Toward an Inclusive Approach to Lingua-Culturally Diverse Students’ Language in Systematic Functional Linguistics Research

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) fundamentally embraces inclusivity, as it legitimizes different language varieties as contextualized, socially contingent categories along a horizontal continuum. It also conceptualizes grammar as a set of linguistic resources for meaning-making, rather than as rigid rules that dictate grammatical “correctness.” However, much SFL-based research on lingua-culturally diverse students’ language use has tended to rely on monolingual native speaker norms. This tendency often reinforces deficit discourses by portraying students as linguistically deficient or lacking, clashing with the increasingly recognized perspective of translanguaging, which affirms the legitimacy of students’ language practices on their own terms. This article critically examines how much of SFL-based research on students’ language use reflects a monolingual orientation and then explores how insights from translanguaging can inform more inclusive approaches to studying student language within SFL scholarship. The article argues that moving away from external monolingual standards in analyzing and assessing students’ language use, and shifting the analytical focus from formal “correctness” to meaning-making, can help re-center SFL’s original commitment to inclusivity. To illustrate how such analytical and methodological adjustments can be implemented in research, it reviews an SFL study on Chinese postgraduate students’ use of grammatical metaphor that adopts the approach of treating learner language in its own right. The article also discusses the benefits of this inclusive approach in light of recent trends in applied linguistics and its implications for future SFL research in particular, and language-related research more broadly.