The 3x3: setting up a linguistic toolkit for teaching academic writing

Over the past 20 years, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), especially its genre theory, has informed the development of an in uential suite of literacy pedagogies within and beyond Australia. In higher education, linguists and educators have drawn on these perspectives to scaffold students’ academic reading (Rose, 2005); to describe the verbal and visual demands of a range of disciplines (Chen and Foley, 2004; Hood, 2006; 2008; Jones, 2007; Lee, 2009; Ravelli, 2004; Wignell, 2007); and to support students in gaining control of the genres valued in these disciplines (Bonanno and Jones, 2007; Ellis, 2004; Cof n and Hewings, 2004; Mahboob, Dreyfus, Humphrey and Martin, this volume; Taylor and Drury, 2007; Woodward-Kron, 2005). The development of SFL-informed academic literacy pedagogies is hardly surprising, given the extended coverage of SFL systems and the long history of this ‘appliable’ linguistics in successfully addressing tasks and problems related to literacy learning and teaching (Halliday and Hasan, 2006; Halliday, 2007)