Teaching students to identify functional groups Karen Margetts Native-speaking English Teacher Cheung Chuk Shan College

Functional Grammar Not a set of rules Looks at the choices we make according to: purpose social activity roles and relationships between participants nature of text and role of language in it

Useful for all levels & abilities S1 & S4 Creative English S4 General English Reading of textbook, newspaper articles, SBA texts and test papers Writing of compositions - narratives, letters of complaint, expository and argumentative essays, problem-solution essays, etc. Speaking / Oral S4 – S7 S7 UE Reading passages

Identifying Functional Groups Processes (Green) – ‘the goings on’ Participants (Red) – nominal groups People, things, issues, concepts or phenomena involved in the processes Circumstances (Blue) Give information about the ‘environment’ in which the process occurs When? Where? How? what with? Why? How? whom for? who with?

Processes - Green Actions Walk, give, move, ride, pick up Mental See, hear, like, love, think, believe, want Saying Say, tell, ask, reply, suggest Relational Be, have

Circumstances - Blue Time – When? How long? Place – Where? How far? Manner – How? What with? What like? Cause – Why? How? What for? Whom for? Accompaniment – Who with?

Participants - nominal groups Pointer – the, those, this, a, that Numerative – three, second, million Describer(s) – pleasant, difficult, most precious Classifier(s) – Form 4, business, indoor Thing – student, meeting, plant Qualifier – with brown hair, we had last week, that’s in the bathroom

Expanding nominal groups She held a bag.  She held a small, black leather bag with a gold strap. They ate some cakes.  They ate half a dozen delicious cakes filled with cream and strawberries

Increasing complexity of texts Less spoken - more written Human and concrete participants to more specific and abstract participants Highly nominalised texts (longer nominal groups) More relational processes (be, have); fewer action processes More clauses in each sentence

Outcomes - reading When students are taught how to identify functional groups, Processes GREEN Participants RED Circumstances BLUE they are immediately able to read much more complex texts with greater ease UE texts are highly nominalised and grammatically complex

Outcomes - writing Improved mastery of the clause and sentence structure Nominal groups are expanded with more frequent use of qualifiers, especially relative clauses Improved ability to write more ‘formal’ texts such as argumentative essays

Outcomes – Speaking & Listening Increased use of nominalisation in group discussions and individual responses One of the advantages of having a class website would be…. The main difficulty faced by those students sitting public exams is … Improved stress and intonation patterns