An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

Transactions are composed of
EXCHANGES
MOVES
ACTS
A typical exchange in the teacher-fronted classroom is the ‘eliciting exchange’, 
which has three moves, an initiating move, a responding move and a follow-up 
move:
T: How do we use a thermometer? Jennie. 
INITIATING MOVE
P: Put it in your mouth. 
RESPONDING MOVE
T: You put it in your mouth. 
FOLLOW-UP MOVE
These three core moves, I(nitiating), R(esponding) and F(ollow-up) led to the 
model being referred to by the shorthand title, the ‘IRF model’.
Many second language teachers will recognize in the Sinclair-Coulthard 
transcripts their own instinctive behaviour in front of large groups of learners, 
especially when institutional pressures prevent more imaginative ways of 
communicating in the classroom. Sinclair and Coulthard’s research brought a new 
awareness of classroom language to a generation of language teachers in the 1970s 
and 1980s, and had an important informing role in boosting the move towards 
communicative language teaching. The model was taken into the world outside 
the classroom (Hoey, 1991; Francis and Hunston, 1992), and since its early days it 
has been immensely useful for those interested in analysing language classrooms 
and many other types of discourse.
Systemic Functional Linguistics
There is a family of linguistic approaches – of which systemic functional 
linguistics (SFL) and critical discourse analysis are members – that is socially 
oriented, essentially concerned with describing the relationship of language, 
text and social life. Within this broad band of approaches, there are functional 
descriptions of language which see a particular kind of relationship between 
language and context where one shapes the other. Functional descriptions seek 
to explain the nature and organization of language according to what it has to 
do (for example, Excuse me, do you know the way to _____? serves the purpose of 
asking for directions). Systemic functional linguistics is one variety of functional 
linguistics, its distinctive feature being the concern to explain the internal 

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Discourse Analysis
organization of language in terms of the functions that it has evolved to serve 
(Halliday, 1978, 1994).
The central concern of systemic functional linguistics is how people use language 
with each other to accomplish everyday social life and how social worlds are, in 
turn, created in and through language. This interest leads to an investigation of 
how language is structured to achieve socio-cultural meanings. Systemic functional 
linguistics therefore focuses on the analysis of texts, considered in relationship 
to the social context in which they occur. It has particular applicability to the 
analysis of spoken discourse. 
The systemic functional linguistics orientation to spoken discourse is similar 
to that of conversation analysis, in that both are concerned to describe the 
relationship between language and its social context. However, the focus in 
systemic functional linguistics on spoken language is on the way that language 
is organized to enable conversation to work and to have the power it does. By 
contrast, conversation analysis focuses on social life, and conversation is seen as 
a key to that. What they share is the belief in the social nature of language: that 
conversation builds social contexts at the same time as these contexts guide and 
shape conversation.
Critical Discourse Analysis
Critical discourse analysis is concerned with the relationship between language, 
ideology and power (Fairclough, 1989) and the relationship between discourse and 
sociocultural change (Fairclough, 1992). The approach is influenced by Halliday 
and systemic linguistics (Fairclough, 1995: 6).
Genres in critical discourse analysis are seen as social actions occurring within