Frances Christie

Last updated

Frances Helen Christie (born 1939), is Emeritus professor of language and literacy education at the University of Melbourne, [1] and honorary professor of education at the University of Sydney.[ citation needed ] She specialises in the field of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and has completed research in language and literacy education, writing development, pedagogic grammar, genre theory, and teaching English as a mother tongue and as a second language.

Contents

Biography

Christie was born in Sydney in 1939. She was educated at Cremorne Girls' High School and completed a BA majoring in English and history, and a Dip Ed., at the University of Sydney. Her teaching career took her to schools in rural New South Wales and to London in the UK. While completing a Master of Education at the University of Sydney (1977), Christie was highly influenced by the outstanding scholar of the history of educational theory, curriculum design and pedagogical principles in the western tradition, W. F. Connell (1916-2001), and focused her thesis on the history of English teaching in the Australian colony of NSW.

During her time with the Australian federal government Curriculum Development Centre, Canberra (1978–81), Christie worked on the national Language Development Project (LDP), a curriculum development initiative addressing the English oral language and literacy needs of children in the upper primary to junior secondary school years. [2] At the same time, she was studying and working with M. A. K. Halliday, a consultant on the LDP, at the University of Sydney. She completed a PhD on early primary school writing development (supervised by J.R. Martin, University of Sydney) in 1990.

Her academic career took her to Melbourne, to Deakin University (1985–90), to Darwin (1990–94) to the then Northern Territory University (now known as Charles Darwin University) and back to Melbourne (1994) where she was appointed Foundation Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Melbourne, a position she held till her retirement in 2002, when she was appointed emeritus professor. [1] She also holds an honorary professorship at the University of Sydney.[ citation needed ]

Career

Her work on the English language curriculum was not without controversy, based as it was in a model of language development inspired by the work of M.A.K. Halliday. [3] The model centred on three core areas: learning language (i.e. the basic resources of sound, grammar, commenced in infancy); learning through language (i.e. simultaneously learning to use language to shape experience, create relationships, make sense of the world); and learning about the language (i.e. learning about the resource that is one’s language, where the latter is primarily a responsibility of schooling). [4] At the time, English teachers resisted any formal talk of teaching knowledge about language. [5] However, Christie argued that language study should be about building a knowledge of the language with which to live and to go on learning, and this meant bringing knowledge about language (KAL) into focus. [6]

Christie also noticed and nurtured valuable connections between the work of Basil Bernstein, the SFL model and pedagogy, bringing Bernstein to Melbourne in 1996 to collaborate. [7] Her most recent collaboration with Beverly Derewianka (University of Wollongong) was an Australian Research Council (2004-6) funded project investigating the key indicators of development in adolescent writing in English, History and Science. [8] The book 'School Discourse' (2008) that Christie and Derewanka co-authored out of this project was described by Mary J. Schleppegrell (School of Education, University of Michigan, USA) as "a tremendous contribution to our understanding of the paths learners follow in written language development from early childhood to late adolescence". [9]

Christie has also been instrumental in bringing the work of other scholars to publication, for example in the Series on Language Education she edited for Oxford University Press. Christie has made a significant contribution to educational linguistics and to the development of the English language curriculum in Australia. She was also the founding President (1995-7) of the Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association (ASFLA). [10]

Key publications

Christie, F. & K. Watson 1972. Language and the Mass Media. Sydney: A.H. & A.W. Reed.

Christie, F., D. Mallick, R. Lewis & J. Mallick 1973. Some Say a Word is Dead. Sydney: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Christie, F., W.F. Connell, P. Jones, & R. Lawson 1974. China at School. Sydney: Novak.

Christie, F., D. Mallick, R. Lewis & J. Mallick 1976. The Growing Green. Melbourne: Heinemann Educational Australia.

Christie, F. & J. Rothery 1979. Language in Teacher Education: Child Language Development and English Language Studies. Applied Linguistics Association of Australia Occasional Papers Number 3.

Christie, F & J. Rothery (eds.) 1980. Varieties of Language and LanguageTeaching. Applied Linguistics Association of Australia Occasional Papers Number 4.

Christie, F. 1985. Language Education. Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria.

Christie, F. 1986. Language and Education. A.A.T.E. Studies in English, Number 2. Australian Association for the Teaching of English, Adelaide.

Christie, F (ed.). 1989. Language education. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Christie, F. (ed.) 1990. Literacy in a Changing Word. Melbourne: ACER.  

Christie, F. 1993. Introduction to Mother Tongue Education. Dakar: UNESCO Office.

Christie, F. 1993. 'The "received tradition" of English teaching: the decline of rhetoric and the corruption of grammar'. In Bill Green (ed.) The Insistence of the Letter. Literary Studies and Curriculum Theorizing.  Falmer Press, London, pages 75–106.

Christie, F. & J. Foley (eds.) 1996. Some Contemporary Themes in Literacy Research. Münster: Waxmann.

Christie, F. & J. R. Martin (eds.) 1997. Genres and Institutions: Social Processes  in the Workplace and School. London: Cassell Academic.

Christie, F. & R. Misson (eds.) 1997. Literacy and Schooling. London: Routledge.

Christie, F. (ed.) 1999. Pedagogy and the shaping of consciousness : linguistic and social processes. London: Cassell Academic.

Christie, F. & A. Soosai 2000. Language and Meaning 1.  Melbourne: Macmillan Education.  

Christie, F. & A. Soosai 2001. Language and Meaning 2.  Melbourne: Macmillan Education.  

Christie, F. & J. R. Martin 2000. Genre and institutions: social processes in the workplace and school. London and New York: Continuum.

Christie, F. 2002. Classroom discourse analysis : a functional perspective. R. Fawcett (ed.). London/New York: Continuum.

Christie, F. 2004a ‘The study of language and subject English’. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 27, 1, pages 15–29.  

Christie, F. 2004b ‘Authority and its role in the pedagogic relationship of schooling’. In Lynne Young and Claire Harrison (eds.) Systemic Functional  Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. Studies in Social Change. London and NY: Continuum, pages 173-201.

Christie, F. 2004c ‘Systemic functional linguistics and a theory of language in education’. In V. Heberle and JL Meurer  (Guest eds.) Systemic Functional Linguistics in Action. A Special Edition of The  Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, Universidade Federal De Santa Catarina, pages13-40.  

Christie, F. 2004d ‘Revisiting some old themes: the role of grammar in the teaching of English’. In Joseph A Foley (ed.) Language, Education and Discourse: Functional Approaches. London and NY: Continuum, pages 145-173.

Christie, F. 2005 Language education in the primary years. Sydney: University of NSW Press.

Christie, F. & J. R. Martin (eds.) 2007. Language, knowledge and pedagogy: functional linguistic and sociological perspectives. London and New York: Continuum.

Christie, F. & B. Derewianka 2008. School discourse: learning to write across the years of schooling. London and New York: Continnum.

Christie, F. & S. Simpson (eds.) 2010. Literacy and Social Responsibility : Multiple Perspectives. London and Oakville: Equinox.

Christie, F. & K. Maton (eds.) 2011. Disciplinarity: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives. London and New York: Continuum.

Christie, F. 2012. Language education throughout the school years : a functional perspective.Language Learning Monograph Series. USA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Halliday</span> British linguist (1925–2018)

Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday was a British linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistics (SFL) model of language. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar. Halliday described language as a semiotic system, "not in the sense of a system of signs, but a systemic resource for meaning". For Halliday, language was a "meaning potential"; by extension, he defined linguistics as the study of "how people exchange meanings by 'languaging'". Halliday described himself as a generalist, meaning that he tried "to look at language from every possible vantage point", and has described his work as "wander[ing] the highways and byways of language". But he said that "to the extent that I favoured any one angle, it was the social: language as the creature and creator of human society".

Basil Bernard Bernstein was a British sociologist known for his work in the sociology of education. He worked on socio-linguistics and the connection between the manner of speaking and social organization.

Allan Luke is an educator, researcher, and theorist studying literacy, multiliteracies, applied linguistics, and educational sociology and policy. Luke has written or edited 17 books and more than 250 articles and book chapters. Luke, with Peter Freebody, originated the Four Resources Model of literacy in the 1990s. Part of the New London Group, he was coauthor of the "Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures" published in the Harvard Educational Review (1996). He is Emeritus Professor at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia and adjunct professor at Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada.

Peter Freebody is an Australian Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Past appointments included Professorial Research Fellow with the Faculty of Education and Social Work and a core member of the CoCo Research Centre at the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia. His research and teaching interests include literacy education, classroom interaction and quantitative and qualitative research methods. He has served on numerous Australian State and Commonwealth literacy education and assessment advisory groups. Freebody, with Allan Luke, originated the Four Resources Model of literacy education.

Multiliteracy is an approach to literacy theory and pedagogy coined in the mid-1990s by the New London Group. The approach is characterized by two key aspects of literacy – linguistic diversity and multimodal forms of linguistic expressions and representation. It was coined in response to two major changes in the globalized environment. One such change was the growing linguistic and cultural diversity due to increased transnational migration. The second major change was the proliferation of new mediums of communication due to advancement in communication technologies e.g the internet, multimedia, and digital media. As a scholarly approach, multiliteracy focuses on the new "literacy" that is developing in response to the changes in the way people communicate globally due to technological shifts and the interplay between different cultures and languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruqaiya Hasan</span>

Ruqaiya Hasan was a professor of linguistics who held visiting positions and taught at various universities in England. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University in Sydney, from which she retired as emeritus professor in 1994. Throughout her career she researched and published widely in the areas of verbal art, culture, context and text, text and texture, lexicogrammar and semantic variation. The latter involved the devising of extensive semantic system networks for the analysis of meaning in naturally occurring dialogues.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. R. Martin</span> Canadian linguist

James Robert Martin is a Canadian linguist. He is Professor of Linguistics at The University of Sydney. He is the leading figure in the 'Sydney School' of systemic functional linguistics. Martin is well known for his work on discourse analysis, genre, appraisal, multimodality and educational linguistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">C. M. I. M. Matthiessen</span>

Christian Matthias Ingemar Martin Matthiessen is a Swedish-born linguist and a leading figure in the systemic functional linguistics (SFL) school, having authored or co-authored more than 100 books, refereed journal articles, and papers in refereed conference proceedings, with contributions to three television programs. One of his major works is Lexicogrammatical cartography (1995), a 700-page study of the grammatical systems of English from the perspective of SFL. He has co-authored a number of books with Michael Halliday. Since 2008 he has been a professor in the Department of English at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Before this, he was Chair of the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney.

Beverly Derewianka is Emeritus Professor of linguistics at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is a leading figure in educational linguistics and Sydney School genre pedagogy. Her major research contributions have been in the field of literacy education. Her research projects tracing students’ literacy development have had a direct and substantial impact on curriculum and syllabus development in Australia and internationally. She has (co-)authored 11 books and numerous book chapters and journal articles in the field of literacy education.

Joseph Lo Bianco AM is Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, and serves as Past President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. From 2011–2017 he designed, led and implemented a 6-year, 3-country language and peace building initiative for UNICEF in Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand. He has previously worked on peace building activities in Sri Lanka in the late 1990s, and in several other settings. He is a language planning specialist, recognised for his work on combining practical problem solving language policy with academic study of language problems. He has published extensively on bilingual education, English as a second/additional language, peace building and communication, multiculturalism and intercultural education, Asian studies, Italian language teaching and the revitalisation of indigenous and immigrant community languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ken Hyland</span> British linguist

Ken Hyland is a British linguist. He is currently a professor of applied linguistics in education at the University of East Anglia.

The Sydney School is a genre-based writing pedagogy that analyses literacy levels of students. The Sydney School's pedagogy broadened the traditional observation-based writing in primary schools to encompass a spectrum of different genres of text types that are appropriate to various discourses and include fiction and non-fiction. The method and practice of teaching established by the Sydney School encourages corrective and supportive feedback in the education of writing practices for students, particularly regarding second language students. The Sydney School works to reflectively institutionalise a pedagogy that is established to be conducive to students of lower socio-economic backgrounds, indigenous students and migrants lacking a strong English literacy basis. The functional linguists who designed the genre-based pedagogy of the Sydney School did so from a semantic perspective to teach through patterns of meaning and emphasised the importance of the acquisition of a holistic literacy in various text types or genres. ‘Sydney School’ is not, however, an entirely accurate moniker as the pedagogy has evolved beyond metropolitan Sydney universities to being adopted nationally and, by 2000, was exported to centres in Hong Kong, Singapore, and parts of Britain.

Anne Burns is a British-born Australian educational linguist, internationally known for her work on genre-based pedagogy in TESOL and EAP/ESP. She is a Professor Emerita in Language Education at Aston University (UK) and Professor of TESOL at the University of New South Wales (Australia). The TESOL International Association named her one of the '50 at 50', leaders who had made a significant contribution to TESOL in its first 50 years.

Alice Marie-Claude Caffarel-Cayron is a French-Australian linguist. She is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Caffarel is recognized for the development of a Systemic Functional Grammar of French which has been applied in the teaching of the French language, Discourse analysis and Stylistics at the University of Sydney. Caffarel is recognised as an expert in the field of French Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).

Kay L. O'Halloran is an Australian-born academic in the field of multimodal discourse analysis. She is Chair Professor and Head of Department of Communication and Media in the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool and Visiting Distinguished Professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University (2017–2020). She is the founding director of the Multimodal Analysis Laboratory of the Interactive and Digital Media Institute (IDMI) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She is widely known for her development of systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA) and its application in the realm of mathematical discourse and multimodal text construction. Her current work involves the development and use of digital tools and techniques for multimodal analysis and mixed methods approaches to big data analytics.

Suzanne Eggins is an Australian linguist who is an Honorary Fellow at Australian National University (ANU), associated with the ANU Institute for Communication in Health Care. Eggins is the author of a best selling introduction to systemic functional linguistics and she is known for her extensive work on critical linguistic analysis of spontaneous interactions in informal and institutional healthcare settings. 

Jenny Hammond is an Australian linguist. She is known for her research on literacy development, classroom interaction, and socio-cultural and systemic functional theories of language and learning in English as an Additional Language or dialect (EAL/D) education. Over the course of her career, Hammond's research has had a significant impact on the literacy development of first and second language learners, on the role of classroom talk in constructing curriculum knowledge and on policy developments for EAL education in Australia. She is an Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Education, University of Technology Sydney.

Mary Macken-Horarik is an Australian linguist. She is an adjunct Associate Professor in the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education (ILSTE) at the Australian Catholic University. This title was awarded "in recognition of her international reputation and scholarly expertise in the field of Senior Secondary English Curriculum." Macken-Horarik is known for her contributions to systemic functional linguistics and its application to literacy, language and English education.

Elizabeth A. Thomson is an Australian linguist. She is an adjunct professor in the Division of Learning and Teaching at Charles Sturt University, and Principal Honorary Fellow of the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong. She is known for her research in linguistics, language education and training, language other than English and curriculum & assessment design, and has made contributions to the field of English and Japanese linguistics from the Systemic Functional perspective. She is a foundation member of the Japan Association of Systemic Functional Linguistics (JASFL), a member of the International Systemic Functional Linguistics Association (ISFLA) and the Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association (ASFLA), and also an associate member of The Council of Australasian University Leaders in Learning and Teaching and The Australasian Council on Open, Distance and e-Learning (ACODE).

Mary J. Schleppegrell is an applied linguist and Professor of Education at the University of Michigan. Her research and praxis are based on the principles of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), a theory derived from the work of social semiotic linguist Michael Halliday. Schleppegrell is known for the SFL-based literacy practices she has continuously helped to develop for multilingual and English language learners throughout her decades long career, which she began as an educational specialist before transitioning to the field of applied linguistics. As a result, her publications demonstrate a deep understanding of both the theories and practices related to teaching and learning.

References

  1. 1 2 Christie, Frances. "Find an expert". University of Melbourne.
  2. "Writing development as a necessary dimension of language and literacy education". PETAA.
  3. "What is Systemic-Functional Linguistics?". ISFLA. Retrieved 15 June 2020.
  4. Christie, Frances (1985). Language Education. Geelong, Victoria: Deakin University Press.
  5. Young, Lynne; Harrison, Claire (2004). Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. Studies in Social Change. London: Continuum.
  6. Foley, J.A. (2004). Language, Education and Discourse: Functional Approaches. London: Continuum.
  7. Christie, Frances (1999). Pedagogy and the shaping of consciousness: linguistic and social processes. Cassell Academic.
  8. Christie, Frances; Derewianka, Beverley (2008). School discourse: learning to write across the years of schooling. London: Continuum.
  9. Mary, Schleppegrell. Book Review. ASIN   0826499929.
  10. "ASFLA History Timeline". ASFLA.