Many students, today, come to university with neither the conceptual framework nor the meta-language that writing instructors traditionally view as points of reference for instruction. A confrontation with such absences emphasizes the need for a way into any discipline-specific academic genre that students, themselves, are required to enter and emulate. This becomes of crucial importance when the degree to which they enter the genre and the quality of their emulation constitutes the basis for assessment.
 

Specifically, this paper outlines the curricular design and procedure, then reports on the initial results, of a study of a somewhat unorthodox approach to teaching 80+ first-year engineering students at the University of Limerick to write cogent, coherent technical background reports. This paper draws on some of the literature on writing pedagogy, language learning, learning styles, cognitive processing, and systemic functional grammar to report on one attempt to engage first-year engineers in a genre acquisition strategy that combines a systemic functional theory approach to the text (Eggins; Fang; Halliday and Hasan) and a pedagogical approach that is largely inspired by Caleb Gattegno’s Silent Way approach to language teaching (Richards and Rogers; Larsen Freeman; Varvel). 
 

Modified for the writing class, Gattegno’s approach to language teaching is instructive in that it accommodates many of the concerns in the literature on teaching and learning such as inductive teaching and the social construction of knowledge, and most importantly, it requires no common meta-language. Of particular importance to this engineering context, Gattegno’s use of color-coding and conceptual abstraction would be a particularly appealing learning tool for visual / spatial, sensing, inductive, active, sequential learners such as engineers (Hecker; Felder and Silverman; Louridas, Halstead and Beddoes- Jones). 

Approaching the text from a systemic functional linguistic perspective allowed a backward engineering approach to text reconstruction. Eggins describes text as the largest unit of meaning (125). Reverse or backward engineering requires that students analyze an existing system in order to identify its parts and how those parts work together to form a whole. From this, representations of the system are recreated in a new form or at “a higher level of abstraction” (“reverse engineering”). Lexico-grammatical choices (systemic constituents) are identified and evaluated for the appropriacy of their semantic and functional contribution to the cultural and situational discourse. Appropriacy is not equated with grammaticality, but consistent with best choice for its social context, the rhetorical situation into which a text is written. 
 

Outcomes are measured by comparing texts written before tutorials had begun with two others written while tutorials were in progress. Features examined in each of the submissions include those modelled in tutorials: clause combinations, thematic structure, rhetorical function, and stylistic considerations such as information, or lexical, density, abstraction, technicality, and authoritativeness. These features are examined for their presence and the quality of their contribution to the cogency and coherence of the text as a whole.

Works Cited

Eggins, Suzanne. An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics. London: Pinter, 1994. 

Fang, Zhihui. “Scientific Literacy: A Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspective”. Science Education 89.2 (2005): 335-47. 

Felder, Richard M., and Linda K. Silverman. “Learning and Teaching Styles in Engineering Education”. Engineering Education 78.7 (1988):  674-681.

Halliday, M.A.K. and Ruquiya Hasan. Cohesion in English. London: Longman, 1976. 

Hecker, Linda. “Walking, Tinkertoys, and Legos: Using Movement and Manipulatives to Help Students Write”. The English Journal 86.6 (1997): 46-52.