Teaching students to identify
functional groups
Karen Margetts
Native-speaking English Teacher
Cheung Chuk Shan College
Functional Grammar
Not a set of rules
Looks at the choices we make
according to:
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purpose
social activity
roles and relationships between
participants
nature of text and role of language in it
Useful for all levels & abilities
S1 & S4 Creative English
S4 General English
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Reading of textbook, newspaper articles, SBA
texts and test papers
Writing of compositions - narratives, letters of
complaint, expository and argumentative essays,
problem-solution essays, etc.
Speaking / Oral S4 – S7
S7 UE Reading passages
Identifying Functional Groups
Processes (Green) – ‘the goings on’
Participants (Red) – nominal groups
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People, things, issues, concepts or phenomena
involved in the processes
Circumstances (Blue)
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Give information about the ‘environment’ in which
the process occurs
When? Where? How? what with? Why? How?
whom for? who with?
Processes - Green
Actions
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Walk, give, move, ride, pick up
Mental
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See, hear, like, love, think, believe, want
Saying
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Say, tell, ask, reply, suggest
Relational
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Be, have
Circumstances - Blue
Time – When? How long?
Place – Where? How far?
Manner – How? What with? What like?
Cause – Why? How? What for? Whom
for?
Accompaniment – Who with?
Participants - nominal groups
Pointer – the, those, this, a, that
Numerative – three, second, million
Describer(s) – pleasant, difficult, most
precious
Classifier(s) – Form 4, business, indoor
Thing – student, meeting, plant
Qualifier – with brown hair, we had last
week, that’s in the bathroom
Expanding nominal groups
She held a bag.
She held a small, black leather bag
with a gold strap.
They ate some cakes.
They ate half a dozen delicious
cakes filled with cream and
strawberries
Increasing complexity of texts
Less spoken - more written
Human and concrete participants to
more specific and abstract participants
Highly nominalised texts (longer
nominal groups)
More relational processes (be, have);
fewer action processes
More clauses in each sentence
Outcomes - reading
When students are taught how to identify
functional groups,
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Processes GREEN
Participants RED
Circumstances BLUE
they are immediately able to read much more
complex texts with greater ease
UE texts are highly nominalised and
grammatically complex
Outcomes - writing
Improved mastery of the clause and
sentence structure
Nominal groups are expanded with
more frequent use of qualifiers,
especially relative clauses
Improved ability to write more ‘formal’
texts such as argumentative essays
Outcomes – Speaking &
Listening
Increased use of nominalisation in
group discussions and individual
responses
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One of the advantages of having a class
website would be….
The main difficulty faced by those students
sitting public exams is …
Improved stress and intonation patterns