Application Of SFL To The Teaching Of College Business English Correspondence

Halliday inherits and develops the concept of system from the London School, and creates his own linguistic theory-Systemic Functional Linguistics. Since its birth, SFL has attracted great attention and been widely used in many fields, including teaching. The deepening of China’s opening-up to the world and development of international trade have been requiring more better qualified foreign trade talents. Business English correspondence is an important course for training foreign trade talents at college. At present, the teaching mode of business English correspondence is still traditional, which mainly focuses on sentence structures and professional lexicon. Such mode cannot achieve ideal effect. This thesis tries to introduce the application of three metafunctions of SFL to analyzing business English letters chosen from the coursebook chosen by the college where the author works, so as to find out the features of language and text from the perspective of function and meaning, and test the feasibility of applying the theory to the teaching of the course, and also try to propose corresponding teaching procedures.SFL, also known as Systemic Functional Grammar, consists of systemic grammar and functional grammar. Functional grammar mainly expounds the three functions of language, namely ideational, interpersonal and textual function. SFL has been drawing great attention from linguists and applied in many fields. Scholars at home and abroad do a lot of research on its application to teaching and have gained many achievements. This thesis tries to employ subsystems of the three metafunctions, including transitivity system, mood system, modality system and theme system, with the help of such methods like table taxonomy, exemplification, and statistics, to analyze the texts of business English letters, in the hope of discussing the way of applying SFL to the teaching of college business English correspondence.The research of the thesis proves the feasibility and operability of applying SFL to the teaching of business English Correspondence. By analyzing the texts from the perspectives of function and text, the author finds out the features, and designs teaching procedures, in order to get better effect in business English correspondence teaching.