Halliday’s Seven Functions of Langauge, Functional Approaches to Language Teaching, and • Language Functions

Group 7 :

# Anis Rovita

# Samrotul Ma’sumi

Language Function

One of the main goals of language teachers is to provide students with the tools to be effective communicators in the TL. Often when students are assigned projects and assignments (like the weather report in Anna’s case study) their lack of practical tools to produce the actual language becomes evident. In these cases, students might very well have the necessary resources to accomplish the task, but teachers might need to consider a communicative approach to teaching the language, focusing on the functions of language, to properly equip students to complete assigned tasks. In this section we will explore functions of language and how they can be taught in the SL classroom.

Halliday’s Seven Functions of Language

Several attempts have been made to catalogue the different functions of language, and to chart child language development in terms of the increasing range of these functions to be found in the growing child’s repertoire. Michael Halliday’s taxonomy is documented below:- Instrumental: Language used to fulfil a need on the part of the speaker. Directly concerned with obtaining food, drink and comfort.

- Regulatory: Language used to influence the behaviour of others. Concerned with persuading / commanding / requesting other people to do things you want.

- Interactional: Language used to develop social relationships and ease the process of interaction. Concerned with the phatic dimension of talk.

- Personal: Language used to express the personal preferences and identity of the speaker. Sometimes referred to as the ‘Here I am!’ function – announcing oneself to the world.

- Representational: Language used to exchange information. Concerned with relaying or requesting information.

- Heuristic: Language used to learn and explore the environment. Child uses language to learn; this may be questions and answers, or the kind of running commentary that frequently accompanies children’s play.

- Imaginative: Language used to explore the imagination. May also accompany play as children create imaginary worlds, or may arise from storytelling.

Functional Approaches to Language Teaching

There are four general orientations among modern second-language methods and approaches:

1.  STRUCTURAL/LINGUISTIC:  Based on beliefs about the structure of language and descriptive or contrastive linguistics.  Involves isolation of grammatical and syntactic elements of L2 taught either deductively or inductively in a predetermined sequence. Often involves much meta-linguistic content or "learning about the language" in order to learn the language.

2.  COGNITIVE:  Based on theories of learning applied specifically to second language learning.  Focus is on the learning strategies that are compatible with the learners own style. L2 content is selected according to concepts and techniques that facilitate generalizations about the language, memorization and "competence" leading to "performance".

3. AFFECTIVE/INTERPERSONAL:  Focuses on the psychological and affective pre-dispositions of the learner that enhance or inhibit learning.  Emphasizes interaction among and between teacher and students and the atmosphere of the learning situation as well as students' motivation for learning.  Based on concepts adapted from counseling and social psychology.

4.  FUNCTIONAL/COMMUNICATIVE:  Based on theories of language acquisition, often referred to as the "natural" approach, and on the use of language for communication. Encompasses multiple aspects of the communicative act, with language structures selected according to their utility in achieving a communicative purpose. Instruction is concerned with the input students receive, comprehension of the "message" of language and student involvement at the students' level of competence.