Book Review: Language Curriculum Design and Socialisation

Abstract

This book introduces a new trend in curriculum design and it is based on a novel concept of ‘text’, which is adopted from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). SFL defines ‘text’ as ‘naturally occurring language use with social functions’ (Hasan, 2014, p.7). Although text occurs in space and time, it is not in the boundary of spatio-temporal dimensions per se. Its importance lies in its function for social practices, where language and action intertwine with each other to accomplish a specific type of social activity (Hasan, 2014). Besides, text is the initial stage in linguistic system, where different forms of language realises (Halliday, 1991; Hasan, 2014). Peter deploys this concept in proposing a curriculum design which is also in close affinity with the notion of genre in North American composition studies, New Rhetoric (NR). The NR holds that the emergence of genre is the result of repeated social actions in particular situations which in turn ends in specific form and content (Bazerman, 1988, Devitt, 2004; Miller, 1984). Freedman and Medway (1994) support that NR genre theorists aim to unite linguistic similarities to the domain of human activities which take place regularly. Paltridge (2001) also states that genre studies in the NR put emphasis on the relationship between text, context, and the actions that genres fulfil within particular contexts. My understanding is that such a notion of genre is compatible with SFL notion of text for social practices, whereby the discourse types are intertwined to a wider socio-cultural understanding of language in use.