Research Writing: A Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspective

Linguistics is the study of language that explains how the language works and why it works in the way it does. Halliday's linguistic theory known as Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is the theory of language which focuses on language in context and language in use. It also helps explain the nature of language (Halliday, 1994). Since its appearance in the 1970s,. its influence and applications have been recognised in many academic fields such as language and literacy education, child language development, speech pathology, research, science education, and artificial intelligence (Halliday, 1994; Halliday & Martin, 1993). With regard to language education, academic writing has been discussed from different perspectives, but research writing from the point of view o,f SFL is still a new field in the academic research discourse. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss two fundamental grammatical concepts in SFL which are useful for understanding the nature and process of research writing in general and writing research abstracts in particular. It also reveals some findings from the analysis of four research abstracts in the field of educational linguistics to examine the grammatical complexity of research writing in terms of lexical density and nominalisation. Following this, a discussion of the results and the limitations of the study are provided. The paper ends by summarising key findings of the research and providing; some implications for teaching academic writing, particularly for writing research abstracts.