A Systemic-Functional and Ethnomethodological Investigation of Children's Literature in an EFL Classroom Context

Abstract

English is the only compulsory foreign language taught in the public education system in Taiwan. In 2001, the Ministry of Education (MOE) of the Taiwan government put the Grade 1-9 Curriculum in place. This curriculum stipulated that English be implemented in Grades 5-6 and that students in elementary school Grade 3 commenced learning English at the beginning of the 2005 academic year. Based on the general guidelines of the Language Arts within the Grade 1-9 Curriculum, schools and teachers were permitted to select their own textbooks from a select censored collection. This collection included a variety of children’s literature. Since then, the implementation of children’s literature within the regular Language Arts curriculum has grown. In particular, children’s picturebooks have been increasingly acknowledged and implemented in primary language teaching classrooms. This research study is centrally concerned with the way in which the language used in a Western children’s picturebook operates in an EFL classroom in order to achieve particular goal, be it pedagogical, social and/or cultural. Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics and Ethnomethodology, this research study employs the analytic methods derived from these two methodological perspectives to investigate the nature of teaching practice in an EFL classroom context. One intermediate class of Grand Future Private English School located in Tainan City, Taiwan was selected as the research setting. The participants included the ten primary school students in the nominated class and their two English-teaching teachers, one Chinese English-teaching teacher and one Foreign English-teaching teacher. Yasmin’s Ducks, written in English, was the text taught in the research setting (McGraw-Hill, 2005).