different contexts of use, and that this variation comes about partly because of the role
language plays in making meaning.
The specific metasemiotic tools they were learning to use derived from a functional
grammar of English (Halliday 1994), which describes English from the perspective of
language as a resource for meaning rather than as a set of prescribed grammatical rules.
Observations about grammatical patterning, and the significance of variation in
patterning, were a prominent aspect of this work. The children knew, for example, that
typically texts which give people instructions about how to do something are
linguistically organised in a way different from texts which argue for a particular point
of view: they are different genres, in Bakhtin’s (1986) sense. Their knowledge of semiotic
design generally, and linguistic variation more specifically, were then important bases
for further insight into how literary texts mean.
A literary text which particularly attracted the children’s attention was Anthony
Browne’s Piggybook. They laughed loudly as Ruth read it to them, exclaiming as they
noticed the transformation of the setting through the occurrence of the pigs in
wallpaper, light switches and lampshades. Their conversations about the book extended
over several lessons. They began with the details of the represented figures, but soon
extended their discussion to notice the patterning of colours, especially the colour
selections and relative saturation. They also began to make some tentative observations
about the different perspectives from which the images were drawn.
Their enthusiasm was so great that Ruth extended their observations to features of
the language. They focused initially on Mr Piggott and the two sons, noticing that these
figures do a lot of physical action, but their actions do not extend to anything else. So they
learned some new descriptive terms of a functional grammar to further their observations.
They learned, for example, that in a clause such as ‘he went off to his very important job’
Mr Piggott is the grammatical actor in the process ‘went’. In contrast, in a clause such
as ‘Mrs Piggott washed all the breakfast things’, Mrs Piggott is the grammatical actor
and the process ‘washed’ extends to the goal ‘all the breakfast things’. They found many
similar examples in the first movements of the text and discovered that the males were
never involved in physical processes which extended to anything else. In contrast, Mrs
Piggott was almost always involved in physical processes which had some aspect of
housework as goal, not only washing the dishes but also making the beds, vacuuming
the carpets and so on. They played extensively with this new idea, discovering that a
character can be made to seem very different by the types of physical process in which
they are made to participate and the goals to which the processes extend. ‘Janet made a
new dress’, or ‘Janet made a mess’ or ‘Janet built a tree house’. All of this, they knew
from their play, was a matter of a writer’s choice, however unconsciously, in effecting
specific meanings.
Finally, they went back to Piggybook to look at the last movement. They had, of
course, already realised that the family relations were different by this time. That had
been clear from their understanding of the sense of the characters and plot on the first
reading. Their teacher’s further question suggested that a different type of
understanding might be possible. She asked: how does variation in the language itself
make the family relations different now from the beginning of this book? After much
READING AND LITERACY 573