Karin Rehman

Focusing participant roles in relation to process types: recently arrived adolescents' progress in written academic language Due to increased migration and mobility, teachers face recently arrived adolescents with limited schooling in need of support to develop academic language and literacy. SFL's meta language supports this development (Christie 2012, Schleppegrell 2013) and process types are applied in genre-based pedagogy in Sweden. Participant roles, however, are not. The intervention study aims to develop and scaffold a metalanguage awareness amongst teachers, enabling an explicit lexicogrammatical focus that could potentially enrich students' academic language and literacy. This pilot study analyses students' texts regarding participant roles in relation to process types within the system of TRANSITIVITY (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014, Thompson 2014). The data consists of 30 factual genre texts written in Swedish by twelve students, primarily with a refugee background, aged 16-18, who had lived and studied in Sweden for two to three years. Preliminary findings indicate a varied use of participant roles. Students' texts can be described more as "complex" than "correct" as if students strive to create complex, cognitively relevant meaning with the limited language resources available to them. This could indicate a starting point for an explicit lexicogrammatical focus. In this presentation, text analysis will be presented and implications for the intervention study will be discussed.