HOW TO APPLY SFL IN CLASSROOM PRACTICE: AN EXAMPLE IN BILINGUAL EDUCATION PROGRAMS IN THE USA

Abstract

In this article I examine a corpus of twenty essays written in English by twenty pre-university Mexican students who were part of a Bilingual Education program in USA in grade 12 during the academic year 2005-2006. I will describe the main errors found in students’ essays. Each error will be illustrated and followed by a discussion on how that error can be addressed in classroom practice.With this study I intend to demonstrate that having Systemic Functional Linguistics as a framework of analysis will be useful to evaluate students’ writing and to reflect on the relationship between linguistic links across sentences and textual coherence. I will also point out that SFL has a crucial role in literacy since it concentrates on the production and analysis of texts in a given language.