Engaging Young Writers with Powerful Academic Texts

Based on the researchers longitudinal case study of two ESL Korean childrens biliteracy development, this book focuses on the text analysis of English academic genres, including narrative, report, review, explanation, argument and procedure - all powerful genres for ESL childrens further text development. The text analysis was conducted as a systematic and comprehensive application of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and the Genre-based approach, both widely accepted frameworks of discourse and text analysis. As a result, this book is expected to be a useful additional reference when providing detailed guidance for SFG-based text analysis of ESL primary school students writing samples. The subject childrens balanced development of narrative and factual texts demonstrates a possible solution for controlling the process of appropriate schematic structures and linguistic choices, including the range of process types, nominal groups, interpersonal modality choices, thematic choices and cohesion devices. Recognizing that ESL children are the minority in an English speaking community, this book hopes to show that the key to prevent ESL children from lagging behind and help them successfully learn at the same time sequence of mainstream native English speakers is engagement with the full range of powerful literacy texts.