Aims and Audience

Talking About Language is an open-access resource developed by Professor Nigel Caplan at the University of Delaware to support current and future teachers of multilingual learners of English. While this text will be of use to any student in a graduate or undergraduate course such as The Structure of English or Pedagogical English Grammar, it is especially aimed at current and future K-12 teachers of multilingual learners who are working with the 2020 WIDA English Language Development (ELD) Standards Framework.* One of the “big ideas” in the Framework is the functional approach to language development, which draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). SFL is an educational linguistics – a way of describing and understanding the language choices that create meanings through words, clauses, and texts. Although SFL is a welcome addition to the Framework, it is a complex theory with metalanguage (grammatical terminology) that is unfamiliar to many U.S. teachers. Talking About Language provides a detailed guide to the metalanguage used by the WIDA Framework with additional concepts from traditional (structural) grammar that teachers preparing for certification – and indeed all educators of multilingual learners – should find useful.

The word grammar makes many teachers and learners uncomfortable, even insecure: it conjures images of pages covered with red ink and experts criticizing your “bad” grammar. So in SFL, we often refer instead to knowledge about language: knowledge about language forms and resources, about the meanings we create, about the choices available to speakers and writers, and about the impacts that those choices have on listeners and readers. However, in order to build that knowledge, we need a way of talking about language: that’s what SFL promises and this web resource attempts to provide.

* Note:Talking About Language is neither affiliated with nor endorsed by WIDA.

Structure of the Book

The first three sections of the book deal with syntax and semantics: the ways words are organized into groups, clauses, and sentences in order to make meanings. We start with clause and sentence structure, the foundation of English grammar, and then explore in more depth verbs and the noun group. In Part 4, we look beyond the clause or sentence level to ways that grammar makes meanings throughout texts, primarily through stance and cohesion. The last section is a chapter adapted from another open source textbook, Essentials of Linguistics 2nd edition: Morphology (the structure of words).

A glossary of grammatical terminology is provided. Clicking on words with dotted underlines will show their definition.

Open Educational Resource

This resource is released as an open educational resource (OER) under a Creative Commons license, thanks to the generous support of the University of Delaware Library and the University of Delaware Press. This means you are free to adopt the book, read it, copy it, and distribute it at no cost. You may also adapt it and create your own version. However, please follow the CC BY-NC license: provide correct attribution to the source and do not use these materials for commercial purposes. Please contact the author for questions about licensing this work.

If this online textbook is useful for you, please let me know how you’re using it!

About the Author

Nigel A. Caplan, PhD, is a Professor and Assistant Director for Teacher-Training at the University of Delaware English Language Institute. He also serves as Director of the MA TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) degree at the University of Delaware and teaches courses including The Structure of English. His previous commercial textbooks include Grammar Choices for Graduate and Professional Writers (Michigan), Essential Actions for Academic Writing (Michigan; with Ann Johns), and Q: Skills for Success RW 5 (Oxford; with Scott Douglas). Nigel holds degrees from the University of Cambridge (BA), University of Pennsylvania (M.S.Ed), and the University of Delaware (PhD). A proud language nerd, he promises that he is not correcting your grammar right now.