ABSTRACT
An effective assessment tool of learning is needed to evaluate students’ written performance so as to enhance the teaching of Chinese. This study applies Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) developed by Halliday (1979, 1985, 1994) to investigate the learning outcomes of Chinese investigative reports of secondary students in Hong Kong. That framework was chosen because of its effectiveness in identifying the linguistic features of texts and assessing students’ written performance. Two Secondary 6 students’ investigative reports of different levels of performance (high and low) are analysed in terms of five aspects of SFL, namely schematic structure, transitivity, modality, theme and conjunctive cohesion to identify the students’ writing difficulties, which hold implications for teaching. Using Functional Grammar, this chapter compares the linguistic features of the two students’ texts from the five perspectives to identify the writing difficulties students encountered. Based on the text analysis, pedagogical suggestions are made to enhance the teaching of Chinese investigative reports. By extending the application of SFL to analysing Chinese genres and texts, this study contributes to Chinese language education by demonstrating a new approach to assessment for learning and teaching, and further suggests SFL as a reliable educational linguistics for researching in Chinese language education.
