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.
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 on SFL oriented prosodic analysis - 12.00 - 14.00 (Spain time). Click here to register and to join the website.
29th May Isaac Mwinlaaru on discourses on decoloniality - 12.00 - 14.00 (Spain time). Click here to register and to join the website.