David Hyatt

University of Sheffield

A Critical Systemic-Functional Literacy Frame for the Introduction of Critical Discourse Analysis in UK Secondary Education.

This paper considers the postulation of a pedagogical, analytical and heuristic tool for the critical analysis of texts, the Critical Systemic-Functional Literacy Frame. The potential for such a frame, in a range of pedagogical contexts, is considered and recommendations for pedagogy, curriculum, teacher education, policy and further complementary research are offered. The Frame offers an approach to the consideration of the construction dominant discourses, and directions for challenging such discourses, leading to social action and social change. This paper is grounded in a social-constructionist orientation to language and through Systemic-Functional and Critical Discourse Analysis approaches seeks to consider the ways in which insights from such an approach can be useful in educational contexts. The Frame is grounded in a critical textual, lexico-grammatical and discourse analysis of the genre of broadcast adversarial political interviewing and from this seeks to develop a pedagogical tool for a range of language and literacy contexts. The research involved the collection of a corpus of 40 adversarial interviews, broadcast between 1995 and 2001, for critical genre analysis, and the insights gleaned from this regarding discourse structure and language choices are supplemented by 21 questionnaires, one letter response and 11 interviews with interviewers working for terrestrial television channels. The corpus data gathered was analysed in terms of its discourse structure and lexico-grammatical features and the informant data was analysed categorically. This work is further informed by literature in the areas of SFL, language and power, media discourse, specifically broadcast interviewing, and critical pedagogies.