Systemic functional linguistics and the development of a genre-based approach to language education

English language teaching has recently been influenced by more socio-cultural approaches to language, which acknowledge among other things, that literacy and learning are culturally situated activities. The genre-based approach to language education represents a major movement in English language teaching in recent years. In Australia it has its roots in first language literacy and draws on systemic functional linguistics for its theoretical base. This paper provides an introduction to systemic functional linguistics, revealing how it is a useful and coherent model for teaching language in that it systematically describes the relationship between a text and its context of use, allowing predictions to be made about the kinds of texts the learners are likely to engage with in different situations, while also providing the meta-language for talking about grammatical and textual options in English. Additionally, this paper will examine the concept of genre focusing on the theory of genre that draws on systemic functional linguistics and will provide a background to recent developments in the genre-based approach to language education.