THE ROLE OF SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS IN

TEACHING LISTENING

By:
Dwi Ilmiani S2001400
Hanif Syafika S200140028
Zaenul Wafa S200140025

Graduate Program of Language Studies

University of Muhammadiyah Surakarta
2014
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TABLE OF CONTENT
COVER ...........................................................................................................................1
TABLE OF CONTENT ..................................................................................................2
A. INTRODUCTION .....................................................................................................3
B. DISCUSSION
1. Systemic Functional Linguistics Paradigm to Learning ....................................4
2. Teaching Listening ............................................................................................4
2.1 Teaching .................................................................................................4
2.2 Listening.................................................................................................4
2.3 Principles in teaching Listening .............................................................5
2.4 Guidelines for Designing Listening Activities.......................................6
3. The role Systemic Functional Linguistic in teaching Listening ........................7
C. CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. INTRODUCTION
SFL is one of outstanding approaches that are attempted to implement in Indonesian
Education. It starts with genre based approach as a core issue to conduct teaching and
learning. We do not concentrate on the each unit of structure in the text in detail to learn
language to acquire or find out the meaning of text. By adopting Systemic Functional
Linguistics (SFL), the learners provide opportunity to investigate text in general concept with
different functions for instance procedure text to give a series of instructions, descriptive text
to describe something and narrative text to retell a imaginative story.
Listening is a complex process in which listeners play an active role in discriminating
between sounds, understanding vocabulary and grammatical structures, interpreting
intonation and stress, and finally , making use of all the skills mentioned above, interpreting
the utterance within the socio -cultural context. Listening skills are anything but easy to
master. For many ESL/EFL learners, listening is the thing they feel most frustrated with. One
the one hand, they cannot control the speed of speech and they tend to have difficulties
decoding sounds that do not exist in their mother tongue. Reduced English sounds (lazy
speech) or contractions are two examples. On the other hand, even when they hear sounds
correctly, oftentimes they have interpretation problems due to a lack of vocabulary. English
slang or colloquial language increases the difficulty of interpretation. For EFL learners in
Indonesia, there is another problem. Since speaking does not receive as much attention as
reading and writing, students always recognize a word by sight instead of by sound. They
may have no interpretation problem when they look at the target word; however, when they
are asked to decipher the word through sound, problems emerge.
There is no denying that successful listening skills are acquired over time and take
lots of practice. For students, to improve their listening skills, they need to build up their
listening vocabulary, familiarize themselves with English intonation and rhythm, expose
themselves to as much English as possible and most importantly utilize appropriate EFL
listening strategies when listening to English. As an EFL teacher, aside from encouraging
students not to give up and to listen to English as often as possible, we have to provide
abundant opportunities for them to do listening practice as well as teach them effective
listening comprehension strategies. In the following parts, besides the introduction of
effective EFL listening comprehension strategies, three techniques will be singled out and
elaborated on to offer some feasible solutions to help EFL learners in junior high school or
senior high schools in Indonesia.
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In this paper, we are going to account for in detail what is systemic functional
linguistics, principle in teaching listening, guidelines for designing listening activities and the
role of SFL in teaching listening.

B. DISCUSSION
1. Systemic Functional Linguistics Paradigm to Learning
SFL is a general theory of how human language works. Being a descriptive approach
based on language use, SFL is a coherent theoretical and descriptive construction that
provides plausible descriptions about how and why language varies according to and in
relation to groups of speakers and contexts of use. But, apart from being a theory of
grammatical description, SFL also provides descriptive tools, e.g., it provides a technique and
a meta-language that are useful for analyzing texts, so that, additionally, it can be viewed as a
type of textual analysis (Gouveia, 2009).
Systemic Functional Linguistics may have been intended initially to be restricted to
the development of a grammar that would be relevant to educational processes, tasks and
problems, as stressed above; but today SFL is more than a

theory

of

grammatical

description and even more than a L1 or L2 language pedagogy, it is a theoretical and

applied territory, covering areas, problems and conceptualizations. In fact, SFL is
simultaneously a theory that describes how languages, meta-languages, modalities and
cultures produce meaning.

2. Teaching Listening
2.1 Teaching
Teaching is derived from word teach. It has meaning; give somebody information
about a particular subject to learn something (Oxford-Advanced Learners Dictionary,
1995: 1225).
Brown (2000), in his book ,Principles of Language Learning and Teaching, stated
that Teaching is showing or helping someone to learn how to do something, giving
instruction, guiding in the study of something. Based on the previous definition the writer
limited the meaning of teaching is a series of subject delivery activity to students to
help, receive, achieve master and develop the subject properly.

2.2 Listening
Listening is the attending, receiving, interpreting, and responding to messages
presented aurally (International Listening Association/ILA, 2008: 7). That

definition

explains that listening is not only recognizing the sound but also student must get the
meaning of listening. If one sentence cannot be heard clearly, it is difficult to understand
words, phrases or sentences so that why there is so much attention in listening process.

2.3 Principles in teaching Listening

A professional teacher must consider some principles in teaching listening. The
principles will assist a teacher to handle and organize how he or she applies strategy that he
or she chooses in the classroom. Here is a series of principles in teaching listening
comprehension.
a) The first principle; Encourage students to listen as often and as much as
possible. The more students listen, the better they get at listening and the better
they get at understanding pronunciation and at using it appropriately themselves.
One of our main tasks, therefore, will be to use as much listening in class as
possible, and to encourage students to listen to as much English as they can (via the
Internet, podcasts, CDs, tapes, etc).
b) The second principle; Help students prepare to listen. Students need to be made ready
to listen. This means that they will need to look at pictures, discuss the topic, or read
the questions first, for example, in order to be in a position to predict what is coming.
This is not just so that they are in the right frame of mind(and are thinking about the
topic), but also so that they are engaged with the topic and the task and really want to
listen.
c) The third principle; Once may not be enough in playing. There are almost no
occasions when the teacher will play an audio track only once. Students will want to
hear it again to pick up the things they missed the first time - and we may well want
them to have a chance to study some of the language features on the tape. In the case
of live listening, students should be encouraged to ask for repetition and clarification
when they need it. The first listening to a text is often used just to give students an
idea of what the speakers sound like, and what the general topic is so that subsequent
listening is easier for them. For subsequent listening, we may stop the audio
track at various points, or only play extracts from it. However, we will have to
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ensure that we do not go on and on working with the same audio track
(Harmer, 2010:135).

2.4 Guidelines for Designing Listening Activities

The following are guidelines for designing listening activities.
a) Materials should be authentic.
b) Videos or texts should last from two to five minutes.
c) Tasks for each text/video should be arranged from easy to difficult.
d) Texts or videos should be presented three to four times to students, with a
e) Different task each time.
f) In teaching listening, homework is a must.
g) Speaking and listening should be paired.
h) Video clips are highly recommended for arousing students interest.
Websites such as YouTube and Dotsub provide English learners with a useful tool to
improve their listening skills. These websites offer very authentic examples of everyday
English used by native speakers of English. Based on some researches, using video clips in
class now and then makes learning interesting and delightful because students are always
attracted to the real life situations of the videos. By so doing, we are helping students
explore the possibilities of online learning. However, when choosing video clips, teachers
should ensure that the video clips chosen are challenging to students but still allow them to
complete the tasks assigned to them. Also, to suit different levels of language proficiency,
teachers can design easier tasks for low achievers and more difficult tasks for higher
achievers, while using the same clips. The procedure for presenting a video clip in class is
provided for teachers reference.
A sequence of teaching listening
First viewing: present the clip with the sound off and ask students to
Step 1

speculate about it.

Discussion: check their understanding.
Second viewing: present the clip with sound and then ask students to do

Step 2

the pre-listening activities.

Discussion: check the assigned task

Step 3

Third viewing: present the clip again and ask students to listen for some
specific details.
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Discussion: check the assigned task

Fourth viewing: present the clip again with the captions and ask students
Step 4

to pay attention to the details they have failed to comprehend

3. The role Systemic Functional Linguistic in teaching Listening

The role of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to language education is centered
predominantly on the theory's relevance to the explanation and interpretation of texts. It is
therefore a general assumption of linguists or teachers working within this tradition that the
primary 'learning outcome' of courses in SFL will be an awareness of the role of lexicogrammar (the integrated system of grammar and lexis) in the production and negotiation of
the social meanings that are realized in both spoken and written texts.
In addition, Systemic functional linguistics treats a language as a means of toolkit to
catch the meaning of the text. Hence, we believe that when students understand context they
are much more likely to understand listening effectively. We are supposed to students not to
write down the words, phrase or sentences they can gain the long or short conversation, but
we ask students to think context of the culture (genre) what is the listening about, who are the
participants in the conversation to understand the general potential understanding that they
enable to explore. This is the reason why the following paragraphs define the main types of
contexts.
a. Context of culture (Genre)
The term context of culture was coined by the anthropologist Malinowski
(1923). He saw that in any appropriate description it was necessary to give
information not only about what was taking place in that precise moment but also
about the whole cultural environment, since in any type of linguistic interaction, in
any type of conversational interchange, the only thing that counts is not the sounds
and visions that surround the event but also the whole cultural history that is behind
the participants and behind the social practices in which they take part, determining in
this way their meaning inside that culture. The context of culture can be described as
the sum of all the meanings it is possible to mean in that particular culture. (Butt,
2000: 3)
b. Context of situation (Register):
The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski needed a term to refer to the whole
environment of the text and that also included the situation in which the text was
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produced. He coined the term context of situation to refer to the environment of the
text in an article written in 1923. With the term context of situation we refer to all
those extra-linguistic factors that are present in the text in any way. As Butt (2000: 3)
declare: Within the context of culture, speakers and writers use language in many
more specific contexts or situations. Each of these is an inner context, which
functional linguists call the context of situation.
Here is the implementation of SFL in teaching listening (narrative listening). The
thing we need to have software to change the text in to speech (listening), there are a number
of software and application in computer of mobile phone but we select speech to text (a
name of online text converter) to change The legend of Maling kundang as one of popular
narrative texts in our country to use in the classroom.

THE LEGEND OF MALIN KUNDANG

Once Upon a time, there lived a diligent boy named Malin Kundang. He lived in the seashore
with his mother. They were very poor, but they lived quiet and harmonious.
One day, a big ship closed to the beach near their village. They asked peoples to join work in
their ship and went to the cross island. Malin Kundang wanted to join with them because he wanted to
improve his familys life. But his mother didnt permit him. She worried to Malin. Malin still kept his
argument and finally he sailed with the big ship.
Several years later, Malin Kundang succed and he became rich trader. Then, he came to his
native village with his beautiful wife, but his wife didnt know Malins real descent. His happy mother
quickly approached Malin and brought a plate of village cake, Malins Favorite. But Malin didnt
admit that woman as his poor mother, and then he kicked the village cakewhich brought by his mother
until scattered. His mother very broken heart because Malin rebellious to her, who had growth him.
Then, his mother cursed Malin became stone
Suddenly, the bigship which Malins had was vacillated by a big storm and all of his crewman
tossed aside out. Malin realized that was his fault that rebellious his mother. He bowed down and
became a stone.

1. The continuum of the role of SFL in teaching listening in class

a) Provide a jumbled chain of pictures to stimulate them about what the story about
b) Ask the students to understand the listening using 5W + 1 H to find the meaning of
the listening
c) Give a question card in the simple question such as what is the listening about, who
are the participants, how could it be and we can ask the moral value of the listening
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d) We suggest the students to arrange the jumbled chain of picture chronologically

related to the listening that we played.
e) Ask a couple of students to demonstrate their final result and we can suggest another
student to retell a story related the listening using their own words.

C. CONCLUSION
Listening is receptive skill that must be mastered in a language. Good listening will
help students to get much more information in spoken text explicitly. Teaching listening
without considering approach to choose will be ineffective and waste much time to study a
language. Focusing on the word by word or phrase is not good way to catch the meaning of
conversation. SFL is a brilliant approach to adopt in teaching listening. It attempts to look
and investigate a language as system to make and find a meaning. SFL is an essential
discipline that helps students to improve their listening for several reasons:
o Firstly, SFL offers the tools for the analysis of (the field) context of genre to detect
what is the topic of the listening.
o Secondly, SFL not only provides students opportunity to guess and analyze the
context of situation to learn a language in use but also learn culture as well.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gouveia, C. A. M. (2009) Text and Grammar: Introduction of Systemic Functional

Linguistics. Matraga, 16(24): 1347.
Halliday, M. A. K. & Matthiessen, C. M. M. (2004), An Introduction to Functional Grammar
(Third edition), Revised by Matthiessen, C. M. M., Edward Arnold, London.
Halliday, M. A. K. & Hasan, R. (1976), Cohesion in English,. Longman, London
Brown H.Douglas (2000), Principles of Language Learning and Teaching,(Longman: Pearson
education, 4th ed.) P.7
Richards Jack (2008).Teaching Listening and Speaking from Theory to Practice.
New York: Cambridge University Press.

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