A Systemic Functional Linguistics Approach to Instructional Design for L2 German: Connecting Language and Content

Abstract

The creation of pedagogical activities in line with genre-based approaches has substantially shaped world language curriculum design and instruction, as seen in Martin (2002a), Crane (2006), and Maxim (2004); however, an insignificant number of principled guidelines suggests exactly how to achieve these pedagogical goals (Kubota, 2016; Ryshina-Pankova, 2016; Schleppegrell, 2019). To this end, this article demonstrates how a genre-based textual analysis through the lens of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) serves as a useful methodology for advanced learners of German at the university level. It introduces a unique online venue for exploring the GDR and selects Karin Bloth's narrative Stark und ohnmächtig zugleich (2004) from this website to conduct an SFL-informed analysis regarding its generic structure, interpersonal meanings, and participant voices. The findings about the narrator's inner conflict as well as the social functions of language are directly applied to specific suggestions for pedagogical activities. The article concludes with a discussion of the benefits and implications of this methodology as a tool for world language educators to support their analyses of culturally relevant materials in order to develop content- and language-integrated pedagogical activities.