The Communicative Syllabus: A Systemic-functional Approach to Language Teaching

This book begins with a survey of approaches to communicative syllabus design, from the functional-notional approach of the early 1970s, through criticism of the functional-notional approach in the early 1980s, to the contemporary search for a process approach to language learning. There has been little discussion of how linguistics could contribute to developing such a process approach, and in the second part of the book a possible role for linguistics is assessed: special attention is paid to systemic-functional linguistics and its concern with social context and language use, and to the need for a meaning negotiation model of language.