Webinars
2026-2027 SFL Master's pre-registration open. Click here to access.
Master's webinars addressed to our students and open to the whole SFL community
10th April John Bateman on Multimodality - 12.00 - 14.00 (Spain time). Click here to register (you will be sent a link to join the webinar)
In this introductory seminar I discuss the need to engage in analyses of communicative products and performances where verbal language, as traditionally targeted in linguistics, may just be one of several forms of expressions actively participating in meaning-making. Such analyses are the concern of the field of 'multimodality', where theories, constructs, and methods often drawn from linguistics are considered applicable to an ever broadening range of communicative situations. The seminar begins with a brief historical overview of 'linguistics beyond language', showing how this has been a concern for many branches of linguistics, systemic-functional linguistics included. The seminar then adopts a more problem-oriented focus, summarising some of the lessons learned for the theory and practice of multimodal analysis over the past decade. Questions concerning how to go about a multimodal analysis will be key, beginning with collecting and organising data, moving through performing various kinds of analysis, and finally reporting results. Particular attention will be paid to where constructs from systemic-functional linguistics can be used and the places where these need extension. Examples will be drawn from many media, spanning relatively traditional cases of combinations of written material and visuals, through current usages of such materials in social media, to highly dynamic interactive situations such as video games or, the most complex of all, spoken face-to-face interaction.
17th April Anne McCabe on SFL and educational linguistics - 12.00 - 14.00 (Spain time) . Click here to register and to join the webinar.
This webinar builds on a Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) perspective on language development in educational contexts, with a particular focus on foreign language learning. It explores how learners expand their meaning-making resources as they move from more spoken-like, clause-based expression to the dense, abstract meanings characteristic of academic registers. Central to this development is the expansion of the nominal group and the role of grammatical metaphor in construing experience as compact, technicalized entities, whose shape differs across disciplines. Through guided analysis of sample learner texts, participants will examine how increasingly complex nominal groups support the expression of abstract knowledge, the organization of information in texts, and the tracking of participants across discourse. The session provides practical tools for identifying patterns of development in learner language and highlights the value of SFL for understanding and supporting advanced literacy in additional language contexts.
24th April Serge Sharoff on SFL and AI technologies - 13.00 - 15.00 (Spain time). Click here to register and to join the webinar.
The talk discusses reciprocal benefits between Systemic Functional Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence. AI enables large-scale functional analysis across millions of texts. This can reveal register-specific patterns, for example, in negation, nominalisation or passivisation. Conversely, the functional framework provides theoretically-grounded metalanguage for explaining predictions from blackbox AI models, thus addressing interpretability challenges in modern AI systems to understand what they do and when they fail.
8th May Teresa Oteiza on history discourses and appraisal - 13.00 - 15.00 (Spain time). Click here to register and to join the webinar. NEW LINK!
This webinar focuses on the discourse analysis of official documents that construct a historical memory about human rights violations during the last civil-military dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990) and the longer-range violation of human rights against indigenous peoples for 500 years in the country. The objectives of this talk are: a) to contribute to the understanding of the construction of the intersubjective dialogue between the authorial voice and the putative reader (audience) in relation to the 'historical truth'; and the proposals for reparation in official Chilean reports on human rights violations; and b) to understand the process of building legitimacy of official human rights commissions (TCs) and their reports in Chile (1991-2025). The analytical approach is framed within critical and social discourse studies developed in Latin America and from memory studies, and with a focus on the intersubjective meanings that can be explored from the discourse-semantic system of APPRAISAL in relation to other discourse-semantic systems, and in relation to the context -register, genre, ideology-, and its wide array of lexicogrammatical realizations. Appraisal contributes to our understanding of legitimations and de-legitimations, since ideology is crucially constructed from value positions. The ENGAGEMENT subsystem is central to this research as it allows the mapping of the negotiation of options of intersubjective positionings in the discourse, thus establishing different levels of dialogicity (White 1998, 2003, 2020, 2021; Martin & White 2005; Martin 2019; Hood 2019; Oteíza 2017; 2021; 2023 a, b; Oteíza in press a, b). Following social scientist Angela Nichols (2019), I would like to explore discursively two of her main arguments regarding the legitimacy of TCs: “TCs that demonstrate authority, a break with the past, and/or transparency are more likely to contribute to an increase in respect for human rights and decrease in violence following civil war or a period of abuse.” (2019: 6); and “TCs with more dimensions of authority are associated with both and increase in government respect of human rights and a decrease in political violence” (2019: 11). This analysis aims to contribute to the understanding of the processes of democratic practices, peace, and social reconciliation in the Latin American region.
15th May Andrés Ramírez, Yuly Andrea González and Cristian David Londoño on Genre-based translanguaging - 13.00 - 15.00 (Spain time). Click here to register and join.
This presentation introduces a framework for translingual pedagogic design and analysis grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics and genre-based pedagogy, extended through translanguaging, and complemented by Legitimation Code Theory for macro-level analysis. The presentation is organized in two parts: (1) translingual pedagogic design through Genre-Based Translanguaging, and (2) translingual pedagogic analysis at micro and macro levels of classroom discourse. The first part presents Genre-Based Translanguaging (GT) as a multilingual extension of genre-based pedagogy, particularly the Reading to Learn approach. In GT, guidance through interaction around model texts and shared experiences is enacted translingually, as teachers and students use two or more languages in principled ways to support learning language, learning about language, and learning through language. Pedagogically, GT builds on the Reading to Learn teaching–learning cycle—including preparing for reading, detailed reading, joint construction, and independent construction—and extends these cycles through the strategic use of the first and target languages, the use of culturally responsive model texts, a gradual increase of target language use, and integrated language development classroom activities as the basis for guided interaction and knowledge building. The second part of the presentation focuses on translingual pedagogic analysis. At the micro level, the primary unit of analysis is the teaching–learning exchange, understood as a discourse-semantic unit consisting of marginal and nuclear phases. The presentation introduces system networks developed to model language-shift options available to teachers and students during classroom interaction, showing how shifts between languages are functionally related to pedagogic purposes within teaching–learning exchanges and across pedagogic cycles. At the macro level, Legitimation Code Theory is introduced as an analytical approach for examining how teaching–learning exchanges and pedagogic cycles are organized within lessons. Using the autonomy dimension of LCT and a translation device, the analysis traces lesson trajectories to reveal patterns of movement across languages, contents, and pedagogic purposes along a translanguaging continuum. The framework, therefore, connects translingual pedagogic design, translingual classroom interaction, and lesson organization through a multi-level model that links discourse-semantic analysis of translingual teaching–learning exchanges with macro-level analysis of lesson trajectories and autonomy pathways, providing an SFL-principled approach for designing and analyzing multilingual pedagogy.
22nd May Meena Debashish, Beyond the Words: Intonation, Meaning, and Context in SFL - 12.00 - 14.00 (Spain time). Click here to register and to join the website.
Intonation is a vital resource for making meaning in language: ‘Prosody … is related systematically to meaning, as one of the resources for carrying contrasts in grammar’ (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014:11). This webinar, grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), explores how intonation functions beyond mere expression, interacting with lexicogrammar and semantics to construct meaning in context.
The main aim is to help participants appreciate the various contrasts in English intonation that are exploited in the lexicogrammar of the language in order to make distinctions in meaning. First, we will be looking at the system network of English intonation: the choices available in the TONALITY system – the chunking of information, the TONICITY system – the focus of information, and the TONE system – the type of information; speech functions & attitudinal meanings. Second, we will discuss how the choices in the systems of TONALITY and TONICITY help to construe textual meanings, and the choices in the system of TONE (primary and secondary tones), the interpersonal meanings. Later, if time permits, you will also be introduced to PRAAT software, and learn to identify tone groups, tonic syllables and tones in some spoken dialogues. Thus, by examining speech data (including examples from Halliday, 1970), we will uncover how the prosodic systems of English language function as semiotic resources that influence interpersonal dynamics, discourse cohesion, and ideational (logico-semantic) expression.
29th May Isaac Mwinlaaru on discourses on decoloniality - 12.00 - 14.00 (Spain time). Click here to register and to join the website.