FUNCTIONAL MODEL OF LANGUAGE

The exploration of interrelations between text and context does contribute to the implications
for language teaching and learning processes in the classroom. It is imperative that teachers
should be aware of the various backgrounds that the learners have. Those backgrounds may
influence the learners’ ways of interpreting the text in its context. It means that the social habits
and patterns can be reflected in the texts of the speakers that is the language used in the text
can show values, customs, about the world of the speakers. At this level, language is formed by
those cultural backgrounds and in the meantime, language may reflect the culture. For example,
the Indonesian language is inherently tied to the people’s culture. The language reflects the
culture. When Indonesians speak English, they might be influenced by their own cultures and
their way of thinking. In this case, their ways of understanding English texts can be influenced by
their cultural values of their first language (L1). The teachers of English as a foreign language need
to understand that foreign language learners are often influenced by interference, inter-
language and generalizations. It is a fact that English texts do reflect the social values of the native
speakers that is its original cultural values; British or Western cultures. Consequently, the English
teachers need to prepare a syllabus in a way that it caters for the needs of the foreign language
learners (L2). This finding can lead us into an understanding that the function of language does
contribute to communicative teaching approaches. This is an approach to a foreign or second
language teaching in which communicative competence of the learners is the goal that need to
be targeted. The communicative teaching approaches have been developed particularly as a
reaction away from grammar-based approaches such as the auraloral approaches, structure-
based approaches, audio-lingual method and direct method. The teaching materials to be used
in a communicative teaching approach can rely on teaching preparations that reflect functional
model. The teachers of English can emphasize different kinds of communicative functions such
as, requesting, inviting, expressing, informing, refusing and directing. The teaching materials
need to be designed to cater for the speakers’ needs and they can be adopted in way that it
reflects how field, tenor and mode are organised to contribute to the teaching and learning
settings. It is important for the teachers to know that they should understand the system of the
language and how the language works linguistically and functionally. If the teachers have already
known the system and how it works, they should then know how to apply the knowledge to the
teaching and learning processes in the classroom. Haliday‘s and Jacobson models of language
functions can be developed by the L2 teachers as a basic lesson plan. The seven functions that
emerge from Halliday model can cater for the communicative approaches that cover
instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, imaginative and informative. The
teaching materials can also be developed to apply the model of function suggested by Jacobson
which is comprised of emotive, conative, referential, poetic, phatic and meta-linguistics.

References
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