Critical SFL Praxis in Teacher Education: Looking Backward and Looking Forward (vol 35, pg 383, 2021)

This special issue explores the affordances and limitations of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as a critical social praxis, specifically within the context of teacher education. We define Critical SFL Praxis (CSFLP) as a social activist approach to teacher education that develops teachers' ability to enact language use in literacy instruction to support learners in seeing, using, and challenging the nature of text/context relationships within and outside institutions through SFL. In this way, CSFLP focuses on preparing teachers to teach students to be adaptive and reflective, and thereby critical, in the process of deploying their language resources to achieve their own social purposes. The articles of this special issue depict both the history of CSFLP and the future possibilities for this work in teacher education.