| Under the great influence of Constructivism,the central preoccupation of the sociology of education with knowledge as its basis is the study of “relations to knowledge”(Bernstein 1990),such as the relations of social class,gender,ethnicity to curriculum and pedagogy.Constructivist teaching model of “student-centered authentic learning” is regarded as panacea.In contrast,what educational sociologist Bernstein(1990)termed as “relations within knowledge”,the “intrinsic features” of knowledge have scarcely been researched and analyzed.The role of teacher's academic authority has been compromised.The paradox of “knowledge is everything and nothing”(Maton 2014)prevailed in the world of knowledge economy.Such knowledge paradox is no exception in the field of education with knowledge as its basis.Though constructivism considered that knowledge is socially and historically constructed,it merely reflects the interests of dominant social groups and refers to the knowers' mental process of “knowing”.Such views dissolve knowledge proper.In the process of teaching and learning,knowledge-blindness is reflected by oscillations between “traditional” and “constructivist” pedagogies.Furthermore,in educational policy,knowledge is widely regarded as undifferentiated,“generic” skills(such as “critical thinking”)or interchangeable packets of information.The basis of the selection,sequencing and pacing of knowledge in a curriculum is considered arbitrary(Maton 2014).Differences between everyday or common-sense knowledge and disciplinary knowledge and those between different forms of the latter are obscured.Ignorance of disciplinarity is the consequence and the underlying structural principles of disciplinary knowledge are rarely excavated in depth.The late of 20 th century and the early 21 st century saw the emergence of social realism(formed by those scholars who coalesced around the need to see knowledge as an object of study).Social realist scholars such as Hunt(1994),Boghossian(2006),Norris(2000,2006),Chandler(2009),Christie & Maton(2011a,2011b),and Muller(2011)recognize the disadvantage of overemphasis on interdisciplinarity and the merits of disciplinarity.They realize disciplinary knowledge is not only social but real in the sense of possessing their own properties,powers and developing tendencies.However,recognition of the need to analyze knowledge is not realizing the analysis of knowledge.Under such an occasion,Maton(2014)proposes Legitimation Code Theory,which is actually the extension of Bernstein's code theory and Bourdieu's field theory.Maton's LCT provides a right kind of conceptual tools for the analysis of knowledge.It brings the analysis of “relations to” and “relations within” knowledge together to demonstrate that knowledge cannot be reduced to “knowing” and the construction of knowledge is neither ahistorical,asocial nor the arbitrary reflection of the interests of dominant groups.The recollection of disciplinarity presents the importance and necessity of the study and analysis of knowledge.And disciplinarity's capacity of knowledge accumulation also gains public attention.Maton(2014)points out that knowledge is a structured and structuring structure.It's known to all,university is the cradle of both the production and the reproduction of knowledge,in which the accumulative construction of learners' knowledge is possible and their capabilities of the application and updating of knowledge can also be greatly promoted.In language teaching and learning,language is both the instrument and the target.The teaching aims to help learners accumulatively construct their knowledge of language and use the knowledge as a key to the whole world.With the help of the knowledge of language,learners can form a system of knowledge about the world.Take Extensive Reading Course for instance,the selection of teaching materials for Reading Course is rather deliberate.It presents encyclopedic knowledge of the world and its content covers a wide range of topics concerning English-speaking countries such as society,history,culture,literature,art,religion,politics,economics,science,EP,environmental protection,local customs and practices,and so on.This course bears the aim to enable learners to grasp the knowledge of English language and apply it to construct system of knowledge about the world.However,under the deep influence of constructivism,the studies of the teaching of Extensive Reading Course home and abroad generally focused on the teaching mode of “student-centered authentic learning”,or “teacher talk”,or “gender differences”,or “emotional factors like anxiety,affective filter”(Wand & Zhao 2000;Zhang & Wu 2002;Fan & Xu 2011;Qu 2013;Krashen 1982).According to this situation,the study selected the Extensive Reading Course at the initial stage in a military academy as the site to conduct her study to investigate how the strategy of Bernstein's “external language description”(1996;2000)guides learners' attention to the inner structure of knowledge of English and thus enables them to accumulate knowledge of English;and to see how learners' application of knowledge of English further their understandings of the world and form system knowledge of the world.In a nutshell,this study was an interdisciplinary one with the focus on disciplinary knowledge.Specifically,this study integrates Maton's Legitimation Code Theory,Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics into an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to study how the strategy of Bernstein's “external language description”(Bernstein 1996,2000)help learners with accumulative knowledge construction through Extensive Reading Course.Bernstein's “external language description” helps promote learners' capabilities of generalizing or abstracting ideas by means of more densed language structure and thus the understandings of the meanings are not context-rooted.LCT enables the researcher to find the reasons for the failures of some “student-centered” authentic learning from the perspectives of “knower-code” and “knowledge-code” of the dimension of “specialization”.The “semantics” dimension of LCT assists the researcher with methods of designing the teaching approach from the perspective of “semantic wave” and approaches of analysis of the data collected from the writing training of “external language description”.Grammatical metaphor's nominalization in SFL provides specific means for discourse analysis of the collected data.Maton(2013 2014)proposes that knowledge is a structured and structuring structure and mastery of semantic wave is the key to accumulative knowledge construction.Semantic gravity(SG)and semantic density(SD)are the two essential elements of the formation of semantic wave.When semantic gravity is decreasing,the dependence of the original context for the application of knowledge is lower and the semantic density is stronger.That's to say,more information is condensed in the language.In contrast,when semantic gravity is strong,the application of knowledge is strongly dependent on its original context and semantic density of the language is relatively lower.In other words,the newly learned knowledge is not internalized in learners' knowledge system.Maton(2013)claims the semantic movement of gravity and density forms the semantic wave.Since the “accumulative knowledge construction” is the top concern of the study,the “nominalization” of grammatical metaphor in SFL supplies the researcher with the specific theory to analyze the linguistic features of learners' work product.The researcher selected two intact classes at the initial stage in a military academy as the experimental and control groups respectively to conduct a five-month experiment,aiming to answer two main questions:1.How much effect did the method of “A Language of Description” produce on learners in the process of their cumulative knowledge construction through Extensive Reading Course?2.What were the characteristics of the development in learners' language proficiency in the experimental group in terms of Semantic Gravity(SG)and Semantic Density(SD)?In order to better answer the two research questions,the researcher applied threefold approaches: First,the researcher used Bernstein's “external language description” as a treatment in the experimental group to systematically train learners' writing about the article in section C in every Unit for the purpose of promoting their ability of applying knowledge of English independent of their original context while summary writing was demanded in the control group.Second,the researcher made her teaching design according to the semantic profile.Maton(2013)states that classroom activities should cover a semantic gap which exists between the educational knowledge and learners' accumulative knowledge.These two concepts are respectively “high-stakes reading”,namely,the “educational/pedagogical knowledge” and “high-stakes writing”,represented by learners' writing work product in semantic scale.The position of “highstakes reading” is relatively higher than that of “high-stakes writing”.Yet,one thing these two concepts share in common is that both of them are with weaker semantic gravity and strong semantic density,which are represented as high lexical density of “nominalization” in the use of knowledge of English containing large sum of information.How the design of classroom activities promotes cumulative knowledge construction lies in whether there is a semantic wave in the semantic gap.The design of this study for every unit involved the model – “question-unpacking-repacking-conceptunpacking-”,which was fit for the mode of semantic profile.Third,the researcher adopted the strategy of analysis of nominalization of the supplementary materials in order to help learners in both groups to better understand the role and the function nominalization plays in real-time communication and further enhance their abilities of detecting authors' real intention through the use of nominalization and finding the hidden ideology.The researcher adopted quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the collected data.The findings of the study show that 1)learners of both groups made progress in English proficiency competence,English reading comprehension ability and writing ability.The experimental group achieved much more progress than the control group.The differences were significant.Academically,the semantic development of language of the experimental group represent strong semantic density(SD+)and low semantic gravity(SG-)as evidenced by the “semantic wave”.More importantly,writings of the learners in the experimental group depicted the comparatively more use of compact language,namely,nominalization.The higher the scores of learners' composition,the higher the lexical density of learners' language use of nominalizing groups was.This proved that the strategy of “external language description” enables learners to promote their English proficiency level and writing ability and thus helps them to conduct accumulative knowledge construction of English.2)The experimental group adopting the strategy of “external language description” outperformed the control group in the use of nominalization.High-and low-achievers showed significant differences in the use of nominalizing groups compared with their pretest performance.Though the semantic profiles of high-and low-achievers' work products presented different degrees of moving tendency,they all proved that both highand low-achievers experienced the process of semantic wave in the application of English knowledge,which was moving from the decoding of “abstract concept” with the stronger semantic density and the lower semantic gravity to the illustration of “specific examples” with relatively weaker semantic density and stronger semantic gravity.And the downward semantic shift and the upward semantic shift exchanged their turns,which helped the formation of semantic wave.As stated by Maton(2013,2014),mastery of the semantic wave is the key to accumulative knowledge construction.The learning process involved the concern of knowledge of language proper through “external language description” witnessed learners' accumulative knowledge construction of English.High-achievers,compared with the low-achievers,had the “cultivated ‘gaze'”,with which they could better understand the researcher's intention and acquire the knowledge of nominalization.Comparatively,though the low-achievers obtained less significant progress in the use of nominalization,their consciousness of nominalization had been greatly enhanced.All these made it clear that teacher's explicit,systemically academic instruction and step-by-step “external language description” writing training would establish a kind of better “dialogue” between teacher and learners for promoting mutual understanding: learners could get the point of teacher's teaching focus and thus start the learning mode of caring the intrinsic features of knowledge of language proper while teacher could get the whole picture of learners' accumulative construction of knowledge of English.In this way,win-win situation could be obtained.Teacher's explicit academic instruction could make learners be clear about that the priority of the study of English language should be given to the study of the intrinsic features of the structure of English knowledge itself.And the practice of Bernstein's “external language description” enabled learners to carry out accumulative learning and construction of knowledge and it benefited middle-level and low-level achievers more.3)Teacher's design of insetting a semantic wave in classroom activities was in essence to help the learners carry out colloquial “external language description” in Extensive Reading Course.Specifically speaking,such a design enabled the learners to unpack the relatively more abstract concept through analysis and discussion of the “pedagogic discourse” and repack the understandings by condensing the meanings into abstract concept and in this way the teacher helped learners grasp the potential semantic wave.The analysis and illustration of the supplementary materials further learners' understandings of Bernstein's “external language description” related with semantic gravity and semantic density.The role of the use of nominalization in delivering author's real intention and thus helped learners understand that language is neither transparent nor objective reflection of the world.Instead,it's often the case that the author's ideology is usually hidden between the lines.These were the reasons why both the experimental and the control groups experienced significant change in the use of nominalization.The dissertation consists of 5 chapters.Chapter 1 is the introduction part which introduces the background and motivations for carrying out such a research and then explains why Extensive Reading Course is chosen as the experimental field in this study.Overall organization of the dissertation is also presented in the first Chapter.Chapter 2,Literature Review,first begins with a brief introduction to the definition of such items as “knowledge” made by different scholars over the historical time span and the traditional and literal meaning of “semantics”,then sets a definition for “knowledge” that this dissertation perceives and explains a new understanding of “semantics” proposed by Maton as one dimension of his Legitimation Code Theory.In this Chapter,the decline and the rise of disciplinarity and its relationship attached to knowledge are presented.The theoretical framework of this study is based on the integration of Maton's Legitimation Code Theory and Systemic Functional Linguistics.Bernstein's “External language description”,was used as a treatment of this study.With such an interdisciplinary theoretical framework learners' data are analyzed.Chapter 3,Methodology,outlines the research questions,the selection of subjects,and the method for collecting and analyzing the data.Chapter 4,Results and Discussion,gives a specific recount of data analysis with the help of useful tools equipped with the theoretical framework within Systemic Functional Linguistics Theory and Legitimation Code Theory.Data analysis is done from two main perspectives: improvement of learners' Extensive Reading ability and changes of learners' control of English from the variation of development of Semantic Gravity and Semantic Density by means of SFL' metaphoric modes of expression.Chapter 5,Conclusion,presents major findings of this research and its significant theoretical and pedagogical implications.The limitations of the present study are also listed out.Aiming to achieve more progress and perfect the theoretical and pedagogical findings for future studies,the researcher supplies recommendations as well.The findings show that Bernstein's “external language description”,advocated by Maton,could help learners form a good habit of “caring the inner structure of knowledge of language and refining language by means of nominalization”.The five-month “external language description” writing training plus the design of insetting a teaching mode of “a semantic wave” in the classroom activities were beneficial to the learners' accumulative knowledge construction of English,which were represented in terms of learners' improvement of their English proficiency level,reading comprehension ability and writing ability.Simultaneously,Bernstein's “external language description” would also enhance learners' capabilities of acquiring system of knowledge about the world through the use of their accumulated knowledge of English.All these findings echoed Maton's view: “knowledge is a structured and structuring structure”(2014).Findings also claimed that the explicit analysis of the use of nominalization would help learners form the sense of critical reading and thus detect the real intention of the author by means of the application of knowledge of English.All in all,the integration of relevant theories from SFL and LCT into one interdisciplinary theoretical framework is a worthwhile attempt in theory as it not only emphasizes the internal relationships of knowledge and its social functions,but gives due attention to the external language description of knowledge.The framework has been proven to be effective in illustrating the role of the concern of language proper in teaching mode wound enhance learners' accumulative knowledge construction and the feasibility of study and analysis of disciplinarity by means of interdisciplinary research.This study not only helps to reveal some problems and challenges in the transmission of educational knowledge,but also contributes to raising learners' critical language awareness of detecting the real intention of the authors by means of nominalization.It is recommended that the strategy of “external language description” and explanation of “nominalization” be applied in schools and thus can promote learners' accumulative knowledge construction of English and further enhance their critical language sense through the use of knowledge of English language. |
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