Construing FL writers’ meaning-making choices in a historical recount genre in Spanish

Abstract

This study reports on a four-semester teaching programme for foreign language (FL) intermediate writing abilities in Spanish to be implemented in educational practice. The study conducts qualitative analysis, drawing on systemic functional linguistics (SFL), of developmental changes in twenty undergraduate, Spanish Level 4 students, based on their performance of, and comments on, pre- and post-instructional written tasks, focusing on meaning-making choices in the construction of a historical recount genre over one semester of instruction at an Australian university. Responding to the need for research on academic writing in FL, the paper shows that SFL facilitates students’ understanding of writing development in an FL as they explore textual, ideational and interpersonal meanings in conjunction with required lexicogrammatical choices to fulfil the rhetorical demands of this genre.