SFL: Fundamentals and Its Applications in EFL Classrooms

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a theory which describes language in its social context. Based on this concept, SFL provides teachers with a grammar that focuses on meaning rather than form and concentrates on whole texts and their organizations as well as on sentences. For learners, SFL suggests that language should be learnt “trinocularly”, not only ‘from below’- as with traditional grammar- and ‘from above’- as with much communicative language teaching- but also ‘from within’ or ‘from round about’ (McCabe, Gledhill & Liu, 2011: 37). The SFL model therefore has been widely applied in educational settings around the world, both from research and pedagogical perspectives. In an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning context, a number of studies have employed different approaches of the SFL theory and reported the findings from different classrooms. By focusing on the context of Asian countries, the present paper discusses the fundamentals of the theory, summarizes the findings from the collected publications, illustrates the potential challenges from the applications in EFL classrooms, and discusses directions for future research.