Impact of a functional linguistic approach to teacher development on content area student writing

This paper reports on a study of a teacher development project informed by systemic functional linguistics and its impact on student writing in math and science. The study was conducted with 41 teachers from urban and rural schools enrolled in the project at a university in the US. Data, in the form of survey, interview, instructional planning, classroom observation, and student writing at different stages of teacher development, were analyzed to show impact of the teacher development. The findings indicate that teachers need a functional linguistic perspective to improve their pedagogical practice for teaching writing. A functional approach to teacher development makes an impact on not only development of teachers’ knowledge and skills but also students’ writing performance in the areas of math and science.