Empowering students to construe worlds and experiences in poems using Systemic Functional Grammar

Radhia Besbes

Abstract

The present study proposes a model of reading that can be applied in the poetry classroom to enable students to produce a linguistic-based literary interpretation. It precisely draws on Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday &Matthiessen 2004) to investigate the way the speaker in a poem imagines the reality and accounts for his/her own experiences of the world in language. To validate the findings of the study, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Eliot 1917) is selected as a case for examination. With special focus on Transitivity, the poem is studied from the perspective of the Experiential Metafunction, including processes and the associated, participants and circumstances (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004; Thompson 1997). A qualitative approach, based on the model proposed is applied in the examination of the poem and findings revealed that Systemic Functional Grammar can provide students with useful tools for poetic interpretation. Making use of linguistic data in a systematic and logical way can develop the students’ understanding of how language works to achieve specific purposes and to make meaning, which in turn can empower them in one of the very challenging classes, the poetry class (Kleppe & Sorby 2018; McCrocklin & Slater 2017; Dutro et al. 2012).