Frances Christie

Frances Helen Christie (born 1939), is Emeritus Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Melbourne, and Honorary Professor of Education at the University of Sydney. She is one of the distinguished scholars in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). She continues active as a researcher and writer after her retirement.

Her research covers Language and Literacy Education, writing development, pedagogic grammar, genre theory and teaching English as a mother tongue and as a second language. As she states, "I have always maintained a strong interest in the history of educational theory, pedagogy and curriculum planning. My interest covers the whole sweep of the history of the English-speaking world from about the 16^th century to the present, and, more specifically, the history of the ways the English language emerged as an object of study, and eventually as an object of study in schooling."

Biography

Frances Christie was born in Sydney in 1939 and grew up in the suburb of Greenwich. She attended the local primary school and then went to Cremorne Girls' high school. She completed a BA with majors in English and history, and a Dip Ed., at the University of Sydney.

In 1961, She commenced teaching English and history in NSW secondary schools in rural high schools. In 1964, like many young Australian teachers of the time, she resigned and went to London and taught there in several schools, though the longest periods were in two secondary modern schools in north-east London. Later on, in late 1967, she returned to Sydney and commenced teaching, firstly at Normanhurst boys' high school, then at Strathfield South high school and thence at James Ruse Agricultural high school.

While teaching at the last two schools she had commenced part times studies for a Master of Education at the University of Sydney. This involved her in attending after school seminar classes in the then Department of Education at the University, where she studied with Professor W.F. Connell (1916-2001), an outstanding scholar of the history of educational theory, curriculum design and pedagogical principles in the western tradition. During the time of studying, she was appointed as a seconded lecturer in the Department of Education at the University of Sydney (1971-8), of which Connell was the head. She was working in a teacher education program, which prepared secondary teachers of history and English. In 1977, she completed her M.Ed. (Hons II) thesis investigating the history of English teaching in the Australian colony of NSW.

After a brief period at the Catholic Teachers' College in Sydney she moved to Canberra to a federal agency, the Curriculum Development Centre. She was working in the national Language Development Project (LDP) (1978-81), a curriculum development initiative addressing the English oral language and literacy needs of children in the upper primary to junior secondary school years, a period long recognised as one in which many students tend to fall behind in their school learning. During this time, she commenced an M.A in Applied Linguistics at the University of Sydney at a distance. She was studying and working with Professor M. A. K. Halliday who was a consultant to the LDP.

The work of the LDP was aborted because the federal government moved to close the Curriculum Development in a flurry of cost saving activities in 1984-5. In 1985, she took up a lectureship in Language Education at Deakin University, where she remained until 1990. As Deakin is a distance education provider she was involved in writing and/or commissioning course books. After completing her M. A. in Applied Linguistics under the supervision of Halliday, she seized the opportunity to create two new courses at the M.Ed, level--One is called Language and Learning, offering an introduction to SFL theory and the functional grammar, and their relevance to educational/pedagogical theory and practice; and the other is Sociocultural Aspects of Language and Education sought to build on the first, opening out and exploring a range of wider educational issues, informed by SFL theory.

The course work at Deakin involved commissioning course books for the two M.Ed. courses she developed were published in the period 1985-90. She conceived the two courses as an introduction to SFL theory with a strong educational/pedagogical interest. In commissioning all the course books she talked to all the writers to consider what was involved. For the most part the books that emerged drew heavily on SFL theory, though there were differences in the emphases taken up. The books were all published by Deakin University Press.

During the years working at Deakin University, she commenced work on a PhD study, devoted to early primary school writing development, under the supervison of J. R. Martin at the University of Sydney. She chose this area because she had been trained herself as a secondary teacher and had spent some time in primary schools in London, so this time she wanted to be better informed about the early years. She graduated her PhD in 1990, and then she went to Darwin as the Foundation Professor of Education at the then Northern Territory University (now known as Charles Darwin University) and stayed there until 1994.

In the years at Northern Territory University she led a research team devoted to theThe Project of National Significance on the Preservice Preparation of Teachers for Teaching English Literacy in Australia. The team created a report making recommendations on the preservice preparation of teachers of English. The report created a great deal of interest and controversy, at least among mainstream teachers of English, many of whom were concerned about use of a functional grammar and about pedagogical practices that promoted overt teaching of knowledge about language. Shortly after the publication of the report, in 1994, she was appointed Foundation Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Melbourne, a position she held till her retirement in 2002, when she was appointed Emeritus Professor.

In the years at Melbourne she won a number of ARC grants and she invited Basil Bernstein to visit, organising a conference around his visit. She edited the subsequent book and brought together Bernstein's theory and SFL theory in a discussion of pedagogy--Pedagogy and the Shaping of Consciousness: Linguistic and Social Processes in 1999.                

After her retirement she returned to Sydney where she served as an Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Education and in the Department of Linguistics for some years. She continued active after her retirement and won an ARC grant with Beverly Derewianka of the University of Wollongong, which led to a book on children's writing development--School Discourse: Learning to Write across the Years of Schooling in 2008.

Contributions to Linguistics

Frances Christie started to expand her interst in the area of the history of educational theory, pedagogy and curriculum planning since she was doing her M.Ed Honors. She was focusing on what was taught in the name of English language studies in the elementary schools in England and the Australian colony of NSW. Such study was a matter of mastering several discrete skills in spelling, reading, handwriting, and the grammar of the written English sentence; the more advanced students might do a little clause analysis and a few would write simple compositions. By the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries some literary studies had been added to the mix, though literature was more the province of the secondary school than the primary.

Her M.A. research under Halliday's supervision was focusing on the history of developments in grammar and rhetoric and their teaching, alluded to above. It was a study she undertook to enlarge her understanding of the models of language and its teaching that she had examined in her M.Ed. thesis. She argued that with the passage of time and the pressures of extending education to all, the "received tradition" of English teaching offered a limited, even an impoverished, study of the language. There was no coherent subject. Furthermore  grammar - really the study of the syntax of the written sentence - comes to dominate, the issues to do with meaning, the province of rhetoric, are lost. And she came to argue that SFL theory and the functional grammar offered a way forward in enriching the traditions of English study that we could offer in our schools.

With respect to teaching the knowledge about language (KAL), Frances Christie argues that the proper focus of school subject English is the language itself, where it should be understood in disciplinary terms. The language and its texts, including literary texts (often these days also multi modal), should be understood as the proper focus of study. Appropriate teaching practices will move constantly from text types or genres to the grammatical features in which they are expressed, and often back and forth. Above all, the focus must always be on meaning, for without this, there is a risk of falling back on the arid features of the“received tradition” of language study. Language study should be about building a knowledge of the language with which to live and to go on learning.

For Frances Christie, Teaching is not a matter of“facilitating”the“processes”of learning in children, as many process theorists and/or constructivists would argue. Teaching is a deliberate act in which the teacher takes a critical role in shaping the patterns of classroom discourse in which understandings are forged, and through which students are enabled to become independent thinkers. The issue of teacher authority is essential for many reasons, though clearly it must addresses the inequalities in schooling about which Bernstein had so much to say of value. She states that one of the most satisfying of the developments using the functional grammar is the ways it can be used to trace children's writing development. Relevant research was covered in her PhD thesis (1999), then later in the middle years (in Christie, 2002) and finally across the all the years of schooling  (Christie and Derewianka, 2008; Christie 2012), 2016.