ABSTRACT
Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) can trace its conception to questions that Michael Halliday posed from the 1940s as a Chinese teacher ‘about the place of the understanding of language in language education, in the broader sense, and also in the more specific narrower sense of language teaching’ (Halliday and Hasan 2006: 15). Halliday further writes:
[A]s a teacher I was a lot more conscious of the need to provide explanations of problems faced by the learners, to try to develop some kind of coherent notion of a language, how it works, how it was learned, and so forth, in order simply to improve the quality of the language teaching.
