Construing experience and organising information in reading comprehension texts: A systemic functional comparison of Punjab Textbook Board and Cambridge secondary English materials

Abstract

This study compares the discourse organisation of reading comprehension texts in two sets of secondary English materials, namely the Punjab Textbook Board (PTB) English textbook for Grades 9 and 10 and a Cambridge University Press practice book (Cox, 2018) used as Cambridge secondary reading material, in order to examine how the two curriculum traditions, construct and organise meaning through linguistic resources. A corpus-based mixed methods design was adopted, and a corpus of 50 reading comprehension texts, comprising 25 texts from each set of materials, was analysed through Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014), whereas Genre Theory (Martin & Rose, 2008) and Schema Theory (Carrell & Eisterhold, 1983) were drawn upon to interpret genre and cultural content. Transitivity, thematic organisation and cohesion were analysed. It was found that transitivity patterns were broadly similar, with relational and material processes predominating and no significant difference in the distribution of process types. Significant differences were, however, observed in thematic organisation and in the distribution of cohesive subtypes, although the effect sizes were small. PTB texts contained more than twice the proportion of marked topical Themes, whereas Cambridge O Level texts used a higher proportion of textual Themes and additive conjunction. The qualitative analysis further indicated that PTB texts more often drew on familiar social, historical and religious contexts, whereas Cambridge O Level texts offered wider geographical, literary and descriptive contexts.