This book highlights the potential for Systemic Functional Theory (SFL) to enhance and promote world languages (WL) learning and achieve successful learning outcomes in the humanities.

The volume charts how SFL has evolved from Michael Halliday’s early work into an appliable framework that can be used in language education to systematically foster learners' development as increasingly sophisticated readers, writers, and meaning-makers. The book demystifies the unique features of SFL and explains what makes it particularly powerful for world language education, understood here as a broad term encompassing the teaching and learning of additional languages which may or may not be used in the learners’ social context. Drawing on examples from German language teaching in higher education settings in the US and her own experience implementing programmatic changes at the university level, Ryshina-Pankova explores how WL educators can integrate SFL with other established frameworks to design pedagogical activities which incorporate both literary and cultural content across multiple modalities and genres, from personal narratives to digital stories and literary texts.

Demonstrating SFL’s power to inform a systematic curricular approach to fostering WL learning, this book will appeal to students and scholars in second language acquisition, language learning and teaching, language education, teacher education, and applied linguistics

Marianna V. Ryshina-Pankova is Associate Professor of German at Georgetown University, USA.