Brian Dare

Director, Lexis Education

Growing grammar

South Australia has proven to be a particularly fertile state in terms of the numbers of classroom teachers across all levels of schooling who have drawn on sfg to inform their teaching. The interest in sfg is evidenced by:

• Over 2000 teachers doing the Language and Literacy Course, a 30 hour professional development program on the classroom applications of sfg

• numerous teachers involved in classroom action research programs funded by the Spencer Foundation

• the implementation of the ESL Scope and Scales, which is a key curriculum document based on a functional model of language

• the number of teachers who have presented their work at local, national and international conferences

• the continuing interest in sfg as a tool for teaching and learning

In this paper I will give a brief description of the context in which this work has flourished and then give some possible reasons as to why there has been a measure of success in getting teachers to include a focus on grammar as part of an explicit pedagogy around language.