Abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the language choices an urban seventh grade male student made as he constructed narrative text using a premade illustration as his writing prompt. In the first section, the significance of this textual analysis as well as the theoretical lens through which the data was viewed will be argued. In the second section, there will be a discussion of the state, parish, school, and classroom demographics, as well as the curriculum and context of the lesson that is the focus of the paper. For the textual analysis section of this paper, there will be a discussion of the genre characteristics of a narrative text and the ways in which this student’s language choices adhere to these characteristics. Each member of our group has chosen to individually focus on one functional aspect while loosely following similar methods of inquiry. The student’s language choices and the ways in which he successfully communicates his meaning for his readers within the narrative text will be analyzed. The last section of the paper will elaborate on possible teaching strategies and instructions that could have been used to better scaffold the student’s learning within this specific genre.

Theoretical rationale and significance:
Our informing theories for this study are sociocultural and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) views on meaning-making and on the use of intertextuality. We look to Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Halliday as the major theorists for our views expressed in this paper.

Keywords:

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Narrative, middle school students.