intervention, 100 essays from the previous year’s students, representing four different genres, were analysed to different levels of detail. During and after the year of the EAP intervention, a similar number of student texts were analysed, most of which were examples of the taxonomic film analysis genre which is reported on in this article. In order to gain further understanding of the context, I attended all the lectures and seminars throughout the year, engaged in ongoing dialogue with the film studies lecturer, and carried out between two and 4 h of interview with each of 20 students. Every week, I delivered a 1-h EAP session in a slot between the film studies lecture and the film viewing. Because both the film studies lecturer and I were keen to represent academic writing as integral to film studies itself, my role as 'writing lecturer’ became blurred with the film lecturer’s role, and to some extent the tutor and the students regarded me as a participant in the teaching and learning of film studies. This blurring provided me with more access to students’ experiences of learning film studies and the lecturer’s role in this than non-participant observation would have done.

In order to analyse the essay texts, the research draws on systemic functional linguistics (Halliday and Mathiessen, 2004, Halliday, 1998a, Halliday, 1998b, Halliday and Martin, 1993, Halliday and Mathiessen, 1999), Sydney school genre analysis (Martin, 1992, Martin, 1999, Martin and Rothery, 1993, Martin and Rose, 2007, Martin and Rose, 2008), Lemke’s work on thematic formations and social action semiotics (Lemke, 1985, Lemke, 1990) and Hoey’s and Winter’s work on text patterns and clause relations (Hoey, 1995, Hoey, 2001, Hoey and Winter, 1986, Winter, 1977, Winter, 1982).

Section snippets

The context of a university film studies course

The scenario in the introduction is a glimpse of the situation in a university film studies course. In systemic functional linguistics, context of situation is described from three perspectives: what is going on, who is involved, and how language is being used. These three aspects of situation are referred to respectively as field, tenor and mode.

Research procedure

The film studies course was made up of two modules - Ways of Seeing One and Two – each of which lasted 10 weeks and introduced first year university media studies students to the processes of analysing film. Each week students attended a 1-h lecture and 2-h film viewing similar to the one described in the introduction, and took part in a 1-h seminar. They were required to write three essays during the ten weeks and also to produce film artefacts – a storyboard and a short film.

The assignment

The language of film analysis – representing film

Film studies at this university is a core subject in the media studies department. Media studies generally has been criticised for lacking credibility as an academic subject area, (see for example Frean, The Times, December 18, 2008). Evidence from this research reveals the language of academic film studies writing to be highly theoretical, specialised and technical. In turn, it has been criticised for these same qualities both in the professional context (cf. Bordwell, 1989, Bordwell and

The thematic formation of mise en scene makes meaning

The sample sentences examined above are produced by students engaging with an academic field of study through the medium of written text. As the register analysis of these six clauses shows, the two representations of this field are not equivalent. The analysis of the complete essay texts in a later section will reveal further the writers’ different understandings of the activity of taxonomic film analysis. This section provides a fuller representation of the field that the students are

The act of film analysis

This notion of film as 'a thing’ seems to correspond with the notion of 'model film’ which is used in the following account of film analysis by the film studies scholar, Bordwell. After detailing a variety of conceptual schemata which film analysts use, Bordwell writes:

One critic may start with concrete textual cues and then cast about for schemata, heuristics and semantic fields that seem appropriate; another critic may start by presupposing certain semantic fields and then, finding some cues

Designing a film studies text

The previous two sections have outlined something of the thematic formation and the Social Action Semiotic System from which this area of film analysis is constituted. To understand the significance of these for the teaching of English for Academic Purposes we now return to the texts which we have previously considered from the point of view of field-building at the sentence level. The analysis which follows begins by focussing on the register variable of mode and the textual metafunction at

Implications for pedagogy

These two student texts are presented here in terms of how each student enacts film analysis by means of their linguistic resources. Essay B by Tyrrell was regarded by the lecturer as a good response to the assignment for a student at this early stage of film studies. Everton’s essay was regarded as inappropriate for university film studies writing. What contribution, if any, can an EAP lecturer make in this situation? The goal of the linguistic analysis presented in this article has been to

Jim Donohue is Head of OpenELT at the Open University, United Kingdom. He holds a PhD for research into the use of systemic functional linguistics and genre-based approaches in academic literacy teaching and learning. Publications include Exploring Grammar: From Formal to Functional. Routledge (2009) with Coffin and North.

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    Jim Donohue is Head of OpenELT at the Open University, United Kingdom. He holds a PhD for research into the use of systemic functional linguistics and genre-based approaches in academic literacy teaching and learning. Publications include Exploring Grammar: From Formal to Functional. Routledge (2009) with Coffin and North.

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