Michele Zappavigna-Lee, Mick O'Donnell & Casey Whitelaw

School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney
WagSoft Systems, Madrid
School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney

Inter-coder reliability and process type

The question of reliability is important when presenting Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) as a practical tool for communities such as literacy educators that may be unfamiliar with SFG or linguistics in general. These communities sometimes require empirical or statistical evidence regarding the validity of a methodology before they will integrate it into their practice. The role of SFG for such teaching will be assessed here in terms of one criteria, that of inter-coder repeatability: can practitioners of SFG agree on their codings of a given set of sentences. We asked a number of systemicists to analyse a corpus of clauses in regards to process type. We then explored the results in two ways:

1. Are there particular types of clauses where there is general agreement? And others which lead to major differences in coding?

2. Where differences exist, can we group the coders into sub-groups which are (relatively) consistent internally? (what Fawcett has called 'dialects' of SFG)

Further research investigating the inter-coder reliability of other aspects of SFG will contribute both to an understanding of how we use the grammar as a community, and to establishing a body of evidence useful for convincing other disciplines that SFG is a robust and repeatable analytical tool.