Frances Christie

Frances Christie is an Australian applied linguist and educationist, Emeritus Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Melbourne and Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney. She is a central figure in the Sydney School of genre pedagogy, applying Halliday's systemic functional linguistics to the language of schooling from the early primary years through to senior secondary.

Christie's distinctive contribution has been to take genre theory inside the classroom and show how lessons themselves are structured linguistic events. Her curriculum genre model reads a teaching sequence as a macro-text with its own staged unfolding, and her two-register account — a regulative register shaping goals and an instructional register shaping content — gave SFL-informed literacy work a tractable analytic lever.

Career

• BA and Dip Ed, University of Sydney; later MEd working with Halliday on the Language Development Project
• Australian Curriculum Development Centre, Canberra (1978–1981), national Language Development Project
• Deakin University (1985–1990) and Northern Territory University / Charles Darwin University (1990–1994)
• Foundation Professor of Language and Literacy Education, University of Melbourne (1994–2002); Emeritus Professor on retirement
• Founding President of the Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association (ASFLA), 1995–1997
• Honorary Professor of Education and Linguistics, University of Sydney

Published Work

• Language Education (Deakin University Press, 1985)
• Pedagogy and the Shaping of Consciousness (ed., Continuum, 1999)
• Genre and Institutions: Social Processes in the Workplace and School (ed. with J.R. Martin, Cassell, 1997)
• Classroom Discourse Analysis: A Functional Perspective (Continuum, 2002)
• Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives (ed. with J.R. Martin, Continuum, 2007)
• School Discourse: Learning to Write Across the Years of Schooling (with Beverly Derewianka, Continuum, 2008)
• Language Education Throughout the School Years: A Functional Perspective (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)

Influence

• Built the theoretical bridge between Bernstein's sociology of pedagogy and SFL-based genre work, bringing Bernstein to Melbourne in 1996
• Shaped primary and secondary literacy curriculum in Australia and fed into English and EAL programmes in the UK and parts of Asia
• Trained and collaborated with the writers — J.R. Martin, Joan Rothery, Beverly Derewianka — who carried curriculum genre pedagogy into mainstream schooling
• Made classroom discourse analysis a mainstream move within applied linguistics, not a specialist corner