LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

Dictionaries
Dictionaries are of many types and useful to students not only of languages but of all subjects. Their design has undergone major changes in recent years, making them much more soundly based, and user friendly. Alongside this there is increasing research into the dictionary strategies of the user: clearly there is a limit to what the dictionary can do to help the user and good dictionary skills need to be trained, though such training has often been neglected.

Systemic functional linguistics in language education
Through its emphasis on the functional basis of language structure and the view of language as meaning potential, systemic functional linguistics (SFL) provides a useful tool for those who wish to analyse texts. It is predominantly a socially oriented theory of language the task of which is to explain how meanings are made and exchanged through the resource of grammar and lexis.