A description of First Grade Primary Students’ Speech within Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar: Textual Metafunction

This paper is an attempt to describe the speech of six year-old children within the Systemic Functional Grammar framework (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) based on the textual metafunction theory. This kind of study is of importance since despite the significance of studying the Persian language, specifically spoken Persian in children’s speech area, the number of such studies is limited. The data of the present research includes more than 4200 simple and compound clauses. This spoken data for children was extracted from a research conducted between 1380-1384 entitled as “The Study of Iranian children’s Core Vocabulary” and was obtained from twenty new-entrance-to-primary-school Persian children in Tehran (including randomly selected ten girls and ten boys). Every story was illustrated by three or four colored and communicative pictures. The main results of this research show that:
a) The simple clauses made 90 percent of the children’s speech, and compound clauses made only 10 percent of them.
b) The occurrence rate of marked experiential theme in the speech of children was 18 percent.
c) Subject pronoun deletion was a dominant, unmarked intent and its rate is about 55 percent.
d) In the spoken language of children, the rate of using compound/multiple themes is 30 percent.
e) The below hierarchy was observed in sequences of compound/multiple themes in spoken language of Persian children: textual-experiential (98%) > interpersonal-experiential (1/5 %) > Textual-interpersonal-experiential (0/5 %)
f) The textual themes have been used in 98% of the compound/multiple themes.
g) The most frequent textual themes were /ba’ad/ and its varieties and after that /digar/ and its varieties.
h) The most frequent textual themes in the subordinate clauses were /ke/ and after that /ta/ which was used in a lower frequency.
i) In the speech of children, the occurrence of interpersonal themes was only two percent amongst compound/multiple themes.