Guo, Libo

This paper reports on work in progress of a large-scale study which seeks to examine and compare knowledge construction and the development of grammatical metaphor in Secondary 3 (Year 9) student writing in English and Social Studies. Through a combination of qualitative (systemic-functional) and quantitative (via computer-supported tool MMAX2) analyses of a sample of 42 student writings, it is shown that arguing in subject English and arguing in Social Studies employ different grammatical resources and point to different directions. Compared with subject English, which employs rankshifted embedding, Social Studies (and its parent disciplines such as History and Sociology) depends to a greater extent on grammatical metaphors to argue. This kind of work can have important implications for developing students’ advanced literacy in that it can deepen our understandings of the textual features of different subject areas and their different underlying value systems.