By Brian Dare
For teachers and students taking on a functional approach to learning about how language works, one of the challenges is to build an understanding of the three main components of the clause that express the content of any text. These components tell us the main happening (the process), who or what is involved in that process (the participants) and the when, where, how and why (the circumstances) linked to the process. A shorthand way of describing these options is to use the term transitivity.
Understanding the transitivity patterns of English (and any language for that matter) may look on the surface to present quite a challenge for anyone new to these functional groupings. However, I can reassure the reader that my own experience working with teachers over many years has shown that this is one of the most productive and rewarding areas of the grammar for both teachers and students. And I would add a far more efficacious way of learning about language than more traditional approaches.
As Michael Halliday points out:
‘Part of the difficulty that many children had with working on language in the old way was that learning about nouns and verbs was a classificatory exercise that had no real function or context for them, since it corresponded to nothing that they could recognize as a quest (let alone as a problem to be solved); it was a set of answers without any questions.’ (Halliday 2007: 59)
My view and that of many other teachers and students is that while it is useful at times to focus on class labels, functional groupings provide a much richer and deeper insight into how language works. By starting with clear, accessible examples as seen in the exemplars below and gradually building complexity, teachers can equip students with patterns and tools that transfer across subjects and genres, supporting their long-term academic success.