Applications Of Systemic-Functional Context Theory In College English Teaching

Context theory plays a vital supplementary role in the understanding and production of the language. Therefore, context should be given due attention in the language teaching. The present paper intends to exemplify the applications of systemic-functional context theory in college English teaching in terms of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation.Chapter one and Chapter two mainly review and summarize the theories and contributions about systemic-functional context which were made by many scholars. These two chapters lay a solid theoretical foundation for the following chapters. Listening and speaking teaching are grouped together in Chapter three mainly because they are verbal language. Constructing the knowledge of context, identifying the communicative intention and finding contextual clues become the comparatively effective approaches in listening and speaking teaching. Chapter four attempts an application of context theory to reading teaching in which linguistic context is used to infer the meaning, eliminate the ambiguity. Besides, we may direct the students to infer the context of situation and generic structure and appreciate the text from context of culture. Chapter five discusses the applications of genre-based approach to writing teaching. The suggested model includes four stages: building the context, modeling and deconstructing, joint construction, independent construction. Chapter six is devoted to application of register variables to translation teaching. The translator should analyze the register of source text and transfer corresponding register into the target language to make the translation versions more faithful to the source text.