If we took a holiday... Some time to celebrate...

Well, it wasn't quite a holiday weekend,

but it was a Halliday weekend.

Facets-Aquamarine's link to Halliday and social justice was the third time Halliday and I met up this weekend [don't tell my husband!]. Here's how it went down:

Friday, 9:30 p.m.: TGIF.

In bed reading Kamler's piece on Gender and Genre in Early Writing:

Kamler associates Halliday with systemic-functional linguistics. From a Hallidayian framework, she says, linguistic patterns reveal and construct social realities. Language gets its form by realizing particular social functions. For example, Kamler draws on Halliday when she starts in on the fine-grained analysis of clauses and labels the actor/goal/recipient parts. I'm not pretending to understand all of this. But, essentially, I understood that Halliday is used to look at how language functions.

Saturday, 9:10 a.m.

Sitting at the SALSA conference (with other friends from our class), it's not even 24 hours laters and here's James Gee talking about Halliday, too. Gee's talk (super interesting!) used linguistic analysis to examine what "academic language" reveals and conceals. From what I understood, Gee was referring to the Halliday camp as representing a functional perspective on language, contrasted with others in the field who take an ideological perspective on language. In the example of academic language he studied, Gee found it to be both functional and ideological. He suggested we do more studies of particular uses of academic language in classrooms, to see how it is functional or ideological or both, leaning toward interesting questions to consider about equity and social justice. Neat stuff. Anyway, this gave me the idea that Halliday fit in the "functional" camp.

Sunday, 7:00 p.m.

Reading F-A's blog, I'm struck by a new adjective: Hallidayian. Apparently, I just can't get enough Halliday this weekend. It is taking shape in my brain how much I appreciate sociolinguistic analysis for the light it can shed on who we are and what we value as individuals inside of social groups. I think this is why I like the Kamler piece - because it uses language to reveal what otherwise lies beneath the surface of our consciousness. As Kamler says, she makes "gender ideology visible so that it may be questioned, challenged, and resisted." And why I liked Gee's talk - asking us to consider the political and social issues that rest beneath the surface of langauge. Funny, that's what I liked last week, too, as we read Godley et al.'s critical discourse analysis - that same notion of examining how our language functions and then asking in whose interest it seems to function.

Good holiday/Halliday weekend.