An SFG-Based Metafunctional Analysis of High School English Lesson Plans and the Gap in Functional Knowledge
It is believed that teachers in secondary education prioritise correctness in grammar instruction and, in doing so, often overlook the functional potential of language, which is used to negotiate social meaning. The paper aims to investigate the language instruction gap in high school general English language classes by examining the extent to which lesson plans incorporate Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) as a resource for meaning-making (Schleppegrell, 2017). The analysis in this paper applies Halliday’s (1994) metafunctional framework and Nunan’s (1995) analytical outline in order to investigate a corpus of ten lesson plans and their corresponding materials through a qualitative coding scheme. The findings reveal that the main instructions remain dominated by prescriptive rules that treat language as a static object. The analysis indicates that, despite learner-centred classroom management, the interpersonal resources of Mood and Modality remain teacher-controlled, limiting learners’ ability to actively participate in the meaning-making process. The paper concludes that SFG can contribute to bridging the instruction gap by transforming grammar from a set of restrictive rules into a dynamic, functional resource for successful communication.